I was reading about some of the fuzzy statistics that relate to the current attempts to filter/censor the ‘internet’ and I couldn’t help but wonder how effective it will be. Many other people have pointed out just how hard it would be, but I’m basically a numbers person, for all that I now like qualitatively styled research. I should mention that I’ve lost most of the links to the posts where others have pointed out how hard it will be to filter. But, after reading the statistics that Irene at libertus.net gathered, I couldn’t help reorganising some of those numbers.
November, 2008
Shifting teaching and learning
Now that it’s the end of one semester and there is a large break til the beginning of the next, I really want to think about what I want to achieve in teaching and learning over the next year. I have so many ideas, some based on the work I do with Luke on wiki learning environments, some based on pod and vodcasting and some based on online testing environments.
There are a number of things I have to do to get the first year students more engaged in learning about new technologies. I got the same kind of feedback I normally get from the last group, specifically, I don’t teach them facts that they can regurgitate so I must be a poor teacher. Admittedly, my evals have improved even if I still don’t focus on facts. Part of the reason for the improvements were not really my doing, but are the results of imput from another colleague into the structure of the assessment details. The document we now have is a good pro forma for future years with everything laid out in a clear manner. Thus students cannot and do not complain that they do not know what they have to do.
Limited attendance
But I still have fairly limited attendance at lectures. The course is always given the biggest lecture theatre which doesn’t really make for a good learning environment and students expect to be lectured at and are often surprised when they are also entertained. Which is probably where the perceived lack of facts originates. All the facts are bound up in stories, so much so that the often don’t realise they are learning until the exam. But, I know there will always be this small cohort of students who don’t want to be entertained, who equate learning with boredom. So, I’ve been thinking of attempting to video a short lecturette around the ‘facts’ which students can download and watch but still do the longer entertaining lecture for the majority. It has the added bonus that I don’t have to bore myself and those in the room with me.
Idea 1: short videos about the ‘topic’ of the week without all the entertaining and contextual information. I will probably need to convince my HoD to give me a new, better computer. Wish me luck with that one.
Competency development
I don’t care what anyone says – we do not have net saavy students in Australia. We do not have tech saavy students in Australia. We do have many students from different cultural backgrounds who have rarely, if ever, interacted in a constructivist/constructionist environment. We need to develop competencies in both the technologies and the learning environment. Herein lies some of the disengagement of local students and much of the confusion of international students. We have two competencies in the course
- Technology/computer competencies
- Research competencies.
We have been using an external provider for the tech/comp competencies, but I’m not altogether happy with that. They have take so long to fix some of the bugs that we found two years ago, while they were busy updating for Vista compatability, all the while ignoring any lip service to Mac compatability that I really don’t know that I want to continue subjecting students to it. The alternative would be to develop my own competency online test within the facilites we have. This would align the tech/comp competencies with the research competencies that are provided in house. I think initially I would need to provide a test case based on filtering out students who are competent with computers. If they pass this in house competency test (at 80 or 90%) then they do not have to fight with the external providers version. At the moment, all students have to do the competency and this does seem to annoy the few students who are saavy. It would also allow us to focus our attention on the students who need more help.
Idea 2: Develop a pre-test for tech/comp competencies
I think I’ll leave the wiki reflection for another time. I have to unpack the differences between the limited wiki and the full wiki and see where the engagement happens.
Reflecting on Collaborative Assessment
I’m about to start the dreaded task of marking the wiki for Mobile Workforce Technologies. I struggle with this every time. I want to encourage student collaboration, but, when it comes to marking it, I want it easy to work out who did what so I can award a ‘mark’. It’s something that becomes quite nerve wracking at some levels.
For each page in the wiki, there is a main player, the person who started the topic, and put in much, if not most, of the effort. They have vested their learning in it. They deserve the recognition for it. But then, there’s the minor contributors. They have seen opportunities for expanding on work, for adding to the totallity of the topic.
In previous years, most pages were single author, partly because Luke and I struggled with the notion of collaboration almost as much as the students do. The eternal question becomes “how will you know who did what?” We always say that we refer to the history of each page and can work out who contributes what. So we have a kind of objective way of measuring what’s been going on. But, it makes the marking so fraught with decisions. How much effort did each contributor put in? Is it directly related to the number of edits? The amount of each edit? How thoroughly do we go through each page to extract the amount of work each student does?
The history does overcome the traditional group work problem of the free loader. There are no free loaders here. And, if there are, they are easy to find. We know who has contributed, who has participated, who has engaged with learning. We can find them and this becomes evident in the participation mark (this will deserve a post of its own when I get to it).
But the contribution of each student, the measure of their learning, this is where we have our work cut out for us. How much did each student learn about the core concepts of both the topics and the values of collaborative work environments? That’s what we’re really measuring. And that’s what we have to find.
Tags: collaboration, learning, mwt
Writing, the numbers don’t add up
I seem to have spent much of this week writing. Numbers. In spreadsheets. Yes, marking marking marking. I just finished one lot yesterday, went to a panel on Podcasting this morning and now I’m shepherding in another lot of assignments. Oh, joy!
The weekend is looking pretty full of numbers. Reading assignments, writing numbers. Two more weeks of this and I’ll be out of the semester and into research again.
Now, where was that list of things to do.