Does blogging promote intellectual isolation and extremism? Cass Sunstein has an interesting article in the Financial Times about the construction of information cocoons and the polarization of political views. He cites an "off-line" experiment:

About 60 US citizens were put into 10 groups. They deliberated on controversial issues, such as whether the US should sign an inter­national treaty to combat global warming and whether states should allow same-sex couples to enter into civil unions. The groups consisted of predominantly either leftwing or rightwing members, with the former drawn from left-of-centre Boulder and the latter from Colorado Springs, which tends to be right of centre. The groups, not mixed, were screened to ensure members conformed to stereotypes. (If people in Boulder liked Vice-President Dick Cheney, they were cordially excused.) People were asked to state their opinions anonymously before and after the group discussion .

In almost every group, people ended up with more extreme positions. The Boulder groups favoured an inter­national treaty to control global warming before discussion; they favoured it far more strongly afterwards. In Colorado Springs, people were neutral on that treaty before discussion; discussion led them to oppose it strongly. Same-sex unions became much more popular in Boulder and less so in Colorado Springs.

Aside from increasing extremism, discussion had another effect: it squelched diversity. Before members talked, many groups displayed internal disagreement. These were greatly reduced: discussion widened the rift between Boulder and Colorado Springs

Sunstein argues that this experiment has parallels in the blogging world:

Group polarisation clearly occurs on the internet. For example, 80 per cent of readers of the leftwing blog Daily Kos are Democrats and fewer than 1 per cent are Republicans. Many popular bloggers link frequently to those who agree with them and to contrary views, if at all, only to ridicule them. To a significant extent, people are learning about supposed facts from narrow niches and like-minded others.

This matters for the electoral process. A high degree of self-sorting leads to more confidence, extremism and increased contempt for those with contrary views.

I do think that many bloggers form intellectual cocoons by linking only to like-minded thinkers. Moreover, anyone who surfs the Internets knows that there is often a lack of civility toward alternative ideologies.

However, I don't agree with Sunstein's conclusion that polarized views are harmful for democracy. Sunstein seems to take the view that democratic debate must be moderate and centrist. He is confusing cause and effect. I do not work on American politics, but I would think that if US political institutions structually push politicians to court median voters in the majority of electoral battles, then it would seem that the real impact of intellectual cocoons is to make polarized thinkers less relevant to the electoral process, particularly after the intra-party primaries. Thus the reason to avoid intellectual cocooning is mainly to make oneself rhetorically relevant outside of a small community of like-minded thinkers.

Labels: american politics, blog

One new feature of MS Word is the ability to send posts directly to Blogger. I want to see if this works because I am embarrassed by the number of typos in my posts.

To post directly from MS Word 2007, just click "new document" in the upper left. There is an option to create a "new blog post." You will need to register your login name and password as well as the location to which you upload pictures.

Okay. Let's see if this works.

[Update... This does work, but it does not seem worth it unless the document is already on MS Word. I have a spell check on my blogger software and MS Word generates really funky and excessive code. I think I will stick to the old method of writing my blog posts on-line.]

Labels: blog, web technology

Well, the semester is over, grades are posted, and I am starting to evaluate whether or not I want to use a course blog again next term. My course blog (vyadav.wordpress.org) was designed mainly to point students to news articles related to course readings.

Pointer Blog

The main goals of the blog were to encourage students to engage current events and to develop a habit of reading newspapers of record (e.g., the New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times) instead of headline oriented sites (e.g. CNN, BBC). Students were encouraged to try to apply their theoretical readings to current events. The blog also served as a forum for students to discuss their reaction to current events. I ask my students not to use first person arguments in their short reaction papers and exams, so the blog was a venue where opinions were permitted and welcomed. I had hoped that quieter students would be encouraged to engage the course and become encouraged to participate in class on the basis of their on-line participation. Similarly, more engaged students could use the blog to explore topics not fully covered in the classroom.

The stimulus for students to post varied by class. In the introductory course, students were given points based on the mean number of posts (with the mean standing in for a "C"). There were also five quizzes and five reaction papers which asked students to apply theories to contemporary events based at least in part on news items linked from the blog posts. In the seminar, students were required to submit five substantial posts of at least one full page in length. Seminar students who posted shorter posts were given extra credit points.

I am still waiting to see the student evaluations but my hunch is that several students did not like the blog assignment. A large number of the intro students waited until nearly the end of the term before really engaging with the articles linked by the blog. I still think there was some value added, but my hope had been that the blog articles would work to stimulate more vigorous in-class discussions.

My general sense is that the blog works much better than just telling students to get a newspaper subscription (which is how my professors used to incorporate current events). Students seem to want to be pointed toward specific articles, particularly at the Introductory level. In my seminar, the students requested that I add links to specific items they had read on line and wanted to comment on.

Wiki

An alternative to using a "pointer blog" is to create a class wiki. A wiki, if you haven't heard, is a collaborative on-line document. I think of a blog as a either a medium which broadcasts from one/few to many; or which allows an individual to point readers to other sites. A wiki is a medium which seeks to bring many authors together to create a single, relatively stable product. A group blog can simulate a wiki, but a group blog is oriented toward freqent posting of new items, whereas a wiki generates relatively stable pages which will have minor edits over time.

I used class wikis at Mount Holyoke with some success. The wiki project mainly involved asking students to create their own class glossary for complex terms from the assigned readings. The software for the program was part of the open source (Sakai) courseware used by Mount Holyoke. If one does not have a wiki option in their courseware, then Google Docs (see previous post) can be used to achieve the same essential objectives.

The assignment worked best in my political economy seminar on "Developmental States," but there were also very positive results in my "Global Poverty and Property" class. I think the number of terms that students have to master for an upper level political economy seminar makes the idea of a collaborative glossary appealing.

The assignment design that I used was to break the students into groups for each term. In one class, I first assigned one term to a single student, the next week I assigned a new term to groups of two students; the following week I assigned a new term to a group of three students, etc... The gradual approach worked reasonably well in acclimating students to the demands of collaborative on-line assignments. The main issue in designing the assignment was avoiding the free-rider problem. Of course, since it is possible to view each student's edits in the wiki, it is rather evident who did what to contribute if the students all collaborate from separate locations.

Students were also asked to list a few key pages from the reading where the term is used and to provide anecdotes in plain english to make the definitions clear. The reason for this was to discourage students from basically mimicing a definition from Wikipedia or another on-line source. As entries were finalized, I would send e-mails asking for additional details if needed.

All terms had to be complete either one or two days before the actual class session -- so that students could use the glossary while doing their readings for the class. Since the end product is displayed to the entire class, edited by the professor, and used by classmates to study for exams, the quality of the work was impressive. Some students even added photos, charts, equations, etc.

Of course, the demands on the professor's time is rather intense, so it is a daunting undertaking. I don't believe in just using technology for the sake of it, but it might be a useful exercise in my "Politics of Development" course next term, because that course requires students to master a wide range of terms and concepts in order to engage the broader developmental discourse.

Labels: blog, teaching, web technology, wiki