Now that you have your forum in place, it's time to start adding the questions and comments that will make it into a lively social discussion area. To do this, you need to start using topics.
Topics are exactly that... topics. They are issues that people want to discuss. A forum that works, remember, will usually be one where the group members have an extrinsic necessity (for example, part of their job role) or an intrinsic desire to engage with it (useful information to gain, important decisions to be made, fun, and laughter to be had).
A forum can be made up of many different topics with a wide range issues. The best discussion frameworks are those which lead to some sort of outcome or conclusion. Some generically useful discussion frameworks include:
- Comparing: For example, "What are the similarities and differences between food we eat today and food they ate in Tudor England?".
- Detecting differences: For example, "What different reactions are there to our company's marketing campaigns in different countries?".
- Putting in order: For example, "Put this list of our ten course topics in order from one to ten. Number one was the most interesting and number ten was the least interesting. Then tell us why you felt like this.".
- Choosing candidates: For example, "Which three course books does our community feel we should recommend to all new students on our next course? Tell us why you chose those particular three?" (one of the most famous Choosing Candidates discussion is the "Hot Air Balloon debate" in which participants have to decide who gets thrown overboard from an air balloon, which is falling fast towards the ground).
- Layout problems: For example, "Let's discuss how we layout our group page" or "How shall we set up our open plan office?".
- Question and answer: For example, Many of the practical support forums on http://mahara.org.
- Ideas from a central theme: For example, "Let's discuss new research approaches". This then gets broken down into sub-discussions as to the relevant merits of the individual approaches.
- Implications and interpretations: For example, "What would life have been like when people didn't have the advanced medical facilities we have today? " or "How do you think Henry VIII would have practically coped or suffered with the gangrene in his leg?".
- Surveys of opinion: For example, "Tell us three things you think we should do differently in our course next year".
- Planning projects: For example, "1. Brainstorm ideas, 2. Prioritize actions, 3. Allocate responsibilities, 4. Report back on progress, 5. Celebrate successes".
- Combining versions: For example, "Let's read all the pages that individual users have submitted to our group and then identify which are the most important elements we think we should include in a common group page on this topic".
This is not an exhaustive list, of course. The most important thing is to try to set up discussions with a clear sense of purpose or outcome to the debate. You do this because you need to give your forum participants a reason to post.
Don't get us wrong, depending upon the engagement and motivation of the group a generic forum title such as "Talk about Dogs" could, in fact, generate just as much discussion as a "Choosing Candidates" discussion like, "The Queen of England likes corgis and Winston Churchill should have had a bulldog. Say which breed of dog you think is best suited to (for example, Queen Elizabeth I or for example the CEO of PI Inc.) and tell us why you chose this breed."
There is nothing to say that you have to use Mahara forums to set up outcome-oriented discussion frameworks, we are simply putting this idea forward for you as food for thought.
Let's go back to Janet and see what kind of topics she thinks could be included in her legal and ethical forum for the Clinical Trials group.
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Janet Norman from PI Inc. thinks: | |
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One of my colleagues has said that they would like a place where they can discuss if withholding medicine for a control group is still scientifically justifiable and ethical. There are implications and interpretations to be discussed here, so I instantly suggested that we set this up as a topic in the Clinical Trials group's Legal and Ethical forum. |