Study: People Want Power Because They Want Autonomy

An article from The Atlantic describing a study that reveals autonomy is, almost entirely, the reason people like to have power. This accords very well with the predictions of self-determination theory.

Power (in the most meaningful sense of the word) is pretty much the same thing as autonomy, I think: it’s about feeling that you are in control of your life, regardless of whether that feeling is justified. This suggests that some forms of what we generally recognize as power (ie. positions of authority, with control over what others do) might not be so great, inasmuch as the accompanying responsibilities can considerably reduce autonomy. Those in middle management, myself incuded, are in a great many ways less autonomous than those over whom they have purported power, in part because of their responsibility to those they lead, and in part due to their accountability to those with greater power. I’m guessing that the same is true right up to leaders of institutions, who are accountable to governments and other funding bodies in much the same way as those lower in the pecking order are accountable to them.

For optimal happiness, organizational hierarchies (not those that occur in natural systems but that are designed by humans) are an inherently weak idea, most notably because they must always be antagonistic to autonomy. They survive as a reasonably effective compromise made to make  organizations and societies function like machines: indeed, they are one of our most fundamental enabling technologies. They are the main way that large groups of people can efficiently live in peace and prosperity together. Hierarchies are responsible for many good things, a foundational technology on which much of human society, culture and technology is based, without which we would likely still be in the trees. But it is important to remember that they are just technologies: they are inventions that can be improved upon and that could easily be superceded by better inventions. Democratic governance was likely the last major successful innovation in the technology, but it doesn’t solve many of the inherent weaknesses. For the most part, the inevitable inefficiencies, filtering of information and, above all, diminution of intrinsic motivation make organizational hierarchies a deeply flawed solution to the problems of large scale human coordination that they are designed to solve.

With modern technologies, especially those involved in and emerging from ubiquitous communication and availability of knowledge, we can and should do better than hierarchies. I am increasingly intrigued by and drawn to the model of The Morning Star Company, that thrives without hierarchies, where everyone, from temporary tomato pickers to the CEO, is a manager, and where power is not given but taken as a natural right. What’s remarkable about it is not so much the pattern (which is not unlike that of traditional academia and many other organizations and social forms) but the fact that the pattern works really well.

 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/03/people-want-power-because-they-want-autonomy/474669/?single_page=true

The LMS of the future is yours! | Michael Goudzwaard

I think this is, from a quick skim through, the beginnings of a very good idea. An LMS that does almost nothing. Quoting directly:

What would this LMS look like? In my view, it would have three things:

1) a course roster with stellar SIS integration

2) a gradebook

3) a rock-star LTI and API

That’s it! Oh, except it would also be open source, students would control their own data, including publishing any of their work or evaluations to the block chain, and you could host it locally, distributed, or in the cloud. Never mind the pesky privacy laws (or lack thereof) in the country hosting your server, because the LMS is back on campus. Not connected to the internet? That’s okay too, because there is a killer app that syncs like a boss (like Evernote. Has Evernote ever given you a sync error? No, I didn’t think so.)

Who wins with the new LMS? Students because they own and control their data and it costs less to buy and run. Instructors because they have a solid core with the option to plug any LTI into a class hub. Institutions because costs are lower and the system more secure.
Who loses? The EdTech companies. Or do they? Without standard wiki features and discussion portals, startups and the old standard barriers can invest their R&D and venture funds in really great tools.”

The principle is a little like that of Elgg, that consists of a very small core, with everything else coming from plugins that use the API.

It seems to me that, though this concept allows its users (teachers, students, admins alike) to do what they like with tools and data, it is still firmly based around the assumption of a traditional classroom model, and seems, as much as the traditional LMS, to reinforce that view. It’s still a course and grading management system, not a learning management system. It needs something that goes beyond the classroom, even in a traditional institutional setting. It needs much more flexible groupings, networks and sets.

With that in mind, this lightweight LMS still seems heavier than needed. A SIS might well provide course information, so that might be redundant. If not, a plugin or service could be written, rather than including it in the core. I am not at all sure that an integral gradebook is needed either, for much the same reason. It might, instead, benefit from a standards-based open source learning record store using xAPI (TinCan), like Learning Locker.  Or, perhaps, an integration of an OpenBadges backpack. Either, along with APIs that allow integration with things like SISs that could make badges look like grades or that could identify relevant learning records, could serve the necessary functions and allow a great deal more openness. Perhaps integrated support for some kinds of grouping and networking would help satisfy the needs of those that want to build institutional courses. All that is really needed is that rockstar API to pull it all together. This begins to sound a lot more like Elgg, and something that could, in principle, be implemented within it.

The blockchain idea is a good one: being able to free data from a central machine is much to be wished for. But it bothers me that privacy laws are seen as pesky and that they should be circumvented. They are pesky, for sure, but with good reason. We cannot force students to part with private data where laws do not protect them (I do have at least one course that does this, but it’s one of the conditions of enrolling because we are actually studying such things). What people do of their own accord is, of course, just fine, but the tacit assumption that this LMS-lite continues to reinforce is that learning happens in courses that lead directly to accreditation. That’s not about people doing things of their own accord.

With that in mind I can foresee a few interesting issues with authorization too, whatever path is taken. The mechanisms for deciding who allows what to be seen by whom might turn out to be quite complex because of the tension between hierarchical roles implied by this system and individual access authority implied by the freedom to use anything from anywhere, especially given the balkanization of social media space that currently exists and that is likely to form a good part of the basis of actual learning activities. Anything that is not public is going to have to interface with this in some quite tricky ways.

For all its embedded assumptions, I like the idea. Building an Elgg-like system with integral LTI, especially if it could support more learner-centric technologies like xAPI, OpenBadges and so on, seems like a sensible way to go

Address of the bookmark: http://mgoudz.com/2016/02/26/the-lms-of-the-future-is-yours/

Reactions to Facebook's reactions

I quite like the word ‘reactions’ that Facebook is using to describe their new options to express feelings about a post. I wish I’d thought of it. This is a matter of much more than passing interest to me as it relates closely to something that occupied a lot of my time over some years of my life. In my own CoFIND social bookmarking system (that first saw the light of day about 18 years ago and underpinned my PhD work) I used to refer to something quite similar as ‘qualities’ – metadata (tags) to show not just that something is good or interesting but how it is good or interesting, that could then be used to rate and thus help to filter and rank a feed of bookmarked resources. CoFIND is an acronym – Collaborative Filter in N Dimensions – that refers to this n-dimensionality of ratings. Facebook’s Reactions feature is a simplified version of this: it’s about categories more than tags, but the thinking behind it is broadly similar. The differences, though, are interesting.

Fuzzy ratings

One of the things that is most notable about Facebook Reactions is that ratings are, like its Likes before them, binary: a simple ‘yes’ or ‘not-rated’.  In most versions of CoFIND (it iterated a lot), users could choose to what extent something was good/loved/annoying/interesting/etc through a Likert scale. Giving the option to choose the strength of a feeling seems much more sensible when talking about fuzzy values like this. I want to be able to signify that I quite like something, or that is is mildly amusing, especially if my intent is to communicate my feelings to others. Facebook’s Reactions are a coarse as a means of expression: it is quite appropriate that its emoticons are literal caricatures.  In all the methods I tried – radio buttons, clickable links, etc – introducing scalar ratings turned out to be way too complex to be usable, but web interfaces were not as rich in those days: I think things like popup draggable sliders (not dissimilar to Facebook’s interface) might make it more feasible nowadays.

Evolving metadata

Facebook Reactions are not just binary but fixed. CoFIND – I think, still uniquely – allowed individuals to create new qualities (reactions), which could then be used by anyone else. It was an n-dimensional rating system where ‘n’ could be any number at all. Qualities quite literally evolved for each community, with more used qualities surviving (being immediately available for use) and less used ones being relegated to backwaters of the system (effectively dying, albeit with the possibility of resurrection if added again). This allowed for such metadata to provide a mirror of the values that mattered most within a given community or network, rather than being imposed uniformly on everyone, and for those values to evolve as the community itself evolved. While I appreciate the simplicity of Facebook’s interface (CoFIND’s most fatal flaw was always that its interface was far too complex to be usable) I still think that user-created ways of emoting – what I have since called ‘fuzzy tags‘ – lead to much more useful reactions that matter within a given community, especially when users can choose the degree to which a fuzzy tag applies. When CoFIND was used in an educational setting, qualities like ‘good for beginners’, ‘authoritative’, or ‘comprehensive’ tended to emerge – they were pedagogical metadata. When used in other contexts, such as to discover what HCI students considered important in a website, site-ranking qualities like ‘slow’, ‘boring’, ‘artistic’ and ‘informative’ appeared.

CoFIND qualities

 

Parcellation

One of the things I hate most vehemently about Facebook is that it same-ifies everything: a person in Facebook has a single unchanging (and permanently reified) identity, with a single network, a single facade, a single caricatured way of being in the world, notwithstanding the odd nod to diversity like pages and lists. Facebook’s business model relies on this, because any clustering or parcellation reduces the potential to connect, and connections are everything to Facebook. This makes me highly sceptical of its claimed ‘discovery’ that people are actually separated by only 3.57 degrees rather than six. Given that the system very deliberately drives them to friend as many others as much as possible, on most tenuous grounds of connection, this is hardly surprising. It shows not that previous studies are mistaken but the extent to which Facebook has manipulated human networks for profit. Apart from evolving to fit a single community, another of the things CoFIND did was to deliberately parcellate the environment, allowing different sets of values to evolve in different contexts. What is ‘good’ in the context of learning to read is not likely to be ‘good’ in the context of learning geometry, so different topics each evolved a (largely) separate set of qualities. This might not have been the best way to drive the growth of large networks, but it was a much better way to enable the self-organized emergence of meaningful communities. It also allowed individuals to express and embrace different facets of themselves, which in turn made it easy to accommodate changing needs and interests: essential in the context of learning, which is (if nothing else) about change.

You can read about the tortuous process of CoFIND’s development and the thinking behind it in my PhD thesis. I continued to develop CoFIND into the mid 2000s but, though the final version was a bit more usable and scalable (I rewrote it in PHP and changed a lot of the mechanisms, simplifying a fair number of things, including losing the fuzzy ratings) I’m still most fond of the final version that is described in the thesis.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/facebook-reactions-update_us_56ccb128e4b0ec6725e42861?ir=Weird+News&section=us_weird-news&utm_hp_ref=weird-news

First, Let’s Fire All the Managers

This is an article about how and why The Morning Star Company works. It’s a company where

• No one has a boss.

• Employees negotiate responsibilities with their peers.

• Everyone can spend the company’s money.

• Each individual is responsible for acquiring the tools needed to do his or her work.

• There are no titles and no promotions.

• Compensation decisions are peer-based.

Moreover, it is:

” a large, capital-intensive corporation whose sprawling plants devour hundreds of tons of raw materials every hour, where dozens of processes have to be kept within tight tolerances, and where 400 full-time employees produce over $700 million a year in revenues. And by the way, this unique company is a global market leader”.

I believe that this could serve as a superb model for academia. In fact, I strongly suspect it would work even better in academia, that has a natural leaning towards autonomy. It would increase motivation, ownership, engagement, efficiency and creativity across the board.

The title of the article is not altogether accurate because the central mechanism through which Morning Star Co achieves its remarkable success is to treat everyone – from the temporary pickers of tomatoes to the president of the company – as a manager. It’s not about getting rid of managers at all but creating a process in which everyone has power and agency, without structural hierarchies (or, at least, with very lightweight, flexible and shifting hierarchies). This is clearly very motivating: 

 “If people are free, they will be drawn to what they really like as opposed to being pushed toward what they have been told to like,” says Rufer. “So they will personally do better; they’ll be more enthused to do things.” Morning Star’s employees echo this sentiment. “When people tell you what to do, you’re a machine,” says one operator.”

One thing I particularly like is that it is hugely empowering, but it’s not about empowerment:

“the notion of empowerment assumes that authority trickles down—that power gets bestowed from above, as and when the powerful see fit. In an organization built on the principles of self-management, individuals aren’t given power by the higher-ups; they simply have it.”

The benefits – more initiative, more expertise, more flexibility, more collegiality, better judgement and more loyalty – are well explained in the article. This is a highly successful company, not just in its market but for its workers.

The article goes into some detail on how it works without centralized control and power hierarchies. It explains how those who don’t pull their weight are treated, how processes are coordinated, how success is measured and what makes it both efficient and creative at the same time. The mechanisms of control are almost entirely social and the production process is almost entirely self-organizing. The company is designed to create the conditions needed for people to work together effectively: not so much a machine as an ecosystem. Inspiring stuff. Not only would it be a great way to run a university, it would not be a bad way to run a program or even an individual course.

Address of the bookmark: https://hbr.org/2011/12/first-lets-fire-all-the-managers

When 300 Million Active Users Isn't Enough | Library Babel Fish

Interesting reflections from librarian Barbara Fister on Twitter’s precarious position, turning a ‘mere’ $191m profit on 300m users and not growing fast enough to assure survival. Turning away from the customer-as-product model, she instead makes a case for small, vertical market, paid-for social (but not too social) services, like Pinboard (tagline: ‘social bookmarking for introverts’) and LibraryThing (“MySpace for bookworms”).

I don’t see these as any more viable than Twitter. If successful, they will be purchased by one of the big few (giving the predator access to my data and social connections) or, if unsuccessful, they will eat my data and my social connections made with them. If they weather all that, the chances of them continuing to grow to meet my ever changing demands are minimal. Vanishingly few will continue to meet my needs for the foreseeable future and it would be foolhardy to bet money that any will survive indefinitely.

And indefinite survival is what is needed, not of the service itself but of the data, processes and social connections that support those data. It is bad enough having elderly files on my own computer that I cannot access at all thanks to proprietary formats. Having such data on a cloud service I may not even be able to access next week is much worse. And, of course, for a social system it is not just about my data but about the network with other people that, when the service dies or I wish to leave it, will be lost.  It’s better to be more of a customer and less of a product, but the endgame is the same either way. Cloud services are susceptible to a thousand and one woes, including unwanted service changes, renogatiated service contracts (seldom beneficial to the customer, once the data are locked in), acquisition, disappearance, failure to grow when needed, and a host of other things beyond my control. The proprietary, locked-in cloud is not the way to go, whether ‘free’ or directly paid-for. It gives the illusion of being open while actually being closed. We need open, portable, distributable and distributed standards for all of this: RSS, OPML, OpenSocial, trackbacks, pingbacks, WebMention and so on. And we need the ability to create, change, move and develop virtual spaces that belong to us, not to a service provider. This is why systems like Known, Elgg and WordPress (with appropriate plugins to support federation) are so important. I find it very encouraging that WordPress (open source and hosted versions) continues to grow and to dominate the social media landscape, powering over 26% of the entire Web. It makes usage of the likes of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube seem like a rounding error, and it is just one of many social systems owned by those that use them.

Address of the bookmark: https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/when-300-million-active-users-isnt-enough

Study suggests high school students hold negative views of online education

This is a report on a poll of soon-to-be US high school graduates with aspirations to enter higher education, revealing an overwhelming majority want to take most of their college courses in person. Indeed, only just over a third wanted to do any online courses at all, while a measly 6% would be happy with half or more being online.

As the article rightly notes…

“Poulin warned against reading too much into those results. He argued that since many people associate the term “online learning” with massive open online courses and diploma mills, there are bound to be misperceptions. Studies that have looked at student outcomes from online courses have found them to be generally equal to those from face-to-face courses.”

It is also worth noting that those polled had largely not had any experience of online learning and have actively been taught not to learn that way. Schools teach a way of teaching, not just what is deliberately taught. And, especially in places like the US where standardized testing dominates actual learning, it is mostly a pretty terrible way of teaching. Overall, this is a comment about the students’ attitudes and failings in US schools, not about online learning. But, to be fair, though the US is notably weak in this regard, the same systemic problems significantly affect the vast majority of educational systems in the world, including in Canada.

One thing the study does tell us about online education is that a lot of work is needed to help get the message across to kids that online learning can be incredibly enriching and empowering in ways most face-to-face learning can only aspire to. Many adults that have spent time out of school (our dominant demographic) realize this, but school kids are so submerged in the teacher-tells-student-does model of education that it is understandably hard for them to think of it any other way.

An immediately obvious way to address this lack of knowledge would be to get a few of our better courses into schools, but I doubt that would help at all, and it might even make things worse. The trouble is, the methodologies and schedules of school teaching would mostly crowd it out: when our schools continue to teach dependence and teacher control, online learning – that thrives on freedom and independence – is likely to be swamped by the power-crazed structures that surround it. Faced with a scheduled, regimented system and compelling demands from local, discipline maintaining teachers, it would be all too easy for online work to be treated as something to fit in small gaps between more obviously pressing demands.

Far better would be for schools to spend more time supporting self-guided learning, which would better support students to take control of their own learning paths, in life and in further learning. Whether online or face to face, one of my biggest challenges as a university professor has always been to unteach the terribly dependent ways of learning school students have been forced to learn. 

Another thing that would help would be for those of us in the profession of distance teaching to more forthrightly and single-mindedly design and promote the experience of online learning as being a way to reduce distance. To show that it can be more personal, more social, more engaging than at least what is found in traditional large lectures and big, faceless institutions, and not far off what is found in smaller seminars and tutorials (better in some ways, worse in others). As the article suggests, many students are put off by the apparent isolation and few realize that it does not have to be that way. Sadly, there is still too much of it that is that way, albeit far less commonly in places like AU.

But it is not just about courses and teaching, that make up only a small, if prominent, part of the learning experience at a traditional collocation-based university. Most online institutions don’t do anything like enough to go beyond the course to engage students in the richer, broader academic community. Thanks to the Landing, we at Athabasca are better advanced that way than most, but it  only reaches a fraction of all staff and students and is all too often just seen as an extension of the course environment by some students. There are lots of ways the Landing could work better and do more but, really, it is only a small part of the solution. We need to embed the kinds of interactions and engagement it provides everywhere in our online spaces. If we don’t, we will eternally be stuck in a cold-start regime where students don’t come because there is no one there, and too many school kids (and others) will continue to miss out on the richness and value of online learning.

 

 

Address of the bookmark: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/02/17/study-suggests-high-school-students-hold-negative-views-online-education

Sorry, technophiles: 92% of students prefer books to e-readers

That’s alright, article-writer: no hard feelings!

I’ve written about this many times before, most extensively in this post that provides a pretty comprehensive comparison, IMHO, so I won’t reiterate the pro and con arguments again. Apparently, similar arguments can be found in the book from which the survey is drawn (that I will buy and read in electronic form) though, according to the reviews, the author comes out a little more firmly – but also equivocally – on the side of paper than I. Of course, a balanced analysis doesn’t make for such zappy headlines. Some people would love the world to be black and white, despite copious evidence of colours and shades all around them.

What I will observe, however, is that a survey result like this is not at all surprising, but the comparison is completely unfair and, largely, meaningless. A p-book is essentially a single technology (unless you count the difference between folios and scrolls), while there are thousands of different e-book technologies. It is ludicrous to compare an e-book read on a computer screen from an abomination like VitalSource, or a PDF file designed for paper, with the same thing read in native format on a new-ish Kindle, and very different again on a tablet or smartphone. Software can make a huge difference too: it is fair to say that a lot of it is still very badly designed, but there are decent e-readers available, and they are getting better all the time. This is not to mention issues like DRM that muddy the waters and get bundled into the same bucket. To treat this all as a single technology is dumb. It’s like comparing walking with all other forms of transport at once (and, similarly, none will or should ever fully replace walking).

Given the enormous diversity and the infancy of the tools, It reminds me a lot of the spurious and nonsensical comparisons still sometimes being made between e-learning and p-learning. Both can be great and both can be ghastly. It all depends on how you do it. 

E-text (and e-learning) is getting better in leaps and bounds, with no sign of a change in rate of improvement, while p-text (and p-learning) has hardly improved in any significant way in a thousand years (I’m not counting manufacturing and distribution improvements and accept there have been  evolutionary tweaks like indexes and paperbacks). I doubt that paper books will ever die out – they do have unique advantages that we are still far from replicating on a commercial scale in other ways – but I think the eventual winner, assuming civilization as we know it doesn’t collapse, is very clear indeed.

Address of the bookmark: http://mashable.com/2016/02/05/books-vs-e-readers/#vWVL5AbJoSqy

Metcalfe's Law is Wrong – IEEE Spectrum

Compelling argument, 10 years old now, that Metcalfe’s Law and Reed’s Law are wrong, and that the correct value for a network should be n log (n). The reasoning is good: the problem with Metcalfe’s and Reed’s laws is that not all nodes in a network are equal. An analogy is made with Zipf’s Law (“if we order some large collection by size or popularity, the second element in the collection will be about half the measure of the first one, the third one will be about one-third the measure of the first one, and so on”) which reflects the uneven distribution of value in a network.

This makes sense to me, but could be taken further. It seems to me that there is no such thing as an ‘average’ network, so we must always examine the actual patterns in any given network to see what value individuals add, and we must always be prepared for some serious outliers that can greatly affect the overall network. If, say, a prime minister or president started to use the Landing, the effect would be quite spectacular (and likely catastrophic, for all sorts of technical and non-technical reasons). There are great risks in averaging things out and looking for statistical effects when observing any human system.

Address of the bookmark: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/networks/metcalfes-law-is-wrong

Microsoft Edge's Private Mode May Actually Record Your Browsing

The fact that some people continue to use Microsoft software continues to puzzle me. I mean, it’s not like we haven’t given them a chance. Decades of chances. And it’s not like there are not alternatives. Much better alternatives, often open source, often free. It’s not even as though Microsoft dominates the market any more. If you are stuck using Windows and you’re not using Firefox or (if you must) Chrome, Opera, Safari or one of many alternative browsers, it’s probably a good time to switch. Of course, if you are stuck using Windows 10, you definitely want to look at your privacy settings anyway. It won’t stop Microsoft from spying on you altogether, but it will help limit the excess

Address of the bookmark: http://gizmodo.com/microsoft-edges-private-mode-may-actually-record-your-b-1756332400

Demotivating students with participation grades

Alfie Kohn has posted another great article on ways we demotivate students. This time he is talking about the practice of ‘cold calling’ in classrooms, through which teachers coerce students that have not volunteered to speak into speaking, rightly observing that this is morally repugnant and reflects an inappropriate and mistaken behaviourist paradigm. As he puts it, “The goal is to produce a certain observable behavior; the experience of the student — his or her inner life — is irrelevant.” A very bad lesson to teach children. But it is not limited to children, and not limited to classrooms.

Online, it is way too common for teachers to achieve much the same results – with much the same moral repugnancy and with much the same behaviourist underpinnings – through ‘participation’ grades. We really need to stop doing this. It is disempowering, unfair (especially as, rather than grading terminal outcomes, one typically grades learning behaviours) and demotivating. It also too often leads to shallow dialogues, so it’s not as great for learning as it might be, but that’s the least of the problems with it.

Ideally we should help to create circumstances where students actually want to contribute and see value in doing so, regardless of grades. If it has no innate value and grades are needed to motivate engagement, there is something terribly wrong. There are lots of ways of doing that – not making everyone do the same thing, offering diverse opportunities for dialogue, for instance. I find student and tutor blog posts and the like are good for this, because they open up opportunities for voluntary engagement where topics are interesting, rather than having to follow a hierarchical threaded flow in a discussion forum. Allowing students a strong say in how they contribute can help – if they pick the topics and methods, they are far more likely to join in. Asking questions that matter to different students in different ways can help – choice is necessary for control, and is way easier to do in an asynchronous environment where multiple simultaneous threads can coexist. Splitting classes into smaller, mutually supportive groups (ideally letting students pick them for themselves) can be beneficial, especially when combined with pyramiding so each group contributes back to a larger group without the fear and power inequalities larger groups entail.

If grades are needed to enforce participation, it’s a failure of teaching.  Getting it right is an art and I freely admit that I have never perfected that art, but I am quite certain that grading participation is not the solution. There are no simple formulae that suit every circumstance and every student, but being aware of the problems rather than relying on a knee-jerk participation grade, especially, as is all too common, when there are no course learning outcomes that such a grade addresses, is a step in the right direction. Of course, if there actually is an explicit outcome that students should be able to argue, debate, discuss, etc then it is much less of an issue. That’s what the students (presumably) signed on to learn about, though there is still a lot of care needed to ensure all students have an equal chance, and that there is enough scaffolding, reflection and support available to ensure they are not graded on ‘raw’ untutored interaction, and that the interaction becomes a learning experience that is reflected upon, not just accomplished.

In case you are wondering how I deal with grading based on social interactions, my usual approach is to allow students to (optionally) treat their contributions as evidence of learning outcomes, typically in a reflective portfolio, and to encourage them to reflect on dialogues in which they may or may not have directly participated. This allows those that are comfortable contributing to do so, and for it to be rewarded if they wish, but does not pressure anyone to contribute for the sake of it, as there are always other ways to show competence. There’s still a reward lurking in there somewhere, so it is not perfect, but at least it provides choices, which is a start.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.alfiekohn.org/blogs/hands