Wow, now that I have my blog home all set up again, I’m so inspired to comment on the massive comments in my aggregator. Through a chain of reading, I see Nate talking about Clarence’s post, which discusses the concept of how students should be assessed in a world where the classroom walls can extend globally and where collaboration can be made transparent through wikis and other web 2.0 tools.

In the original post to which they refer, the author relays an exchange that highlights a huge issue not just with the web 2.0 world of assessment, but with group assessment in general:

Jeff Utecht: How would you assess a student who changed a single word?
Ryan Bretag: Think about contributing one word from a poetry standpoint, how critical is one word? Writing in a hypertext society makes that one word critical.- From the Strength of Weak Ties.

If a group of students is working together and one student serves as the student who conceptualizes an idea, and the other students work diligently to carry out the idea at the direction of the first student, did the self-selected/group-elected leader contribute more?  And now, when collaboration takes place through a more transparent record, for example, if you use a wiki, how do you ascertain individual student’s contributions. One of the references on The Strength of Weak Ties is to a wiki that uses a framework of significant contribution versus constructive modification. The creator of that rubric, David Kuropatwa noted previously on his own blog the distinction between these two varieties of contribution and the special challenge of “constructive modification” as a critical thinking process is addressed. In determining assessment strategies, one could also do as Ben Wilkoff did and turn it over to the students to discuss.

I encounter more often the issue raised by another blogger who noted failure to integrate wikis in a way that led to student creation of content.   Even the earlier example of the math wiki is very structured, with questions I assume were determined by the teacher for students to answer.

Not in these posts and discussions but in society at large, I see a lot of confusion about the purpose of a wiki. And for that matter, a lot of suspicion about externalized collaboration in education. Though a wiki is in written form, it is, for me, at least, an externalization of thought process and collaboration. At its most elaborate (for example wikipedia), it can be a valuable resource, but most of the time it will reflect information that is targeted for a specific community. In some cases, the information gathered might have outlived its purpose (not unlike, by the way, many websites!). The wiki exists not to document forever and ever, but to provide an opportunity for collaboration as those collaborating make connections in their own minds and developed their own questions, ideas, and analyses. That too is the power of the wiki, that it can change and grow as its purpose and function expand. Wikis offer an opportunity to externalize the work of a collective mind, which directly contradicts the typical education model which requires us to assess each student purely for their individual contribution (most of the time). And there are a lot of students and teachers experimenting with how to make it work.

This is just an informal post to list some of the issues and questions that came up in the course of our workshops today on RSS feeds, blogs, social bookmarking and podcasting (and every place I use blogs in this post, feel free to replace with dynamic social collaboration tools). I don’t want to lose these thoughts, and I will if I don’t write them down. So in no particular order:

-I was surprised about the initial perceptions about blogging and particularly myspace as largely negative and mostly irrelevant to education. There was mention of the association of myspace with crime (I’m guessing the resonating effects of the Taylor Behl case).

-The question was raised—why is it that a child who would freak out if their mom invaded the privacy of their room is willing to post all kinds of private information (name, address, school, etc) in an online forum such as myspace?

-It was expressed that blogging content is not reliable information (fair enough) and thus information from blog sources may not be appropriate for the classroom. This is an interesting one. I’m going to take this a little farther with a RL (real life) analogy. If we were all sitting at the corner store, having a glass of soda on the porch and having a conversation, how would we know whose information to trust? The “blogosphere” is not really all that different—the information is as credible as the source, and all netizens must develop the skills to be adept at evaluating the source. Looking at who is authoring a site, who connects to or comments on their site, what sources they refer to—this is how we can start to construct a perspective of what is “true” using a variety of information sources.

-The above leads into the larger point—we cannot just think of blogs purely as CONTENT. They are dynamic. The information is updated with regularity. The style is colloquial. It is PROCESS, not PRODUCT driven. The perspective of the writer is hopefully changing, growing, developing over time. The affordances built into a blogging platform allow for discourse and quick linking to original sources and other commentary. The interactions with others through the medium; the links to the words of others; belonging to a community of discussion–this is the larger picture of the potential of these RSS-fueled media.

-Internet 2 ≠ Web 2.0

- A lot of concerns about privacy, and what is appropriate and not appropriate for students to discuss openly. When confidentiality, privacy, building insular trust in a class is critical, blogging/podcasting/etc is not appropriate. Are controversial topics appropriate? Where do free speech lines get crossed?
-For educators preparing professionals in the community (nurses, teachers, etc.), even if blogging is not integral to the course, discussion of one’s representation of self online could be key, as inappropriate content online can derail a career.

-Can .swf files embedded in RSS feed be automatically detected and downloaded to a podcatcher (Juice)? Are there any restrictions on the type of embedded media that can be dowloaded via a podcatcher?

-My own question—is blogging behind password protection still blogging? Or is it something else? This is only an issue at this point because Blackboard is so backwards in terms of not providing any kind of blogging space that would be worth using, and because they do not provide a way to link RSS feeds from discussion boards. (In other words, our choices at my institution are a basic discussion board or a wide-open-to-the-world blog.) When those features are added, I hypothesize that the majority of educators interested in blogging will step back behind their content management system for student discourse. And that’s ok. But we still need to understand what is going on with all that information is out there in the blogosphere.

-The progression the use of these tools need to take is for students to become adept at finding useful information to their process of lifelong learning, to create their own content, to participate in educational communities that sustain the curiosity that convinced students to enroll in a course in the first place.

Some things we did not talk about nearly enough:

-Use of these tools for communication is fundamentally changing how we interact with others. There is no way around this, once you start digging in. In addition, once you start to “lurk” and comment on blogs, these changes begin.

-I do not like to the buy into the myth of the “millenial” students, who are basically cyborgs at this point. That is way too simplistic. These students–perhaps more than older students who understand what we are giving up and sacrificing in the way of privacy, and who have certain conceptions of what constitutes a “trusted source”–NEED space and guidance in reflecting on the nature of information and communication in the age of ICT.

-The truly positive side to these social communication and collaboration tools in terms of connecting isolated individuals with various needs (whether it be educational, community support in dealing with an illness or life difficulty, friendship) and providing a space, not connected with geography, to form human ties.

-If one believes that most of what is on blogs is useless drivel and too much information, what sources of information do you trust and why? We give a lot of credence to information that is “published” because it has been peer-reviewed. In a heavily read blogging site with many readers, isn’t that also “peer-reviewed” to some extent? Are experts always acting in the interest of simply deploying truth, or are there other factors at play?

All in all great audience participation and questions.