Over at the HASTAC forum, a conversation has begun around the role of assessment in 21st-century classrooms. The hosts of this discussion, HASTAC scholars John Jones, Dixie Ching, and Matt Straus, explain the impetus for this conversation as follows:
As the educational and cultural climate changes in response to new technologies for creating and sharing information, educators have begun to ask if the current framework for assessing student work, standardized testing, and grading is incompatible with the way these students should be learning and the skills they need to acquire to compete in the information age. Many would agree that its time to expand the current notion of assessment and create new metrics, rubrics, and methods of measurement in order to ensure that all elements of the learning process are keeping pace with the ever-evolving world in which we live. This new framework for assessment might build off of currently accepted strategies and pedagogy, but also take into account new ideas about what learners should know to be successful and confident in all of their endeavors.
Topics within this forum conversation include:
- Technology & Assessment ("How can educators leverage the affordances of digital media to create more time-efficient, intelligent, and effective assessment models?");
- Assignments & Pedagogy ("How can we develop assignments, projects, classroom experiences, and syllabi that reflect these changes in technology and skills?");
- Can everything be graded? ("How important is creativity, and how do we deal with subjective concepts in an objective way, in evaluation?"); and
- Assessing the assessment strategies ("How do we evaluate the new assessment models that we create?").
The conversation has only just started, but it's already generated hundreds of visits and a dozen or so solid, interesting comments. If you're into technology, assessment and participatory culture, you should take a look. It's worth the gander.
Here's the link again: Grading 2.0: Assessment in the Digital Age.
Posts
2 comments:
Thank you thank you thank you for this fantastic link--I'm definitely going to be following this blog.
I've sent a link to the assessment in the digital age post to my university IT person, the person in charge of assessment, and to colleagues in my department who are particularly interested in the topic.
First ask why students are in the classroom!
To be graded? To learn basics? To fulfil potential? To discover? To create knowledge? To learn values? To keep them off the street.
I work at uni level and it seems people have many many conflicting goals and hardly anyone agrees.
So we agree to have a shambles and attend to our own interests.
First we need to be clearer on what we are trying to achieve.
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