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Don’t Ignore a Good Question

Matt put a good question on his blog last week in response to Paul’s post. I just read the question again and realized that I had missed something the first time I read it.

“Why make learners go through the cognitively challenging task of reading, comprehending, thinking of a response, composing the response, and finally typing the response?”

There is benefit to forcing users to take the time to read, comprehend, think and then compose a response. There are times when that is not important, but sometimes it is and the designers of social software should consider what is important for the tasks they are supporting as they make decisions about what kinds of interaction to support.

By David

David is the father of 8 children. When he's not busy with that full time occupation he works as a technology professional. He enjoys discussing big issues with informed people, cooking, gardening, vexillology (flag design), and tinkering.

One reply on “Don’t Ignore a Good Question”

David, you’re on the right track. But IMO the question is not whether we should be “forcing users to take the time to read, comprehend, think and then compose a response” in general, but rather whether we can support this type of activity/task using /synchronous/ tools such as chat.

It would seem that asynchronous tools are better able to support this type of activity.

And I think you’re spot on about designers of social software considering the task at hand when creating interaction support. I would argue that Habbo Hotel is only well-suited for low-level, informal social interaction. There’s lots of good research on MOOs and MUDs that you might find enlightening in this respect.

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