What were they thinking?

When someone (usually a high-ranking public figure, but sometimes a high-school or college student) tweets something embarrassing or incriminating, the question is often asked: "what were they thinking?" The implication of this rhetorical question, it seems, is not to express some genuine curiosity about their decision making process but rather as a way of calling these people incomprehensibly stupid. The older or less familiar people are with social media and its role in young people's lives, the more likely it seems people are to be unable to understand why someone would do such a thing, or to dismiss the people as simply stupid or bad.

But I am genuinely curious about such behavior, and I think there are some untested assumptions many people make about it. Here are three plausible explanations

1. Ignorance of public/privacy distinction within social media. It is possible that social media users simply don't know that their messages, in some cases, can be read by anyone anywhere at anytime. While this may seem obvious to many, it can be confusing in that not all social media is uniformly public/private. Facebook messages are between two people but could be re-posted in another forum. Facebook wall posts are visible to between 20 or 1000 people who relate to you in different ways depending on your privacy settings and how many friends you have. Twitter has its own privacy settings: not all tweets are public. Instragram is different. So it is not a straightforward obvious fact as to whether social media messages are public or private.

2. User believed it was unlikely that anyone would pay attention to their tweets. This seems like a very common, justifiable explanation for why people say embarrassing or incriminating things in social media, and I think its one that doesn't get much attention. Anyone could read this blog. Does that mean that anyone will read this blog? Of course not. While potential audiences for public tweets are huge, actual audiences are most often very small and familiar. It would be foolish (and conflict with much of what we know about decision making in communication) to assume that people who repeatedly got feedback indicating that their messages were being received by a very small, familiar audience would stay aware of the possibility that others might receive the message. In fact, the odds of these messages reaching those other people are so low that, in a sense, its not really a very bad decision to tweet something a little embarrassing or incriminating. People take into account likelihoods of outcomes when they make decisions. To imagine that they would, in any instance, counter their experience and sensible unconscious calculations of likelihoods with some rule ("don't ever tweet anything that might be seen by your boss or your girlfriend's mother"), doesn't make much sense.

3. Momentary lapse in judgment/self-control. I wonder how many people who do this do it not out of ignorance but because they were drunk, had some momentary lapse in judgment, or were really upset. You would think that people would then delete the tweet or message after they came to their senses (most social media allow you the opportunity to revise history in this way), but maybe they forget about it and/or just don't care.

The likelihood of any of these explanations explaining this behavior depends on people's awareness of how public/private various social media messages are. I think this is an ever-shifting variable, both in terms of how public/private the social media messages actually are (the applications change their privacy settings often) and how aware people are of the current privacy settings (I'd like to think that media literacy classes such as the one I teach at East Carolina University have some influence on this).

I also think that the lack of nuance in our conversations about privacy doesn't help. The knee-jerk reaction to over-sharing seems to be to tell people to imagine that anyone (potential bosses, significant others, exes, parents, grandparents, police, governments) will read/watch what you post online. To me, this is the equivalent of telling kids that "drugs are bad". You put a diverse group of things into one category (because its simply easier to think of things this way), some of which are extremely dangerous, many of which are mildly dangerous. Young people inevitably experiment, usually with the least dangerous things in the group. They suffer little or no immediate negative effects. They conclude that you're not trustworthy, that all drugs/social media posting is fine, and don't learn the distinction between good/kinda bad/REALLY bad until it's too late.

Online classrooms: to synchronize or not to synchronize?

Reading Salman Khan's book on the virtues of online learning got me thinking about one particular attribute of the education experience (which, after all, is just another form of communication, one which, if Khan is a sign of things to come, will be increasingly mediated): whether or not teaching/learning takes place synchronously or asynchronously.

Khan makes an excellent point about a problem with synchronous classroom teaching: everyone has to move at the same pace, and if you're a bit slower to understand the concept being taught, the class moves on without you. If students were allowed to learn at their own pace, slower students would get a chance to master the material without slowing down the faster students, and everyone would learn more. There might be other benefits to teaching and learning asynchronously. There's the obvious convenience factor: our leisure, work, and social lives are increasingly fragmented, unscheduled, and asynchronous. Each of us has a different schedule. This difference essentially requires every activity, including teaching/learning, to become asynchronous. Khan also makes the point that a teacher waiting for you to give them the right answer, even in a one-on-one tutoring session, creates pressure that can inhibit thinking.

Having had the experience of a class move on before I mastered the material (quite recently, as a matter of fact), I instantly saw the value in Khan's customizable approach. But as much as I am capable of seeing the downside to a classroom that moves at one pace, I wonder if the synchronous approach motivates students who would otherwise not be motivated to learn the material. Customizability sounds good, and from the (straw-man) economists point of view, it is logical to assume that students who know that they must pass the class in order to get a job they like that pays well will try hard to learn the material. The students are accountable for their performance, and they know that they slack off at their own peril. If customizable, asynchronous learning experiences are a better tool for that (which, I would agree with Khan, they are), then it would follow that students would benefit from their use.

Being in a synchronous learning environment does put pressure on some students: the pressure to keep up. When we take that pressure away, how does this affect student motivation? My intuition, after having spent the past couple of years absorbing research on immediate/delayed gratification and self-control, is that even when some students know they should (or even need to) pay attention and try hard when completing coursework, they will be unable to do so without the pressure to keep up. Its not a question of accountability as much as it is a question of motivation.

I'm reminded of students who form study groups. Some criticize the practice as counter-productive: students spend more time distracting one another than holding one another accountable or helping each other learn the material. But I'd wager that for a certain type of student, such groups (which are kind of a self-imposed synchronous learning environment) are far better than trying to study alone. Traditionally, students have been left to find out whether studying on their own or in groups works best for them, but as someone who will likely be teaching an online course in the near future, I'd like to consider ways of identifying the characteristics of students that would benefit from synchronous learning environments and keep things synchronous for those students while having the others learn at their own pace. It would be a hybrid course in terms of synchronicity/asynchronicity.

I have only begun reading Khan's book, so maybe he addresses this issue of motivation in the new asynchronous learning environment later on. The grand MOOC experiment has already begun, and I'd love to get a look at who drops out of the courses and why. Another point on which I agree with Khan: online learning gives us more data on how people learn than we had before, and this could be a great help to those designing better learning environments online and offline.