How threads die

An annotation assignment ideally leads to some dialogue. A student or teacher makes an annotation, other students then add useful information to the first annotation to create a thread……

Teachers can facilitate good annotation behaviour by:

  • outlining clear goals for an annotation assignment
  • connecting the annotated content to other key course materials
  • keeping discussions on track
  • periodically summarizing quality annotation content to ensure that it reaches the attention of all students
  • providing examples of good and bad annotation output (see prior discussion on this website)

But, threads will not go on forever……students will move on to the next assignment. What contributes to undesirable death of conversation threads???

                     

How threads die
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25473498

In this paper on asynchronous discussion threads, the author considers how the threads die……

  1. If students prioritize visiting unread notes (as we all do when consuming our email…..), this will lead to the death of threads (after all students have read the thread and no new contributions have been made after their reading). In the Hewitt paper, consider the results of a computer simulation of note reading and addition, versus the actual students……
computer simulation of unread prioritization

Most threads were isolated (thread size = 1) in both the real course (42% of threads), and in the computer simulation of prioritized unread thread contribution (40.9% of threads).

44.4% of all the notes in the computer simulated conference were located in threads that contain 10 notes or fewer. This was close to the observed figure of 46.2% in the actual course

2.  From student feedback in the course, these are the ways that threads die:

  • Discussion is exhausted
  • Discussion is too confrontational/threatening
  • Loss of interest
  • Competition between threads
  • “Clunkers”
    • responses that shut down further conversation; could be simple agreements without further building, or could be lengthy pontificating…..the other extreme
  • Discussion is off-topic
  • Moderator influences (either lack of interest, or a instructor's post viewed as the definitive “final answer”)

All asynchronous discussion threads will eventually die -- a course annotation assignment has a finite lifespan. It is unlike the longer lifespanpost-publication peer review annotation behavior discussed on this site previously. The instructor’s goal should be to guide and contribute to the most enriching dialogue possible. The above tips would seem to help, plus the occasional addition to revive quality threads expected to already have full reading coverage by the student body.