The ebb, flow, and content of the conversation

The weekly volume of posting throughout the course also supports the notion that topics in the blogosphere were student-driven. The first peak in posting volume occurred in mid through late October when both the mid-term and first project were due. The second occurred right after Thanksgiving just before the second project mini-presentations were due.

One might wonder based on this pattern whether posts were always strongly topical, perhaps relating only to specific problems students were encountering. Indeed, there was a good dose of that in the 75% of posts that were less than two paragraphs.

However, in the 25% of posts over two paragraphs (i.e., around 270), students tended to be more reflective and to inject new ideas. A classification of the 50 longest posts in length indicates that only four (8%) were about specific topical problems (e.g., “why doesn't this database query work?”). Eleven (22%) were posts attempting to recap what the person had learned about one of the class topics (e.g., “Here's what the last couple of weeks of learning about this technology have led me to conclude.”). Seventeen (34%) were meta-comments about the course (e.g., a paean to blogging, or a reflection on the extremely tough nature of the mid-term). Fifteen (30%) were new topics the student introduced about outside goings-on in the realm of information business. Three (6%) were off-topic (e.g., complaints about the national election results).

Was the conversation one-sided?

One might wonder what my role was, given that students had to achieve a minimum quantity and length of post. Did I need to blog at all? Recall, as I mentioned in my first post, that the point of the exercise was to get students to reveal to me what was going through their mind in the course; in essence to start a conversation.

Therefore, I had to participate but also wanted to keep my role to a minimum so that the conversation remained more student driven. I wound up responding directly to one out of three (I would mention in class that I had been reading posts, so students knew I was there). I triaged posts according to difficulty, urgency, and whether there was a policy issue. For the most part, students could not provide responses to extremely technical questions. Further, I was the one responsible for policy.

The net result was that I achieved about double the student participation volume over what my colleagues have reported when using email in this course with about half the number of posts they reported.

Relation to the blogosphere at large

I think the chief difference between how I conducted this blogosphere and how other bloggers with an audience operate is that I had to motivate my external audience (the students) to blog. Other bloggers suffice with those who have already decided to blog on their own.

However, there are otherwise many similarities. Consider, for instance, the highly visible Robert Scoble of Microsoft. In a recent interview with Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson, he professed to reading 1300 blogs a day. Having followed his blog for several months, he makes between 10 and 20 posts a day, and he pushes about 100 other links per day with excerpts into his link blog. This suggests that around 90% of his blogging is responsive to the environment around him. In essence, Robert is monitoring his environment and promoting what he likes by linking to it (almost a direct quote from the interview). Mind you, Robert seems much more efficient than me, but we are essentially using blogging the same way.

Chris Anderson, the Editor of Wired Magazine, has written extensively on something he refers to as the long tail, sometimes called the power law distribution. In a power law distribution, the most frequent items tend to be much more frequent than the infrequent items. For instance, in the traditional classroom setting, the professor controls the floor over 80% of the time. The nearest student might talk 10% of the time. In other words, most people in this context are excluded from participating.

Anderson's perspective is that those in the tail are excluded from participating because we have not applied technology in a way that allows them to. Stephen Downes, a thinker on social software, points out that technology will not solve this problem by chance but needs to be designed to do so. Here I have provided quantitative analysis that indicates the extent to which we were able to activate the long tail in this class. The key seems to have been moderation in output by the class leader and a specific mandate to participate directed at those in the tail. We were able to achieve the results we did because the technology allowed us to free participation from the constraints of time and space.

Next on the docket

I will present the results of a student survey to see what they thought of all of this.

[The tagback for this post is LearningBlogosphere. To tagback, just copy the link into your post. I'll eventually pick it up in Technorati. Feel free to trackback also.]