e-learning 2.0

I have just read an interesting article by Jacob Nielsen about how few people contribute to on-line communities.

He says:

User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule:

• 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don’t contribute).
• 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
• 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don’t have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they’re commenting on occurs.

and the situation is even worse for blogs:

Blogs have even worse participation inequality than is evident in the 90-9-1 rule that characterizes most online communities. With blogs, the rule is more like 95-5-0.1.

This prompted me to have a look at  the statistice for a new blog I have set up to support staff in using e-learning. Yesterday there were 40 accesses to the blog and one contribution. This seems to generally tie in with these ideas.

On my blog for students which is associated with module activities then the contribution rate is higher though still well below the access rate.

I suppose the lesson to learn here is not to get to depressed about not getting participation, particularly when using these technologies with students. Many more are reading than are contributing and also that probably don’t do anything for other modules that don’t have an on-line component.

I am reminded about when I first used on-line conferencing about fifteen years ago and expressed concern that I was only getting 70% contibution outside taught sessions.  The studsents told be that they did nothing which was not directly linked to their assessment for their other (non on-line supported) modules. I had naively assumed that when I asked students to do things outside taught sessions then they did so. What on-line communication does is to give us, as tutors, some feedback about out of session contibutions from students where as previously we had no data.