Group items tagged

This matrix is a common representation of Web 2.0 assessment on the web. It attempts to connect web 2.0 tools with assessment. You've heard of e-learning 2.0, well here are some Web 2.0 technologies applied to assessment. The table seeks to show how teachers can use social software for assessment purposes.

Kinship here, and familiar friends.

Note our friends Randy Bass (AAEEBL) and Mary Huber are prominent.

This question returns to us, so here is a resource and key to be able to point to.

Kimberly said of this: The focus on activity deals directly with the learning process - one that pushes students to take a more active role - while assessment supplies faculty members with the feedback necessary to diagnose and correct learning problems. Technology allows such active learning processes to be expanded to large courses and, as learning software and databases become better, to use faculty time more effectively. Relates to clickers and skylight learning activities/assessments, in the large class context, as well as the elusive LMS.

"We said, 'Let's create a university that actually measures learning,' " Mendenhall says. "We do not have credit hours, we do not have grades. We simply have a series of assessments that measure competencies, and on that basis, award the degree." WGU began by convening a national advisory board of employers, including Google and Tenet Healthcare. "We asked them, 'What is it the graduates you're hiring can't do that you wish they could?' We've never had a silence after that question." Then assessments were created to measure each competency area. Mendenhall recalls one student who had been self-employed in IT for 15 years but never earned a degree; he passed all the required assessments in six months and took home his bachelor's without taking a course.

from JISC (pdf)

This article provides an international view of the commodification of academic research, including this base line definition, from an email interview with Hans Radder, a professor of the philosophy of science and technology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Q: Academic research has always cost money to produce, and led to products that made money for others. How is the "commodification" of research different today than in past periods? A: Commodification means that all kinds of activities and their results are predominantly interpreted and assessed on the basis of economic criteria. In this sense, recent academic research is far more commodified than it was in the past. In general terms, one can say that the relation between "money" and specific academic activity has become much more direct. Consider the following examples: first, the amount of external funding acquired is often used as a measure of individual academic quality; second, specific assessments by individual scientists have a direct impact on departmental budgets; for instance, if I now pass this doctoral dissertation, my department receives a substantial sum of money; if not, it ends up with a budget deficit; third, the growing practice of patenting the results of academic research is explicitly aimed at acquiring commercial monopolies. Related to these financial issues are important and substantial changes of academic culture. Universities are increasingly being run as big corporations. They have a top-down command structure and an academic culture in which individual university scientists are forced to behave like mini-capitalists in order to survive, guided by an entrepreneurial ethos aimed at maximizing the capitalization of their knowledge.

Opinion leaders are influential members of their social networks, strategically selected for their ability to sway community norms. The aims of the study were to assess: 1) whether it is feasible to identify student opinion leaders (SOLs) and their social networks among Grade 11 students at two high schools in Cape Town, South Africa; and 2) whether these opinion leaders would be willing to be involved in an HIV/AIDS prevention program in their school. The students (N = 412) completed a semi-structured, anonymous, self-administered questionnaire. ... Of these, all but two at each school were willing and available to participate in a HIV/AIDS prevention program. ---------- Focuses on HIV/AIDS prevention but can we use principles in other contexts and Facebook recommendation tools to support the process?

I've been thinking about how to support the development and visibility of SOLs using technology, without creating a creepy treehouse. How do we make them more visible and accessible?

Bloom has not gone away, and this revision helps delimit the nominalist implications

"ITIF uses 16 indicators to assess the global innovation-based competitiveness of 36 countries and 4 regions. This report finds that while the U.S. still leads the EU in innovation-based competitiveness, it ranks sixth overall. Moreover, the U.S. ranks last in progress toward the new knowledge-based innovation economy over the last decade."

I went to Virtual TA and Highlighted their language describing how it works.

Item Gary emailed around

most of history, only the wealthy have been able to afford an education geared to the individual learner. For the rest of us, education has remained a mass affair, with standard curricula, pedagogy, and assessments. The financial crisis will likely change this state of affairs. With the global quest for long-term competitiveness assuming new urgency, education is on everyone's front burner. Societies are looking for ways to make quantum leaps in the speed and efficiency of learning. So long as we insist on teaching all students the same subjects in the same way, progress will be incremental. But now for the first time it is possible to individualize education-to teach each person what he or she needs and wants to know in ways that are most comfortable and most efficient, producing a qualitative spurt in educational effectiveness. In fact, we already have the technology to do so. Well-programmed computers-whether in the form of personal computers or hand-held devices-are becoming the vehicles of choice. They will offer many ways to master materials. Students (or their teachers, parents, or coaches) will choose the optimal ways of presenting the materials. Appropriate tools for assessment will be implemented.

Visifire is a set of open source data visualization components - powered by Microsoft® Silverlight™ & WPF...Visifire can also be embedded in any webpage as a standalone Silverlight App. Visifire is independent of server side technology. It can be used with ASP, ASP.Net, PHP, JSP, ColdFusion, Ruby on Rails or just simple HTML. No radar charts, but for some things, this might be useful.

"As smartphones and handheld computers move into classrooms worldwide, we may be witnessing the start of an educational revolution. How technology could unleash childhood creativity -- and transform the role of the teacher. "

"In three issues for Inside Learning Technologies, Jane Hart shares the rpos and cons of building three types of social learning environment, and how to deliver them at low or no cost."

Assessment is not even mentioned, but the series is still useful.

The digital age appears to be reviving literacy... Good.

The digital age is reviving literacy..

New realities rendered starkly.

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