Journalistic integrity aside, I was pleased that Stephen Downes gave me a “B” for my 2008 prediction. I put more effort into asking people for and compiling predictions than into writing my own. But knowing that Stephen will likely do this again in a year makes me want to think harder about my 2009 prediction.
I wrote about rating faculty in a previous blog post. I thought about that post yesterday when I taught a BostonCHI professional development seminar on Online Consumer Health. We had a lively discussion about what it means to rate doctors or hospitals, what the advantages are from the patient perspective, and how information like that might be used. While there are many rating sites, they are typically part of a health site. Their biggest drawback, my students decided, was lack of context. Even when you get a recommendation from a stranger, there is a context to where you met that person, even how healthy the person looks.
In our increasing consumer-driven society, does anyone behave differently if they know they are being rated? I certainly believe so, although I hope most people have the professional integrity to do their best regardless of any feedback mechanism. On the other hand, many people become adept at gaming the system, so to speak. I have read, in medicine, that this can be a problem with pay-for-performance plans. And I know how Stephen thinks enough to know that certain types of predictions are more likely to win his praise. But I will stick to mine for now, hoping for an “A” or “B”. Or perhaps, like the increasingly complex movie rating systems, can offer Stephen a more fine-grained approach for rating predictions. Or, better yet, I can ask him to rate the 2009 predictions now and then, a year from now, can rate Stephen’s accuracy at judging the accuracy of the predictions.