Christopher D. Sessums :: Blog :: Engagement, Facilitation, and the Vicarious Learner: Notes from Sloan-C 2006

Reporting from the Sloan-C Conference on Asynchronous Learning Environments, I found the following session particularly enlightening:

Determinants of Engagement in an Online Community of Inquiry by Jim Waters  – Waters investigated the roles of participants in an online graduate course using a schema he and Susan Gasson developed at Drexel University.

Ask
In a nutshell, Waters was able to demonstrate that asking questions in an online discussion forum generates more participation. While this seems like a no-brainer, I found this presentation to be helpful as it reminds us all that if we want to create an engaging online presence (be it formal or informal), asking questions, a method with a long history, still works wonders in activating and stimulating dialogue and interactivity. Go figure?

Post Early, Post Often
Other notes from Waters presentation included an analysis of which posts generated the most action. He found that within the course he was investigating, those participants who posted early (i.e., once a question or prompt was put forward) where more widely read and more attended to by other participants.

Student Roles in a Community of Inquiry
As participants in an online community of inquiry, we can adopt a number of roles and stances. Waters and Gasson note such roles as the initiator, the facilitator, the contributor, the knowledge-eliciter, the vicarious-acknowledger, the complicator, the closer and the passive-learner. (More information on these roles can be found here.)

In his research, Waters noticed that the type of message posted had much to do with its attendance and reading by others. Specifically, posts that acknowledged and drew out debate on a question, i.e., facilitated knowledge creation and discussion, were read and attended to more often.

Role of the Facilitator
This leads to an interesting notion of the role of facilitation in online teaching and learning environments. The role of a facilitator is more than initiating or contributing to a conversation. Waters’ notes that facilitators “often resolve external or logistical problems for other students, moderate discussions, warn the community when a debate is wandering off topic, and actively acknowledge other students’ contributions.” A facilitator must be able to expand upon ideas presented and push them along adding additional insight.

So, if posts that facilitate discussion and knowledge creation are the most attended to, should educators be encouraging and training students to become facilitators in online communities of inquiry?

Do we do this through modeling such behavior? Is it through directly stating student expectations? Do we take the schema developed by Waters and Gasson and share it with our students? Will a well-defined rubric/matrix help?

Clearly if we make our thoughts and feelings known to students as to what we expect and model such behavior, we provide a basic structure that can be built upon. I hesitate making any generalizations because so much depends on the context and activities we are engaged in.

More on Vicarious Learners
Finally, Waters’ mentioned his next research steps included investigating ill-defined and well-bounded questions and the role of vicarious learners (aka lurkers). I was recently engaged in a similar discussion about vicarious learners with a colleague at school. Erik brought up what he calls the “the 1% meme,” i.e., 1% of users utilizing 100% of an application.

He writes:

I am pondering the concept that the richness of information available via blogs can be a bit overwhelming and actually limit interactivity in some cases. Rather then participating in a few blogging spaces and defining a presence through 2-way discourse in these spaces, I witness many students visiting and reading many blogs but rarely posting. Is this a genuine observation?

Rather than proffering a response, I would like to turn the question over to you.

What might be accounting for the various levels and attitudes behind vicarious learners/learning?
 
You can click on the “site meter” link on this weblog in the right navigation panel and see the number of visitors, the length of their visit, etc. You will probably notice a small fraction of visitors who spend any time here actually comment on a post.

Am I not asking good questions? Are my questions ill-defined or not well-bounded? I can quickly think of a number of reasons why people do not respond. However, one of the main reasons I write and blog is for the feedback. I would be curious to know if you find the information here useful, not useful, boring, not what you’re interested in, etc. (Anonymity is an fascinating side effect of Internet communication, to say the least.)

As always, your thoughts and comments are encouraged.