Forgive the misuse of the well-known Oscar Wilde quotation, but why is always assumed that the more comments there are on a student's work, the better? We need to consider the management overhead, and the implications for the impact on learning, of a multitude of comments.

(This article should be read in conjunction with the piece about audience.)

Here is the context of this article: if you go to a conference or a presentation about Web 2.0 in education, it will only be a matter of time before a speaker says something along the lines of:

"How many people see your students' work? Maybe 30? Perhaps 50? look at this!! My students' work was viewed by 200,000 people, and this one here has received 5,000 comments! Think how useful and great that is."

I think that this is a rather superficial approach to say the least, and here are my reasons. I've divided them into two sections, impact on learning and management overhead.

Impact on learning

1. The only point in doing anything in education is for its impact on learning. You may wish to define that learning in qualitative rather than quantitative terms, such as "ability to collaborate" rather than "Level 5", but that doesn't change the argument. If an activity has no impact on learning and achievement, it should be dropped.

Does having 5,000 comments on a piece of work have an impact on learning? Well, only if (a) the student reads them and (b) if they are useful in themselves. Comments like "Mega" are not known for their capacity to help students improve on their work.

2. Let's suppose all the comments are useful. Is reading 5,000 comments likely to have a greater impact on learning than reading 4,000? Or 1,000? Or 10? Put another way, how many variations of a particular comment can there be?

3. Let's suppose that not only all the comments are useful, but they are all unique in terms of what they say (ie not just the way they say it). Are the benefits of reading 5,000 comments likely to be worth the cost, in terms of time?

4. Suppose you agree with me on these issues, yet still believe that having 5,000 comments is a "good thing" on the grounds that having such a vast amount of feedback is good for the student's self-esteem. All I can say is that I disagree with encouraging such narcissistic tendencies. We live in an age where people want to be famous for being famous. Is it really our job to reduce education to a a kind of "X Factor" or "Pop Idol"? In any case, we should be trying to get students to understand that what matters is not feedback from as many people as possible, but from the people one respects, or whom one could respect. For example, a comment on a student's chemistry experiment from a scientist, say, is surely worth more than a comment from a history professor or a plumber?

Management

If I have failed to convince you that more does not necessarily equal better when it comes to comments, there are still the management aspects to consider. Taking the point of view that the students should respond to any comments they receive (on the grounds that not to do so is impolite), we need to consider the following.

1. How long does it take to read 5,000 comments? I have carried out a back-of-the-envelope calculation. Suppose each comment takes 10 seconds to read. That works out to almost 14 hours -- and even that assumes that literacy is not a problem. Fourteen hours, and we haven't even allowed for responding. It works out to 3 days in terms of school time. Where is the time going to come from?

2.Are you going to moderate the comments? You should. So far we have been talking about one student. If you have a class of 30 students, and they each receive 5,000 comments, we're talking about 150,000 comments. Do the 10 second calculation again, and we're talking about over 17 days -- 24 hour days, not working days which would, in effect, double or even treble that figure.

The point is this: having 5,000 comments is simply not manageable. We should be encouraging students to value quality over quantity, not pandering to their need for ego-fulfillment.

What do you think? Please leave a comment.