I have a question for you edubloggers.
I am wondering about large comment threads and how valuable they are to the originator and others participating within the thread.
For example, when you read a post that interests you and you notice there are 40 comments attached to the discussion, do you read through each comment?
Do you skim the topic sentences of the comments?
Do you “walk away”?
Do you add your two cents worth?
What are the benefits from long threaded discussions?
What if there are 2, 4, 6, 8, 10 comments?
Are you more likely to read and comment when there is less commenting?
What are the psychological reasons behind why we choose to respond or choose to walk away?
In a related vein, I ran across this article by Christopher Allen on his Life With Alacrity weblog that focuses on group size and maintaining a sense of connectedness in online communities. I am curious what research says about optimum group sizes in online collaborative environments. Is there really a general rule of thumb or is it always context dependent?
I’d love to know your thoughts.
Keywords: co-cognition, cognition, commenting, comments, discussion threads, discussions, learning, online, teaching, threads
Comments
RE Reading comments on other people's posts: it tends to be a function of available time and interest.
RE Reading comments on my posts: I go through these pretty thoroughly, and sometimes re-read them over time. Some of this, of course, is narcissistic revelry :) -- but, as Stephen says, if someone is responding to something I put out there, I'm curious to hear what they are saying.
RE Commenting on others posts: a function of interest, time, and having something to say. If I'm commenting on someone's blog, I also want to be sure that I'm actually contributing to the conversation, as opposed to consuming bandwidth.
Cheers,
Bill
Dear Christopher
I wanted to add a comment to say thank you for the great image and the great blog- just discovered it today via delicious tags and really appreciate the content and your thoughts - also very interconnected with mine and the web (and world) I am weaving....
On the comments - I actually do a combination and I do think it is context dependent (these days I think everything is context dependent - in fact I don't really believe you can ever seperate context out though change in context impacts everything else and wise versa) AND I also think that comments lead to more comments...I wonder whether invitation and intention lead to more comments as well? And I also wonder whether enough people, as yet, know how to comment online (your comment system is actually one of the more simple I have seen! And shows how 'unscary' blogging and comments are...)
Ok enough from me for now -looking forward to what else you are going to weave into your blog and thanks again for the image and ideas...
warmly,
Natalie
Thank you all for your responses.
I was especially intrigued by Natalie's comment about whether or not people know how to comment. A co-worker mentioned the notion of cognitive boundaries which perhaps gets at this idea.
Blogs are one area where I do tend to read comments. I've been on large, international discussion boards where it seemed like I was reading through reams of comments and felt like there was this huge disconnect. That is, everybody was talking but few people were actually talking to another.
I need to read the article referenced by Stephen today on Comparing Weblogs to Threaded Discussions.
Chris
I would say that most of the blog posts I read have between one and five comments. This is probably because I come to them straight away through my RSS reader.
For those where there's quite a lot of comments (more than 10, say) I tend to read the first response and those written by names I recognise. If it seems to be an interesting discussion then I'll read the rest.
Of course the best discussions are those where the original poster keeps the conversation going (much as you do, Chris!)
Doug(teaching.mrbelshaw.co.uk)
Christopher,
I find it interesting when a proponent of the "Read and WRITE Web" terminates the thread. Has the limit gone down to 38 comments? Who decides when a discussion is over in our wonderful virtual community?
http://weblogg-ed.com/2006/dear-kids-you-dont-have-to-go-to-college/
Regards,
Charles.
Doug,
As always, I appreciate your comments.
Charles,
Wow! I never noticed that before on Will's blog. I've posed questions on a couple of Read/Write evangalists blogs where I never received a response which kind of threw me for a loop. Kinda disappointing.
I was thinking of changing the "Add a comment" header to "Discussion." I wonder if that semantic shift would make a difference?
Chris
Hey Chris,
Just for the record, the reason the comments go off is that after a few weeks, trackback spam just inundates the thread. I'm not sure what to do about it other than have WordPress close it down at a certain point. It certainly is not something that I prefer doing!
To your question, I read all of the responses sometimes many times on my blog. And when I'm commenting on a long thread, I try to scan to see what the general sense of the conversation is and read more deeply those comments that for some reason seem to resonate. But it is a function of time.
Thanks again for being a great teacher and for sending those delicious links my way. I do appreciate it.
Will
Will - you should use the Akismet spam module for WordPress, it's caught almost 30,000 comment/trackback spam on my website since March. No spam have got through yet.
Chris - I guess I read all the comments, since I just got to bottom of this thread. Like Natalie, it's very context dependent, as I don't read all SlashDot comments (as if anyone with a life could). On my own blogs, I read all of the comments very carefully; comments are what turn an "online journal" into a conversation.
Excellent question; as is evident from all of the comments.
I'm with those who say that responses to our writing are the most wonderful things. I read every comment I get. I don't always respond, though, and sometimes, when I feel it's better to do so, I respond in private. I never want to leave requests for information hanging, though, so I always respond to those.
As for the really juicy comments, I believe those need to make it into a blog post so that they aren't missed by those people who don't scan comments.
When it comes to commenting on other peoples' work, I'm a firm believer in the responsibility that we have to spend time commenting, for several reasons. The first is that folks need to know they aren't writing in a vacuum -- we're out there, and we're listening. The second is that we, when it's productive to do so, should try to challenge and support the thinking of others. Maybe that's a teacher thing.
We're halfway to 40! Doug Belshaw (comment #8) has figured out how to get comments into his blog reader. I would like to know how to do this, too, as normally I figure that it would be the job of the blog software to determine what content to include in a feed.
I miss the forum/bulletin board model for rich, interactive discussions. I find blog comment threads limiting in that most people drop in their comment and then disappear from the conversation.
Cocomment is an invaluable tool for tracking comments. I've only recently been immersing myself in comments as much as the original post. It seems to me that the nature of blogging is often that it allows for quick publishing and thus many times, especially for me, ideas aren't fully developed.
Just like Microsoft was noted for releasing products before they were ready and then have its users refine and improve, bloggers often do the same thing. That's not a bad thing. Readers need to be as interested in the comments as the posts.
Congrats on your award.
http://www.moondance.org/2005/summer05/poetry/graph-of-tree-and-
Try this link above..
-c