Web 2.0 The Machine is Us/ing Us and Assessment April 12, 2007
Posted by Joseph Papaleo in Assessment, Web2.0.trackback
This has been out there for some time now, but if you haven’t seen it, you must see a video called: Web 2.0 The Machine is Us/ing Us. It was posted by Professor Mike Wesch.
From the video, Mike states that
Web 2.0 is linking people …
…People sharing, trading and collaborating…We’ll need to rethink a few things …
-
- copyright
- authorship
- identity
- ethics
- aesthetics
- rhetorics
- governance
- privacy
- commerce
- love
- family
- ourselves.
I believe he forgot one item that we as teachers will need to rethink – Assessment.
- Will Web 2.0 technology change the way we assess students?
- What are we looking for when a student posts an entry on a class blog? Is it there spwlling or grammar? Is it there style? Or are we assessing their synthesis of a concept that they have covered in class and the fact that they have written about it and covered it in a cognitive manner?
- How will we assess a student’s contribution made to a group project using a wiki? Is it that important to assess each student individually? What do teachers normally do when assessing group projects in the “traditional” way? Should it be any different?
- Are we going to assess a podcast any differently to a written essay? Are we listening for musical introductions, tones and inflections to keep the listener interested? Or should it just be the content?
These questions interest me as I ponder whether I’ll be assessing student work any differently to a “traditional” piece of work. Of course, dinosaur teachers will use all of these questions to argue why they shouldn’t use Web 2.0 technology in class. And sadly , some of them have not yet discovered the “joys” of PowerPoint as a teaching and learning tool.
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Now that is what we should have been discussing a the conference on Tuesday! You should have taken the ICT session !. It was great catching up with you finally. You set my mind racing, and I always have 100 questions for you. In reference to your questions above – my thoughts are that you could assess any of the above just make the criteria clear to students when you set the tasks. Criteria could change depending on subject, task, domain, whatever , provided students clearly know beforehand what it is you are assessing.