Rene’s Assessment

It seems that, after static content, the lecture has now definitely made it into the realm of ‘what you share for free’ in stead of what you ‘sell for money’. We’ve had Teachertube for a while now, but this always struck me as being a tutor-to-tutor resource:

Bu in recent weeks we’ve had a launch of two really great resources that provide world class lectures directly to learners. A few weeks ago we saw the launch of Academic Earth which is aspiring to bring us ‘Thousands of video lectures from the world’s top scholars’ such as this lecture from Paul Bloom:

It seems from the embed-tag that Academic earth uses blip.tv, which is interesting. But what I really like about Academic Earth is that is often provides full transcripts and reading assignments, which makes these videos into a truly accessible and valuable independent learning resource.

And today I stumble on Youtube’s attempt to create an online iTunesU: Youtube EDU, which does not seem to have the high production value of Academic Earth, but will most likely develop very impressively in terms of sheer available content, such as this series on special relativity:

Other then being very grateful for these wonderful resources, I must also say that I am intrigued by the speed which with the traditional University is being dismantled. That information, content, and perhaps even knowledge have been commodotized is not really that surprising, but that, only a few years after that development, are already declaring the lecture dead in terms of marketable value, that does surprise me. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I disagree, I am just baffled by the speed of developments. Either way, I’m going to wrap up this post, as I have some lectures to watch.

The lecture is dead: Long live the lecture!

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I watched a talk from Barry Schwarts yesterday. The talk (see below) was dressed up in a lot of obama and economic downturn, but deep down there were some very valuable truths about education.

I completely agreed with the notion that we are killing excellence, compassion and creativity by insisting on conformity and procedure, “health and safety” being the favorite example on every body’s list I would imagine. The arguments in favor of rules and incentives are often hard to counter, but I think Barry did this exceptionally well.

Rules might prevent mishap, but they guarantee mediocrity

Incentives ensure that any decision is made with only self interest in mind.

I think there is a lot to be learned from those 2 statements, in particular when it comes to our assessment system. A lot of people might think Denis Rancourt is taking things a bit too far by giving all his students an A+ at the start of their module, but I do think there is something to be said for taking away the abundance of rules (the assessment criteria and marking scheme) and the incentives (the grades) to then unleash true unburdened curiosity and learning. Would we rather our students learn a little that we feel we can quantify and evidence, or a lot that we have less control over? Is it the degree that has value, or what has been learned?

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I attended a very interesting seminar this afternoon by Zoltan Dienes about unconscious knowledge. While the seminars  focused more on how to assess unconscious knowledge, it was the underlying models about knowledge and decision making that caught my attention. Zoltan presented 4 basic ways of making decisions:

• Guessing
• Intuition (based on a subconscious understanding)
• Rules (based on a conscious understanding)
• Memory (based on identical previous situation)

Modes of decision making

It struck me that each of these are a compromise between accuracy and generalisability, as depicted in the illustration on the right. In formal education we tend to focus on rules. It all seemed logical at the time, but now I can’t help but wonder why.

I’m quite ok with ignoring guessing and memory, they represent extremes of the spectrum that either have very little accuracy, or very little applicability. But intuition actually seems very valid, especially ina world in which rules and facts are changing at an ever increasing speed.

Intuition is crucial in domains where rules are non-existent, or too complex to support a timely decision. But it is also important to recognise that intuition can be a precursor to a more  conscious understanding of rules. In both cases, experience, wether actual or through games and simulations, are crucial media for learning. Ideally this learning should include at least 2 very different experiences based on the pattern we wish to develop. In the case of the further development and refinement of this intuition towards rules, these games could be followed by a meta game, or game analysis, in which rules are reconstructed.

This model is a replacement of the model that uses facts as a precursor to rules. That model perhaps had some validity in a more static world, requiring a highly specialised workforce. But today I think this has little value, and we are better off developing our instincts, then ourknowledge of facts.

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I’ve recently been given a more active role in the ownership of our VLE, Blackboard. And while at heart I am an open source fanatic, I do also believe that in the end the tools aren’t necessarily that important, it is how you use them. With that in mind I was planning to take a positive approach to my new-found challenge.

My initial exposure was quite positive. I attended the Blackboard Europe conference 2008 in Manchester in spring, and was positively surprised to hear Blackboard talk about openness, open standards and connectivity to, or even integration with, Moodle and Sakai. I was also very impressed by some of the community work being done, in particular the work around the Assignment submission building block at Sheffield Hallam University. Unfortunately this exuberance was not going to last.

My first frustrations started when trying to get more information in the assignment handler. I was very keen for us to have a look at it, and would have been more then happy to make a case for buying it. However, Blackboard was strangely evasive. The building block wasn’t exactly ready, and they didn’t really know what they were going to do with it. In our most recent discussion this changed to ‘We don’t really want to sell it to you, you can hire us to redevelop it’…

What? So you have a great bit of functionality, but in stead of selling it, or helping us integrate it, you want us to actually fork out the full development cost again?

I’m not quite sure how this fit’s in with Blackboards new found spirit of openness, but if this is the way in which they see their relation with the community then I think I’ll consider myself thouroughly disillusioned. In stead of supporting and empowering their community to build more value around their product, they seem to choose to stiffle innovation and collaboration. Similarly in our own efforts to start upskilling our team to create new functionality through building blocks I have not found a great deal of support either. Blackboard seem to not offer much in terms of training or support here, but in stead offer to build a buildingblock for us and let us watch and learn while they do it, and then leave us to it.

It’s a shame that some vendors behave in this way, as it creates such an antagonistic atmosphere. You would think we both have similar goals and interests here, yet we are treating eachother like potential enemies and rivals. For example, I still don’t know officially what Blackboard are going to release in version 9, as they feel they need to avoid anything that might be mistaken as a guarantee or legal commitment to deliver. But where does that leave us with our roadmap planning?

And I guess that’s why I prefer Open Source software. Not because everything needs to be free, but because I want a mature constructive,collaborative relationship with the partners that we work with. And unfortunately many commercial vendors seem to have great difficulty doing that.

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One of the topics that came up several times over the past days in Reykjavik, is that of the differences in culture around assessment. Different countries have different ways in which they perceive and deal with assessment, and this can have a significant impact on the effect of the assessments, and the success of the educational system as a whole.

One particularly interesting approach was outlined by Jakob Wandall, who’s work in the Danish national tests I have blogged about last year in High stake national assessments and ranking. I tried to capture Jakob’s slide on a picture, but unfortunately that failed rather miserably, so I have tried to recreate his message in the graphic below:

The graph outlines how both the focus of the assessment (on the horizontal axis) and the purpose for which the results are primarily used (on the vertical axis) vary from country to country. I thought the visualisation was very interesting. Comparing this to, for instance, the outcomes of the 2006 PISA, it is interesting to note that neither the approach of the Scandinavian schools (who focus primarily on learner focused formative assessment) nor the Anglo-Saxon approach 9that is much more heavy on the measurements of indicators for performance, tied in to funding) really yields the best results.

The starts of PISA are of course the Finnish, and the unique approach is apparent from this graph. in stead of moving somewhere between the top left and the bottom right of the graph, they sit toward the top right. The Finish system highly values national measurements, evaluating the success of the system by objective measurements. However these measurements are not tied to any control, either through formal channels or more informal ones such as public rankings. In stead the measurements made in the Finnish system have the purpose to inform teaching and learning. An evidence based approach to teaching shall we say.

When I translate this to our own practice, I can’t help but relate this to demands to increase the amounts of formative assessment in our teaching. And while I am sympathetic to these demands, these assessments are similar to those in the top left of the above graph, informing and supporting individual learning processes. And so perhaps in stead of focusing primarily on formative individual assessment, we should focus (also) on assessment and evaluation that informs teaching. Building an infrastructure through which lecturers can stay in touch with the progress, successes and difficulties of all their students, and modify their teaching based on this understanding continuously.

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