Equitability and Dominance in Online Forums: An Ecological Approach

Equitability and dominance in online forums: an ecological approach Jon Rosewell EATING, 13 th November 2008 Dept of Communications and Systems Faculty of Mathematics, Computing and Technology

The few and the many…
Participation in forums is very variable
a few students post many messages
many students post a few messages

It seemed a good idea at the time…
A relatively painless way of analysing FirstClass forums
Looking at patterns of messages, not content
quantitative, not qualitative
Postings only, not ‘readings’

What is the point?
Analyse past forums
make sense of what went on
Relate to structural features
how to design the perfect forum
Dashboard approach
monitor the health of forums

Forums included in study
Course-based: moderated, not tutors
Large: 100-800 students
Mainly 10 pt, 10 week intensive courses
Peer support
Varying purpose: chat, discussion, help, …
Only some presentations analysed
4 courses, 36 forums, 3000 posters, 27000 posts

The few and the many (again)
Robin Mason: ‘Rule of thirds’
1/3 post many, 1/3 post few, 1/3 lurk read
Or should it be:
posters, readers, phantoms?
Or for posters:
post many, post some, post one or two
Actually a bit more subtle…

All the data you want

Do you want to see it again?

Do patterns vary?

Ecological analogy
Communities often composed of dominant species plus a long tail of rare species
Biodiversity
a statistic of academic and practical interest

Diversity indices
How to measure diversity?
simple species count risky because of long tail
dominance should count against diversity
Diversity indices try to capture both:
richness (species count)
equitability (relative abundance of species)

Shannon’s index
where:
S total number of species (participants)
p i proportion of i th species (proportion of total postings)

Ecological stories

From May (1975) Patterns of species abundance and diversity, pp 81-120 in Cody & Diamond Ecology and Evolution of Communities , Harvard University Press

Shorrocks Genesis of Diversity after Lack (1947) Darwin’s Finches Pianka (1981) ‘Competition and niche theory’ in May Theoretical Ecology

From Whittaker (1972) Evolution and Measurement of Species Diversity, Taxon , 21 , pp. 213-251

Mark Newman Power laws, Pareto distributions and Zipf’s law Contemporary Physics, 46 , 323-351 http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mejn/courses/2006/ cmplxsys899/powerlaws.pdf

State of play
No simple underlying model
Not geometric: not straight on log-linear plot
Not broken stick or log-normal: not sigmoid
Not power law: not straight on log-log plot
So use diversity index as summary

Other possible analyses
Thread lengths
Starters & finishers
Groups
Readers
etc…

Is it useful?
At least in subset here, patterns of participation seem remarkably consistent, so:
doesn’t seem to tell us much about existing forums
no clues as to what to do differently next time
Dashboard not likely to be much help
although simple measures might (rate of posting…)
Moderators
offer quicker route into feel of conference
can intervene more rapidly
skilled moderation more useful than statistics!

www.open.ac.uk
Jon Rosewell The Open University Walton Hall Milton Keynes MK7 6AA [email_address]

The fruitees

The fruitees – how many readers

Equitability and Dominance in Online Forums: An Ecological Approach

by Jon Rosewell

Accessibility

Categories

Upload Details

Usage Rights

1 Embed 1

Statistics

Equitability and Dominance in Online Forums: An Ecological Approach Presentation Transcript