Understanding promotions in a case study of student blogging

Abstract

Promoting blog content is a social activity; it is a means of communicating one student's appreciation of another student's work. This paper explores the feasibility of using student promotions of content, in a blogosphere, to identify quality content, and implications for instructors. We show that students actively and voluntarily promote content, use promotion data to select which posts to read, and with considerable accuracy identify quality material. We explore the benefits of knowing which students are good and poor predictors of quality content, and what instructors can do with this information in terms of feedback and guidance.