Fwd: [p2pu-research] Forum Participation Research

[Maria Droujkova]

This is from our colleagues at School of WebCraft - and I find the graphs fascinating. Makes me wonder what would happen if you collected those peak outliers that post the most all in one course. KABOOM!

Cheers,
Maria Droujkova

Make math your own, to make your own math.

 

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Diebolt <dandi...@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Feb 19, 2011 at 2:27 PM
Subject: [p2pu-research] Forum Participation Research
To: p2pu-re...@googlegroups.com


I would not consider these numbers verified but I have been exploring forum participation rates based on the P2PU forum postings for currently running WebCraft courses. Here are some preliminary graphs that show the number of posts per participant for each WebCraft class that is currently running:

http://jottit.com/77h8g/

By whatever trendy name you want to associate the phenomena with, the long tail is very obvious. Some courses do not use the forum for communication so some of the charts may not be too helpful for making inferences. Also, I had to scrape this data out of the web site and I am not 100% certain I have all the kinks worked out of the script yet. I present this information more as a discussion starter in the research areas of understanding engagement, retention, participation dynamics.

In the Course Design Orientation forum and privately with Joe we have been kicking around some of these ideas to understand participation dynamics and ways to improve it:

Principle of Least Effort
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_effort

Participation Inequality: Encouraging More Users to Contribute
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/participation_inequality.html

Power Law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law

Zipf's Law
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_Law