[squeakland] Re: the reasons for ranking

Wed Sep 30 08:20:56 PDT 2009

Hey, John,

Nice to see you are still around and interested -- hope you are doing  
well.   Thanks for the comments.

As for me and Viewpoints -- there is one reason only for ranking and  
that is filtering in an attempt to bring the best educational examples  
and those illustrative of etoys' strengths to the attention of the  
community.   So, I,  for one, am hoping that those "voting" are not  
voting for any particular child, author or person, but for the example  
itself -- I hope those voting/ranking are asking "is this a fine  
exemplar to help teach a concept, principle, or powerful idea?".   The  
more the example answers back with a "yes" the higher the rank.  Also,  
the more complete an example the higher the rank.  How disclosing of  
what the Etoy is meant to do is in the example?  Does it have an  
explanation of what it is?  If it is a game does it have instruction  
on how to play and the goal of the game?

I hope that teachers who encourage their students to upload projects  
will *only* allow sharing if their student provides  an "About" flap,  
or some intro/explanation of the Etoy and some instruction on where to  
start, the aim of the project, etc.  The most beautiful simulation of  
something will fall completely flat with someone if they have no real  
idea of what they are looking at or what the script they are playing  
with is meant to do. Etoys are intended to teach and help us learn;  
learning cannot occur without context.  No author should assume their  
project will be self disclosing; it will not.  Our users have a  
variety of levels of expertise in both Etoys and subject matter areas;  
providing more context can only help.

If there is no "ranking" in place and everything is posted the  
offerings soon get overwhelming and most difficult to navigate.  We  
found this years ago when we had an active "super-swiki".  Projects  
that were no more than a single sketch with no script at all were  
posted and only "muddied the waters" for those wading in an attempt to  
find something with some meaningful content.

I hope the community will bear this in mind when "ranking" what gets  
uploaded and understand that not everyone can be represented in a  
featured showcase.
  -- Kim

On Sep 30, 2009, at 7:58 AM, voiklis wrote:

> Hello all,
>
> I apologize for joining this conversation so late; I am a longtime,  
> though recently quiet, member of the community.
>
> I understand that the ranking system is an attempt to enable people  
> to judge the quality of a contribution (or contributor) based on  
> some directly observable measure of reputation. On first sight, one  
> could argue that such a system overcomes the problem that in the  
> face-to-face world reputation is not directly observable. In order  
> to get an honest assessment of a person's reputation, one has to  
> invest a lot of time building trust with the people familiar with  
> that person. Even then, a trustworthy assessment requires direct  
> observation of the person's actions.
>
> A ranking system would appear to reduce that effort by half; knowing  
> the person's reputation among his/her peers, one only needs to  
> assess the work.
>
> The problem with that reasoning is that electronic ranking systems  
> are highly susceptible to manipulation. Building reputation becomes  
> the goal of the activity for many people and they use all sorts of  
> seemingly harmless social and technological means to inflate their  
> numbers. Our lab has been studying this phenomenon through both  
> observational studies of online communities and laboratory  
> experiments. The two papers below report on the phenomenon as it  
> presents itself in Digg, the news aggregation site.
>
> The first paper demonstrates that a tit-for-tat game of reciprocity  
> inflates the reputation of contributors and their contributions  
> without reflecting anything substantive about their contributions.  
> The second paper really brings out the negative consequences of this  
> phenomenon. The paper reports on an experiment where people judged  
> how interesting they found the contribution. The ranking values of  
> the articles were set by the investigator; sometime the rank of the  
> article was set high, at other times low. Experimental subjects  
> rated higher-ranked contributions as more interesting than lower  
> ranked contributions. The same article was rated as highly  
> interesting when its rank was set high and uninteresting when ranked  
> low. Duncan Watts (of small-world networks fame) observed the same  
> phenomenon with music rating.
>
> What this means in the present discussion is that people will likely  
> ignore low ranking contributions. Worse still, when they do actually  
> look at those contributions they are likely to see what the ranking  
> value led them to expect rather than the qualities of the  
> contribution itself.
>
> Unless we can find scientific research that demonstrates any  
> benefits to ranking, I think we should be wary of using such systems.
>
> All best,
>
> John
>
> Sadlon, E., Sakamoto, Y., Dever, H. J., & Nickerson, J. V. (2008).  
> The karma of Digg: Reciprocity in online social networks. In R.  
> Gopal and R. Ramesh (Eds.), Proceedings of the 18th Annual Workshop  
> on Information Technologies and Systems. http://cog.mgnt.stevens-tech.edu/~yasu/papers/reciprocity.pdf
>
> Sakamoto, Y., Ma, J., & Nickerson, J. V. (2009). 2377 people like  
> this article: The influence of others' decisions on yours. In N.  
> Taatgen, H. van Rijn, L. Schomaker, and J. Nerbonne (Eds.),  
> Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science  
> Society.http://cog.mgnt.stevens-tech.edu/~yasu/papers/cogscidigg1.pdf
>
> Salganik, M. J., Dodds, P. S., and Watts, D. J. (2006). Experimental  
> study of inequality and unpredictability in an artificial cultural  
> market. Science, 311(5762):854-856. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1121066 
> [/url]
>
>
>
>
> -------------------- m2f --------------------
>
> (from forum)
> http://squeakland.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=11554#11554
>
> -------------------- m2f --------------------
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