The goal of this site is to provide a discussion board capability that some instructors will want to use for their courses rather than using the discussion boards found in course management systems (e.g., Blackboard) or web portals (e.g., Yahoo). The comparative advantages of this tool are likely to result from its small size, e.g.,
More capabilities are being added continually. The most significant addition to date is the capability to choose to receive email notification when a post is made on a topic. By contrast, Blackboard doesn't provide any email notification to users. The changes page describes recent and planned changes. I would welcome comments on both the current functioning of the tool and on these plans.
I developed a simple version of this tool in October 2002 for a class I was teaching in the Graduate School of Education at George Mason as an example of a data-driven website. The current development of this tool is through the Dogwood project at Northern Virginia Community College.
Bill Pegram, Northern Virginia Community College, wpegram@nvcc.edu, www.erols.com/wpegram, March 18, 2003