recipe for a social learning platform - #10 - no social rating?
Posted by: admin in site_development, tags: blogging, drupal, social ratingI played with the idea of setting up social rating of peer-contributed content on the site. The votingapi module sets up filter- and sort- fields which can be accessed by the Views module, to surface material which has acquired a threshold vote (average or accumulated score), sending these to a “promoted posts” page (filter e.g. VotingAPI points vote result (sum) ≥ 5); and/or to sort posts in descending order of voted score (using this same field as a sort criterion in the view).
However - a small number of trial users nixed the idea of peer rankings before it was out of the bag - with concerns of how peer rating of content might be perceived (esp. re the ability to “demote” or “vote down” ratings - or “offer low karma” in the language of the extra_voting_forms module). This latter concern could be avoided by selecting the “vote up only” option in extra_voting_forms, not permitting peers to demote the score of a contribution; or by using another ranking module, such as fivestar, which also integrates with votingapi. I can see their point - it does take a mature learner to be able to gracefully accept and profit from peer review (I’m picturing still another verse appended to Janis Ian’s At Seventeen …). I can also create terrific counter-arguments. Perhaps I folded to the democratic process too readily, before giving users a fair trial.
So here’s the deal. I’m a wimp on the issue. I would love to hear the experiences of others who have experimented with peer rating of user contributions. How have students responded/related to this? Have you seen threatened / disenfranchised / disillusioned users, and if so, how might this be addressed or perhaps even turned into a real-word learning opportunity?
The ability of this site to permit fresh-generated contributions, and integrate these with material aggregated from user contributions in other web-publications (via the Aggregation module), in part matches the work that D’Arcy Norman has been doing with his eduglu project; but without the added feature of social rating/surfacing.
I have retained the idea of social rating of content, but restricted to 3rd-party content; so am experimenting with social rating/surfacing of imported news feed items, using a separate aggregation module (feedapi).
Table of contents for social learning site
- recipe for a social learning platform - #1
- recipe for a social learning platform - #2 - demo site
- recipe for a social learning platform - #3 - site & core modules
- recipe for a social learning platform - #4 - additional modules
- recipe for a social learning platform - #5 - modules hacks
- recipe for a social learning platform - #6 - social rated news
- recipe for a social learning platform - #7 - theme
- recipe for a social learning platform - #8 - login & access
- recipe for a social learning platform - #9 - views
- recipe for a social learning platform - #10 - no social rating?
- recipe for a social learning platform - #11 - files repository
- recipe for a social learning platform - #12 - distributed content
- recipe for a social learning platform - #14 - news feeds
- recipe for a social learning platform - #15 - surfacing algorithms
- recipe for a social learning platform - #16 - surfacing algorithms - node cloud
- recipe for a social learning platform - #17 - news feeds take two
- recipe for a social learning platform - #18 - making it social
- featuritis
- recipe for a social learning platform - navigation


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