I’m about to start the dreaded task of marking the wiki for Mobile Workforce Technologies. I struggle with this every time. I want to encourage student collaboration, but, when it comes to marking it, I want it easy to work out who did what so I can award a ‘mark’. It’s something that becomes quite nerve wracking at some levels.
For each page in the wiki, there is a main player, the person who started the topic, and put in much, if not most, of the effort. They have vested their learning in it. They deserve the recognition for it. But then, there’s the minor contributors. They have seen opportunities for expanding on work, for adding to the totallity of the topic.
In previous years, most pages were single author, partly because Luke and I struggled with the notion of collaboration almost as much as the students do. The eternal question becomes “how will you know who did what?” We always say that we refer to the history of each page and can work out who contributes what. So we have a kind of objective way of measuring what’s been going on. But, it makes the marking so fraught with decisions. How much effort did each contributor put in? Is it directly related to the number of edits? The amount of each edit? How thoroughly do we go through each page to extract the amount of work each student does?
The history does overcome the traditional group work problem of the free loader. There are no free loaders here. And, if there are, they are easy to find. We know who has contributed, who has participated, who has engaged with learning. We can find them and this becomes evident in the participation mark (this will deserve a post of its own when I get to it).
But the contribution of each student, the measure of their learning, this is where we have our work cut out for us. How much did each student learn about the core concepts of both the topics and the values of collaborative work environments? That’s what we’re really measuring. And that’s what we have to find.