Thought this was interesting but with several strong caveats:
1) this is from a company that takes an promotional and generally uncritical view of edtech companies. 2) the claim si that people don't use threaded discussions anywhere in the real world - what about facebook?! It's all about threaded discussions! 3) the solution to all of this is threaded video discussions because writing is hard. All that said, I do like the shout out to 1st gen college students finding it more welcoming.
"The classroom-management system we use, Sakai, comes with this massive surveillance infrastructure. You can see what students clicked on, and you can see what they did. Early in the semester, I show students all of the tools that follow them around, and we talk about it.
I tell them, I'm not going to look. I don't want to decide whether or not you read something based on whether you clicked on the article. I don't want to play these surveillance games. I just want to see, did you write something thoughtful in the forum?
We use it to start a conversation about what it means to be a student in this day and age. They usually have no idea that their professors can see every click."