Many-to-Many: Finding Mavens in Usenet
This post by Ross Mayfield is loosely connected to my post yesterday discussing why it is so difficult for a "learning community" to form in the limited time and space of a single semester.
If you look at the pattern of interaction on Usenet, I would venture to say that a similar pattern is found on other internet-based (or even face-to-face) communities of practice. In fact, this is what Gladwell would argue in talking about people who are Mavens.
In any given population there are only a few true mavens. These people do not emerge overnight. It is only by the gathering and sharing of information over a period of time that they begin to gain influence.
One advantage of the public internet is that multiple mavens can come together around a given topic and this is (in my anecdotal experience running online communities) what creates a rich dialog and inviting environment for others to join in the conversation. I see this possibility emerging from the image representing the analysis where a few nodes (or experts) are formed. To extend this further to Gladwell, one could then imagine that online connectors begin to link to other communities they belong to and sales people extol the virtues of the community to anyone who will listen. Others then come to the community to learn but only post if they need information.
To tie this random thought back to my post on course discussion boards: In a single class discussion board, you might be lucky to have one true maven and the possibility that this person will have the time to gain a reputation as a trusted resource is small. Even if this happens, there are rarely multiple mavens to engage in debate and give more than one viewpoint. Sales people and connectors never have the opportunity to emerge on a class discussion board because it is locked away behind the course management system.
PEDABLOGUE - Cutting the Threaded Discussions
Michael describes his ongoing frustration with getting students to actively participate in using discussion boards. I think he is right when he says that the design of many boards is part of the problem. Why is it so hard for universities to design a decent UI for their CMS? Many of them seem to look like they were developed by undergraduate computer science students as a class project, rather than by thoughtful designers (with extensive user input).
The bigger issue, of course, is why students do not want to post. I think we make the mistake of thinking that we can somehow "capture" the hallway learning that goes on among students in an admittedly artificial forum. While this might seem like a great idea on the surface, in reality it is a solution in search of a problem. It is an attempt to foster a virtual "community" where a real learning community already exists.
Even in fully online courses the threads that are created by instructors for "water cooler" chat are unused or seen as a place to ask technical questions. Part of the reason for this is that most people taking online courses are adults with very busy lives who tend to be goal-driven (just let me get through the assignment). Another issue is that we (I know I do) set expectations based on what we see on very successful boards that are out on the internet. But there are two other reasons why I believe learning communities fail to develop on discussion boards.
One reason is that there is not enough time in a semester for online communities to truly develop. It takes a long time for trust to be established and people to feel comfortable with open communication. It seems like I start to get to that point right about the time the semester ends! The communities that are successful out on the internet have been around for many years and have built a following over time.
The other reason is related and it is one of scale. There are usually too few people in a class to have the critical mass necessary to achieve a learning community. In most communities, there are a huge number of lurkers who learn from a few very active people. Some lurkers never join in but some will join in when specific topics get posted. In a give class you might only have one or two active posters (and one might be the instructor) in an open forum. This does not generate enough grist for the mill in a short semester and the threads linger and die.
In the successful online communities grouped around a profession or topic, there are usually 100s or 1000s of people who post to the forum. But only a small percentage are really active over the long term. That's ok in a large group because it keeps enough fuel in the fire to keep the community viable. The lurkers then jump in (usually when they have a specific knowledge need) and know that someone will respond in a reasonable time.
I still keep an open forum in my online classes but my expectations are fairly low. Every once in awhile I am pleasantly surprised but I am just happy when the required posting forms are active!
The following is an entry about my current dissertation work. While there is a light at the end of the tunnel, many struggles remain to complete this effort by June.
I can say that when I first read Reeves (2000) state that we should be conducting "socially responsible" research in educational technology, I was intrigued. Follow this with articles by Schwen (1977), Richey and Nelson (1996) Richey, Klein, and Wayne (2003) and I'm a believer. I have chosen to use a specific form of developmental research created by Reigeluth and Frick (1999) called formative research.
Fast forward a couple of years and add personal experience and I am headlong into collecting data in my formative research project. As I continue to document a user-centered process to develop learning objects, I have learned one thing (well, more than one thing but one big lesson): Developmental research is hard ;). Of course, all good research is difficult but trying to using a more emergent methodology to generate knowledge about development process is as complex as instructional development itself.
Part of the issue is just that I am conducting this research in the "real world." The real world is messy and makes disciplined inquiry difficult. Merging the timelines of academic research with the timelines of business has been a challenge. The original project for study changed multiple times and so have most of the players on the team. While this might make consistency difficult, it is important to understand because this is the world in which many designers find themselves.
The best I can hope for is to accurately reflect this in the process and make sure that I am clear in the dissertation about how all of these things influenced the development of the process.
I am beginning to see why most ISD process models have very little research-based evidence...
Click below for references
P.S. sorry for the old-fashioned attributions but I find there is still value in things written before the digital age :)
Reeves, T. C. (2000). Socially responsible educational technology research. Educational Technology, 40(6), 19-28.
Reigeluth, C. M., & Frick, T. W. (1999). Formative research: A methodology for creating and improving design theories. In C. M. Reigeluth (Ed.), Instructional-design theories and models volume II: A new paradigm of instructional theory (Vol. 2). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Richey, R. C., Klein, J. D., & Wayne, N. A. (2003). Developmental research: Studies of instructional design and development. In D. H. Jonassen (Ed.), Handbook of Research for Educational Communications and Technology: A Project of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (2nd ed., pp. 1099-1130): Lawerence Erlbaum.
Richey, R. C., & Nelson, W. A. (1996). Developmental research. In D. H. Jonassen (Ed.), Handbook of research for educational communications and technology: A project of the association for educational communications and technology. New York: Macmillan.
Schwen, T. M. (1977). Professional scholarship in educational technology: Criteria for judging inquiry. AV Communication, 25(1), 5-24.
I finally got around to upgrading the site to MT 3.14. There are only a few external changes to the site. The best one is that I can now have more control over comment moderation. This should stop spam from appearing (even if it still gets posted).
I am still having some difficulty on the backend with Firefox. I have to log in almost every click on the admin interface. I read a few posts on the MT forums about such issues but only from people who were having the problem with all browsers. Clearing the cache fixed the problem in IE but Firefox continues to ask for log in and password at every turn.
Update Ad-Aware was blocking cookies.
Oh well, if that is the worst problem I run into after a fairly major upgrade, I'll consider myself lucky!
Update: I should have waited before posting that last statement. I was tinkering with the templates and left out a /div tag and, just as I discovered how trashed my front page was, my internet connection went down for about 2 hours. Arrgghhh....Now all seems to be ok and I have tweaked a few more things.
We are living through amazing times and we don’t even know it. Despite all of the negative news reports we have heard and tragedies that have been endured, there was some truly incredible news from Titan. Titan is a moon circling Venus and, after a seven year journey, the space probe Huygens safely descended to the surface of Titan after a ride on the back of its mother ship Cassini.
It is so hard to believe that we can create a craft that can travel 1 billion miles and still function as promised seven years later. I can remember when I was working as a multimedia programmer in a planetarium working night after night to get a special effects projector to align a NASA rendering of Huygens dropping onto an artists rendering of Titan more than seven years ago. I can remember thinking that seven years in the future seemed like an eternity. My son was only 4 years old when the people with the vision and foresight to build this machine launched it on its journey.
I wonder how the future will treat this acquisition of knowledge. Will it be lost amid all of the other things going on in the world or, will these types of discoveries have a much more profound impact than so much of what we think is important today?
The press kit is here. And the first images from the surface of a world that we have never seen before can be found here.
This is something that should be spread...the total donations are amazing in such a short time.
Thanks to Mark for posting on his blog...
cogdogblog: A Bit of Edu Torrents?
Happy New Year everyone! This is the official first post of 2005. It was supposed to be made on a new platform or at least an upgraded MT blog but *sigh* I spent too much time playing with my new video editing suite Santa brought me....
Alan wonders out loud about how BitTorrent might be used for education. I too have been thinking about this. While it might not be as useful for posting things like lectures, what about the 1000's of hours of old educational films and movies? Even Newsreels and other films with historical significance would be excellent to have available.
Imagine being able to download any of these at superfast speeds into the classroom. Just think of all of the stuff that has been produced at taxpayer expense that should be freely available from many different sources.