Jenny Booth
Posts: 6
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| 30/05/2007 19:23 |
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One interesting theme that emerged from today's 'Feast of Case Studies' live chat was that of the role and influence of technology in assessment. Pedagogy should always come first - or should it!? New technologies can be a springboard for us to reexamine teaching methodology. Any views?
There was even a mention of exploring second life as an assessment tool - love to hear more about that one!
Thanks all
Jenny |
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Derek Rowntree
Posts: 35
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| 30/05/2007 23:39 |
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| Well, Jenny, as you say: "New technologies can be a springboard for us to reexamine teaching methodology." However, they can also seduce us into looking for ways of using the new technology and perhaps losing sight of our educational purposes. As professionals we should, of course, aim to make ourselves aware of as many technologies as possible -- but the starting point should surely always be: "What are our learning objectives and what kinds of learning activities (using old or new technology) would help our students achieve them?" rather than "How can I think of ways of teaching using the latest gizmo?" My memories of some of the early television programmes we produced in the early years of the Open University (which ended up owing more to the media aspirations of the BBC producer than to the pedagogy of the academic) remain with me as a caution about letting the medium come first! |
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Carol Russell
Posts: 1
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| 31/05/2007 01:29 |
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| Sorry I missed the live chat session. But I agree with the Trojan Horse theory. In my experience, most teachers in campus universities are heavily constrained in their pedagogical thinking by experience that is limited to the traditional classroom environment. Having moved to a traditional campus university 7 years ago, after many years at the Open University, I am (still) constantly reminded of how few teachers question traditional disciplinary teaching practices. So if the lecturers have to rethink their classroom practice because students are asking them to use the latest gizmo - great! ... even if (as happened on our campus) it's just making digital lecture recordings available automatically. At least the lecturers start thinking about what's being recorded. |
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kumar chandrasekar
Posts: 2
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| 31/05/2007 06:07 |
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| Definetly. There are issues with respect to Indian conditions where the really tech savvy teachers are very much into the latest and are updating where as there are many in the conservative mode who do not even appreciate the efforts of the students with respect to the latest technology. There has to be a standard across to monitor the use of technology for the benefit of the student community as a whole. |
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Peter Donnan
Posts: 2
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| 31/05/2007 07:02 |
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Hullo Jenny,
"New technologies can be a springboard for us to re-examine teaching methodology". Views?
It seems to me that most of the assessment issues that teachers encounter are not new ones: they are perennnially recurring themes. Graham Gibbs (2006,p. 12) wrote: "As class sizes have increased there have been some economies of scale in teaching (such as through larger lecture classes and 'tutorials' that may nowadays contain twenty-five students) but there have been few economies of scale in assessment. Assessment costs usually increase in direct proportion to the numbers of students".
One of the recurring issues with assessment is workload and the time it takes to provide good feedback.
One lecturer I know has reduced his time in providing feedback on student photographic work by recording an MP3 file using Audacity and emailing it to them and they tend to listen to it more than one once. An advance on the rubrics he formerly used.
In group assessment students do feel conflict in assessing each others' inputs but if this is done fairly, transparently and systematically (a system such as SPARK, now being re-engineered) using technology, then that's a plus. The perennial problem is that when students are face-to-face, consensus and "we all deserve the same mark" often rules: students don't like to draw attention to unequal inputs in a group discussion but may privately protest, as a colleague put it to me: "How can I soar like an eagle when I am surrounded by turkeys?"
The time-consuming process of marking and returning assignments may be facilitated by online drop boxes that are in many learning management systems. The integration with Excel and assistance with adding and collating marks is an example where technology helps.
Creating a complex case study, with real life complexities and multiple perspectives, perhaps including some voices, visuals and concept maps, can be aided by technology but the same learning could be done under a gum tree in Australia. What's perhaps an advance is the richness in presenting the case study. And if one wanted to weave a series of interpretive, more sophisticated, deductive-from-the-case type multiple choice answers and have the marking automated, this too is another consideration.
So in short some of these are really administrative or time-saving issues to old problems but the role of technology is worth a look!
Peter Donnan
University of Canberra
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Mark Findlay
Posts: 1
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| 31/05/2007 08:47 |
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My background is more with technology than pedagogy (hence my bias!), but it does strike me that as students are brought up in this digital era we have to adapt what we do somewhat to cater for their increasingly changing learning styles largley brought on through technology.
We no longer live in a 'book' culture, with young people more likely to open a browser or listen to a podcast to gather information, so we have to look increasingly at new ways to teach/assess our students to keep them motivated.
A few years ago people would have scorned the idea of running a totaly online academic conference - and hey, I think we have al learned substantialy from it... technology for technologies sake??
Obviously pedagogy is the driver as to wheather a technology should be employed within a certain scenario and always should be!
With regard to using Second Life as a learning/assessment tool there is some thought in this area within the MSc in eLearning at the University of Edinburgh, see our eLearning conference website and Sian Baynes' presentation for more details (http://www.elearn.malts.ed.ac.uk/events/elearnconf07/)
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Jane Thomson
Posts: 1
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| 03/06/2007 13:50 |
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| The younger generation which makes up the majority of undergraduate students are technologised into the 21st century. Contemporary students make meaning from multimodal texts and this includes a wide range of communicative technology. I think this is accepted now. What we really need to consider are the ways in which students make meaning. For instance on a web page, they take meaning from the graphics, sound and layout, etc. and the printed word is perhaps only to support the page. In a print based culture (books) the printed text is how they make meaning and visuals are only used to support rather than convey meaning. I think we need to reconceptualise how students are reading texts and communicating. Technology shouldn't be about enriching the curriculum but about transforming it to suit the needs of contemporary society. |
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