Ranking.. Even here.. LO17344

T.J. Elliott (tjell@IDT.NET)
Sat, 07 Mar 1998 15:33:41 -0800

Replying to LO17340 --

Richard Karash wrote:

> Please consider this a thought experiment, not a proposal. At times, when
> I've posted content msgs, I would have been interested in feedback on
> quality and relevance of my contribution. I believe that responses are not
> necessarily a good measure of the influence any msg has had.

I wonder what does occur for members of the list when they get their daily
passel of messages: How do they sort them out? What are their ways of
acknowledging value encountered in others messages? I think that if we
knew this then we might gain some sense of what the list culture is
regarding messages. (Or we might find that we lack the consistency to be
characterized as possessing some homogeneous culture; we are plural.) I
often wonder what the effect is of messages sent as Rick suggests above.

What would my own answers be to the above questions? I immediately discard
certain threads that I followed for awhile and that aren't of deep
interest to me or the discussion has gotten too abstract, too contentious,
etc. If I find something that I think is marvelous I let the person know
in a private note. I've had several exchanges that way that convince me of
the transformational power not only of this list but of the Internet that
supports its existence. I suspect that we would discover that there are
many different approaches to what goes on her. Thus rankings, evaluations
or even feedback without some prior discussion of the criteria and mission
from which they are derived would hold little worth.

-- 

"T.J. Elliott" <tjell@IDT.NET>

Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>