I had a parenthetical phrase in my previous post that was about as long as the paragraph that contained it, so I decided to extract and reform it into its own post. It's something that's been on my mind the last few days in two of my classes, specifically game design and human-computer interaction. I'm using Google Docs in these classes, as I have done for years in many classes. Google Docs has some excellent affordances for learning, perhaps the most obvious being that student teams can collaboratively write in a convenient way. To me, however, this feature is secondary to the ability to highlight and comment on specific parts of a document and then to transform that comment into a conversation in the margins. If I see something interesting or confounding or insightful in a student submission, I can highlight it and leave a comment. The comment might be a question designed to make a point, an honest question of my own curiosity, a reference to relevant work or other student work, or really anything else I can express in text. Whoever wrote that section of the document gets a notification, and anyone who reads the document can join in this comment thread.
The problem is that my students are not responding to the comment threads. In fact, I believe that this entire semester so far, no student has responded to or even resolved my comments in any of their submissions. I paused to wonder why this was the case, and I came up with two answers. The first is the simple pedagogic answer that I had not incentivized them to do so. Students, like many of us, are busy—some are even busy with with their studies. If there is no incentive to respond to comments, then why bother?
When I teach CS222 (Advanced Programming), I often use a resubmission policy through which students can rework old assignments, learn from their mistakes, and resubmit for course credit. If a student resubmits something and they have not responded to my comments, they should expect me to simply kick it back to them. I believe that this policy is generally good for students, since they have a real incentive to learn from their mistakes, although it also has the negative consequence that some students submit substandard work knowing they can resubmit it later. That aside, the resubmission policy requires a lot of effort on my behalf: not only do I have to grade a submission more than once, I also have to try to understand and comment on the differences between the original and the revised submission. The burden on my time is one of the reasons I am not using a resubmission policy this semester.
I think there's something going on here besides just the incentive structure, however. Conventional educational practice involves students "turning in" work to the teacher, who then evaluates it, assigning a grade and giving some feedback. A student gets the paper back, looks over the comments, and then discards it. Online writing environments like Google Docs draw upon a conceptual model of writing on paper, in part because the legacy of text editors is often tied to the concept of printing onto paper. It's worth noting, however, that "plain text" editors make no such pretense. While it's possible ti know what "page" you're on when programming in your favorite programming environment, nobody does it. Concepts like "page" are purely metaphorical in a digital writing environment: there is not a "page" at all, not unless work is printed onto said page. Because rich text editors draw upon the conceptual model of paper, however, students get drawn into the same one: whether a student gives me a URL or a printed sheet, the culturally expected behavior is the same. This phenomena rose its head earlier this semester when I noticed how many students were putting hard page breaks into their Google Docs documents that are intended to collect all their work. This makes it tedious for me to scroll through their work, because to me, the conceptual model is "chronological log of work," but to them, the model appears to be "series of pages of work."
What I intend, when I leave comments into a student's document, is the conceptual model of conversation, not submitting paper to a teacher. Imagine sitting with a student who makes a claim such as, "I don't think Don Norman gives enough credit to the role of amateurs in his discussion of the future of design," and you say to him, "Why is that?" and then they simply walk away. Cultural constraints around conversations tell us that this is not only strange but rude. However, I have left, oh, let's say thirty questions in students' submissions already this semester, and they have all essentially got up and walked away. I think it's a mismatch of mental models: I think we're having a conversation, where they are in a transaction.
Unfortunately, it's not clear to me how to encourage students to use the feedback-as-conversation mental model without adding incentives such as resubmission. This means that once again, it breaks away from being an exchange of ideas and into a transaction around points. There's always the opportunity to turn it into an achievement in a course that uses it, although I'm not using many achievements this semester as I experiment with specifications grading instead.
My observations beg the question, "What would a digital writing environment look like that fosters the conversation rather than transaction mental model?" I hate to beat a dead horse, but I think this is exactly what Google Wave was getting at, and perhaps is one of the reasons why it didn't catch on. It was solving a problem that people didn't know they had, because they were locked into a different conceptual model of how writing and conversations manifest. For programmers, the answer is clear: digital writing looks like GitHub, which integrate writing and conversation along with version control and issue tracking. If GitHub supported commenting on text without needing a pull request, then perhaps using it and Markdown would be a viable alternative to Google Docs for the kind of learning environment I want to foster.
No comments:
Post a Comment