Notification settings in a forum and 'the Woolies effect'

I've been having a mini-debate with a colleague about notifications when setting up forums in Blackboard. I always harp on about email notifications as 'promoting connections' but yesterday it was suggested that notifications negate the 'woolworths effect'. Some of you will be old enough to not only recall 'Woolies' but also the strategy they had of changing their offering so often that it piqued your interest enough to get you over the threshold and, hopefully, back out having made a purchase.

In Blackboard it is possible to set notifications:

1. To include the body of a post as well as a link back to the forum 
2. To only include the link to the forum post 

Does anyone have a hunch as to which of these, if at all, would be the better option to encourage participation (or 'promote connections', with reference to the Networked Learning definition). I had one of these notifications earlier. Was getting the 'full story' from the email stopping me from accessing the forum to see what was actually happening? I am not sure there's a direct relationship there. I am sure that other factors could easilly overturn either approach in the moment that a decision is made about whether or not to visit the forum. Speaking personally, when I get notifications which only give the link to a post I get frustrated. It does not allow me to evaluate on the spot how much of an interruption to my workflow this post demands. Merely the hint that someone is active in the forum is a point of frustration. Perhaps it is better to simply tell students at the start that they are going to miss out unless they check the forum every day. Then, when they make it their routine, they discover that the visit was worth it and hang about for long enough to participate. However, if the full text of the post is given to the student, they can then begin to think about what was said without the delay of having to login only to discover that the message did not require a reply. This feels like a question that someone answered conclusively in about 1975.
(image: cc wikipedia)

Where to put this wiki...

Students are working in groups to produce a page of evaluated links to resources around a certain topic in healthcare. Where do I put the wiki?
In their own VLE module? Sadly, this limits the audience and thus the students' awareness of that audience.
In their programme-level VLE module where all students on their programme can access it? As this task is run twice a year, it's soon going to get hard to navigate and muggins is going to have to maintain it. At least building one per cohort keeps it manageable with no overhead of maintaining it.
Somewhere all of our students can see it? This would mean farming them out to a different wiki-space not normally associated with learning and teaching.... politically sensitive! Plus the need to do all the 'gardening' implied in '2' above.
Sigh - looks like I stay with option one. It's, as ever, a trade-off between wanting to do the right thing educationally and yet keep it manageable...

Pedagogically neutral? No

I do not know what happened just then, but I suddenly saw a little fissure in my (relative) complacency about choice of VLE. Ah yes, I know what it was... I was transcribing something a student had said to me in a recent interview.

[I] don't really put anything into blackboard, it's more what I get out, out of it

Well now, I am not about to bash corporate VLE's. Of course, it's the way that we use the tools that matters most. But part of 'networked learning' ought to be the establishment of links, of all shapes and sizes and levels and types of activity.... but it struck me that they ought not to be one-way streets. In the perception of this student, a discussion list was alien to the overall thrust of blackboard. How can the whole enterprise of being a student @university be re-branded and re-engineered so that the statement above can be inverted to read:

[I - or, better, we] really put loads into blackboard, it's more what I put in, into it

Coopman's First Monday essay about Blackboard

Sorry to pull off the cream of this one and not add much commentary but this, her last sentance, especially needs some mulling over:

Although Blackboard designers structure the course platform for efficiency and profit, instructors and students need a course environment optimized for learning and performative teaching.

First Monday, Volume 14:6 - 1st June.