What's persuasive? And what have we really
been persuaded to read?
Working with the forum ratings
We're going to spend some time today discussing the responses to the
persuasiveness rating exercise; the aim is to begin reflecting on
what kinds of things -- especially written language -- actually
affect our decisions.
Reflections on the process
One immediate observation I had as I've read forum postings is that
many people seem to be posting the same thing twice, or even three
times (in one case, I think, seven times). This is probably a result
of the fact that when a forum is configured this way you can't
see responses until you've completed all of them. When the forum is
set up this way (they won't all be), let me offer this caution:
before you click "Post to Forum" a second time, wait till you've
completed all of them and see whether you actually missed one (if
you're concerned that you might lose a comment, save it elsewhere
and re-post it if it turns out your post really didn't make it).
I've gone through and deleted as many duplicates as I could find,
but may well have missed some.
Another observation is that quite a number of people seemed not to
notice this sentence, from the prompt and the forum itself: "For the
ones you rate "very persuasive" indicate in a couple of sentences
what you found particularly strong in persuading you that we should
read and discuss the article." A "1" all by itself doesn't tell us
much. (I've also deleted a few empty "1" postings where the poster
explained the choice in a second posting.) Assessing the forums
I'm going to set up some new groups, and ask each to work with the
responses to one of the articles. I'll give each group a couple of
copies of a printout of the forum on one of the articles, and ask
you to do three things, and fill out the
form you'll get:
Count up how many ratings (of 1, 2, and 3) there are for your
article (you may need to infer what rating the writer actually
intended to give the recommendation, because people didn't
always make that clear). Enter the totals on the form.
Identify which of the explanations of why a poster was
persuaded actually refer to the recommendation itself . List the
names of the writers on the form.
Identify which of the explanations of why a poster was
persuaded are about the topic or subject of the article rather
than the recommendation. List the names of the writers on the
form.
When all the groups have completed that (it should take, I estimate,
fifteen minutes or so) we'll go around to each group in turn and
identify the comments that actually help us think about what
constitutes persuasive writing. And then we'll make some decisions
about which one (or possibly two) of the articles we want to read
and discuss.
There will be a prompt this evening outlining how we'll do that
between now and Tuesday. I'll email the class list when it's up.