[IxDA Discuss] Living in a User Generated World

[Christine Boese]

What a great question, and nearly a rhetorical one, since it may be
something that will always be with us, and perhaps remain unanswerable.

I'd like to come at it from left field, from an area that might be
instructive, even if it is outside the discipline as it is conventionally
considered.

Leading horses to water, but being unable to make them drink is one thing,
and the blogsophere and social media as a force at all are evidence that
quite a lot of horses are drinking, even with oppressive mass media
conditioning for passive media consumption, going back decades.

But think instead about realms where people every day every day sit around
and try to think of ways to encourage participation, not of "users," but of
students. I'm talking about classroom teachers.

Understand, there are different kinds of classroom teachers, and the
stereotypes for those different types abound, from "professor yellow-note"
droning in the front of a big lecture hall (classic "sage on the stage") to
your ever popular worked-to-death freshman composition teacher, or any
teacher whose main job is to teach "skills" or a craft, like a one-on-one
music teacher who gives lessons, a master carpenter working with an
apprentice, or yes, the writing teacher whose primary job is not simply to
bleed red on papers to punish you after the fact, but rather, to be a
writing coach who has to teach something even more nebulous which must
preceed good writing: critical and creating THINKING.

You might say, yes, but teachers have a captive audience. The threat of the
grade hangs over the heads of those who insist on attending a discussion- or
skill-based classroom and merely filling a chair with a warm body. Yeah,
right.

Good teachers, good teachers who are trying to gently lead students to take
greater initiative, to hold them to high standards of logic and reasoning,
they don't BOSS a class, they act as a catalyst. The best classes happen
when an open environment for discussion takes off on its own, and students
start teaching each other, with the teacher as coach, or "guide on the
side."

Besides, that grade threat is non-existent in these days of rampant grade
inflation and helicopter parents who think their precious darling is really
attending some variant of gym class, where you get an A for just showing up.
Especially in skills classes with little quantitative testing, because
authoritarian garbage-in/garbage-out is antithetical to the very idea of the
independent critical thinking values the class is trying to instill.
According to helicopter parents, that means the class is "subjective," and
everyone should get an A just for trying.

So teachers can play the authoritarian heavy and stifle discussion by
scaring students into cowering in their seats, or they can spend hours at
conferences and inservice workshops, learning tricks to increase classroom
participation and ACTIVE learning, the bits of sourdough starter that
ferment a discussion and lead it to be of an intellectual quality that goes
beyond, "Like, did Anna Nicole Smith O-D, or what?"

So what have those teachers learned that participatory social media (and
people who study computer-mediated communication, as well as the regular old
face-to-face interpersonal communication) will want to know?

One: men dominate discussions, online and off. Women are very often silenced
by social forces. Back in the 1990s, some very good research into listserv
discussions found men in the groups studied pitched fits and complained the
"feminazis" were taking over whenever the participation of women started to
go above 21%, a similar stat that's found in small group face-to-face
communication as well.

Two: silences should be honored as well as activity. It could be a matter of
the squeaky wheel getting the grease, but even elementary school teachers
will tell you that boys get called on more than girls, and demand more
attention (and need more help with certain kinds of classes). Some argue
this is a good reason for all-girls and all-boys schools, not because we
believe separate but equal is anything remotely equal, but to give girls a
chance to learn without having to turn into little Lady Macbeths and unsex
themselves to get called on in the classroom.

Silence, or thought and reflection, has value. Try that idea on in the
fast-paced synchronous communication of a chat room If everyone is talking,
who is listening?

Or, alternately, all participation is not created equal. Classroom use of
chatrooms (and I've analyzed these texts) can fill line after line with
drivel and inane banter, but in a heady discussion in these spaces (and I've
been in those also), different actors develop varying ethos through their
speech acts, so that someone who talks and talks, but rarely says anything
of value becomes just noise, while a thoughtful writer can utter a few lines
with such clear reasoning as to persuade everyone else in an entire space,
face-to-face or virtual, and turn a discussion in a more fruitful direction
altogether. And such a person can also be shouted down, or  buried in the
din. (see also, trolls, right?)

So do you just want more participation, as in numbers of people spouting
drivel? More cat blogs started and abandoned? Or do you want to encourage
real and rich communities to develop, with members paying close attention to
each others' words, creating dialogues that enrich and instruct, dialogues
that advance our communal sense of understanding and knowledge in the world?

Is the model for comments fields, blogs, and social media the Commons, with
plenty of monster shouters standing on soapboxes, or is it Plato's Academy,
with people walking around, trying out ideas, rigorously testing and
weighing them, paying attention, listening, and participating?

It's kind of a macro/micro thing. Numbers will never reveal the true quality
of the participation/interaction. When we talk about "Many-to-Many," we
can't fall into the mass media trap of over-generalization about demographic
groups and name that as "interactivity." From 30,000 feet, it may look like
"Many-to-Many," but when you get closer, it has to look like "One-to-One,"
and never "One-to-Many," or, I would argue, it is not really interactivity,
and is something else entirely.

Chris

On 2/12/07, Dan Williams <dgwillia at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> I was recently reading a book about Modern Day Phobias and it got me
> thinking, so I thought I would post a few questions to the group and see
> what you guys thought....
>
> How do you get people to contribute in a User Generated World who are not
> prone to contributing? How do you get people to blog, comment on your
> site,
> add video to youtube, join social networks etc etc?
>
> In the physical world I have been to a lot of meetings which have been
> dominated by the extroverts within the group. How do we as designers
> encourage everyone to contribute online even those who may initially not
> feel comfortable doing so?
>
> Or do we actually even care about those that are not comfortable
> contributing?
>
> I feel there must be design principles that can help to encourage
> contribution. For instance developing an environment where all feedback is
> valued, allow people to post anonymously etc etc. Any ideas?
>
> Cheers
>
> Dan
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