VLE Report 2015/Participatory features
This page is part of the VLE Report 2015.
Moodle arose in a context valuing collaborative features in education and software development, under the slogan "The use of Open Source software to support a social constructionist epistemology of teaching and learning within internet-based communities of reflective inquiry".[1] On the other hand its social constructionist credentials are not found so distinctive these days.w:Moodle#Origins[2] Wikimedians have a more thorough-going vision of participation, and one Member of the Education Committee looked to "refocus the VLE to be more conversational".[3]
In the end, the proposed innovations around MediaWiki+Moodle were not delivered. The VLE was largely the work of a single author, Charles Matthews, though some material written by John Broughton was adapted. Attribution credits are given at the beginning of each lesson. Moodle, as with OER systems generally, is quite weak on the metadata side.
The CC-by cascade
In terms of educational material, therefore, the VLE does not exhibit "mashup" characteristics; which on the other hand are common in primary and secondary education as a way of adapting teaching material rather than constantly reinventing the wheel. Wikipedia is quite strict on plagiarism, the English Wikipedia having a guideline on it (w:WP:ATTRIB). As is well known, plagiarism is rife in higher education, to the extent that institutions have to process submitted work systematically even to keep it in check.
It has been plausibly been argued that consciousness of the need for attribution is too low, in secondary education for example, even on the teaching side: and that therefore pupils do not acquire the right attitude by the time they are supposed to produce original written work at universities. Whatever the merit of this claim, OERs do not always carry attribution metadata. As soon as collaboration is introduced the problem is exacerbated.
Look now at Wikipedia practice when two articles are merged. In theory, attribution is preserved, because:
- The merging editor is supposed to announce the mergefrom article's name in the edit summaries as its content is added into the mergeto article. The edit summary is free text, not searchable or updateable by editors.
- Failing the edit summaries, the merge may have been formally announced with templates "mergefrom" and "mergeto".
- With the two merged articles identified, the authors and so attribution may in principle be recovered from the page histories, as a list of account names and IP numbers.
The caveat of "on principle" includes the following point: pages may have been partially merged, earlier, into those pages being merged. There are as many page histories to scrape as there are pages that have been combined.
The idea of the "CC-by cascade" reflects the complexity of the history of well-used educational material, constantly adapted and update. The requirement of tracking attribution becomes an overhead. So one conclusion from contemplating the metadata situation in Moodle is that MediaWiki, somewhat better, does not have the perfect solution:
- there is a need to encapsulate the cascade of attribution so that the social asset of collaboration does not become an administrative millstone round the neck".
To sum up: setting a good example on plagiarism includes a technical issue to address. This is also a social issue, because it involves recognition.