The Irish Food Bloggers came to the Milk Market Saturday, and as part of the day, I led a short discussion about building communities online.
There is at least one thing in common between lecturing and blogging In both forms, someone at the physical or virtual front of the room does most of the ‘talking’, and hopes that occasionally someone out there will ask a question or offer a comment which indicates that someone is listening or reading.
As a lecturer, I can use grades as a carrot (or stick) to get students to actually participate in online discussions but if it doesn’t carry marks, getting students to offer comments online is hard – in large classes of 200-300, there are often only 3 or 4 who will rise to the invitation. That is about as few as well ask questions in lectures and I wonder how far that number (about 1%) carries over to the blogs. If you get 2 comments on a post, can you assume that 200 or so people actually read it?
It is hard to work out how to hang a hook on a blog post that will lure people into commenting. Offering a comment on a blog can be just as big a step forward as being the person who puts their hand up in a lecture to ask a question. Many folks are afraid that their comment or question may seem ‘stupid’.
One of the points I introduced, from the work of Lave and Wenger on communities of practice, was the concept of legitimate peripheral participation, which sounds like a mouthful, but is a handy label once you decode it. In any group of people, there will be people who have been involved for a while, know the customs of the group and move comfortably around the group. There will also be the ‘newbies’, interested in whatever the group is about but hanging on the edge, unsure of how the group ‘works’. In any group is is important to recognise that it is not normal (legitimate) to be on the edge (periphery) and that is a form of participation.
Of course when a group of people meet in the real world, it is easy to spot the new faces and draw them into the group. In the real world, we have a wide range of visual cues and tools to make people feel welcome in the group and help them to move from the periphery into active participation. Online, none of those work; everything has to be conveyed in words. All the smiles, nods and hand gestures that ease the flow of group interaction in a room have to be explicitly spelt out in online discussion.
Many people are comfortable hanging round the edge. Regardless of whether your passion is for food or history, you want to try and encourage people to explore new territory beyond what I call the comfort zone. I think I use that label is a way that is very similar to what Vygotsky called the zone of proximal development, that space in which children in education can operate comfortably. Vygotsky and his followers had a lot to say about how you build ‘scaffolding’ to support people so they feel safe in their voyages of exploration.
We got into a discussion of how people can use tools to integrate the more conversational networking tools like Facebook and especially Twitter into the sidebars of blogs to create an easy entry path so that the people who read our blogs can come in at the shallow end as it were and have fun online. Obviously, I haven’t done that yet – better find time to get that done!
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