Update (trackback)  Another perspective In Defense of Blogging

Take a look at my first draft, and compare that previous iteration to this revision. I have added a few more links to sources, and appended my ideas thanks to follow-up feedback and reflection on new information.

This is a response to the blog post about legitimate peripheral participation posted by George Siemens.

George Siemens writes eloquently on the topic of legitimate peripheral participation, arguing that is negative and detrimental to the development of PLNs as it encourages a self-centeredness in learners, who lurk without creating, collaborating or sharing with others and can be described as takers.

Being connected, without creating and contributing, is a self-focused, self-centered state. I’ve ranted about this before, but there is never a good time to be a lurker. Lurking=taking. The concept of legitimate peripheral participation sounds very nice, but is actually negative. Even when we are newcomers in a network or community, we should be creating and sharing our growing understanding. We noticed this time and again in CCK08/09/EdFutures/PLENK: a resource (image, blog post) created by someone trying to understand a topic is often more valuable than instructor-provided readings.

He is strongly opposed to the notion of pursuing a lurking strategy when the viability of learning networks depend upon a gift economy in which learners openly share and contribute ideas with others. He explains that learning networks we contribute to and maintain empower us to engage others and make a social impact. Once the sharing stops, the network collapses. Thus, his argument that we need to set clear expectations about participation and sharing with learners.

For many educators, these networks function on a gift-economy basis. We’re involved in a type of social contract where we share freely with others and, in turn, we receive freely from them. Once the sharing stops, the network collapses. Which is why I’m pushing back against this notion of “what does my PLN do for me?”.

I agree on many levels with what George is saying. However, intuitively, I sense there is more to this. I think that in fact there are legitimate reasons for lurking that go far beyond self-interest. Lurking does not always involve taking, as George asserts. Lurking assumes that visitors come, read, and leave without further action. Does that ever actually really ever happen? I wonder. Sometimes these lurkers write down the link, copy and paste the post, and refer to it later in some paper or presentation somewhere, sometime down the line. Sometimes they return to it several times, just to take it in, to read, to tease out the nuances, to make more sense of it.

Sometimes the "lurkers are just passing through. There are times when visitors view a page, scan it, evaluate it, and realize that it is not what they are looking for. They are exploring sites, content, posts, and scanning for speciifc content. Active searches and explorations are a large element of the "lurking" activity.

I think that George is not really referring to the visitor that sifts through data swiftly before moving on, and I don't think he is referring to visitors that review the content repeatedly over time without actively sharing it with others. I mean, so many of our learning events occur in solitude, after reading someone else's ideas. That we don't necessarily have someone to share it with, or we don't post it up and share it with others, doesn't mean it is lurking.

From my perspective, having had an extra day to think about this, I think it is crucial for the contributor to not give the impression that they are in fact lurking, especially if they intend to incorporate others' ideas into their own flow of thoughts for a blog post.

I think George Siemens is referring to the type of learner who withholds oneself from the discussion, but who is interested in the exchange, who does download, read, and think about the ideas presented, but is holding back, reluctant to enter the arena of ideas. But I don't think this is taking, as he describes it.

I think maybe he is referring to how some learners think of taking from others entirely in a narcissistic sense, judging and evaluating and sifting and consuming others' ideas, and view their PLN in terms of what it can do for them. George does mention he has some push=back for this kind of attitude among participants. But how can you ever really be sure this is their attitude, however? If we respond within a network with the assumption that others are predators and acting as information parasites, one's own openness will cease. One's own perception of others' intentions will be warped, and you will be a lot less willing to share, killing off the network altogether.

George explains that the learner who openly shares their drafts are contributing to the learning of others. Though I agree wholeheartedly with this aim, I also suggest that we must be cautious about expecting students to share and disclose their thoughts with others when not yet ready to do so (for whatever reasons they might be).

Rather than perceive the learners' reticence as a negative, educators need to recognize that the reticence is because of the way the drafting process, the act of sharing, is tied intricately in with a learner's sense of identity. In an earlier post I referred to Norm Taylor's 2008 DETS presentation, titled The confounding dimensions of the learner in middle life about the different selves we present and balance. Lurking, based on a practical standpoint, is a negative. Sure, granted. But not everyone is ready and willing and in a spiritual space to share openly with others. What they have to say needs to be said in a private space, not an open one. How they learn can be so tied in with personal experiences (experiential self) it is a bit overwhelming to read a post from a fellow peer about how their assignment has been keeping them up late and anxious, and how it is triggering emotional distress. Are we asking our learners to openly reveal these events to their peers? Don't think so. But these emotional loads are what halt open participation, open sharing. It is what keeps some learners from sharing their learning with peers they had never met before.

What I am saying is that learners are a heck of a lot more complex, and we cannot simply attribute learners' lurking activities to a selfish withholding of their ideas from others, to a negative holding out on others because they are simply takers. Not all lurking activity can and should be attributed to parasitism and predation.

I was pleased to receive Stephen Downes OLDaily newsletter by email this morning, and visited Dave Cormier's series of three videos about MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). In one of them, Dave describes the expectations of participants for successful learning within a MOOC.