Network Effects in a Large Lecture
Motivation:
At the end of class today, Dr. Easley was trying to finish up a thought on “Market for Lemons,” and as one, everyone started rustling around. It struck me that it must be kind of annoying to be teaching and have everyone at lecture in a 700 person class clearly stop respecting what you have to say at once and start putting their things away so they can be out the door faster. I also thought about the fact that this behavior isn’t really present in my smaller classes. After looking around a little bit, I found some literature on cascades in large lecture.
The article: http://classroompresenter.cs.washington.edu/papers/2002/SIGCSE_Wolfman.pdf
What I’ve found is not strictly speaking what I was seeking in the motivation, but instead talks about using the size of a large lecture as an advantage. Specifically, Steven Wolfram talks about how the sheer number of students in a large lecture naturally leads to a greater diversity across any scale and to pooled resources in the sense that a large staff provides “development capacity for the class that exceeds the proportional capacity of smaller classes”. He goes on to talk about exploiting these advantages by providing public opportunities for students to share unique work. As an example, on the first day of his CS class, Professor Wolfram told the students “this is a hard class but together they were strong enough to overcome the difficulties”. He then proceeded to yell as loud as possible, and then instructed the students to yell as load as possible to show them how they dwarfed him together.
What Wolfram is doing here is using popularity as a tool to enhance the learning experience of a large class. By asking all the students to yell as loud as they could together, he used network effects and the wisdom of crowds to induce even shy students to feel like they could participate in a meaningful way in the class. However, it was this same network effect induced all the students in class today to start putting their stuff away at the end of class today before Dr. Easley was done talking. This just goes to show how networks can be both good and bad.