COOL forums revisited....

I wont lie, I haven’t been the most active member of the COOL forums on WebCT… perhaps its partly the info I was given about the forums on previous years, and partly due to the lack of interest I had in it after the first couple of weeks… But I HAVE been making an appearance, be it a mainly covert presence.

There’s no doubt about it, interest in the forums is certainly flagging. Considering the number of posts I was met with after I logged on for the first time 3 weeks into the module, 6 weeks after that and the seriousness of posts has gone down, the level of people actually posting for the benefit of others has deteriorated, and it seems most posts are now related around off topic and general personal conversations. I get the feeling that in the initial panic in the few weeks, and after being told in lectures that participation is being noted, people posted for the sake of posting. I could well be one of these people – I tried to get involved, but I couldn’t see anything worth getting involved in.

What does this tell us? Perhaps it suggests that people can’t be forced into a community – individuals have to have a good reason to commit their time to others, and a university module may not be a good enough reason. Perhaps with some of the abuse that was thrown around at the start, people were less inclined to post. Perhaps the conversations being mainly personal meant that people found it more difficult to get involved. It could even come down to language barriers – looking at the list of people on the module, its possible that many of the students are from non-English speaking backgrounds and may not have the same grasp of typing the English language as others. This is purely speculation of course; the fact that my surname is Chrisostomou could suggest to others that perhaps I’m not from an English background…

One things for certain, I don’t think I’m likely to take anything useful away from the COOL forums from this point on. I’ll keep checking regularly, and hopefully I’ll have a more positive update come 5-6 weeks from now, but right now I can’t see it going anywhere other than downhill.