Choice of Digital Communication Space in Academia

Oct 14 2008

Choice of Digital Communication Space in Academia

We’ve all had the experience of walking into a room full of people and having every single person look up and stare at us. Most of us taking CCT courses this semester have also had the experience of pushing the publish button, knowing that in a few seconds, some number of people will be reading (and necessarily, judging) our blog post. Both are intimidating, even in the most casual or intimate of circumstances.

A recent conversation with a CCT professor had me thinking about how “real life” behavior transcends the digital barrier. This professor pointed out her observation that students were far more active on the forums in Blackboard in past years than they are on the current WordPress blogging platform. Her interpretation suggested that Blackboard provided a more discreet form of participation as compared to the spotlight of the blog system. And in fact, in our “Why We Blog” series, this sense of exposure was cited as one factor in why people are reluctant to blog.

It reminded me of what my neighbor John, who works for Hostelling International designing and developing new hostels, pointed out about the common spaces in these establishments. When designing these spaces, hostels are now trying to eliminate this sense of exposure. Rather than having guests enter the common space and find themselves facing the entire room, they are working to design spaces that allow a brief peak into the room to assess the situation, or perhaps a more subtle entrance that allows for psychological preparation before entering an unfamiliar space with unfamiliar people.

It seems that the experience is very similar. So, I pose a question similar to the one Lauren poses in her recent post about social perceptions on Facebook: how can our knowledge about human behavior in physical spaces of communication inform the design (and choice) of online communication spaces, and vice versa? And, in the context of my post, what does this mean in the academic setting, specifically, for professors trying to encourage student participation in online conversations?

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Submitted by Margarita Rayzberg on Tue, 10/14/2008 - 17:49.

mystique of the discussion board

Submitted by Brad Weikel on Tue, 10/14/2008 - 23:14.

I wanted to point out a structural difference between blogs and discussion boards that, I think, must be playing a role here:

Blogs are organized as posts accompanied by comments. How the posts are ordered and accessed varies, but they are almost always organized around posts, and comments are not really part of the structure -- they're just tacked onto the posts. As such, posts are priviliged over comments; they seem more important and, consequently, receive a greater amount of attention. This, particularly in an academic space where posting and commenting are mandated by a syllabus, leads to lengthy, well-developed, and somewhat performative posts, with very few comments, and the comments are almost always tied directly to the original post: sub-conversations rarely keep their momentum.

A Blackboard discussion board, on the other hand, is organized around a different concept: threads. When you log into one, you see a list of which threads you haven't read and, when you click it open, you're presented with links to every post in the entire thread. The first post is still used as an organizing unit, but only in name - in a discussion board thread, all posts are equal.

Put differently, though we're all used to hearing that "blogging is a conversation," it is often framed as an author-to-commentor conversation, whereas discussion boards are generally understood to be community-centric conversations.

(As a humerous but pointed aside - while I'm writing this comment I keep wondering if it is getting to long, or if I should post it as a blog entry instead. Would I wonder about this on a discussion board?)

Finally, on a bit of a tangent, I also think the ways we consume blogs and discussion boards are profoundly different. When I've taken courses with blogs, I've subscribed to their RSS feed and slipped into very passive reading habits - I read them as they trickle into my reader, but am often not in the right mindset to leave comments.

In courses that used Blackboard discussion boards, on the other hand, I always set aside "Blackboard time." At the time, it frustrated me because it was often a last-minute inconvenience, the night before class, to sit down and read through 30 or 40 posts while trying to squeeze out my quota of comments, but in hindsight I see that this structure may have fostered a more discursive setting overall.

definition of an "assignment completed"

Submitted by Margarita Rayzberg on Fri, 10/17/2008 - 20:14.

Brad - I agree with you in terms of both the organizational and consumption differences of blogs and discussion boards.

To add, I also think that the point of "I've accomplished what has been required of me" is different for the two (and for the most part, students, at least in the context of their classes, blog because it's assigned, not for the love of it...although, if there are any of you out there, let's hear your thoughts). In blog based system, the primary, explicit requirement is to post and secondary, implicit requirement (and it may not even be one) is to comment. Once the post is submitted, it's crossed off of the To Do list. The discussion board, on the other hand, has no concrete stopping point. The nature of the requirement is ongoing: keep checking, keep posting. I see your point about the frustration of having to "squeeze out a quota of comments", but from what I remember, the discussion board posts and comments, were usually shorter and more manageable in high numbers than posts.

Perhaps then, the question is not which one is more appropriate in academic setting in general, but what is the academic setting trying to accomplish? If it is to create a discursive space, then a (better version of) Blackboard discussion forum is more conducive. If it is a comprehensive space, then blogs are the way to go.