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Crowdsourcing Authority in the Classroom
“A wacko holding forth on a soapbox. If Ms. Davidson just wants to yammer and lead discussions, she should resign her position and head for a park or subway platform, and pass a hat for donations.”
That is an example of some of the negative comments I received when I wrote a blog on grading in my “Cat in the Stack” column on a website for the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory( HASTAC). I titled the post How To Crowdsource Grading and its premise grew out of a course I taught last year at Duke called “This Is Your Brain on the Internet"… more
A Thought Experiment: Why grade? Why test? What if?
Let’s try a thought experiment. Let’s assume we live in a culture where all forms of educational achievement tests have been banned and no one is allowed to assign a letter or numerical grade for anything. How would we evaluate what students are learning? How would we decide which teachers were doing their job effectively or how they could be more effective? Would there be objective (i.e. impartial, unbiased) ways of determining who was the smartest student and who needed help? And why would we want or need to know that? Without testing, would being the best be a useful question? Or, as a mathematician would ask, would that question be an interesting one (one that could yield an answer that wasn’t simply a circular restating of the question)? How would the content and methods of education change if assessment by means of testing and grading was banned?… more
In Praise of Mo' Better Grading
Meanwhile, back at the pedagogical ranch...You may remember that back in November I reported on my experiment in grading, combining the long tradition of contract grading with what I call “crowdsourced grading.” Since I was already constructing “This Is Your Brain on the Internet” (ISIS 120) as a peer-taught course, I decided that the students responsible for team-leading each class would also be responsible for determining if that week’s required blogs on their reading assignments measured up to the contract standard. It didn’t seem like such a radical idea. This is a course on cognition and collaboration in the digital age and responsible evaluation, feedback, and participation are part of that equation. I thought of this as simply “practicing what I was preaching,” an object lesson to the students in how to be responsible public citizens of the Internet. Well, some people thought of it differently. They acted as if “Prof Davidson” was destroying civilization as we knew it.… more
Education: Time to experiment, learn, share, mobilize
At HASTAC, we’ve been very excited this month to be one of the “community partners” for the upcoming Mozilla Drumbeat Festival: Learning, Freedom and the Open Web taking place in Barcelona, Nov. 3-5. The MacArthur Foundation is one of the sponsors of the event and the linkage between the Digital Media and Learning initiative and the Mozilla Drumbeat Festival promises to be exactly the right convergence of people, place, method, and timing to inspire new ways of thinking and learning together. No talking heads, but tents and self-organizing sessions, and real work plans and lesson plans for the future. … more