Stumbling across ideas

How does a student peer derived epistemology sound?

I am teaching a couple of other courses outside of Athabasca and have been working with concept mapping, text mining and theme analysis as a way of providing feedback to student discussion posts, when I thought I might be interesting to do the same thing with assignment papers.

Here is what I found with a Nursing Theory course assignment, and the message I posted to the students:

I was looking at week 4 discussion papers and with Watson and Orem, there were 4 papers for each theorist, so it seemed reasonable to group them and then look for themes. I have added this grouping by theorist to the week 5 discussion map and if you take a look at the Watson and Orem groupings, you will be particularly interested in the group concept map and the phrase net, word tree and tag cloud for each theorist.

If up until now you could not (or would not) see the point of examining any of the maps and analyses, now you might have to acknowledge that there is something exciting happening, namely we are starting to see the emergence of a student derived epistemology of nursing theory, at least for 2 of the theorists.

Can you imagine what might happen if we kept adding student papers for each of the theorists to this map, we would eventually have a complete epistemology representing each theorist. Now, let that sink in for a minute or two. Imagine using this epistemology as a teaching-learning tool and paper writing support device for future students in this course.

If that were not mind-boggling enough, imagine generalizing this approach across all topics and concepts. This would be of enormous assistance to successive generations of students, in *any* course. I must give credit to all of you for this idea, since it was really me being a dwarf and standing on your giant shoulders to let me see this possibility (nanos gigantium humeris insidentes).

So then I thought, why don't we try this? It would just take a loosely knit collaboration between those of us teaching courses/sections with assignment papers to collect papers from students and I would volunteer to add them (identified by a code number) to such an analysis. Even more exciting is the possibility of taking such a cumulative student-derived epistemology and generating an ontology from it. Is anyone interested? This would be a marvellous research topic.

Even if you are not interested and/or do not have the time, it is still a strategy you might like to use for giving student feedback. I will do this for one of my current Nursing 602 papers and then get the student's permission to share the entire paper and this type of feedback. Just imagine, you could do a gap/similarity analysis between any given student paper and the cumulative epistemology/ontology.

Jack