Understanding promotions in a case study of student blogging

Abstract

Promoting blog content is a social activity; it is a means of communicating one student's appreciation of another student's work. This paper explores the feasibility of using student promotions of content, in a blogosphere, to identify quality content, and implications for instructors. We show that students actively and voluntarily promote content, use promotion data to select which posts to read, and with considerable accuracy identify quality material. We explore the benefits of knowing which students are good and poor predictors of quality content, and what instructors can do with this information in terms of feedback and guidance.

Understanding Learning and Learning Design in MOOCs: A Measurement-Based Interpretation

“…Equally important is promoting the emergence of crowd-based reciprocal teaching by supporting dialogue and collaboration between peers as reciprocal teachers. Early evidence has emerged as to the capacity of learners to provide reciprocal teaching services, such as identifying quality material, guiding selection of what to read, identifying quality posts, and evaluating peers (Gunnarsson & Alterman, 2013, 2014. The work of others (Sadler, 2010) has suggested that engagement with exemplars and in dialogues about holistic quality can assi st learners, over time, to develop the tacit knowledge of unseen, unarticul ated knowhow that marks out an expert from an inexpert appraiser, and the teacher from the taught.…”

Collaborative and Individual Learning - Mixing the Two

“…The promotion feature is simple to use and easy to implement and understand. Studies have shown that students will actively promote content; promoted content tends to be of higher quality; the promotion data is used to navigate; and some students are reliably better at assessing quality than others (Gunnarsson and Alterman, 2014;Gunnarsson and Alterman, 2013).…”