Communication
In the late 90s the asynchronous
nature of online communications was hailed as a great opportunity to change
the nature of dialog especially between professionals. Participants
who were likely to be logging on at different times anyway, could take the time
to reflect and construct measured and meaningful replies; more so than
in face to face communications where we rarely pause for more than a few seconds
to consider our next contribution. Mulling things over is a valuable reflective
process. This type of interaction does make up a significant proportion of online
communications but increasingly it seems in many contexts synchronous
or virtually synchronous is what users are looking for.
When the internet was new
we were happy to mail off a technical query and wait a few hours or days for
a reply but today's young users often want answers "now". Notschool
researchers will often go to public chat rooms and ask for technical help from
peers or check if there is a technician online who they can 'chat' to, rather
than sending an e-mail to their technical team. I find the same with their learning;
a large proportion want support through "live" communications.
The boundary between synchronous
and asynchronous communications is soft, gaps of a few minutes or tens of minutes
may well be largely due to speed of typing. A lot of community interaction will
be a mix of measured reflective and virtually spontaneous interactions and typically
have gaps of a few minutes to hours or even weeks between contributions to a
thread of dialog.
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4. Dominantly asynchronous
until around 11.40am on 30th when a researcher contributes to this thread
and starts another related thread.
3. The sequence of
titles is not linear indicating that several responses were made to some
contributions ie there are three titled 'Re (10) the game' repeated by
10 hours and 8 other contributions. Similar patterns of interlaced conversation
threads emerge in synchronous chat between several users.
2. Around 11.40am
another brief virtually synchronous interchange.
1. Starting at the
bottom at around 5.00 am on the 29th; two researchers are coming to the
end of some dialog via email to a community area this was characterised
by a mail every few minutes and allowing for reading and writing time
is virtually synchronous. |
Lurkers
I dislike this term but
it is becoming the accepted terminology for some community members who, if left
to their own devices, seem almost invisible; rarely contributing to
any discussions, if your system allows the history of messages or other
interactions to be viewed you will probably find they have been looking at a
lot of material but prefer to read rather than contribute. Lurking may
sometimes be a transitional phase as a new participant finds their way around
and gets the feel of the ethos and protocols. We find it can take three
to 6 months before a Notschool young researcher becomes an active member of
the community.
We find in general
participants will read a lot more than they contribute. The value of
reading but not contributing is rather like watching question time on the television
where the captive studio audience provide feedback and debate which is hopefully
a fair representation of what we might have asked. The observation of debate
stimulates thought and the decision not to become actively involved may often
be due to a lack of time. It can be that prior to an individual visiting it
a discussion may have already covered the topics/ stance a participant would
have covered so they see little sense in contributing. We generally are able
to read faster than we can write, some low level contributors see their highest
benefit is from reading as much as possible. The act of writing a response
or contributing to debate is often the first step on the road to ownership and
sense of belonging.