There has been some lengthy discussion about this, one very very long thread initiated by MD on blogs vs. forums. I wanted to throw out some ideas, that I think have not come out yet:
After using moodle and a number of main activities (forums, assignments, journals (when available) ) I've come to see a lot of parallels. In comparing forums to assignments:
- Option of students writing text on the webpage;
- Forums yes
- Assignments one of 3 options
- Option of attachments by student
- assignments can be text but at expense of attachment, or vice versa.
- forums text WITH attachments optional (set by teacher)
- Option of being readable by peers
- forums yes
- assignments now
- Option of replies
- assignments yes (inline too!)
- forums yes
- Option of assigning grades
- assignments yes
- forums yes
- Quick grade/view/feedback options
- assignments yes
- forums no
- Threading
- assignments no... would it make sense?
- forums yes
Forgive my sloppy notation- it's 1:44am and you know how that goes..
but it seems to me that in the spirit of the OO in moodle, what we have, especially as we add blogs to the mix, is one kind of object, that in fact just has a wide variety of settings:
Create a new activity that is an ASSIGNMENT/FORUM/BLOG - let's call it a DIALOGUE (if that's not already taken).
Settings would go something like this:
- icon (assignment or discussion or journal or blog)
- public (for peers to see)
- graded (all typical grading options as in forum)
- allow inline feedback (for teachers)
- one per student or not(so each student sees THEIRS and THE REST, as in a blog, where the rest lists everyone)
- allowing replies
- subscribing (if public, but always for teachers, as with current homework)
- quick grading (I LOVE this add on to assignments)
From a presentation standpoint, you could still have each of these named items, but they could functionally do the same thing, perhaps with different defaults- so a forum is a DIALOGUE that's public, with replies, optional grading, subscription options, etc..
A journal is DIALOGUE that's private, with optional grading, teacher subscription options, optional inline feedback, etc..
A blog id a DIALOGUE that's public, allowing replies, optional grading, subscription, etc...
I suspect this whole conversation may be somewhat redundant with similar conversations- so forgive me for not being up to speed on all of them. It just started to grate on me when grading hundreds of assignments and forums how similar they are in functionality- yet how different the options and setup and interactions (from a teacher perspective) are.
If anyone's interested in this angle, I'm eager for thoughts.
d.i.