Rene’s Assessment

Bless TED for introducing me to so many fascinating people and ideas. This morning I watched the talk by Alain de Botton: “A kinder, gentler philosophy of success”. It was an eye opening perspective on our society. I never really appreciated that when you create the illusion of a meritocracy you are implying that, in the same way that people who deserve to rise to the top, will rise to the top, people who are down at the bottom are also there because they deserve it. They are losers, not unfortunates. And given the enormous influence of randomness and chance in every life, that is an unfair judgement. It is a judgement that creates not only ‘low self-esteem’, but also the fact that suicide rates are higher in modern individualistic societies, then anywhere else in the world.

I think I might have to add some of Alain’s books to my ‘to-read’-pile.

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The report  “The Transition to Computer-Based Assessment – New Approaches to Skills Assessment and Implications for Large-scale Testing” has been published. The volume, which is based on a set of workshops that was held in Iceland in September 2008, was edited Julius Björnsson and Fritz Scheuerman. I think it gives a very broad and comprehensive overview of the current state of, and issues around, computer based assessment.

I would especially recommend The article on “CAT as a pedagogic tool” by Jakob Wandall, and “Issues in Computerized Ability Measurement: Getting out of the Jingle and Jangle Jungle” by Oliver Wilhelm.

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Cornelia pointed out a report by Bobby Elliott (SQA) to me today:

Online Collaborative Assessment

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As we’re in the middle of a review of the tools we use in support of assessment, I thought I’d share my analysis of the various tools that we come across. As today is a Sunday, we’ll start off with a simple one:

Classmarker
Classmarker is an online quizmaker that offers free quizzes (supported by advertisement) with upgrades (including removing the advertisement) for an additional fee.
Type: online service
Cost: Free with paid upgrades
Features: Multiple choice quiz, free text quiz or punctuation quiz.
Interoperability: None
System requirements: Any browser

The first thing I notice when registering, is that the UK doesn’t exist, although the 4 home nations do. A more serious point to note, as with many online services, is that all content (and so that includes all personal information, questions and results) will be the property of Classmarker.

The features of this service are extremely limited. While the Classmarker supports 3 question types, it only allows you to use one of those per test. Options such as randomisation, feedback and branding are all features you will have to pay for. There seems to be no way to import or export your questions.

The site seems to be built mainly around Google Adsense. The advertisement and a Google search box is present on every possible page, and that will include the ones your learners visit. Upgrading to get rid of the advertisements costs $24.95 (or 49.95 for a business account, whatever that means). But then your users will still ave to register with the service before being able to take the test. Allowing for unregistered learners to take a test will cost you $0.10 or more per learner. Not really value for money given the incredibly limited features that are on offer.

Conclusion: I really can’t see anything of value here. If you need something that is hosted for you, most survey services offer you more functionality. If you have your own space to host your assessments, even the simpler tools available wil offer more then Clasmarker.

Apologies to have to start of with such a negative review. I just stumbled across this tool today, and I thought I might as well write this up now. Do let me know if you have any comments, or perhaps sugestions for other tools I could review.

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As some of you might know, I’m an avid listened of podcasts (mainly to make my daily hour long commute seem a little less wasteful). Two of the recent casts I listened to grabbed my specific attention.

The first is a presentation titled Republic 2.0 by Cass Sunstein. In this presentation mr. Sunstein explains the risks of web 2.0 to democracy. While the increased access to the expression and consumption of information and opinion seems like a wonderful thing, there are downsides to how we engage with blogs, wiki’s and social networks. Due to the vast amount of information out there, but also because of the nature of these new social artefacts, we tend to expose ourselves only to information and opinions from those that we are close to (ideologically or otherwise). Research has shown that in homogeneous groups like these, polarisation takes place: views and opinions become more singular and extreme.

This is a concern in itself, and something to keep in mind when considering aspects of our education system, such schools based on subgroups of our society over dimensions such as religion, class or even geography. The concern got a new dimension for me however after listening to one of the seminars of the Long Now Foundation In his talk, Ignore Confident Forecasters, Philip Tetlock shares some insights from his research on peoples ability to make appropriate predictions about complex future events (in this case in world politics). He found 2 types of thinking, leading to 2 distinct patterns of predictions. one group was classified as ‘hedgehogs’. These were people that had a single specialism or conviction, and tried to explain everything in the world from this single perspective. The second group, the ‘foxes’ were more broad in their thinking, and the constructs they applied to solving problems. Foxes significantly outperformed the hedgehogs.

So this begs the question: If we allow ourselves to be exposed only to those views and people that we have sympathy with, something the web increasingly allows us to do, are we really depriving ourselves of the tools for a balanced and effective mental development?

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