What I am doing now?
Now I am working in more widgets. Our professor, Erik, works with social networks in all his courses, specifically he suggests to the students that they have to tweet and to blog once per week. For teachers and assistants is relatively easy to follow what the students are doing whether they are actively participating in the social networks, for instance, using Google reader for the blogs and your twitter client, but becomes more difficult whether the teacher/assistant tries to know who is actively participating... and visualizations can play an important role to help this situation...
We developed this widget that visualizes per week the number of tweets:
On the top of the table, you can see the number of the week, on the right side the usernames. You can take an easy overview.
However, doing the same for blogs becomes a bit more close because you have to visualize posts but also comments who is posting and where.
These visualizations are not only oriented to teachers, also for students can be useful to be aware what others are doing and whether you are not enough active compare it with other students. One of the main critiques could be... to game the system is easy... you do a silly comment in the specific network and the cell becomes green. This is true... but we should not forget that teachers and assitants have to read all this social network interaction and they can remind students the kind of expected contributions.
So here maybe, we have to evaluate whether this kind of visualizations shared by teacher and students are good triggers for students to reflect on their progress.
Summarizing:
- How can we help students and teacher to drive conclusions using visualizations?
- How can we motivate students to reflect on their activity?
- What visualizations are more useful in a learning context and why?
So let's start to work!
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