We often hear teachers say, “I want students to have free discussion, to articulate whatever they want to say through online forum or the like.” At first glance, this senses perfectly fine. Students are give a lot of freedom and control; they are granted the opportunity to direct learning to their interest or in their own pace. Then I begin to wonder, what’s the pedagogy behind the “free discussion”?

The arguments for the “free discussion” might be that the topics forced onto students might not be interesting or meaningful for them. That will confine their opportunities for self-directed learning. The compulsory online discussion, inevitably, will generate empty, meaningless and shallow pieces.

However, empowerment itself can’t guarantee the quality of students’ work. Students will not become intrinsically motivated once they get more control. A problem associated with the “free discussion” is the clueless students. They might have no idea what to write about or to discuss about. Or the online posts might be on such diverse topics that it was hard to have a focused and on-topic discussions. In many cases, voluntary participation is equivalent to no need for participation. Students usually will not interpret the voluntary participation as an opportunity for them to take initiative and ownership of their study. They interpret the task as something less important or unnecessary. Otherwise, why the teachers make other assignment required, but not this one?

All in all, something “nice-to-have” is very hard to sell to students. They can be too busy or to lazy for something that is not “need-to-have“.

For members in an online community, they take on the roles of writers and readers at the same time. The interesting thing is that although they are like comments as writers, they also seldom comment on others as readers. This is easy to be interpreted as just selfish act. but I think there should be something deeper. For example, it can be associated with

• knowledge ( e.g. I don’t know much about what he/she is talking about, so better keep my mouth shut.)
• habit ( e.g. I prefer to write commentary on my own blog. )
• technology threshold (e.g. I need to log in to comment? Why bother.)
• perceptions (e.g. I simply have nothing to comment on. )
• preference (e.g. I don’t want others to see my comment. I will shoot the write an email.)

On the other hand, there are some motivators for commenting act:

• rule of reciprocity ( e.g. This post is really useful. The guy left me a comment, I’d better leave him one as well.)
• clarification (e.g. I don’t quite understand, better ask. )

I have had this debate with myself for a while and my perspective on this matter changed over time. A discussion with Nicole after a seminar we went to ignited it again. I guess it will be worthwhile to record my change here.

I used to be a quite strong opponent of forced participation for students. I believed in that students will benefit more if they are engaged in the authentic activities to their genuine interest. The ideal situation is that students are driven by the internal motivation instead of the external motivation. I used to feel it was kinda pathetic or sad to force students into online discussion.

On the other hand, we all know that the online community will not take shape just by creating an online forum. Social infrastructure such as goals, rules and facilitators, can play an critical role. A case I was involved in my work set me to rethink about this required participation. A teacher in our faculty is a very experienced online facilitator. She is dedicated and skillful. The course she taught in the past had successful online discussion when the online participation was given extra point. When the online discussion became voluntary, she got the participation problem. So here, we have similar students population, same great online facilitator, but the online discussion failed to take off.

There are many factors that influenced students’ online participation, some are related to individual student, some are related to the course. To form a self-organizing online community, or having online discussion out of free will, there are many conditions to meet. For example, students need to be mature learners who believe in peer learning . On account of this, maybe such self-organizing online community will be more possible with post-graduate students who are more self-initiative, resourceful and reflective.

But for those teachers of the undergraduate students who wanted to promote online discussion among their students, what can they do? If they don’twant to leave the online discussion to chance, assessment might be an effective measure. It might be argued that the best solution might be to promote the inner need for peer learning. Then it comes down to how to make students willing and ready for online learning? In this respect, there are several barriers. For example, it takes time to change one’s epistemology. It’s impossible to change students’ perception and attitude overnight. In addition, the subjective teacher can’t spend much time on this as well. So to show students that peer learning might be useful and valuable, one way is to get them into it and try it out themselves. So the means might not be graceful, but the ends might be good.

 … critical technological literacy focuses on a deep, socially contextualized, and informed understanding of technology.

… creative literacies: the ability to experiment with technology in order to create and manipulate content that serves social goals rather than merely retrieving and absorbing information.

… network literacies include the ability and the impulse to effectively and ethically manipulate a range of technologies to communicate and collaboratively construct and share knowledge. (p. 107)

Burgess also pointed out that blogging, as a fluid and flexible genre, posed special challenges for students. Due to its individual ownership, students need to take initiative in experimenting and shaping the genre of blogging as their personal learning platform. Ultimately, it is students who need to decide on their preferred mode of blogging. However, many students are used to the stable and enclosed systems as CMS. This type of participatory and autonomous online activities are foreign for them. Thus a perspective shift is in need.

Although I don’t have much interest in probing into blogging as a writing genre, the issue mentioned by Burgess was indeed a valid point.

Burgess (2006) Blogging to learning, Learning to blog

“Increasingly, the digital divide is giving way to concern about the participation gap. Throughout the 1990s, the primary question was one of access. … As long as the focus remains on access, reform remains focused on technologies; as soon as we begin to talk about participation, the emphasis shifts to cultural protocols and practices. “(p. 23)

Race, class, language differences amplify these inequalities in opportunities for participation. One reason we see early adopters is that some groups not only feel more confidence in engaging with new technologies but also some groups seem more comfortable going public with their views… (p.258)

It will be very interesting to decipher how the individual perception of media affordance is shaped by the cultural and social forces. The barrier to online participation is less about access to computer and comfortable level with technology; but more on the psychological perception and cultural norms, or as the ” consequence of uneven motivations and literacies“. The perception regarding what media is appropriate to contact whom under what circumstances differs from person to person. Then how this personal perception of technology formulated poses as a very interesting question.

Convergence, as we can see, is both a top-down corporate-driven process and a bottom-up consumer-driven process. (p. 18)

The power of the grassroots media is that it diversifies; the power of broadcast media is that it amplifies. That’s why we should be concerned with the flow between the two: expanding the potentials for participation represents the greatest opportunity for cultural diversity. Throw away the powers of broadcasting and one has only cultural fragmentation. (p. 257)

In this convergence culture, we need to create a synergy between grassroots media and broadcast media. There is a balance to maintain between the top-down and bottom-up forces.

Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press.

I know making blogging part of course assessment will be an effective way to increase and motivate students’ participation. But at the same time, I believe blogging is not for everyone. So giving students’ the control and freedom can ensure more meaningful use of the technology. (It just occurred to me that I once saw a study that showed that required and voluntary online participation didn’t have much difference in terms of students’ performance.) But I still believe the beauty of blogs is to give students the freedom to explore personal meaning and social value.

But inevitably, more students’ control means less teacher control. That is to say, how the students use and benefit from it will be somewhat out of control or unpredictable. In a sense, it can be called accidental learning. Then if the teachers want to use blogs to achieve certain learning objectives, it seems a risky thing to do by giving students too much control.

Personal epistemology is a new term I picked up today. It refers to beliefs about knowledge and knowing. I know students’ perception of what knowledge is and how to learn have huge impact on their actually learning. For example, for those students who don’t regard peers as the important source of knowledge, the incentive for collaborative learning might be low.

I just didn’t realize there is a lot of research focusing on this connection between personal epistemology and learning. Hofer BK, Schraw G and Hammer D seem to have quite some publication in this respect. In addition to the general perception on knowledge, there are also discipline-specific epistemology.

• Identity – a way of uniquely identifying people in the system
• Presence – a way of knowing who is online, available or otherwise nearby
• Relationships – a way of describing how two users in the system are related (e.g. in Flickr, people can be contacts, friends of family)
• Conversations – a way of talking to other people through the system
• Groups – a way of forming communities of interest
• Reputation – a way of knowing the status of other people in the system (who’s a good citizen? who can be trusted?)
• Sharing – a way of sharing things that are meaningful to participants (like photos or videos)

He actually had some problem with the label “digital natives”:

… the “digital natives” analogy implies that these skills are uniformly possessed by all members of this generation; instead, young people have unequal access to the technologies and cultural practices out of which these skills are emerging and so we are facing a
growing participation gap in terms of familiarity with basic tools or core cultural competencies.

So with the uptaking of the participatory culture comes the participatory gap:

the unequal access of youths to the opportunities, experiences, skills, and knowledge which will prepare them for full participation in the world of tomorrow.

Participatory culture shifts the focus of literacy training from individual expression onto community involvement: the new literacies are almost all social skills which have to do with collaboration and networking.

I haven’t have time to delve deep into the affordance.(Someone warned me not to.) I am more interested in the perceived affordance. I sort of have the feeling that it is closely intertwined with cultural and social dimensions. Each might warrant a long and hard investigation.

• • 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
  • 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
  • 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions

And this participation inequality is simply part of the online community. The phenomenon will always be there.

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A report on how customers use social networks by Charlene Li showed a diagram like below. It is also pointed out that

the younger the group, the greater the level of participation. More
than a third of teenagers fall into the creators category, while people
in their 20s dominate the joiners and Gen Xers are avid spectators.
Many older people lurk in social networking sites, but “boomers and
seniors need more relevant content and services to get them engaged,