Will’s Similiblog

I’ve been thinking a lot about effective strategies for surfacing material of particular interest to the learning community, in an active community blog.

For small communities – and ours, at 500+ students, is likely on the cusp re this – a river of news format, with author tagging and tag cloud display, may well suffice without the need for other surfacing methods. For larger communities, it may become essential to provide a method to surface material of particular interest to the community at large.

As I’ve noted earlier, I’m a bit reluctant – in part on the advice of some test users – to introduce social rating of peer-contributed content in this context (of a community blog for a small, closed learning community). I certainly can see some potentially positive aspects of peer ratings of contributed content – inspiration to make contributions constructive to the group’s collaborative learning, with positive reinforcement for doing so; along with the learning opportunities implicit in offering and in receiving peer review.

But I am concerned about some possibilities – that this could become a popularity contest either in fact or in perception; that ratings might have more to do with agreement with a student orthodoxy than with a post’s contribution to community learning; that poor peer ratings might serve to disenfranchise some students rather than to inspire continued effort. Although offering and receiving peer review may be a valuable learning opportunity and may contribute to maturation of both parties, these lessons likely require more interaction than can be effectively communicated thru an up/down vote.

In less personal settings – e.g. surfacing of aggregated 3rd-party news items, or in more disseminated communities such as those driving Digg – social ratings seem to be the ticket. Am wondering tho if other algorithms for surfacing of content might be better suited to a community discussion.

Gardner Campbell wrote a recent post in his blog, titled Mistakes as Portals. Got me thinking about this question specifically – is the voted-up post necessarily a more interesting learning opportunity than the voted-down post? I’m recalling a forum discussion from a class last fall; unable to find anyone to cover my class, I was forced to teach 2 weeks of a course at a distance, while teaching in Europe. I assigned readings, and set up forums on our class Moodle page for discussion, weighing in on my end from cybercafes while traveling. One student posted a comment that struck others – and me – as rather offensive. By the time I read it, given the timezone difference, there were already several reactive comments posted. I nudged gently with a reply, and watched the conversation shift to a productive learning opportunity that permitted the original poster some recovery of dignity, and incorporated some of her original thoughts into an understanding that transcended the original disagreements. My sense is, that in a Digg-like format, her initial posting would have been buried as unpopular, offensive and unaligned with student orthodoxy; she would likely have remained disenfranchised and we would have been denied a productive discussion.

So perhaps an alternative criterion on which to rate user posts, would be how much does it inspire community discussion? With this in mind, using the Drupal Views module, I set up a “most commented” page – filtering for posts which have received at least 3 comments, and listing these by descending order of # of comments received. Posts receiving active discussion will surface toward the top of this page. Promotion is based not on peer-review as such, but rather on quite objectively, how much did this post engage the community in discussion?

Here are the essential settings on the Views settings for this page, set up in “table view” format:

Fields:

This entry was posted on Friday, March 14th, 2008 at 2:00 pm and is filed under site_development.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.