Despite the literalness of the image, I’m really thinking of this as “getting off on….” That’s a good thing to think about at the start of any term, and with the growing use of online discussions, there’s also evidence that there’s a clear way to do that. I’m ordinarily as cynical about “big data” as the next person — not that it can’t tell us a lot, but we’re not especially good at gathering and analyzing it just yet. Anyway, a recent entry in the Chronicle of Higher Ed‘s “Wired Campus” blog gives results of a just released study of online discussion forums (fora?) in 3,600 courses at 545 institutions of higher ed.

Some of the results were neither clear nor compelling. It turns out that students are much more likely to shroud themselves in anonymity when asking questions at “highly selective universities” than at other kinds of schools, which is somewhat surprising. (Is the idea that smart students thinking asking questions makes you look dumb?) But so much depends on how discussions are set up and configured, how different schools and classes and profs use them, etc. that it’s really hard to conclude much of anything from this particular datum.

More interesting is discovery that students who were asked to introduce themselves in online discussions posted two and half times as often throughout the term as those who weren’t. People who use discussion boards have long believed in the virtue of “icebreakers”: students say who they are and where they’re coming from at the outset. Everyone likes to talk about themselves, so this is not hard to get going, and the instructor gets a good gestalt of the class — prior knowledge, communicative skills, attitudes toward the subject, etc. Though I guess we must always recite the litany that “correlation is not causation,” here we have confirmation of what always seemed good practice. For why, there seems no better observation than that of Jim Groom, formerly of CUNY and now of U of Mary Washington; he said, in another article in another publication ( “The Intersection of Digital Literacy and Social Media” in Campus Technology), “A big part of digital literacy is understanding what it means for other people to see, experience, and find you online.” Groom is obviously talking about much more than a self-introduction in an online forum, but it’s a start. A good start.