I am working with a group for the final project in Museums and Public Spheres. Even though there is a deadline for the project, the professor gives a lot of flexibility in regards to the time and depth of content the group can handle. There are no evaluations or submission of progress report to give the group incentives to contribute to the project regularly.
A reputation system would be useful to motivate the group to contribute to the project. According to Resnick, reputation system needs people expecting future interaction and feedback that is collected, distributed and aggregated to guide trust decisions. Trust is important in the group because it helps the group to work together effectively. Without trust, members would be uncertain about other members’ performance, and they would be unwilling to cooperate and communicate effectively to produce quality results.
The reputation system will build and encourage trust among the group by “establishing the shadow of the future (Resnick, 2000).” Shadow of the future explains that expectation of reciprocity of retaliation in future interactions creates an incentive for good behavior (Resnick, 2000). The reputation system will be a forum that allows members to rate each other’s posts (number of stars) and collects points for each post. One’s stars and points will be counted towards the grade for the final project. Ultimately, the system will help to know each other’s abilities, dispositions, and current contribution to the project, and encourage members to be more active in the final project.
If the professor does not look into the forum for content and quality, but just depend on the stars and points members are accruing for the final project to grade, members can collaborate and rate one another positively, artificially inflating their individual contribution.
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I agree that reputation systems are important in group projects. There have been many instances where groups complete fantastic work, but they have internal issues due to a lack of trust. Hopefully reputation systems would help with that problem. I liked how you used stars and points to acknowledge the members that are displaying the desired behaviors. This can help highlight the members who are really working hard, and the slackers just coasting along. But I do also see how the system could be taken advantage of and inflated. I think if everyone just takes the reputation seriously and honestly evaluates their group, it should work fine.
ReplyDeleteI like to think of reputation systems as filtering out the signal from the noise. In a group project, this may mean figuring out those who are good workers and those who are bad, and ensuring that all workers meet a certain baseline standard. This also exists in other contexts, like record labels filtering out the bad music from the good, and human resources departments filtering out the poor applicants from the good ones. By this filtering process, two very important things happen. First, the individuals are identified for their strengths. Second, the overall strengths of the group are increased.
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