Twelve practical suggestions about how to get the most of participating in online communities

Whenever we learn anything we are influenced by other people, as well as by our culture, our beliefs, experiences we’ve had, the understandings we’ve developed about the world and the way it works, and our current context. Every human being’s learning is therefore shaped by the people around them, even when they are not directly seeking to learn collaboratively. Language and the way we use it to communicate plays a large part in shaping our experiences, especially in the online world.

I suspect that most have us have been misunderstood when they have sent an email, posted a comment in an online forum, or typed up a blog post. Why do these misunderstandings arise? Nancy White (2000) highlights 5 key differences between face-to-face and/or real time (synchronous) communication, and communication where there is a time delay between the initial communication and the reply (asynchronous):

• No visual cues - this means that as you type you will not be able to pick up on the physical cues you are used to receiving in face-to-face contexts. Written language can be quite slippery, and something you may have meant to be lighthearted, may be read as something totally different.
• Delayed response - you are likely to be used to this from text messaging and emails. Sometimes, however, the delay might be exceptionally long, or you may not receive a reply at all. There are also group dynamics where a community member contributes a lot, or logs in, reads but does not leave a comment or reply (lurking).
• Illusion of distance - most of us have done it...sent a communication that we’ve instantly regretted but can’t retrieve. Often it’s something we’d never say if we were in the same room as the person, and as such is outside of social norms.
• Biased toward writers - while it is becoming easier to communicate using audio and video, novices to online learning communities tend to start with text-based communications. This puts those with less developed literacy skills at a disadvantage.

• Public versus private - some community members may have quite strong views about what should be public and what should be private; for example, some members will not want to reflect critically about a skill they have trialled or an experience they have had.

So now we have looked at some of the key differences, we can now explore some of the strategies we can use to 1) help encourage positive dialogue in online spaces, in part by modelling responses; 2) minimise the risk of misunderstandings and communications that go awry; and 3) ensure that we don’t inadvertently ‘shut down’ discussions.

Encouraging positive, ongoing dialogue and participation

The following examples are only a very few suggestions and models of approaches you might use (adapted from Anderson, et al, 2001, p. 8) . There are many others, and I would be delighted if this grew into a much bigger resource with a broader range of ideas...so, please add you’s in the comment box below :-)

1. Identifying areas of conceptual / theoretical agreement/disagreement: "@Xu Lin, Janelle has provided some compelling suggestions that seem to take a rather different stance from your’s. It would be great if you had the time to respond to her?"
2. Seeking to reach consensus/understanding: "It feels to me like Martin and Whare are, in essence saying essentially the same thing :-)"
3. Encouraging, acknowledging, or reinforcing contributions: "Thank you for your insightful comments"
4. Setting climate for learning: "@Manu - I love the fact that you are 'thinking out loud' in this conversation. It’s great to be able to follow the flow of your thoughts. Would be good to hear if you reached a final conclusion ;-)"
5. Drawing in participants, prompting discussion: "Any thoughts on this issue?" "Anyone care to comment?". Alternatively, you might want to ask quite specific questions that encourage, for example, the write of a blog post to dig a bit deeper: “The experience you describe here is heartening. I was wondering, though, did you see specific shifts in student writing while they were using Storybird? Were students interacting differently than when they were using pens and paper?
6. Unpick resources, ideas and comments: "In the video Black says [insert provocative quote]…what do you think? Do you agree / disagree? Have you had similar experiences?"
7. Focus the discussion on specific issues: "Hmmm - I wonder; it feels as though...[insert specific issue] has been explored a lot in the media, but I am not sure that I agree with the coverage that has been given, because...[select a specific aspect of the issue] "
8. Summarise discussions: "The original question was …Krishna said...Nigel then responded...and Togi concluded that…. But I feel as though we haven't addressed…"
9. Explore understanding / suggest explanations.: "I feel as though you are pretty close in your interpretation of …[insert topic / theory / concept here], but I’m not sure you accounted for… …and I feel this is important because…”
10. Gently highlight what may be misconceptions: "While it sounds as though from a senior management perspective this is likely to be a positive way forward, but I’m not so sure it holds true in other roles…for example, when I was...what do you reckon?"
11. Share ‘knowledge’ from diverse sources, e.g., videos, articles, podcasts, personal experiences (and include pointers to resources): "I was out running and listening to a podcast, where Gilly Salmon was saying …If you are keen to listen to the podcast in full, you can find it at http://www…."
12. Responding to technical concerns: "If you want to include a hyperlink in your message, you need to . . ."

A few more tips (from the Australian Flexible Learning Network) for fostering a safe and engaging online community area include:

1. Sound like yourself, use a 'genuine' voice and model the style and tone of the 'conversation' you would like to see from other online members.
2. Explore useful communication such as how and when / if to use acronyms and emoticons (smilies).
3. Use plenty of white space and if you can, use different colours and fonts to enhance clarity and identify key pieces of information.

Roles for effective facilitation

You might be involved in facilitating an online community, and the following are some proposed roles and functions (suggested by Feenberg and Xin, n.d.) that can help you identify on what your purpose is, and so select positive language to match that purpose.

• Meta Functions: in your role as facilitator you can help foster conditions required for good communication; watch multiple conversations and weave common threads between participant comments, offering prompts and summary when important; help address issues around information overload; summarise, and compare, and contrast different points of view.

One of the issues here is that you “run the risk of wresting ownership of the dialogue from its contributors” (Collison et al., 2000, p. 141). So, often you will need to leave the community members to formulate questions that will deepen the dialogue, while you also “avail yourself of techniques that explore tensions without seeking resolution, examine rationale for beliefs or assumptions without assigning value” (Collison et al., 2000, p. 141).

• Contextualizing: this is where, as a facilitator, you provide context; select themes or questions for discussion (or sets up a process for community members to do this); open discussions; model interactions and behaviours; share your own experiences; set the tone; and refer to resources or links to extend thinking or that might be useful for community members.
• Monitoring: in this role, you recognise community members’ contributions; help keep the momentum going in discussions if necessary; and prompt contributions by posing new questions.

As part of monitoring, you will need to acknowledge contributions from every member at some point - this is a bit of a balancing act though, and you don’t want to become the sole voice or the person who always replies.

Positive reinforcement can be very powerful, but remember that by publicly praising a participant you can shut down further dialogue. Other participants reading your message of approval may think: ‘I don’t think I can really add to that’, or your message may create anxiety if other participants think: ‘Why didn’t (s)he respond similarly to my message?’.

Cultural responsiveness

In online communities, as in any other community, there are ethical issues of respect for one another regardless of gender, ethnicity, religion, class and age. As such, as members of an online community, we need to be culturally responsive, and to be aware of the diversity of community members. While this list is not exhaustive, some things to be aware of are,

• some content may be sensitive – for example, politically correct in one culture but offensive in another culture
• a request for community members to upload an image of themselves would be inappropriate for some cultures (an image of something that interests them may be OK though)
• language used may potentially reinforce cultural stereotypes

When posting and/or responding in an online community you may want to look for resources that represent more than one cultural viewpoint.

And remember - recognising that participation in an online community cannot be culturally neutral is the first step in the process of becoming culturally competent (Palloff & Pratt, 2003, p. 41).

There are many more and it would be excellent if you make suggestions (or relate your own experiences) in the comment box below.

Additional resources

• Avoiding Online Conflict (Moussou, & White, 2004) - provides 4 tips for avoiding online misunderstandings. It also includes some great questions for you to think about in connection with your facilitator roles and responsibilities when a community is experiencing negative behaviours.
• Wheeler’s blog post, Lurking and loafing (2010), is worth reading in full if you have the time.
• Let's get more positive about the term 'lurker' looks at the value of lurking, resistance to lurking, and why lurkers ‘lurk’. It also summarises some pros and cons, and has a short, but useful list of suggested further reading.

Images

• Communication. cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo by Paul Shanks: http://flickr.com/photos/pshanks/411196422/
•  'Seedling Planting'  http://www.flickr.com/photos/39108150@N05/3598029211 Found on flickrcc.net
•  'P1340974' http://www.flickr.com/photos/33748728@N02/8008353068 Found on flickrcc.net
• 'Corn Refraction'  http://www.flickr.com/photos/41380738@N05/4372324287  Found on flickrcc.net
• 'food for thought' http://www.flickr.com/photos/44124348109@N01/49191352 Found on flickrcc.net

Taking action against online bullying - what can you do?

Bullying on IRFE in March 5, 2007, the first class day. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As you're sure to be aware from the media Cyberbullying (and bullying in face-to-face environments) is experienced with all age groups, and in a wide range of situations. (See herefor example). It is reprehensible in all cases, and people need to know how they can respond if they are bullied, and how they can support each other in cases when a friend or colleague is being bullied.
Beth Caras (in this article) advises "“If you don’t want to respond back to whoever is doing this to you I understand, but you should tell the social medium whether its Facebook or Twitter, because they have people monitoring their traffic, and they have their compliance officers. But you should also tell the police, because law enforcement has computer crime divisions now and they can determine if the threat is credible or not".
Cyberwise, during the US Anti-bully awareness month, also identify a raft of useful resources for young adults who use social media, and their parents (read more here).

• Preventing Cyberbullying: Top 10 Tips for Teens
• 7 Reasons to Leverage Social Networking Tools in the Classroom
• Report: Students On Facebook Study 10 Times Less Than Non-Users
• The A - Z of Education Technology Tools
• The Cost to Educate a President

If you are not convinced that this is something for all of us to take action, and responsibility for, you may also want to read the following article that remembers Amanda Todd, a 15 year-old Canadian who recently committed suicide after being bullied. Diana Graber challenges us with the following (read the full article here):

It’s tempting to blame social media for this tragedy. But that’s too simplistic an explanation for a string of events that include not only the original unfortunate lapse in judgment, but years of emotional and physical bullying, and a very public plea for help. It makes you wonder were the adults were during all these years. And why issues like bullying, sexting, sharing inappropriate images on social networks, and more, aren’t embedded into our daily discussions both in the classroom and out.

If we can take anything away from this sad story, I hope it’s a call to action for all adults to use this event as a catalyst to talk to the young people in our own lives. Whether we like it or not, we must accept the fact that most of their lives are now being conducted online, so if we don’t learn how to speak to them about appropriate and safe online behavior, or better yet, inhabit the digital world they live in order to be better equipped to guide them through these unchartered waters—then shame on us.

Related articles

• Cyberbullying only rarely the sole factor identified in teen suicides
• On Cyberbullying
• Authorities Investigating Death of Bullied Teen

Understanding the Digital Generation

A lively, entertaining presentation from uLearn by Lee Crocket - a man after my own heart who believes in really visual presentations :-)!! Well worth watching if you are wondering if learners of today are "wired differently".

The description from the EdTalks site reads: "Lee Crockett is an award winning designer, marketing consultant, speaker, and co-author of Understanding the Digital Generation. Lee's keynote presentation at ULearn10 is an intelligent and humorous look at the differences between digital learners and those that are educating them. Lee believes that we need to provide students with a fundamentally different set of skills; "We don’t need four year degrees any more, we need 40 years of learning and relearning."

Three steps to enhance e-teaching in schools (Ken Stevens)

Image via Wikipedia

Ken Stevens (working at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada & Victoria University of Wellington) gave an interesting overview of introducing eLearning at the high school level, in particular in rural schools away from the main settlements. He suggests that this should be built on a collaborative model, which incorporates a conceptual shift at the teacher education stage.

The collaborative model includes inter- and intra- institutional communication, virtual classes meeting traditional classes, and also (and most controversially he has found) challenging the notion of traditional schools.

Ken outlined three main steps for the enhancement of eTeaching in rural schools. He also introduced a pedagogy for e_learning which looked at awareness open learning structures, collaboration, learning circles, and building shared realities for understanding. A cybercell is a face to face group whose members extend their discussion into the virtual, and can invite in guest and expert voices from around the world. The notion is that sustainable eLearning communities are based around collaboration, adaptation, cultural identity and innovation. As such, Ken puts forward a scaleable, sustainable model for eLearning that recognises issues of access and equitability.

Analytics and intuition: Reading classroom gestures (Tom Murdock, Moodle Moot 2010)

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Tom Murdock talked about transitions - students transitioning from high school to college or to a career. The mismatch requires some planning to address the issue, and a growing number of states in the US have policies that help prepare high school graduates for college through aligned standards, and course requirements. Furthermore, many states have policies to ensure high school graduates are workforce ready.

Remedial courses in the US are utilised by 77% - math, 30% - English, 29% - reading, 12% study skills, 35% - writing (these are percentages of 1st and 2nd year students who ave taken remedial courses since high school graduation).

A teacher can see, by doing a close reading of gestures, a student's engagement with elements of the course, find out about activity efficacy, and clues about course fulfillment. As such, Tom Murdock  suggests that one way of helping solve the transition problem is by teaching an analytics engine to intuit information from Moodle gestures is a positive way to 'fix it before it's broke' - finding out with a student where they are and offering support if required. Moodle activity reports, input into forum posts, and quality of responses can give real clues to student engagement or disconnection.

Separate and connected knowers - a separate knower will say, 'I understand this, and I have an idea', whereas a connected knower who does not really assert what he/she knows "but Jill just said something interesting". When we are online and can't look each other in the face and can't really help each other with communication, we have to practice both separate and connected knowing. Moodle has these principles underpinning its design.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Education: Student Apathy (time.com)
• Letter: Evaluating Teachers (nytimes.com)

Enhancing online discussions - some ideas from the blogosphere...

Good afternoon. I thought you may be interested in this blog post about encouraging learners to 'talk' in online discussion forums. It is entitled "Say what? Promoting discussion in online courses", and has some interesting tips and wrinkles.

The introduction from the blog post is as follows: "How can we get learners to talk in online discussions, and how can we get the chatty students to shut up? The results have been pretty disappointing so far. Most instructors set up a discussion forum, and ask students to post an original post and to comment on two other posts. But instructors complain that students are doing the minimum and the discussions aren’t exciting. But what are they assessing? They’re just counting how many posts each student gives. The discussions, hence, are seen as tedious busywork."

Management, Marketing and Ning-ing

Today, on the auspicious day of 9th September 2009 (09.09.09) Vickel Narayan and I facilitated a workshop with the Department of Management and Marketing as a requested follow up session to a more generic Web 2.0 session, which Vickel had previously run with the group. Prior to the workshop we worked with the department to identify outcomes that they would require from two Ning sessions (number 2 in October) - this helped ensure that participants voices were 'heard' beforehand, and also that we didn't run the session that we thought they wanted, as opposed to the session that they actually wanted :-)

Session 1, today's, was a hands-on session that focussed on utilising a Ning space for their Department which could be used as a way to build more of a community, communicate and share. There was also conversation around negotiated guidelines, which they would later need to discuss. The agreed guidelines would be used to shape interactions they all felt comfortable with within the online forums, the 'identity' they shared with colleagues, and the content that was considered appropriate.

By the end of the session all participants had joined the Ning, added a profile and photo, posted to a forum, written and posted a blog reflection, and searched for, embedded and shared a video.

Session 2 will focus on using Ning with learners.

After a start where there was some trepidation, the room was filled with laughter and talking. One participant commented in their blog at the end that they were really happy that everyone was involved and having a bit of fun! A further participant came up and said she had been really anxious before attending the session as she felt she would not be able to do or accomplish anything. In fact, she had achieved a lot and was really over the moon.

Watch this space for the next installment.

The Power of Multimedia to Express Complex Concepts

Multimedia - the nurturing of ideas

Sometimes wondered what all the fuss is about multimedia? Pondered how to express a gnarly concept? For me the answer is illustrated by this animated video "Democracy is..." (bu Lucas Szozda). It is, in my opinion, beautifully eloquent and yet hauntingly simple.

Another podcast: Open Source Administration

I was out for a run the other day, and listening to podcasts...as you do, and one came up that that I found heartening....

This is an hour and ten minute podcast which features a keynote address by John Maeda. He talks a lot about creative communication...especially through the daily blog that he, as President of the Rhode Island School of Design in the US, keeps and shares with the whole of the institution. Maeda encourages 'thinking aloud' and rather than asking for comments, he asks his community 'what are you thinking?'. He also compares creative leadership with more conservative leadership. Well worth a listen!

Hope you enjoy :-)

You can download the Mp3 file directly by clicking here.

Web Tech Guy and Angry Staff Person...

Ever had that meeting where you have been working on innovative approaches to something, and then you hit the brick wall? The person or group who really do not want anything to do with what you are suggesting and are not open to seeing the potential benefits, but rather focus on issues.

This animation: "Web tech guy and angry staff person" looks at some of the common barriers frequently mentioned, and discusses responses while also acknowledging that there is no easy fix. I found it useful for raising awareness of some of the key points and how I might open a dialogue around them in relevant situations.

Technology problems, or social problems...

Out running on Friday, I was totally absorbed by what Morris W. Beverage Jr. had to say (Educause podcast). He started from a point around technology which actually switched me off to begin with, describing technology as 'things' communicating with 'things' rather than, apparently, seeing the key focus as the communication and co-construction of artefacts/knowledge that is enabled through technology.

Anyhow, once I had stopped bristling and listened to what he went on to say, a lot of it seemed to make sense. One point in particular where he spoke about issues in education (for example, plagiarism) are not technology problems, but rather social problems. It make such a lot of sense. Yes, technology such as Turnitin may be developed to attempt to address the problem, but in fact what it needs is a recognition of the reasons behind the plagiarism, which tend to be academic literacy challenges and questions around ethics.

Well worth listening to this podcast as it is likely to strike a few chords no matter what your role is in, or supporting, education.

The Educause blurb is: "Campuses today face a growing number of clashing cultures. Faculty struggle with traditional methods of teaching in an environment where demands for flexibility and convenience are rising. Learners increasingly treat a college degree like a commodity. Battles rage over resource allocation. External constituents exert influence on campus operations and outcomes. This session addresses these issues and the role IT departments need to play to help higher education not just survive, but thrive."