di: Tough love for the DI community

[Heather Penney]

Hi Chris,

Probably best to join the existing group, and get people talking about resources and sharing resources, that may increase group members. Posting to the group will undoubtedly help. If the group gets large enough then they may recruit additional admins?

Heather

Sent from my iPad

> On 3 Oct 2020, at 13:24, Christopher Duss <duss.christopher at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi Heather,
> 
> Thanks. I joined both to have a look and will let you know my thoughts. What do you think about approach to a DI specific group? Use the existing one and attempt to reinvigorate it either by posting or taking over as moderators? 
> 
> Thanks,
> Chris
> 
>> On Oct 3, 2020, at 16:56, Heather Penney <h.penney at btinternet.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi Chris,
>> 
>> Here is a link to the existing Direct Instruction Special Interest Group that already exists on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/groups/DISIG/?ref=share it currently has only 310 members and is not that active at the moment. Maybe have a look and see what you think? 
>> 
>> This is a good example of a well run Facebook group where resources are shared and advice is available. The Precision Teaching Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/6125768559/?ref=share it has 2.1K members and is run by the Standard Celeration Society. Direct Instruction curricula are sometimes discussed. 
>> 
>> Heather 
>> 
>> Sent from my iPhone
>> 
>>> On 3 Oct 2020, at 2:57 am, Christopher Duss <duss.christopher at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> Hi Heather and Amy,
>>> 
>>> Thanks for the reply and suggestion for a Facebook group. While I think a Facebook presence is a necessary part of social media management for the product, and I see NIFDI does post updates there, I haven’t found Facebook pages particularly easy to use or navigate for the type of information that should be on a DI forum. In particular, in my experience at least FB is a serial string of posts by time and not by topic, unless you create different pages for each program. Amy brought up some functionality that I am not aware of, so we may be able to make that work. 
>>> 
>>> I do think a dedicated forum is the best approach. Honestly, as developing and maintaining a forum requires resources, I think the forum should be set up and managed by the producers of the DI materials, not NIFDI or a fan club of DI volunteers. Similar to the Adobe or Microsoft community forums or Quora even, if they built a seamless forum experience they would have volunteers ready to contribute. 
>>> 
>>> That said, if a dedicated online forum is not forthcoming, let’s see what we can do with existing platforms like Facebook. I’ll reply specifically about that separately.
>>> 
>>> Thanks for everyone’s interest in improving these programs and the experience of delivering them. 
>>> 
>>> Chris 
>>> 
>>>> On Sep 23, 2020, at 16:13, Heather Penney <h.penney at btinternet.com> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> Hi Chris,
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> I’ve been member of this group for sometime and this is my first post. I completed agree a proper place to share and talk about resources and programmes would be a huge step forward. Even a Facebook group would enable people to follow threads, look back at what had already been discovered and share resources.
>>>> 
>>>> Many thanks for saying this!
>>>> 
>>>> Heather
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> Sent from my iPhone
>>>> 
>>>>>> On 21 Sep 2020, at 8:46 pm, Christopher Duss <duss.christopher at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> Dear DI Community,
>>>>> I have been a member of this forum and daily user of DI products for a few years now.
>>>>> I have now spent hundreds of hours developing supplemental materials (practice videos, progress checksheets for better parent communication, etc.) for the Language For Learning program, as I found it to be the only program necessary to teach beginning learners English. Given the vested interest I have in this program surviving and thriving amid the development of other effective learning resources, I have some comments about the state of the DI community that I would like to share.
>>>>> First of all, it gives me no joy to have to say these things. I had hoped that Zig’s passing would spark a renewed interest in his work and passion for further developing the programs he invented. What has seemed to happen instead is those very programs dying with their creator. By sharing the following I hope to invigorate the response I expected or at least expose where I am wrong in my thinking.
>>>>> In short, we are falling short from a user experience perspective.
>>>>> Let me start with this forum. I am aware that there is some consideration within NIFDI about improving this, but we can’t hope to promote these programs and the collaboration necessary to improve them via the current e-mail forum construct. We have to move this to a webpage online at the very least. Only then can we properly warehouse past discussions in an accessible way and incentivize regular contribution. Quora, Gear Slutz, Adobe/Dell/Microsoft product support come to mind as effective forum systems. Less fancy and developer-intensive frameworks can be implemented cheaply in Wordpress. We may also be able to piggyback on existing software by setting up a Stack Exchange community or subreddit.
>>>>> Now the programs. I am currently using Funnix, Language For Learning and DISE. They are all aging but Funnix is the worst. I have heard there is an update coming soon, and I am looking forward to it. As product developers and implementers we must seek continual improvement. If we don’t improve, someone else will and their product will replace ours. The fact that it has taken almost 20 years to get v2 of Funnix does make me question how good it is. Language For Learning and DISE could both be Apps (mobile or otherwise). We should keep our minds oriented to the best user experience possible. For these programs that would be NO teacher interaction and students acquire the program skills. How do we get there?
>>>>> I have ideas, some expertise with executing the above programs, some software tools that could help. I imagine many of the thousands of DI teachers around the world do, but we don’t have the right venue yet to hear their voices. I think the first step is to create a great forum, then allow that to grow into a place where we share supplemental materials, expertise and ideas to make these programs better and better. I am interested in hearing from others about what our priorities should be at this juncture.
>>>>> I believe there is still enough energy in this community to move DI to a more prominent place in the education world, but feel we are at dire risk of allowing that to slip beyond where we will be able to recover.
>>>>> Sincerely,
>>>>> Chris
>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>> di mailing list
>>>>> di at lists.uoregon.edu
>>>>> https://lists.uoregon.edu/mailman/listinfo/di
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