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Opinion
Learning in the Webiverse: How Do You Grade a Conversation?
6/18/2008
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An Academic Online Conversation
In a real-life conversation last week, a friend told me about a colleague who based all grades this past semester on his student's conversation in Blackboard. The course itself was traditional, but the student's evidence of learning was entirely how well they conversed about the course's topics in the forums in the course management system. How, you might ask, do you evaluate written turns in an ongoing conversation?
The students' first impulse was to just write essays. However, these were not conversational turns, but performances, so they were graded very low. When the students instead started picking up on elements in the previous comment and including references to these elements in their own comments, their grades went up. If the students extended their discourse skills to synthesize several comments in their own comments, they got even higher grades.
Principles for Evaluating Online Conversations
We've already seen one criterion for grading a written conversation: creating coherence. A cohesion element is a linguistic link between one language element and another, such as repetition or re-stating or referring to. By using cohesion elements in written discourse, the interlocutors (conversational partners) produce a coherent conversation.
Awareness of audience is another criterion to use in judging how skilled your students are in sustaining an academic conversation online. If they are responding to other class members online but seem to actually be writing to you, their teacher, then they are not showing awareness of their audience. But, no matter how coherent or audience-aware the students are, if they forget the purpose (goal) of their conversation, and get side-tracked into social chit-chat, then the conversation is no longer academic (social chit chat can work toward the purpose, of course, so this is not a you-can't-have-fun rule).
And, the diction (the words) in academic conversations is necessarily different than in social conversations. A discussion of an idea is not the same as the discussion of a party.
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