Web 2.0 and learning at universities
Attending a workshop / roundtable as part of the “Web 2.0 Authoring Tools in Higher Education Learning and Teaching: New Directions for Assessment and Academic Integrity” Project (wiki here).
[Discovering the difficulty of jumpong between twitter and blogging: need to learn to use RSS feed from my twitter stream! Raises the question: how the hell can students and academics keep up with the opportunities when so much changes, so rapidly? It requires a remaking of the everyday business of knowledge work - eg do I read that article or learn RSSing twitter]
Summary of morning session
Several things emerge from this morning discussion which focused on seven broad groups of technologies (see website above):
- further evidence of significant differences in how people understand the term Web 2.0, even while recognising its useful role to open debate and create interest in new approaches to teaching.
- a degree of scepticism about ‘standards’ for judging student work – enthusiasm and interest in the publicness of assessment that is possible via the Internet, utilising the public audience as a way of assessment
- competing and contrasting assumptions about the social nature of technology – environment or tool? Clear that ‘how’ we use technologies in learning is governed by these assumptions
- one difference depending on what counts as Web 2.0 is the time it might take to ‘do’ or ‘use’ it: eg twitter vs vodcasting
- if Web 2.0 is, to some extent, a move to collaboration, how does this fit with the university’s requirement for individual certification?
Summary of afternoon session – principles, do’s and dont’s for web 2.0 assessment
Overall – the session was broken up into several sections (discussed in small groups) which then were combined at a plenary. The following is a brief summary of each sub-section. I would note that, at times, the groups obviously struggled to limit their discussions to the specific briefs given. I think this behaviuour demonstrates the complexity of assessment and learning as a systemic functional construct; it feels more, to me, like an experience whose design is quite personal / individual, and while it is enacted in stages, it is understood as a whole.
Designing assessment
4 principles for designing assessment:
- Reflect on what Web 2.0 means to you as an educator
- Triangulation and Iteration in design: outcomes AND tasks AND applications
- Make assessment tasks pertinent to students (pertinent includes realism, authenticity, relevance, purpose)
- From Feedback to “feed” – feedback is inherent to the assessment process, from students to students, from teachers to students, from students to teachers, throughout the task – continuous error correction
Conducting assessment
Relevance; choice of technology important; is the task something do-able outside of Web 2.0 – if so, why the complexity?; how to assess and grade relative performance? Engaging students in a conversation about why doing this. Weighting of the assessment grade = time and effort required of student. Web environment is more persistent, make for living tasks (relates to students’ sense of purpose); importance of ‘program’ (course / major / degree) approach which generates learning over several units and years. Don’t mandate Web 2.0 unless it actually makes a difference. Don’t confuse the task with the environment. Respecting students as individuals. Important to persevere with one’s innovation and change.
Marking assessment
Consider the relationship between the technology’s form and the assessment criteria; assess across a range of tasks [criteria? components of a task]; importance of audience (in various ways); establish standards for marking; for large cohorts – agreement of standards across all graders and students. prepare yourself and students. Links Web 2.0 to ability to detect plagiarism [hmm?]. Moderating easier with online systems. Peer review as a positive. Dangers in publicness of assessed work, especially in the future.
Reporting/Feedback
Importance of application developers to address the needs of learning online. Ethical standards. Individual and group feedback processes differ. Complications of meeting university requirements vs students requirements.
Quality assurance
[ran out of batteries for this one - that is apposite, eh?]
Reflections
Well, interesting. Very clearly, the phrase “web 2.0″ generates very different perspectives and emphases, to the point where it appears ‘collaboration’ and ‘co-construction’ of knowledge have come to dominate – largely from people’s experiences with blogging, collaborative environments, and wikis. Not clear with Web 2.0 actually the right term, yet. There remains, also, a sense that web 2.0 is a synonym for ‘another go at online learning’ either because it has failed to be adopted in areas prior to this time or because people are unaware of the significant impact of the Internet on learning throughout the 1990s. Difficult, sometimes, to generate broader perspectives because putative benefits, uses, and disadvantages etc are all – actually – specific to a system, or a particular use of system. Fundamentally, we see some new orthodoxies emerging around the term Web 2.0 and its application to learning – orthodoxies that owe more to the way Web 2.0 is positioned oppositionally to prior elearning and to the ‘failures’ in current practice without the Internet that it might solve.