Since we’re in the middle of March Madness, I decided to track class participation in a bracket-style tournament format. A student advanced each time he or she directly addressed Dr. Sample in class discussion, or if Dr. Sample called on them to answer a question. One could only advance if there was an opponent available to defeat (therefore, someone who answered five straight questions would only win one matchup, not five). Although I could have played the role of the selection committee and “seeded” the field, I chose to use the list of names from the blogging groups page in the order they are listed.
The results from Tuesday’s class are below:
Unfortunately, we ran out of time on Tuesday to determine a single winner. Also, the Gephi workshop on Thursday prevented the bracket format for serving as a good measure of participation (since we spent more time discussing in tables rather than as a whole class).
Although the bracket exercise was certainly amusing, it doesn’t appear to be the best way to determine the “best” participants; a lot of people who were bounced in the first round ended up speaking a lot later in the class, often more than the people who originally eliminated them. Perhaps the same critique could be applied to the NCAA basketball tournament as well.