home
intro
feeling the walls
non-participation
blogging & lurking :
learning styles
summary
| Why opt to lurk rather than post? | The Benfield article listed several reasons why students were reluctant to contribute online. This made me wonder whether there might be other (positive?) reasons for online silence [see: lurking, reasons why]? Indeed the most common reason people chose to not contribute posts was because they were seemingly quite happy reading and browsing. |
| How common is lurking? | Before I focused on non-active participation (lurking) I wanted to get an idea of how prevalent this behaviour was in online communities [see:categories of users]. This article suggests that there are 3 categories of users in an online community, each of which differs by a multiple of 10. So, for every 1000 lurkers there are 100 participants and 10 key contributors. Lurking, rather than being a minority behaviour is one followed by the vast majority - and when given the option of posting or not posting most people choose to not do so. |
| Lurking as a learning strategy: | After reading an article by Williams suggesting that "Discussion and sharing experience have been identified as two of the most effective means by which adults learn" I became confused. As suggested above lurking is widespread and there are a wide variety of reasons for doing so... most of these are not copping out but are instead strategic behaviours. However if there is little online interaction can one assume that the value of the discussion board in a learning context is reduced? Both bloggers and lurkers 'do' their learning away from the online community, and learning isn't consolidated by online interaction but by reading and/or private reflection [see: blogger = lurker?]. Hence bloggers and lurkers are not making use of the discussion and sharing components. |
| Impact of lurking on the learning community: | Why might one person contribute towards the knowledge capital [Reingold] by posting to a blog or discussion whilst others (despite being very involved by their reading/learning) do not? Whilst some learners may meet their learning needs by lurking the wider community receives little or no benefit from the lurkers [see: blogger = lurker?]. The presence of non-contributors significantly changes the dynamic because whilst their learning needs may be being met those of the blogger/solo-discussion-poster may not [see: feedback and JSB]. It's also a little artificial because the blog may not be as private as it appears to the blogger, nor the discussion board as uninspiring as its number of contributions suggest. |
| next: learning styles |
| blog references: | categories of users |
| lurking, reasons why | |
| blogger = lurker? | |
| feedback & JSB | |