There's quite a lot being written about online presence - and of course mobile presence - the way in which we demonstrate our ability and willingness to communicate. I'm not sure about the effect that lurkers have upon community development but of course, one of elearning's greatest strength is being able to allow learners to access information and resources in their own way - and observing a conversation or choosing to join it is a good example of this.
I guess the questions are more around - how do we best encourage people to become active members of communities; how can we support lurkers to ensure they benefit from community involvement and what methods are there for displaying online presence that are not text-based? - (for example how can lurkers leave a mark to represent their use of a thread, their understanding of a thread or their benefit from a thread without being involved in its construction)
Now, where did I put that sleeping smurf avatar...
This is an interesting point given that as administrator of the site I have access to all the site traffic metrix (how much, where from, when, etc) and from this data it's clear that we have many more visitors (many regular) who have not registered and can therefore not post. I'm assuming that this indicates some distrust in the registering process most likely caused by the confusion caused in the media about 'not revealing your email address' as method of reducing spam. Although we have gone to lengths to assure prospective members of the lack of spam from this site and that they can even set their identity and email address to be private even to other members.
There are many things we could easily add to this forum that would allow users to participate without posting such as peer review, i.e. this post was useful y/n? etc. However, I'd be concerned to provide this facility to non-members as it extends a culture of taking without giving back and a potential for abuse even though we have only seldomly been troubled by
Internet Trolls. I'm not sure we would want to allow random guest/anonymous postings but would welcome other members views on this subject.
So there's a question of how to encourage existing readers to register as members of our community and then encouraging them and existing members to participate.
The site is officially one year old in about a weeks time and we have nearly 400 members which is pretty exciting but, of course, it would be great to see even more discussion on the boards. An argument is that of time, i.e. people are too busy. But in my almost perpetual state of travel to meet people to discuss handheld and mobile technologies in learning it seems that a lot of questions asked and discussed are either on here already or could be discussed here thus saving a lot of time which is one of the objectives of attempting to set up this forum to create a resource. The other objective is to create a social network.
Andy's question "Is Lurking Learning?" is an important one because I sense that people still have a sense of guilt if they're caught surfing the web even for work related activities especially if it involves participating in a social forum such as this one.
And it's not even the same colour scheme as Ebay!
p.s. An area that does get a lot of activity/participation from non-signed up members that have been using the site (i.e. they have read visited other parts of the site beforehand) is the Games area - all the high scores are from non-members
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