Will’s Similiblog

I 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).

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 8th, 2008 at 4:03 pm and is filed under site_development.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.