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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Hitch-Hiking across cyberspace

“This is your Captain speaking so stop what you're doing and pay attention. First of all I see from our instruments that we have a couple of hitchhikers aboard. Hello whoever you are. I just want to make it totally clear that you are not at all welcome. I worked hard to get where I am today and I didn't become captain of a Vogon constructor ship simply so I could turn it into a taxi service for a load of degenerate freeloaders. I have sent out a search party, and as soon as they find you I will put you off the ship. If you're very lucky I might read you some of my poetry first. ”

Douglas Adams: The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

I love Hitch-Hikers Guide, because it speaks to me on so many levels. I used the Vogon Captain monologue because it reminds me of some of the behaviours I see online when students work collaboratively. Or .... when they don't, and simply live off the back of other people's hard work. It is not hard to understand the reasons why some students get really hacked off when they work hard to contribute meaningful and considered contributions to a wiki or online discussion group only for others who haven't contributed to also take credit. That's sometimes the problem with group based collaborative work.

In some user groups and online circles, this practice is called 'freeloading' or free riding - essentially hitching a lift at the expense of others. In paper form, using someone else's ideas without their permission or without acknowledgement of the source is referred to as plagiarism. It's a practice that in education world we call 'academic dishonesty.' It's is generally frowned upon in academic circles and can be punished severely. Plagiarism is fairly clear cut, but freeloading on someone else's ideas in the virtual or online world is more difficult to detect. It's not quite the same as plagiarism, because students are not actually copying the work of others, they are taking the credit for it. Freeloading in a collaborative group is often hard to deal with, and although tools such as wikis have tracking devices to show who contributed what and when, many tutors do not have the time to go into these records to check.

Often though, the tutor doesn't need to do anything, particularly when the group decides to police itself. When the members of a group detect that someone is not 'pulling their own weight', they soon tend to get a little resentful. The same applies to virtual learning groups. The wiki is a great tool, but it has a lot to answer for. I have seen students fall out big-time over issues that involve ownership, lack of contributions or disagreements about who wrote what. It has even been known for some students to be ejected from a course for persistent episodes of freeloading (not by me I hasten to add - I tend to read them my poetry instead), in much the same spirit as the Vogon Constructor Ship Captain intended to be the fate of the two stowaways in the Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy. I want to continue along this road in tomorrow's post, talking about some of the psychological principles - the reasons some students try to hitch-hike across cyberspace.

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