Sharing Nicely

Steve Egan has set himself the task of blogging about some of the core issues in open education. This week he writes about assessment. Assessment is a huge issue in open education for (at least) three reasons:

1. The open model questions the role of the traditional “expert”, but it is that “expert” who is typically responsible for assessment in education. For informal learning communities to work peers must be able to assess each others’ work.
2. Secondly, while assessment and accreditation are two distinct issues, you need good assessment to enable reliable accreditation.
3. And finally, online social networking communities are pioneering new ways of assessing information, even though they don’t call it that, and it’s exciting to think about their application to education. Things like aggregating group opinions (digg.com, slashdot.org), peer review and discussion (amazon.com reviews), reputation networks that automatically filter content (topsy.com) are perfectly suitable for assessment purposes in learning. 

Steve asks for literature suggestions. Some of the things I have been reading recently, or return to regularly include:

• Philip Greenspun’s recent rant about the state of higher education in the US is enjoyable and raises some important questions. For one, he suggests cutting the link between teaching and assessment, and argues they should be done by separate people/institutions. http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/universities-and-economic-growth
  
• Sir John Daniels (and co-authors) explore possibilities to increase access without jeopardising quality and argues that this separation would increase innovation and drives down cost. He writes in Change Magazine:
  

  “If the trend to delink testing from teaching continues, it will lead to more flexible and less expensive models of higher education, with the result that the aspiration of giving people access to high-quality higher education worldwide may not be an illusion.”

• Via the tomorrow’s professors mailing list from Stanford’s School of Education a short text by Bill Cerbin titled “Assessing How Students Learn” arrived timely this morning (It’s not on their website yet, but you’ll be able to find it here — search for article #956 — soon). While I suspect the author would take issue with the idea of separating teaching and assessment, it describes a fascinating study that investigated reasons for the disparity of Maths grades between African American students and others students. Performance was traced back to participation in informal study groups (or the lack of participation in such groups). It’s a brilliant response to those that still argue peer-learning or -assessment don’t work.
  

  “For example, Chinese students [who performed significantly better than African American students] formed study groups outside of class and devoted their time to the most difficult material rather than simply reviewing the mathematics they already knew. They compared solutions, tested one another, and talked through difficult concepts. The African American students also invested a lot of time studying calculus, but did it alone.”

• “Rethinking Classroom Assessment with Purpose in Mind. Assessment for Learning, Assessment as Learning, Assessment of Learning” provides a comprehensive discussion of the different roles assessment can have in learning and teaching. It’s especially useful if you are approaching open education from a non-education perspective (for example as an open source software researcher) and helps you relate your experience to the education context. It’s available for download: http://www.wncp.ca/media/40539/rethink.pdf 
• And Stephen Downes “Open Source Assessment” article, continues to provide insightful reflection, even though it’s written  almost exactly 2 years ago. He analyses how an “open source” approach can be applied at different levels of the assessment process, including the assessment questions. He writes
  

  “The proposition here is that, if the assessment of learning becomes an open, and community, enterprise, rather than closed and proprietary, then the cost of assessment would be reduced and the quality (and fairness) of assessment would be increased, thus making credentialing accessible.”

Technorati Tags: open education, ocw, oer, p2pu

Yesterday was one of those great open source days for me. The idea that there is a global community of smart and creative people who share ideas openly and help each other is powerful, but also a little abstract. But when you reach out, and the community responds and makes it all happen, it’s a wonderful experience that reaffirms the possibility of togetherness. That’s how I felt when The Wire moved from an abstract idea to pre-alpha. Putting the love aside for a second, let’s get to business.

Thanks to Jim Groom and Joss Winn and Hans Poldoja (neither one is in the picture) for conversations about a combined blog-aggregator/discussion-forum that would be really useful to follow the kinds of disaggregated discussions that take place in many open education courses (like this one, this one, or this recent Mozilla/Creative Commons one). It’s one of those things, that we all felt was so obviously useful that it just had to exist … but it didn’t. So with a little help from my friends (and some new friends) we built it, in one day.

The Wire (pre-alpha) is a simple way of keeping track of what’s going
on in a course discussion. It’s like a content stream that aggregates
discussions which take place across many blogs. When readers click on
the post or comment headings, they are taken straight to the original
blogs. What neat about is that it brings together posts and their comments.

This version is built with google forms, yahoo pipes, a bit of open standards and you can roll your own in an hour or less (or much less if you are Tony Hirst). An example is at http://p2pu.pbworks.com/Wire, a pbwiki site we have been using for some peer 2 peer university tech prototyping.

Here is how it works. I created a google form that collects feed URLs. The form is embedded into the wiki page, which looks like this:

A yahoo pipe then collects the list of feeds via the CSV interface for google spreadsheets (Publish as a web-page, then select CSV). Here is what the link looks like: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rkfTjEyTRbZlaJS6URg8CbA&output=csv

The pipe fetches all blog posts and all comments and does some fancy sorting to make sure it all comes out in the right order. A huge thanks to Hapdaniel “The Pickled Piper” whose yahoo pipes wizardry pulls it all together. You can get the pipe and improve it here.

If you go to the site, you can try adding your feed URL and watch it get added to The Wire (sometimes yahoo pipes needs a few moments).

It’s far from perfect and I’ll be spending more time on design aspects and various other bits. If you want to help, please leave a comment or get in touch by email.

Voila - thanks everyone for the ideas and the help, and really making my day. Hapdaniel, you rock! And special mention to my friend Tau Tavenga for introducing me to this Wire

The OpenCourseWare Consortium has been one of the original OER pioneers. Earlier this year, we were able to announce that the membership of over 200 institutions has published more than 8000 (!) courses. As a movement and an organisation, we have arrived at an interesting and challenging moment. The focus is shifting from content to learning and collaboration, collaboration between developed and developing countries is slowly growing, and the sustainability of publication projects remains one of the pressing issues. These are exciting times, and as a member of the board, I’d like to join Steve in thanking Terri for all the hard work (wrangling lawyers, corraling board members, and getting us on track) and welcome Mary Lou, who brings an exciting mix of experience to this young organisation.

Dear OCWC community,

The OCWC Board of Directors is delighted to announce that Mary Lou
Forward, of Brattleboro, Vermont, has accepted its offer of the OCWC
Executive Director position.  Mary Lou comes to us from SIT Study
Abroad, where she has served as Academic Dean of African Studies since
2000.  (…)

As you are likely aware, the position of Interim Executive Director has
been filled for the past nine months by Terri Bays of Notre Dame. 
The Consortium could not have succeeded as
it has in the past year without Terri’s tireless efforts to move the
organization forward.

Please join the members of the Board in welcoming Mary Lou and thanking Terri for her effort.

Sincerely,

Steve Carson
President  |   OpenCourseWare Consortium