This website is a discussion forum set up solely to facilitate discourse in Mark McClure's First Year Colloquium on Chaos and Fractals at UNCA. The site is powered by the open source application Discourse. It is similar in functionality to the StackExchange sites like math.se. In fact, one the founders of Discourse was also a founder of StackExchange. Unlike StackExchange, however, Discourse is open source which allows us to have our own dedicated forum.
Participation in this Fractal Discourse is invite only and participation is mandatory - you can earn actual points for your grade!
How do you get those points?
First, there will be several clearly spelled out assignments - simple things to get you started on the site like sign up and fill out a profile or answer some question. These little assignments will be worth 5 to 10 apiece.
In addition, Discourse, has a built in trust level system. You start at trust level zero and can increase up to trust level three by participation. Specifically, to make it to trust level 1 you must
- Spend at least 10 minutes
- Reading 10 posts
- Spread out over 5 topics
To make it to trust level 2 you must
- Spend an hour
- Over 10 days
- Reading 20 posts
- Spread over 10 topics
- Reply to at least 3 topics
- Receiving 3 likes and
- Dishing out at least 5 likes of your own
To make it to trust level 3 you must
- Spend at least an hour and a half
- Over 20 days
- Viewing at least 20 topics
- Replying to at least 6 topics
- Giving at least 10 likes
- Receiving at least 8 likes of your own
Most importantly, you earn 10 actual class points for each trust level.
It's really not particularly hard to make it to trust level 2. More importantly - the real benefit of Discourse is that it is a genuine opportunity to learn!