Personal Understanding and Experience of the Reader-to-Learder Framework

In this week’s reading, the one The Reader-to-Leader Framework: Motivation Technology-Mediated Social Participation really intrigued me most by its very clear, logical and thought-provoking discussion. It mainly explores and classifies the different level of people participating in online social activities: readers, collaborators contributors, and leaders. This kind of scientific method of studying online user community is completely brand new to me, but I did, after reading it, find it make so much sense to think about the social online activities I experience in daily life. Furthermore, I believe this detailed study of motivation and behavior of people’s participation online on each stage can help designers, managers and researchers to improve the interface design and promote both the quantity and quality of online social participation.

This reading reminds me of my role in social online activities and I realize it varies a lot according to different circumstances. Moreover, many factors of website design which influence people’s involvement also give me a lot of ideas by thinking on my real life experience.

For most of the time, I’m not much socially active online, thus I am just a reader who only read, browse and care about information that I need. For example, when I search information on Wikipedia as a reader, I tend to believe what I see on the website edited by other people with more expertise, never raise doubt the accountability and even never feel responsible for correcting the wrong information. As a reader, I only use it because it’s designed clear and simple for novices, people around are all using it and the content of it accurately fulfill my needs. Or when I go on a new website for the first time without any sense of belongingness of this community, what matters most to me is the interesting and relative interface and content design, which I believe is the most important factor for readers. Since contributors or collaborators may care more about the quality of their participation experience.

Certainly, there are cases where I become collaborator or contributor in some social online activities. Since I am a huge fan of films, I always go to my favorite film news and reviews website Mtime to post reviews, rate others review, join forum discussion and reply other people’s question. After read this article, I find that my enthusiasm to spend my time working on that makes me as a collaborator in this online social activity. Then accordingly, the factors that mostly influence my participation in this community is no longer the appearance design, but the accessibility of getting involved, visibility of my contribution, recognition of my expertise, possibilities find similar people to collaborate with. The requirement of being a collaborator and a contributor are quite similar, but on different levels. For contributors, which is confined in smaller group of people, they care more about trust and belongingness which motivate them to work for something big.

The last role the leaders, which I didn’t experience myself and involves much fewer people, also exist in my online social community Mtime. There are some users spend much time organizing discussion or activities on the forum, designing their own forum homepage, synthesizing information from collaborators and contributors, making policies for all the community members. At the same time, their roles are also being highly respected and honored. In this case, the factors the influence learder’s experience and behavior is the sense of leadership, entitled with special power and effort being valued and respected.