Following from my previous post about attributing works used, I find it exceedingly frustrating when working with students who fear that someone else will ‘steal their work’. In much of the teaching I do, I work with wikis. Allowing students to see how other students work is important for learning. I get a real kick out of watching how they finally realise the importance of someone besides me reading their work. But I have not yet been able to overcome the competitive spirit of the university system here in Australia. Everyone competes for a high grade and, until recently, there was a limit to the number of high grades (criterion based marking rulez!).
With the realisation that criterion and norm based marking are pretty well incompatable, comes the ability to lessen the competition for grades. With that comes the potential for more collaborative endeavours. But, and this is the whole point, students still have a fear of not getting their fair share of marks. I know I had to prop up some of my peers as I waded through the jungle of undergraduate learning and I know there are people who would like a free ride, so I have to compromise and allocate individual marks to a collaborative endeavour. But we still see students really concerned about losing their work.
Student Contributions to the Table of Contents page
Enter History Flow from IBM. This is the first semester I have had access to the whole setup for my wiki course. I can get into the database, I can extract what I want when I want[1]. But I can see the potential of using History Flow in helping students understand the ways in which their contribution can be seen and assessed, I think I can move them to deeper collaborative efforts. I think these kinds of visualisation[2] help them to see what they otherwise might not have.
- provided I can work out why I max out the CPU setting and close off the site every time I do [↩]
- which I’m sure I first saw on FlowingData [↩]