Looking closer at moderation of blogging posts today on the ECML blogging system. I really like what Mario has done with the moderation. Small icons lead the teacher to either approve or withhold a student posting, adding small notes for improvements with electronic blogging stickies that the student and teacher can see but which no-one else can. Nice for those students who are perhaps afraid of public correction or criticism. However, it does bring us back to the point that my neighbour at the conference has just reminded me of. What’s best for the student? Private message exchange and error correction between student and teacher – the way we’ve taught for the past n years – or public commenting and peer assessment.
Mario likes the concept of peer assessment in the open on the blog, I think. He mentioned (with a wry smile on his face) the possible opportunities for subversion of older teaching methods with the open blog. But obviously, with such disparate educational cultures represented in this project, he’s been under a lot of pressure to provide a pre-moderation tool. And, as a non-believer in pre-moderation he’s the first person to convince me that it might work in some scenarios with the model he has created.
Best of all is that on his Technical Track blog he’s had students commenting on what they think of pre-moderation. They seem to like it because they’re afraid of making mistakes publicly. But in my mind it’s chicken and egg: why are they afraid of making mistakes in public? Is that not a reflection on the kind of attitudes and fears of failure that we instil in students in our classrooms? Is that perhaps a good set of attitudes for a student to have or is there more potential for success in learning publicly from each other’s errors?
I’m still open for convincing!
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