How to increase participation in blogs? Some answers from the net

In an earlier post I claimed that most adults are not motivated to take part in the possibilites of web2.0 as they use the internet more like classical media.

Doing research on how to increase participation two aspects are generally mentioned:
1) technical barriers have to be reduced
2) it’s necessary to motivate to comment 

I think technical barrieres are more and more reduced (although they still exist), but the question still to answer is how to increase participation.

Some good general suggestions are made by the librarian David Lee King in a series of blog posts called “Inviting participation“. He treats passive as well as active participation. Nevertheless I think “ask the readers about their opinion, people are willing to share” is to simple and does not work in general. But he reminds us that many blog posts don’t really invite participation.

 Salla mentioned in her blog that people have fears about sharing thoughts, information, etc. I think that’s right. Adults are also much more aware of risks when sharing more or less personal information online. Furthermore I think blogging (and commenting) can be compared to public speaking. Something many people don’t like.

Nina Simone, expert for participatory museum experiences,  has also written two posts on developing questions for visitor participation. Although these articles are not directly linked to questions in blogs you can transfer her ideas to them.
Finding the right questions (for visitor dialogue) and Design Techniques for Developing Questions for Visitor Participation (especially recommended)

Her “useful characteristics of good questions” are:

• questions that trigger an immediate response
• questions that induce grappling
• questions that motivate authentic expression
• questions that draw from personal experience, not abstraction
• open to anyone (minimize cultural bias)
• speculative (what if? instead of what is?)
• questions which produce answers that are interesting to consume and respond to

I think her suggestions are useful as they reduce at least partly fears of writing a comment. In general many questions are to abstract and need to much reflection. So one maybe thinks about it but it takes too long to find an answer (and so one leaves the computer and takes the question with him  - until something else comes to his mind). 

So what’s the essence?
Don’t hope adults are absolutely willing to share their thoughts and to comment on blogs. Give them easier opportunities to  participate in blogs. Ask simple but interesting questions to make them familiar using web2.0 actively.

Museums and Twitter

Maybe you know I follow some museums and art galleries on Twitter. I actually appreciate what they’re doing and that they try to find new ways of communication. 

So it can be interesting to get quick news and information via twitter but it becomes difficult as soon as they try to develop active participation. One problem is that I don’t know the tweets they get and like that I don’t know what they answer to. The same is when museums and galleries ask questions: I don’t know what the others are saying or doing. E.g. the SFMOMA had a small competition: Twitterers could send pictures for the new twitter avatar of SFMOMA. You could either twitter a link to SFMOMA or send it via email. So I think it was a pity that it was not possible to see what suggestions contributors had sent to them. 

So how to solve this problem?
Well, you could use hashtags (which I would really recommend… also for live tweets) or you could RT interesting tweets. But my general result at the moment is that indeed you can get in touch with the museum via twitter but there’s no good possibility to create some kind of group communication. And it’s maybe even more difficult as museum followers are no compact and manageable group like a seminar, or time-bound like a conference.

Choose your perspective

The more possibilites museum websites offer the more difficult is it to find the right way through. I’ve just found that MOMA now has a bar at the bottom where you can choose your “view” on the website. According to this it gives you recommendations which parts of the website to visit. E.g. if you are teacher it could be interesting to see the teacher site, to inform about programs for kids, learn about the teensite of the museum; for students it suggests the ressources sites of the MOMA as well as video content on the website itself or on Youtube. 

It’s maybe not fully developed yet but I think it’s a good approach to help visitors find the right sites of interest right from the start.

Blogging in the education of adults?

As a task for the seminar I should write a blog entry on how to use blogs in education and combine it with an educational theory. But at the moment I am not sure if blogging practically works in the education of adults – they are simply not used to it, if they have internet at all at a certain age – I often work with. So of course you can provide materials and additional information (no matter of what kind) in a blog but this would theoretically also work on a usual website. 

It may be that pupils are highly motivated to work with blogs but I think this is not right for most adults – maybe also for our seminar. So there should be different considerations first, like:
How can adults be “taught”  to use the internet not like classical media? How do have educational blogs to be changed to increase active participation – and I talk only about comments and discussions? What are the fears of adults to write a blog? How can they be reduced? How does a virtual learning environment look like which motivates adults to write an own blog or even participate at all? What does adults motivate to share their thoughts and learning experiences?

I guess most of the adults would have to be somehow trained to take part in the possibilities of the internet at all.

Thoughts and Questions

One of the main arguments using blogs and microblogs in the class room is motivation. I guess this is mostly as it is something new at school. So how long will the increased motivation hold on if blogs and microblogs are a common feature of lessons?

Another argument is the increased engagement of students, esp. with microblogging in class. One of my thesis is that many traditional learning environments don’t support participation (also when participation is wanted). What I mean is every form of ex-cathedra teaching and I especially think of lectures and seminar presentations: One person is talking for ten up to 90 minutes (or even more). Especially in lectures you shall not interrupt but listen for such a long time. Questions are usually only allowed in the end when everybody can’t concentrate anymore, only wants to get ouf the room and have a break. So I think one reason why the students like back channels is that it is much more active and maybe even helps to concentrate better for such a long time. (I know so many students telling me they are absolute interested in what the speaker is saying but it’s hard for them to follow, some are even struggling with not falling asleep.) Furthermore simple but fundamental for understanding questions can be resolved immediately. And as many questions appear long after presentations this would be a good possibility to ask them in a group.

So actually at the moment I am more convinced of microblogging (than blogs) as a useful tool in classes, seminars and lectures with many listeners when interrupting and questioning is not really possible. 

Something I think can’t be answered in general is if teachers should be able to read this backchannels. A reason for not sharing this information with the teacher is that students could be ashamed of showing what they are (still) not knowing. But on the other hand exactly the same – to know at which points students still have problems – could be interesting for the teacher to know. As I think of this especially at university I guess most of the professors would not follow this anyway…

Nevertheless there are also advantages to lectures without the possibilty to get immediate an answer to everything: it’s learning how to find it out yourself (and where to look it up). And this kind of research has been  an amazing support of learning for me.

Linklist: Educational Uses of Backchannels

As it was topic in the seminar here are three links on Backchannels

Backchannel: explanation on Wikipedia

As asked in the seminar here is the link to the blog entry on Museum 2.0 about the educational uses of back channels (for Conferences, Museums, and Informal Learning Spaces). Nina Simone explains what she thinks is the value of backhannels as a learning tool. Thereby she not only mentions Twitter but also a talkbalk board, a chat room and Delicious and compares them.

Furthermore an article on Learning From (and About) the Backchannel by Liz Lawley. She gives an example and tries also to explain backchannels for people who have never used it.

Task: Use of blogs in education

Task: How can blogs be used in education to support learning?

Something General

The matrix of Leslie Scott offers a good introduction in the uses of blogs in education as it illustrates one the one hand the uses of reading blogs as wellas writing blogs for students and teachers and on the other hand differentiates the uses for oneself, the instructor, a class and the rest of the net. Like this it demonstrates at one glance that one blog can have multiple uses for an undefinite number of people (something I find a bit difficult to shortly describe in words).

Museums and Blogs

I’ve done some research on Hamburg Museums and blogs and it seems as if blogs are in general not in use there. The situation in English-speaking countries is different. It seems as if more and more museums there have blogs and the museum community disscusses actively how to use the internet in order to engage visitors (and just starting: even non-visitors, to say: people who will NEVER come to the museum but have the chance to learn something online).
As you could publish the content of museum blogs also on a “normal” website I won’t discuss it here (although I have the feeling that the content is appreciated differently). More specific to blogs is the possibilty to give feedback on the articles. Interestingly enough, it seems as if the comment function of museum blogs is rarely used. That’s mentioned in some discussions, e.g.by Angelina Russo or by Linda Kelly. As reasons they mention technical barriers as well as that people feel uncomfortable to comment as they see the museum writer as an expert. So the number of readers is high but the participation rate is low. Instead of that people seem to prefer to discuss on Facebook groups. This reminds me of conferences when you could discuss after a speech and there is pretty often not much participation. But later people discuss about the speeches much more. I guess there are similar reasons.
Actually I thought it is almost impossible to let visitors blog. But then I found the Teens Programms at Walker Art Center. The idea was to create an appealing website for teenagers by teenagers and it’s a blog. The creation was treated as an educational program itself. A presentation of the  project was held at the Museum and the Web Conference 2008 (actually it’s pretty interesting to read – maybe I will write a little bit more about it in the future. The paper had pretty much hints what to keep in mint when designing a web site for that purpose).

E-Learning Toolkit

I found a little compendium on “web2.0 applications for the support of individual learning processes” by the informatic department of the uni Münster which seems to be pretty useful. It addresses to students and introduces various tools along an idealised learning process when writing a scientific paper or learning for an exam.

You can download it here (pdf).

Struggling with information overload and getting organized

Wow, this is work!

Whenever I try to do my homework for the next session I get totally lost in the internet… I’ve done some research on blogs, education, museums, archaeology etc. My link list grow bigger and bigger. Like you may have seen I’ve already created two new pages for links. But after starting to create my third link page knowing this would still not be enough I’ve decided to create an account on delicious. Until today Delicious has been something I’ve heard about but never understood. I’ve only known that you can bookmark websites and publish them. The question until today was: why should I do this if I can bookmark websites in my browser (and sort them in folders) – and why should I publish them? Well, it makes sense and seems to be a good tool for organizing your bookmarks….

So just in case one of you has the same struggles like me you can get it here.

Furthermore I wanted to know what other people, museums, magazines, etc. are twittering. And suddenly my list of tweets was sooooo long that I couldn’t find the tweets of the seminar participants anymore… well, now I’ve installed tweetdeck and everything is nicely organised in groups. You can find other twitter clients but some only run with newer software versions…

So it’s better right now. But it bugs me as you need so many additional tools and application. Furthermore I could need an additonal monitor for my work.

So how are you doing? And do you have some recommends for organizing?

Task: What do I know about blogs and twitter?

Task: Describe what you think Blogs/blogging and Twitter/microblogging are.

Blogs
Well, if you had asked me before the first session of the seminar I would have described blogs in a more functional aspect. Like: A blog is another form of homepage which is easier to handle and to update as a normal homepage. But a blog can also be part of a homepage. As a difference between a blog and a usual website I would have said: a homepage is for fixed, long-term information, a blog for short-term, more-in-time information.
My own experience with blogs: Well, I read blogs and have some feeds to be updated. I’ve tried once or twice to commend on a blog entry but quited when I had to leave mail address.

Twitter
Until last week I thought you are in need of a mobile phone to use twitter. You twitter from your phone and get your messages on the phone. So I thought it was some kind of short message delivery service which can be used to send SMS to several persons but is much cheapier as you have to send only one SMS. I’ve heard that you can also use the website but thought this is only a compromise for people not having a mobile phone. So maybe you understand why I thought microblogging is blogging in form of a short message (almost right) for mobile phones.