Question 42 of 365: How can you frame a question so that it actually gets answered?

Participation matters. Above all else, if you expect people to come to your blog, read your feed, follow your buzz or engage in your web application; you must look for a level of participation that really doesn’t have a whole lot of modeling in the real world. The blogosphere had to institute a delurking day so that people would start commenting on blogs and letting us know that they existed. Even worse, it is almost inconceivable when starting up a new wiki that you will be able to break free from the 90-10 problem (10 percent of the people provide the content, 90 percent consume it).

So, as I have ventured into the realm of asking questions, one of my biggest concerns is that of participation. How is it that I can frame a question as to evoke the power of participation within my audience, and how can others do the same of their audiences?

It is my contention that there are three reasons that people listen to an answer and/or want to engage in a conversation about answering a question:

1. Someone you know and trust directly asks you to answer the question. This is why evites are so popular and widely used. People you believe add value to your life are asking you the simple question of: Will you come to my party? If you feel any kind of lasting connection to this person, you will respond. It is the same way for bigger questions. If someone you love pulls you aside and asks you for advice on what their next career move should be (even if this aside is in an e-mail), you will most likely participate and answer that question. It is the personal connection that solidifies participation.
2. An expert engages you with an intriguing and provocative solution. While you may not know this person directly, their status and experience in working with the question you have proposed propels you into engaging in the conversation. If Will Richardson comments on my blog or links to me on his blog, I am much more likely (as are other people who read this blog) to comment and engage in the conversation. His status as an expert in classroom blogging and learning networks means that people listen to what he has to say. They engage because he has engaged.
3. Data is also compelling. The data about a solution can sometimes be much more engaging than even the solution itself. When people see that there is a great groundswell behind a single idea, they are much more likely to engage, even if it is only a few data points to suggest that the groundswell exists. It is the mere suggestion of data that gets people ready for a debate. They are just as likely to agree with a statistic as they are to dispute it. They fuel fires and vote in polls. This is one of the easiest ways to find engagement. There is very little that people have to do in order to weigh in when you have it boiled down to a good or bad type of equation. They just have to push buttons, and if that get’s them to engage further, I am all for it.

So, I guess that what I am trying to accomplish with these questions and answers has a lot to do with trying to find a way to incorporate all three into my frames. What I would really like, though, would be for all questions that get asked to be framed by those who ask them. I would really like to see a single video companion to every question that exists explaining who the asker is and why their question is important. This would allow people to start investing themselves in the question and get a personal relationship with the asker. Framing the question would also be a way to ask for experts to come in, almost a challenge for an expert to help answer the question too. As for the data, I think that everyone should be able to see the merits of the frame and rate what they thinks makes sense to pursue. In effect, each answer becomes a new data point that will cause others to engage.

My hope is that by framing the question correctly, participation will be the rule and not the exception.

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• National Delurking Day (blogworldexpo.com)

The Ripe Environment: The Markers

The “I know it when I see it” form of collaboration is no longer valid.

We need new ways to tell if learning is happening through group contribution. We need to be able to assess collaboration, but we can’t do it the same way that we assess writing or proficiency. Those skills are much easier to boil down to a continuum or rubric. Others have tried, and we have been for the most part satisfied with their traditional, enigmatic, and mostly non-educational continuums for collaboration.

These forms, however, are not worthy of our cause. They provide us with a way to see things in an abstract sense, showing a fictional path to collaboration that is just as hopeless as using the term as a buzzword to show that change is occurring.

Instead, I would like to outline the types of collaboration that occur in The Ripe Environment. These are the markers that we should be striving for and looking for:

1. Learning objects to be used by multiple learners, created by multiple learners. (This does not include one person writing or creating and the others supplying their input. True collaboration means that everyone has their fingerprints on the potting wheel.)
2. Collaborative asynchronous lists. (Never underestimate the power of listing. And yet, the power is not in the listing. It is in the reordering, reorganizing, and reconstituting a list. Think of wiki collaboration here.)
3. A followable thread of discussion (This can be through linking, commenting, or something like voicethread)
4. Shared Space with over 10 revisions (Any object or space that has been edited or revised more than ten times by multiple authors can be considered a respectable work of collaboration).
5. A mash-up or remix of anything (This type of collaboration marker is the halmark of true collaboration. The best examples are when the masher doesn’t know the mashee. That is when the unintended (but most amazing) concequences of sharing and collaboration kick in.)

Obviously this is not an exhaustive list. What are the other markers of collaboration in The Ripe Environment?

The Ripe Environment: Backchannels exist.

Whether we provide students or teachers with a backchannel, one will form. So long as there is more than one voice in a learning environment, the need to be heard will be undeniable.

Students may pass notes or they may text message in their pockets.

Teachers may point to a highlighted passage or simply make a face of disgust.

These things are not meant to stay in the background. They are essential, and as such, must be elevated to their rightful place in the classroom. The backchannel must influence the front-channel and must become the front-channel if the discussion and learning going on there is more important.

But, before I get too ahead of myself, let me set my definition of a backchannel:

A backchannel is the running commentary (critiques on, questions about, distractions from, references for, resources under) the dominant information stream. This dominant stream could be a lecture, discussion, video, or any other attention getting activity that would normally occupy the majority of the learners.

This may sound like quite a distraction. Why should we bring the note passers into the discussion? Why should we encourage distraction? Because it is how we learn.

Kelly Christopherson does a really great job of highlighting how a backchannel actually functions in a Ripe Environment, but I think the hardest thing to understand about a backchannel is balencing the two things that inherently have to go on within an classroom, but are not always so center stage. He says it this way:

Watching the crowd made me realize that we have a long way to go as educators. Many people in the room seemed to be having difficulty with the two things going on at once. Maybe that is why so many educators become frustrated with the use of cellphones or laptops in their classes; they don’t see how the two things can be going on at once.

The rapid fire writing down of resources, texts, or quotations is all well and good during a class or PD session, but what about questioning those things. When does that happen? If all learning is conversational and requires relationships, when are those relationships born and when do those conversations occur? They occur during the backchannel, if and only if one is set up and is relevant to those in the audience.

The experience that Kelly describes above is one that happens far too often. Those who do not find the backchannel relevant write it off as distracting, or worse, destructive. They want the front-channel to be the only channel, even though their brains and pens are commenting non-stopped on what is being said. We need to teach the value of commentary, fact-checking and questioning. We need to construct The Ripe Environment for the backchannel.