Tuesday, February 03, 2015

Let's discuss discussions

Here's something else to consider. We seem to have fallen out of the habit of discussing the books in the forum. Do we want to revive that practice with the next book? Should we start taking our talks over to a, say, private group at Facebook?

Any other suggestions?

4 comments:

Rohan said...

I never liked the forum. I'd rather see more discussion on the blog posts, actually: one thing a lot of bloggers have remarked lately is how commenting seems to be declining, and holding our discussions out of sight seems like it would run counter to the way blogs themselves are set up to enable back and forth. But I can see that because we get multiple posts all up at once (and often cross-posted) it does make it hard to have a more general conversation. Hmmm. One idea might be to have a "Let's Talk About It" kind of post go up here after the book posts are up. But maybe there are better ideas.

dorian stuber said...

Although I arrived after the forum went into decline (or so it seems) I agree with Rohan. Perhaps the person who chose the books could offer a synthesizing post after the others went up, pointing out consistencies, disagreements, general observations etc. I would be willing to do that this time around. (Can you tell I'm a teacher?)

Rohan said...

My feeling is that something very simple as the start-up post (like "What do you all want to talk about?") is all that would really be needed to kick things off -- not least to minimize the effort required, but also so people don't feel any sense that now they *have* to respond to a whole lot of things, or any specific things. But whatever people want to try is of course fine with me. Anyone else have a suggestion or preference for how to proceed?

Rebecca H. said...

I like the idea of a post on this blog devoted just to discussion -- as Rohan says, a quick "let's discuss this!" would suffice to get things going. There's no reason, though, Dorian, that you couldn't do a synthesizing post (I'd love to read that, actually!). I think, though, that that kind of synthesizing post should be just an option instead of a regular expectation. Whatever makes it easier to participate is better.