Themes

I very much like this idea too. Darren's implementation especially. Perhaps like istockphoto.com students might also be able to upload their own too.

There has been a discussion on the Japanese Moodle recently about ways to improve forum posts among shame prone Japanese. It seems that greater group integration and greater anonymity both can work. The former would be the way to go in an ideal world but the latter is a lot less work. My guess is that in some situations this could be negative, allowing student to hide behind false identities, posting non-ego-invested claptrap.

But especially in language classes, where it does not matter if respondents speak claptrap so long as they speak, and the fact of speaking in a foreign language makes posting yet more difficult, I think that anonymity is probably the only way to go. But in the case of greater anonymity, talking to a non-person with no name or image is disconcerting.  

So, a selection of avatars would be a great help. 

Avatars in addition to real photos, and nicknames in addition to real names -- with teachers being able to see the former, and students the latter -- would be interesting to say the least.  But this has been discussed before.

Timothy