Lurking and loafing

Yesterday in Hitch-hiking across cyberspace I started discussing some issues around student engagement in collaborative online learning environments such as wikis and discussion groups. Today I want to explore some of the reasons why we believe some students don't pull their weight.

The reasons why people freeload were investigated in a series of experiments by Latane, Williams and Harkins (1979) who described the effects of what they termed 'social loafing'. Social loafing is recognised by many as the reverse of the old maxim 'many hands make light work'. In effect they suggest that the more people there are within a group, the less effort each will put into performing a given task. In one experiment participants were asked to clap their hands as if in applause. In another experiment, participants were required to cheer as loudly as they could. In each experiment observations were made on individual participants, pairs, groups of four, and groups of six. The observed effort in all cases dropped significantly as the size of the groups were increased. Latane et al surmised that each individual participant assumed that their own efforts would be less identifiable the larger the group they were in. Could a similar effect be observed in online discussion or wiki groups? And might there be an optimum number of students?

Online learners who 'lurk' during a discussion event, whether synchronous or asynchronous, could be said to be loafing. As with freeloading, lurking is frowned upon by students and instructors alike, and tends to be actively discouraged. Lurking is a term used to describe those students who access a discussion group or chat-room, but don't actively engage in the discussion. They are similar to the silent student who sits in the corner of the traditional classroom, observing but not contributing, or the participants in Latane et al's experiments who produced less effort as the group size grew. Often there are no complaints about such behaviour in conventional social settings so it is interesting to discover that there should be objections in online settings.

But putting to one side the moral and ethical objections to freeloading, we can raise an important question over the learning pay-off for both the contributors and the lurkers and freeloaders. Some discussion group members tend to 'stay quiet' and lurk, primarily because they are fearful of being criticised for what they have written (Pearson, 2000), whilst others may simply lurk because reflection is their learning style, and they would probably also stay quiet in a conventional classroom. For those who do participate, feelings of anonymity may encourage greater participation, and create more equal opportunities for contributions, with no interruptions from the more vocal members of the group (Pearson, 2000).

It is far from inevitable that larger groups will cause social loafing, say Harkins and Petty (1982). Through their studies they identified two methods to reduce the tendency to disengage, or put in less effort. The first method Harkins and Petty suggested was to increase the difficulty level of tasks and thereby make the task more challenging. Secondly, a differentiation of tasks within the group can improve individual performance. Asking each group member to perform a slightly different task will increase their perceptions of being 'back in the spotlight' and cause them to increase effort. These findings have obvious application to the e-learning context, where students can each be given a separate topic to comment upon, or different roles, such as a rotation of the responsibility to moderate a discussion forum, as well as an increasing cognitive element to gradually raise the level of difficulty in the discussion or online tasks.

Related posts

Why aren't they doing anything? (Dean Groom)

References

Harkins, S. G. and Petty, R. E. (1982) Effects of task difficulty and task uniqueness on social loafing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 43, 1214-1229.
Latane, B., Williams, K. and Harkins, S. G. (1979) Many hands make light the work: The causes and consequences of social loafing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 37, 822-832.
Pearson, J. (2000) Lurking, Anonymity and Participation in Computer Conferencing. In D. M. Watson and T. Downes (Eds.) Communications and Networking in Education: Learning in a Networked Society. London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

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