'Developing a Perspective', 'Inter-Connecting', and 'Bringing It Together': Who Chooses to Use a Labelling Feature in Online Conversations in a Graduate Course?

This study explores a labelling feature that allows students to tag parts of their online messages. Data comes from four sequentially offered sessions of a graduate education course. Students engaged in two to three online activities in groups of three or four. Students (n = 53) contributed from 0 to 56 labels (M = 12.42, SD = 13.50) and 18 to 114 messages (M = 39.70, SD = 18.04). Groups (n = 17) contributed from 0 to 109 labels, and 57 to 227 messages. Field-notes and descriptive statistics suggested there were seven labelling groups, seven non-labelling groups, and three groups difficult to categorize. None of the individual characteristics hypothesized to predict labelling did. Still, categories of users and non-users emerged from qualitative analyses: strategists, trusters, and techies contrasting with fringe participants, surface coasters, techie-shy, and fluid writers/thinkers/readers. Labelling appeared to be largely a family affair--which group a student belonged to correlated to how much he/she labelled. MANOVA gives for labelling usage F(16, 36) = 2.697, p less than 0.01. (Contains 3 tables and 5 figures.)