Social media, the democratisation of knowledge and physiotherapy. Can they play nice together?

I attended an assessment and learning workshop today and while the presentations were informative, I just wanted to highlight the principles of good assessment taken from my faculty’s assessment policy.  Since I don’t have a background in education, guidelines like these are incredibly useful when creating assessments for students.

1. Responsibility for assessment – the module co-ordinator is responsible for designing the assessment and mark allocation.
2. Assessing against outcomes – performance should be measured against pre-determined expectations of achievement (learning outcomes).
3. Assessment criteria – the expectations of the assessment, including the specific criteria of judgement, should be available to students to ensure transparency.
4. Validity and appropriateness – the assessment methods and tasks should accurately match what is being assessed (knowledge, understanding, content, skills, behaviour, etc.)
5. Authenticity of evidence – measures should be taken to ensure that the evidence produced by the student is attributable to the student.  With group work, the lecturer must verify that each student has made a fair contribution.
6. Formative and summative assessment – assessment should judge students’ performance (summative), as well as provide feedback to enhance learning (formative), although not simultaneously.  Students should be aware of whether they are being assessed formatively or summatively at each assessment.
7. Continuous assessment – should have a strong formative focus and be undertaken over the course of the module.

For me, just knowing about these guidelines has already made a significant difference in how I approach the assessment of students.  Clearly, it’s not enough to re-use old test papers and merely change the scenarios.  We need to make sure that we’re actually testing what we set out to test, as well as linking the assessment to the curriculum and learning outcomes.

One other point I want to mention is a comment made by one of the presenters, regarding the importance of testing students interpretation of the course content.  This is one way to make sure that students actually understand what they’re writing, rather than just regurgitating bullet points.

The Social Media Classroom is a web-based teaching platform developed by Howard Rheingold, the author of Smart Mobs, which uses new web technologies like blogs, wiki, RSS, etc. to encourage collaboration between students and teachers.   I just came across it this evening and would love to play around with it a little bit.  I may have to wait for exams to finish though.

Here’s the link to a talk that Howard gave at TED in 2005:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/howard_rheingold_on_collaboration.html

Here’s the link:
http://socialmediaclassroom.com/

A little while ago (07 Sep. 08) I wrote about some of the challenges faced with using web services like Facebook to engage with students.  I just came across this somewhat related story that highlights some of the dangers of using a service to be an online storage site for your personal information.

This article talks about plans by the US government to grant new powers to security services that allow them to access personal information on social networking sites like Facebook.  It’s all being done under the “We have to protect you from the terrorists” slogan that plagues American society currently.

While this article doesn’t specifically address the use of services
like Facebook in education, I just thought it makes an interesting
follow up.

Here’s the link:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/oct/15/terrorism-security

This morning I presented an overview of e-learning at a small colloquium at my university.  I didn’t know who would be in the audience so I decided to take a step back and have a look at the e-learning landscape as I see it.  I tried to look briefly at the following:

• The current generation of students (the so-called Net Generation)
• Education as it is and why that won’t work
• Education as it will be and it’s implications for teachers
• Social media and why it’s important
• Examples of specific technologies and the implications of using them
• Challenges faced in e-learning
• The way forward
• E-learning in the mobile space

Clearly with such a broad area of discussion, it was difficult to deeply explore each topic.  As I said, this was a broad overview of the e-learning and potential applications in the higher education space.

Download the OpenDocument version here: e-learning_an_overview