Levels of online social engagement

I encourage your reading of “Micro engagement is killing our edublogging community” from The Curious Creative. The post does a great job of expressing some of the growing frustration I have felt for some time (e.g., Finally, a positive way to understand edchats). The key point I take from the Curious Creative’s post is that what we describe as online social interaction tends not to be that social and not that interactive (my translation). The author offers an interesting chart illustrating levels of engagement. Production is the lowest level.

If viewing the issue a little differently (the goal of personal learning), I would modify the chart a bit. I would place Tweets below blog posts and probably reading other tweets. I value the integrative experience of writing an extended post over reception experiences, but I recognize few posts originate purely from thought without external inputs.

Perhaps the author is encouraging what I would describe as a SAMR model. I don’t in general regard SAMR as that profound as the notion of proposing a task analysis, determining where you are, and working toward the next step if fairly universal. What is interesting in cases where the sequence is not obvious is the model. Curious Creative proposes that writing posts in response to posts offers the pinnacle of opportunity for the community (and I would add for the self).

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