Designing Great Comment Love in Peer to Peer Learning

Sally Field's  "You like me! Right now!" Oscar acceptance speech 

One of the most important aspects of being part of a peer to peer learning environment such as ds106 is engaging in the art of giving, receiving and eliciting critical feedback. What makes giving, receiving and eliciting feedback or comment love as it's called in ds106 so difficult is that we are basically strangers, even if we've hung out once or twice on Google for another MOOC, or chatted in real time. It's even harder when participants have done none of these. Critical feedback works best when there's a trusting relationship between learners and among the group of learners. These relationships are difficult to build in face to face learning communities so even more challenging in learning environments like ds106. However, it can be done! Many times communication among participants is limited to asynchronous interactions, often making it difficult to read tone and intention. In peer to peer learning, it's important to "always assume positive intent."  When giving or receiving comment love, it's important to keep an open mind, pay attention to one's feelings and reactions, whether receiving or giving the criticism.  

Week 6 in ds106 explores the art of design. It's the beginning of the week so this is a my pre-assignment post because I have been thinking a lot about how we as human beings struggle with designing feedback. Peer assessment and feedback in MOOCs is a hot topic of conversation because it often fails and becomes highly contentious for a variety of reasons. Sometimes, peers aren't really peers at all, so participants feel feedback is not coming from an expert. There are limited, if any, opportunities for conferencing between teacher and student to design and build feedback loops necessary for growth and mastery. In peeragogy, it is mentioned that "to assess learning, we do not just measure “contribution” (in terms of quantity of posts or what have you) but instead we measure “contribution to solving real problems”. Sometimes that happens very slowly, with lots of practice along the way."  In a learning experience like ds106 how exactly do we contribute to solving real problems? How do we design our feedback to forge stronger connections, collaborations, and harness the power of our network to improve feedback loops that will help participants bond, and keep conversations evolving for years to come as our needs change?  How is the art of feedback loops embedded in the course design optimize engagement, success and self-efficacy?   

http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2013/02/15/designing-great-feedback-loops/

Last week I noticed a tweet about how participants in ds106 are often perceived as the fun people. DS106 is fun, but deceptively deep! There is method behind the madness and our experiences in the course do help us solve real problems. Participants have personal and professional goals, and what we learn we apply to impact how others learn. DS106 opens our eyes to see the world through a creative lens and become more creative individuals. When we become more creative, our relationships and our problem solving approaches improve. This can change the world! As mentioned in peeragogy, this may be slow to pass, but it is happening and will continue to happen over time. I do wonder how our feedback loops in this peer to peer learning experience, and any other can strengthen our connections and collaborations. I found this post by Alan Levine that answers my questions.

Whatever it is we design, we do so with a purpose, function, audience in mind and hopefully with a passion to motivate ourselves or an audience to act. "Designs can be used to nudge behavior, and great feedback loops are a vital piece of pulling it off." When it comes to designing great comment love, first, we need to plant the seeds of trust to set the feedback loop in motion.  The Golden Rule is always the best way to get those feedback loops going. 

So, in thinking about designing comment love, I also thought about how my blog's design functions to increase traffic and invite my professional learning network to dialogue about the topics I'm learning in MOOCs? Are my words and its design encouraging comment love from my peers? Is my blog's design optimizing the reading experience for my visitors? Essentially, who is the audience I'm writing for? Am I writing and thinking aloud for me, or for others? Is my voice academic or conversational? How do I make my learning visible through my blog's design to give occasion for feedback loops to occur? 

I have concluded that, for now, I like the design of my blog. I realize others may not. I like that it's busy. Maybe I'm stubborn, or tacky, or both when it comes to design, but my blog's design is my personal choice. My blog is my digital home. If I were enrolled in formal course then perhaps I would have to make concessions to conform to the course expectations of a blog. 

I thought again about the idea of the personal cyber-infrastructure. When we design it, whose expectations do we keep in mind? Our own, the world's, or the learning community we've joined? (That would be tough to meet the expectations of so many.) Are there then certain standards that must be met when designing one's personal cyber-infrastructure so that one's blog design is universally accessible to all, optimizing every visitor's reading experience? I have a hunch, without having read any of the resources yet, that design is subjective. It's about personal taste and style, and what is personally visually appealing. Even regarding blogs, design is all in the eye of the beholder, and one size does not fit all. However I also know that sometimes designs have no choice but to appeal to what the masses prefer, what is more visually pleasing to the human eye, or what we are brainwashed to think is beautiful.  Sometimes when designing an online or F2F learning space, we must balance personal preferences with what looks/works best to optimize learning.  Balance is always key, but  I like coming to this digital learning space where I have freedom to design however I want.  I've personally designed it to write from my heart. I think it's pretty, and this blog matters to me. Some people aren't going to like the design. I can totally live with that because I didn't design it with them in mind. I designed it with me in my mind. How boring and truly tragic would life be if our personal designs were only meant to meet others' expectations and not our own. Like I said, sometimes designs must conform to meet the needs and make affordances to the general public, optimize usage and be aesthetically conforming to societal expectations ..schools often look like

Stepford Wives Movie Clip

prisons...the Stepford wives look...the bland suburban gated communities...I get it. These designs work for some, not for others to achieve certain ends, but no design is truly universal and optimizes usage for everyone. We are all unique individuals with a right to create and explore designs for self-expression. Some of our designs may appear ugly, busy, plain, or weird to others while some may totally dig our designs. That's a metaphor for life. We can't please everyone all the time. That's why color exists. Designs are not meant to be one-size-fits-all. Designs should optimize usage when possible, but optimizing usage in a peer to peer learning environment is relative. One must reflect on a tough question: Am I designing my blog to optimize how I learn, or do I consider a blog design to optimize how others learn, or both? And, in that case, how in the world do I design my blog to meet everyone's learning needs? Is the design optimizing the reading and commenting experience for all my peers, known and unknown, who visit? It's a tough question in peer to peer learning because of the nature of digital interactions, the need to build trust first, and the informality of one's participation.

Giving, receiving and eliciting comment love about design becomes highly sensitive and subjective. I do think that in a MOOC and peer to peer learning environments, as long as we are sharing, and having productive conversations among multiple platforms, following the Golden rule, when we set out to design our blogs, our designs may be self-serving, and provide no other function than to create a personal digital space to openly think aloud and reflect. When we design our comment love, as Alan Levine wrote in this post, we must be sensitive to "include useful feedback or ideas for improvement. Think about giving the kind of feedback you’d hope to receive. And when you get comments, reply if it merits a response. Think of this as a conversation." Through our comment love we can build trust, community, and design many beautiful conversations to help us all grow and be better human beings!