Exue Service - Thread Discussion Board

The community provides a thread discussion board for members to post ideas and comments. Generally, users can post any ideas they are interested in and make comments. But most postings focus on three areas: sharing learning strategies/reflections on learning, recommending/presenting learning materials in the message body or as attachments (will address this issue later), and making request for learning materials/learning strategies.

The web is not only readable but also writable in two levels: users can read and post message and the postings are editable and can be modified later. But only message owner can edit their own postings or comments. There are some postings regarding how to effectively improve spoken English and members’ reflection on learning experience. But most of them are not in-depth and intelligent discussions. One thing worthy to mention is that users are allowed to insert multimedia files into the message body.

In lieu of web 2.0 technology, the thread discussion board is a service and read/write web. It does use collective intelligence. But, the postings and comments do not reach a (tentative) final product based on collective intelligence, while in online communities using wikis technology such as wikipedia, there is usually a tentative final product at one time based on collective intelligence. Therefore, spoken English users need more efforts to make decision on which learning materials and strategies to use than in the situation that there is a consensus based on collective intelligence.

Under this general discusiion board, there are three sub-forums/aggregators: Downloading Center - holding links pointing to postings with downloadable attachments, Highly Recommended - holding links points to postings highly ranked by the administration team (still not clear how they rank the postings), and English Pronunciation - dedicated to English pronunciation topics (not sure it is sub-forum or aggregator collecting pronunciation related postings from the general forum.