The Timeline Beta Blog

We always do this with assessment; we frequently to do it in our course material. Our tests/assignments/exercises attempt to teach (or enforce) a larger amount of knowledge than fits into the moment. You still have to do all of the reading, even if we don’t cover it in class. Next week’s test will cover X amount of material, but only ask Y questions. If you knew which questions those were, you could save a lot of time… but you don’t.

One of the things that happens with Web 2.0 is that teachers get all starry-eyed thinking that we’ll be able to use the same old pyramid trick, but with carrots instead of sticks. Instead of getting students to do work by holding them accountable in a traditional sense, we are going to motivate them to cover that ground by sheer coolness. Except that, oops, guess what — students are really good at telling the difference between work and… not-work. Sigh.

Today’s survey results fall on both sides of this question. Since I want to work with four questions from the survey for this point, I’m posting them as images rather than listing the results.

I learned more information researching my post than I posted to the timeline.

Nobody disagreed with this; out of a total of 18 respondents in the two courses, only 3 people were even neutral on this point. This is a classic example of a successful pyramid scheme assignment. It’s also the locus of some of the most active critical thinking around the assignment. Pick a topic, explore it broadly, narrow the field, select the pertinent information, synthesize, post. Fantastic.

Now, the story of that extra information doesn’t end there, however, and I think it would be less successful if it did. By having the students present their timeline posts in class, a lot of the extra information that didn’t make it into the little 150-word post DOES get communicated as part of this presentation, in which the students usually describe their research trajectory as well as their conclusions. Hence our next question(s)….

I learned a lot from other students’ posts during class presentations. / Presenting and discussing timeline posts was a productive in-class activity.

I’ve lumped these two together for discussion. Again, the responses are globally quite positive. Less than a quarter of the students disagreed with this statement, about a quarter of the students were neutral, and slightly over 50% agreed or strongly agreed. I think, too, that these questions are impacted by student attitudes towards peers as a reliable source of information. Students who only listen attentively when the instructor is speaking, and tune out the rest, are not likely to glean much benefit from this format. It should be noted, however, that I am very active during these presentations – in between each one I usually speak for a few minutes, expanding or linking the information presented to the course material at large. I use them as a dialogical framework for information that I might otherwise present as straight lecture.

I learned a lot from other students’ posts outside of class.

What is surprising about this question is that anyone responded in the affirmative at all. Before we implemented the list view on February 14 (3 weeks into the semester) there was no way to identify new posts whatsoever. The list view was an imperfect, but at least functional indicator of recent activity. However, it wasn’t until we put in the color coded new entry function on March 20 that we had a true, visual representation of recent activity, one that was visible on the timeline (and so in context.)

Because there was no real way to monitor recent activity, the only accountability I imposed for reading classmates’ posts was that duplicate posts were marked down. In other words, check and make sure someone else didn’t get there first. This was much more of a factor for the cinema class than the literature class, because they were researching narrower topics (New Wave films, for example) and because there were more students.

I’m unsure whether I want to implement greater accountability for peer information in the next round. The question of quality control becomes much more pressing if the students are to be held accountable for the information. I like the in-class presentations, and I think that the visible “what’s new” function is going to increase the level of browsing. I can easily imagine a different subject area or assignment format, however, where an instructor might want to hold students accountable for the timeline information.

I’m going to start posting the survey results to the blog. It seems unmanageable to post it all at once, so I will take it a few questions at a time, to allow for analysis and discussion. In order for this analyis to make sense, however, I need to begin by outlining the differences between the way the timeline was used in the two courses. These differences had a measureable impact on the survey results, and I will be referring to them frequently.

The principle thing I would like to highlight here from the very beginning is that the timeline assignment was more fully integrated into the literature class than into the cinema class. As we will see from the survey, this did not result in a failed assignment in the cinema class. It could, however, explain the less uniform response from the students in the cinema course. At the same time, it is also important to note that because of the amount of time a show-and-tell session can take with 17 students, it was much less practical to assign the timeline every week in the cinema course, whereas with 4 students, this was quite effective in the literature course.