Small Group Discussions: Social Networking

This wiki page is provided for recording small group discussions about issues relating to the assessment of student contributions to social networking sites.

Participants

Marcia Devlin

Julian Cox

Ashley Holmes

Beverley Oliver

Scribe: Nilma Perera

Discussion question:

Discussion...

So are you using facebook or anything that use in personal life or anything?

I do have a set up, and i was working with Chris about simething like this and I think student want to keep facebook and studies together they would reject it. It is a more of an affect thing.

Yeah something like that happen to me... my daughter barred me when I advised her privately to take care about saying things she on facebook she may later regret (giving her links to articles about the persistence and potential damaging effects of past Facebook comments on a person's career prospects)... I was gratified when she restored me without prompting

[the discussion was about the 'generation gap' and risk of being perceived as an adult intruding on a a youth's social space]

Like I said if more of an affective thing.

facebook and social networking can be very different, there are is a deffineatly an affective/social thing like you seen in facebook. But on the more to the social network site thing, we have created a sort of a portfolio (iport folio) system that work in education, but it has socail networking fuctions such as inviting people, rating etc. but in a more formal way. We are not trying use facebook but we trying to use similar fucntions in education.

I think what we are trying to see is to sort of define what social networking we can use for education

Yeah I agree...

Web 2.0 is an abstract thing and could be working at a higher level

Problem I have here is where do you draw line. What is web 2.0? is everything that have a http in front of it is web 2?

Tagging was there at the outset. Now it is sort of moving towards web 3.0 where, after there are enough tags and searches etc, the machine will interpret all this information what people gather. And that's what Google does; information argregating. The semantic web. Do we need to do that? Because google and other powerful serch engines does that...

I think we do, it would be important to aggregate information and it would be useful. This is meant to be the result from establishing defined vocabluaries based on 'ontologies' derived from metadata.

My question would be about in this iport folio I can polish up something you have done - who does it belong to? back when I was teaching you can see that parents, friends and others have input to it... But I make my own CV and lot of the project I have collaborated with but its in my CV so I claim the project... so same it sort of apply to blogs in away because I am modifying things that are taken by others.

Assesment usually a private thing, but by publisiing it we are using this sort of to promote almost motivate students.

Qualitative and formative is where we see the power. Sharing and interactivity... not so much collaboration...

But we do we have that, group assignment.

I have peer assessment. I do find that students doen't take peer review seriously so thats why I need to assess it as well...

Rating by peers have become the basis of thier mark. I don't really look at what they have written one by one but rather list how the peers have rated them. So peer review and and feedback is what is important here. Students prefer a free form of peer review although constraining peer reviews can be very useful in education terms.

So the question here is, what does social networking involve regarding rating?

I think we need to get away from social networking = facebook. I think we are doing it here. For example I was looking at hotels and the star ratings I though that was excellenty because it is rated by people who have stayed in hotels and payed ut of pocket. Its almost like how we rate papers.

I have tried to emulate how we do peer reviwing papers in my system for my students.

Social networking is bring ppl in collabratively and that ratinig thing and it is very easy online and people understand what 5 stars

That why I brought out the qualitative vs quantitative... for example students are very critical in say feedback but holds back when rating

But I have had a different experience... students haven't given good useful feedback/reviews, but I like your idea about reviewing the reviewer.

There has to be rules... and as the teacher you'll be moderating but there is also braking away from the student teacher heirachy.

Collaboration online self and peer...

eg: Trip advisor, collaborative peer review, collaborated peer-review

Can use to find fauls in peer-review process.

Issues on how socail it is, depending on how socail we need rules and the responsiblity comes back to the moderator...

Risk: Using peer-review systems where it is not suited...

Most people don't have a expertise.

Dycotomy of public and private? what is private and when does it become public? I think there is a degree of private and degree of public. In traditional sence private is assessment between teacher and student, but with peer review it becomes public among the students.

There is a potential to make the assessment tasks more fun.