I just want to make sure I understand your instructions correctly for Assignment 4. Do we grade ourselves based on the A4 Rubric or do you grade us based on our participation description?
Thanks in advance for your clarification.
Paula
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David Vogt 11:20 am on November 12, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Hi Paula –
Sorry for missing your question until my weekly round-up. The answer is, “yes”.
Ultimately I’d love to institute a reliable ‘social’ process for grading participation in the course, meaning that your own sincere evaluation of your contributions to the cohort, calibrated in some way by the crowd, and relative to it, would serve as your A4 grade. However, I don’t believe this is practical yet, and it may not be for some time (anybody have any brilliant suggestions for making this work now?).
So your A4 submission is your own assessment of your contribution, relative to the cohort, and I’ll refer to this as I review my record of your actual contributions. I will then assign an A4 grade.
Thanks,
David
Paula Poodwan 4:56 pm on November 12, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
Thanks David, much appreciated 🙂
Patrick Pichette 2:29 pm on November 17, 2012 Permalink | Log in to Reply
One of the biggest hurdles in the participation grade is in the tool that was used to encourage participation. I have never participated in a 20+ person blog before and have to admit that given the choice, I would prefer not having the experience again. 🙂 Personally, I found it rather dizzying trying to navigate and relocate posts I had contributed to or conversations I wanted to follow.
It’s been an interesting approach to creating an online presence but I’ve felt completely lost for most of the semester as I struggled to find the topics I wanted to follow. If anything, I would highly recommend moving the majority of the discussions to a discussion forum as opposed to a blog. Where discussion forums have an advantage are in its use of a hub model that provides a very organized structure to allow students to easily locate and follow topics of interest. Often, there are also subscription options that students can use to receive notifications of contributions to topics of interest.
As for how to evaluate participation, I think that depends on what you desire to evaluate. My recommendation would be to include a main topic each week for which a contribution is expected from your students. As your current structure involves students contributing to a great deal of the content through the weekly technology topics, you could also have each group create a post for which all students would have to provide an insightful response. I really liked this student-centred approach as it felt as though we had a great deal of impact on the direction discussions could be taken and I imagine it makes for a very unique footprint left by each cohort. I’ve also seen a few courses for which students are asked to contribute a response to a two classmates’ assignments contribution as part of their participation grade. I found this really valuable as it allowed me to obtain a few different perspectives on my contribution to further direct me in the knowledge construction process.