One of the more interesting things about Scott's application is the level that he wants to scale his community to. He is trying to run a course with 1000 students. He wants them to participate in an electronic community, in part I think as an effort to scale himself, and in part, truth be told, because he is a technology maven. He thinks it would be neat to do.

You might think handling 1000 students in something like a wiki is trivial. Wikipedia, an extremely oft-cited example, has over 30,000 contributors who maintain over 1 million entries in a sort of web-based encyclopedia. Well, if you do the math, you realize that these numbers boil down to saying that there is typically one maintainer for every 30+ pages of content. So, scaling here comes in many cases from people having a domain that they essentially own in the larger social enterprise. In an academic course where you are trying to present basic material, the range of topics is likely to be much more focused leading to potential collisions among participants all wanting to talk about the same topic at once. It's unclear that most wiki software is built to withstand this sort of contention.

Another extremely important issue that Scott is facing is that the academy is not a bottom-up organization. Therefore (and perhaps oddly to people not engaged as academics), software produced by academic institutions (not students or researchers, but administrators) tends to be top-down and control-oriented. The idea is that the professor broadcasts to the students and the students receive. Further, the professor or university may have some knowledge asset that needs protecting (please read this phrasing as subtly sarcastic). So, things are built with the notion of controlled access and protected intellectual property as top priorities. Engendering bottom-up participation is not considered, even though one might think that getting students' active involvement is one of the keys to getting them to actually learn.

Scott is saddled with such a software that variously goes by the names ctools (internal to University of Michigan) and sakai (the open-source base of ctools used by a number of universities), and he wants to use it for a discussion board to engender class participation.

The problem I see with discussion boards is that the person who has ownership is the discussion board owner, and this is doubly the case in something like ctools. I have an alternative proposal. Use blogs for individual discussion and aggregate them. You will get individual participation much as you see this conversation taking place on the web. We did a successful prototype with this last fall which I have reported on extensively here and for which we will soon prepare a whitepaper.