The Strength of Weak Ties

When I was at CUE, I had the opportunity to see Vince Cerf do the opening keynote presentation. He gave a very interesting keynote, and one thing really stuck with me, and it was about what constituted a contribution in a networked environment.

Mr. Cerf suggested that we would never publish a single word as a book, as a journal article, or magazine article. He continued by saying that in a Web 2.0 world that included Wikipedia, you could and would publish a single word, and most importantly, it could be a significant contribution.

So, last night in Dean Shareski’s uStream session, many of us had a very interesting discussion about online contribution, and levels of contribution. Clarence Fisher was the guest and he was talking about his ideas relative to the classroom as a studio as well as what it meant to improve information. Some interesting ideas from the chat:

Jeff Utecht: How would you assess a student who changed a single word?
Ryan Bretag: Think about contributing one word from a poetry standpoint, how critical is one word? Writing in a hypertext society makes that one world critical.
EdtechVision: (paraphrasing here). How would peer assessment enter into this?

Personally, I think you can begin by taking a look at Darren Kuropatwa’s framework for his classroom wiki, where he defines what a significant contribution is and what a constructive modification means.

Back in the chat, after much discussion, a single question was distilled:

How do you assess contribution in a networked classroom?

Ok, so what does it look like? What’s new, what’s different, what’s the same? Your ideas?