Assignment Wild Cards

uno.jpg by Blacklisted, on Flickr
This series of thoughts (maybe just one messy thought) was inspired by No Good Reason’s post, although no one should blame Martin for what I have written here.

I’ll speak in specifics regarding the #ds106 course but I think the concept can easily apply to any course where participants are creating products1. You would simply tweak the “cards” to reflect the content.

So the basic concept is that all students are given X number of cards. These cards are something like the Draw Four Cards in Uno mixed with the Community Chest cards from Monopoly– only hopefully without the negative connotation.

The students would get a variety of cards at the beginning of the course and to use them they’d tag the origin post and link to the person they want to be the recipient of the action.

So, maybe I want to take CogDog’s #ds106 aura photography challenge and assign it to someone else to remix as a drawing project. I’d play my “Change Format2” card in the comments and indicate that person X should do it. They might make something like the design below.

There are lots of possibilities for cards. There are lots of ways this might play out. It might introduce too much chaos but I think it has the chance to change how participants take part in the course. It gives them a degree of control and institutes a degree of randomness that is attractive to me and might be attractive to others. I like how it puts more power in the hands of the participants and changes how they interact.

Thoughts?


1 You could even do this with something as mundane as notes. Imagine being able to play a card where student X has to summarize the day’s notes in the style of Dr. Seuss.

2 This could be more specific – like “make it a drawing” or something like that.

4 thoughts on “Assignment Wild Cards

  1. This whole card idea is sick. And it can be a subtext to the course in the event it becomes too chaotic—though that is what I am hoping for. I am gonna write this into the syllabus, you need to create the cards…deal? Let’s talk about this.

  2. I’m in. This is fun.

    I think it would be pretty easy to make a random assignment generator. I’m thinking: make a spreadsheet with a few columns… CONTENT (chapter 2… appositive phrases, short story), PRODUCT (infographic, comic strip, tweet, diorama) and STUDENT (or group of students) and maybe add in STYLE (Hemingway, Seuss, Pound, … or take Byrdseed’s Differentiator and make it pop out a random differentiation or combination.

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