Posts made by Apostolos Koutropoulos

We can design interactivity without looking at game design. For a game to advance something needs to happen but it can be menial Think of World of Warcraft and harvesting gold to get materials later on. It's menial, it had to be done, but it's not fun. I think we need to provide an appropriate mix of "this has to be done" and providing activities that get people engaged.

I've had classes where people were asked (in a rubric) to reply to at least 5 classmate's posts, in addition to writing something original, and that is what they did, but the work (judging as a fellow student in the class) was mediocre. A better rubric would have been to leave the amount of posts out (something more than 1 is implied), but specify the content more and what is appropriate/good content for the response.

I've also had classmates, by the way, that went way above and beyond the call and really provided thoughtful insight to most posts (very demanding I think, but I learned from them)
I actually would love for LMSs to have like/dislike (or digg/bury) buttons. In many rubrics in my online courses we are told to not just respond "agree" to someone else's post. We ought to be writing something more substantive. Of course this becomes tedious when you want to let people know that you agree, but the person has said things so well that you don't need to add more info (I find the "disagree" or "I agree, but..." proposition to be more conducive to writing longer, more thought out, statements.

I've been peeved when classmates have just written "agreed!" or "hooray!" or "you're right!" as a response because it clutters my mailbox...then again, if there isn't a like button, there is no other way of letting people know that they've struck a cord.
Having seen both sides of the coin - the learning and the management side of things, I found the ECAR article interesting. At the same time, I think, rightly as you said, that we shouldn't exclusively focus on management.

The ECAR article was written, it seems to me, by managers for managers. Sometimes those managers have come from a teaching background and know what teachers/instructors/faculty (hereafter "teachers") might want to know, but CIOs don't often come from academic backgrounds (at least in my experience). The data that is pulled and analyzed isn't always the same data and where you come from and what you use it for will influence your conclusions.

Now as far as focusing on the learning, in my experience not all faculty view more learner information as a good thing (as a matter of fact most seem to even view meaningful technology enhancement of their courses as additional work that they don't want to undertake). Part of it is really a culture change issue for existing faculty. The management side (affectionately known as the bean counters) have used data and analytics of various sorts for much longer for their business decisions, so it doesn't really surprise me that we see more info geared towards that side of the house.
The one thing that I would be cautious about is the group think that might develop from only following popular threads. It's important to not just put the blinders on and ignore potentially insightful threads and comments that aren't popular :-)