Our INFO 3650 class - specifically the blog - can be considered a community. Trust is important in this context because it is good to know a little bit about the author and his or her previous posts when you sit down to read the blog. ("Is this post likely to be good, or am I wasting my time by reading it?") Desirable behaviors for blog posts include writing interesting entries that fulfill the requirements of the assignment. Good posts are also well-written and do not include unnecessary or inappropriate information. The main reward (and motivation) for good behavior is a high grade, but a reputation system could have other rewards, too. For example, there could be a rating system in which students could rate others' posts, maybe on a scale from 1 to 5. Since people might not want ratings displayed next to their posts, there could be an option to view the highest-rated posts without seeing the actual scores. Similarly, one could search for users whose posts were rated highly to find reliable authors. Each user could have an overall reputation score equal to the average of all of his or her posts' ratings. This overall score would be visible to other people.
This rating system could help the instructors pick out the best blog posts each week and share them in class as an additional reward (with the author's consent, of course). However, the ratings probably shouldn't be visible to the instructors until after the grading is done to avoid bias.
A weakness of this system is that it could easily be manipulated, especially since many members of the class know each other. People could agree to give each other's posts high ratings to inflate their reputations. Then honest people who did not collude would be at a disadvantage, even if they worked hard and contributed high-quality posts. Also, the system might have the negative side effect of discouraging people who receive low ratings on their posts. On the other hand, they might be inspired to try harder to earn a better reputation.
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I really see the benefit of this reputation system as more for the writer of the post rather than the readers. If, as you point out, instructors cannot see the ratings until after grading, the ratings themselves wouldn't really affect people's grades on the blog posts. Rather, the motivation to get a good rating stems from knowing whether people think your blog is worth reading or not. This would affect grades in the long run because of the feedback received through this system could help them improve their posts to cater to their classmates' interests, which are hopefully in line with the instructors'.
ReplyDeleteWould it really benefit to have a rating from 1 to 5? It's a good idea, but to me I'd have a hard time judging 1 to 5 without reading through a lot of the posts. On a system like a blog, I wonder if it's better just to do a like/dislike system.
ReplyDeleteNonetheless, the reputation system is pretty cool for a blog and in ways, I'd really like it to be introduced to this blog. One way to track this is through trackbacks. The more trackbacks to a post, the more people like it. This doesn't apply as much to our blog since we don't tend to link like that, but with other blogs, that's probably akin to a like/dislike system. Cool stuff.