How can we evaluate students' interaction in web 2.0 assignments?

 Teachers do not know how to evaluate students' interaction (Gray et al., 2012).  I think evaluation of interactions on social media should refer to evaluation of student participation in online discussions in Blackboard or other learning management system. Even though social media is a new research area, online discussion is not a new one. Many studies have focused on how to evaluate what and how to evaluate online discussions in various platforms. This rubric should include the three aspects: the quality, quantity, timing, and the nature of student participation in social media. This rubric is based on Dennen (2005)’s definition of participation in online discussion. The nature of student participation refers to on-topic, off-topic or administrative or technical issues while the quality of student participation is the level of dialogue (Dennen, 2005).

But there are some problems. It’s hard to evaluate the quality of student participation in social media. It’s hard to let students focus on the topic on social media related to the class all the time. Take a class Twitter hashtag for example, some students may share some interesting pictures or videos which are not related to our course content. Some students often retweet or favorites others’ tweets. Other students just read the tweets without leaving any footprints. Still others never care about class tweets because they do not get used to using twitter for learning purpose. For these students who do not participate in Twitter, teachers cannot blame them because they feel free to use it or not.

Indeed, one merit of evaluation of learning activities on social media is “capturing the visible evidence of invisible learning” (Bass and Eynon 2009, p. 4). Nowadays, with specific social media analytic tools like Klout and Google Analytics, students’ page views, watching videos, and checkpoints can be accurately recorded and analyzed. Take a class twitter hashtag for example, teachers can easily use Twitter analytic tools to analyze interaction between students and teachers. Students’ retweets, replies, and favorites can be easily analyzed. The social network analysis tool can be also used to analyze social network among students and teachers to check who have more interactions with whom, and who the center of the conversation in this class is.

Bass, R. & Eynon, B. (2009) ‘Capturing the visible evidence of invisible learning (Introduction and synthesis of findings)’, Academic Commons, (January), pp. 4_29.

Dennen, V. P. (2005). From message posting to learning Dialogues:  Factors affecting learner participation in asynchronous discussions. Distance