SUBJECT: RE:
Excellent points, Dougal. Your post made me think of a few other things to mention. I really believe that the media that you use to communicate affects the amount and type of communication. Communicating by printed letter, email, Facebook, Twitter, and Chat all afford different communication styles. We can see that Nicenet causes some people to write lengthy academic posts (which is great). But it doesn't help much in the between-post coherence or in the participation rates.
Using a more modern Discussion Board software might help. I think that it should (at least) have threaded discussions that go more than 1 level deep. Fully-threaded discussions make it very obvious who you are replying to. It would also be nice to have formatted text, ability to upload documents, and ability to share weblinks without typing in the HTML codes.
Another really nice-to-have feature would be notifications by email. I agree that it is difficult to remember to check Nicenet. But if people could sign up to receive an email every time a new thread is posted, or every time someone replies to them in a thread, or every time someone posts to a thread that they are interested in, etc., the reminders might help them visit the discussion more often. Most modern online forums have this kind of functionality, and I really believe that it might help (assuming people WANT to participate
