Introverts: Why their time has come

I heard about this TED talk, and the first thought that came into my head was this (thanks to @shluthra) and I realised I didn’t have anything more to add!

I do have an anecdote, though, dating back to 2003 when @joannejacobs and me tried out a group blog for the first time with an MBA class (we published a paper on the subject in AJET the following year). In this class, one individual developed quite a following because of the high quality of their posts. The person in question had a Chinese name and I’m ashamed to say that — at this time — I did not know if they were male or female. It was quite a large class, and it only ran for six weeks, so I didn’t get to put a face to everybody’s name. At the end of the term, the mystery blogger — a mainland Chinese woman — stayed behind at the end of the last class to personally thank me for allowing her to participate! She was a very intelligent individual who had not been game enough enter into the verbal jousting with the group of extrovert Australian males that had tended to dominate proceeedings during in-class discussions.

The lesson I learnt from this is that, online, everyone has an equally loud voice. Importantly, people get to contribute who might otherwise not, and others in the group benefit considerably from their insights.

Blogs vs discussion boards

When attempting to articulate the virtues of edublogs today, someone asked how they offered anything different from discussion boards. Fumbling for a response, I observed that the learner has much more control than they do in a linear, pre-determined discussion thread. An article published in 2004 by James Farmer provides a more erudite explanation, part of which is reproduced below:

‘While discussion boards can be placed alongside content in packaged courses and with limited opportunities to use the technology in ways unforseen by the designer, a weblog is essentially free-form and there is little, besides providing templates, guidelines and facilitating the group as a whole that the teacher can do to actively impact on the technical structure of their experience. … [T]his is not to say that an anarchistic structure is appropriate but rather to suggest that one of the key attributes of weblogs is that they have within them “incorporated subversion” (Squires 1999) which allows learners to express themselves and explore their context in ways independent of the original designers intentions.’

Thus, educators might design not with constraint in mind, but with freedom and flexibility in mind … ‘this emphasises the active and purposeful role of learners in configuring learning environments to resonate with their own needs …’ (Squires 1999 p. 1).