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cc by Karsten D. Wolf 2007

Closing the Participation Gap - User Generated Content in E-Learning

Karsten D. WolfDidactical Design of Interactive Learning Environments

Online Educa 2007Berlin, 30.11.2007

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What is the participation gap?

attribution: wasta on flickr

//bwr


1,731,000 569,000

474,000 367,000

353,000 288,000

283,000 251,000

222,000 221,000

19.04.2007Slides: www.slideshare.net/kadewe

http://blog.didactalab.de



native speakers of language Wikipedia article

Slides: www.slideshare.net/kadewe




articles ratio

Suomi 109,454 48

German 569,000 176






articles ratio

Suomi 109,454 48

German 569,000 176


Wikipediaarticle

1





+17% +13%

+19% +17%

+18% +27%

+25% +15%

+27% +14%

ca. 6 months later (1.10.2007)

Suomi +22%







statistics*

really old: October 2005 = 2 Internet years ≈ 14 years ago

50% of all edits done by 0.7% of users (615 people)

72% of text written by 1.8% of users (1,500 people)


0 25 50 75 100 125

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actual data

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rough estimation

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very few people

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very few people

do very much

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20% of people are doing 80% of the work


I am doing all the work and everyone else is lazy!


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# of

edi

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authors ranked by # of edits

as of February 2007

Datasource: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_by_number_of_edits





# of

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Wikipediholism#1 159,825#10 79,162#30 53,500#50 46,529#100 36,608#500 17,305#1,000 11,101#2,500 5,300


# of

edi

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Wikipediholism#1 159,825#10 79,162#30 53,500#50 46,529#100 36,608#500 17,305#1,000 11,101#2,500 5,300

10 edits a dayfor 3 years


# of

edi

ts


as of February 2007

Long Tail of Authors


Wikipedia: consuming vs. producing?

20k requests per second1,728,000,000 requests/day

200,000 edits a day8,640 requests/edit

(0.01%)

67,000 editors active in November 2006approximately <0.01% of user base editors



German youths

25% Creators

Datasource JIM 2007 Press release


Why participate?

© Karsten D. Wolf 2007

Why engage for free in OSS?

• The economist‘s view: It‘s just signaling for self-promotion (Lerner & Tirole, 2002)

• Empirical studies contradict: it is intrinsic motivation!

• Hertel, Guido, Sven Nieder and Stefanie Herrmann (2003)

• Lakhani, Karim R. and Robert G. Wolf (2003)


Understanding Open Content Authors Motivation

• Altruism – for the love of other people

• Reputation – showing off one‘s own capability = self-promotion

• Interest, Fun and Flow – doing it for the Joy of it

• Learning – learning by authoring public entities

• Collaboration – tackling something not feasible for oneself

• Job – getting a paycheck

• Saving – no need to buy textbooks and giving back some time

• Political Statement – e.g. anti capitalist point of view, anti copyrights pov…

• Assignment – getting a grade and a diploma

• Convenience – it is easier to find notes in public repositories than on my HD


What kind of content makes good candidate for OCP?

• both basic and advanced level of content, doesn‘t matter

• both Super Special Interest and Mass Audience

• Opportunity costs of making it open is low for most scientific SSI and school market

• Reputation gain is great for Mass Audience


Content size, team size & collaboration

• Smaller snippets are easier

• Wikipedia = collective

• Blogs = individual

• The bigger, the more authors = more difficult (e.g. WikiBooks)

• Solution: snippets!

• Problem: Thousands of snippets do not make great textbooks


Commented Collections

• DRY = Don‘t Repeat Yourself

• DRY(AO) = Don‘t Repeat Yourself and Others!

• Good bye Open Content Books

• Hello Commented Collections of Open Snippets

• Makes sense from the Personal Learning Environment viewpoint, too!

Why participation in education?


buildpublicentities

Seymour PapertFather of Logo

Constructionist


culture of participation

recreation to become a form of re-creation (remix, tinkering, sharing) based on productive inquiry situated in communities of co-creation

learning about ➙ learning to behttp://mitworld.mit.edu/video/419/

John Seely BrownXerox Parc

Cognitive Apprenticeship

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/419/

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/419/

http://www.everlearn.info



Structure and effects of participation?


Research project settings

• Learning environment EverLearn (http://www.everlearn.info)

• about 4000 active users (= having completed a course)

• logs from fall 2004 to summer 2007

• about 1,85 million logged actions of users

• non-reactive observational data (level 5, Fritsche & Linneweber 2006):the users are not aware of the observation and they don‘t know, that their data is used for research




Consumptive usage

• read pages

• navigate the course

• download files

• …


Productive usage

• Edit pages

• Upload files

• Discuss

• Chat

• …

Usage by time: consumption vs. production



Correlation between production and problem solving

Chat Messages

Discussion entries

Created content in

words

Problemsolving Score

.03(.425)

.28*(.048)

.43**(.005)

n=36 (Wolf/Prasser 2006)

Gender: productive vs. consumptive usage

Cons. Prod. Total P/T

M 677,2 106,7 783,9 13,6%

F 924,2 130,6 1054,9 12,4%

n = 1688

Wikipedialinear

MeanMedian

exponential

50% edit morethan median!

0.001% edit morethan median!

Wikipedialinear

MeanMedian

exponential

50% edit morethan median!

0.001% edit morethan median!

production is harder than

consumption

participation isless equal distributed

How to close the gap?

technical: make it easy

social: make it a smallaccountable community

motivational: build up interest and develop meaningful taks


Get more info [email protected]://www.karsten-d-wolf.dehttp://blog.didactalab.dehttp://teachlab.didactalab.de

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.ifeb.uni-bremen.de/wolf

http://www.ifeb.uni-bremen.de/wolf

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