David Jakes is a really funny guy who often doesn’t get enough credit. He’s been in my ‘gator and on my radar for a long time now and Clarence pointed this thing out to me this morning.
The Strength of Weak Ties » A Single Word
How do you assess contribution in a networked classroom?Ok, so what does it look like? What’s new, what’s different, what’s the same? Your ideas?
I’m not a good one to work in the Ustream/Elluminate world, so I dont pay a lot of attention to these events. They strike me as “technology because we can” and not really good applications of the tools. Elluminate doesn’t run on my main (linux) machine and between time zones, meal times, kid taxi, and all the rest, I seldom can get into this stuff at all. I catch the tweets and read the recaps in the blogs. While that’s probably a bit Luddite of me, I just don’t see the value in talking heads, powerpoints by remote control, and fancy-dan chat rooms with so many bells and whistles they crash my computers. You wanna chat? Gimme IRC .. plain text for plain speaking. If you can’t type… that’s a different matter, but I digress.
THIS thing, though. This seemingly innocuous question is at the heart of it. There are some really interesting and thoughtful comments under the post and Clarence’s take on it is insightful. For those who’ve wondered about — and even been openly critical of — the way I run classes, this should articulate it for you.
Welcome back from Spring break.
March 24th, 2008 at 10:30 AM
[...] so inspired to comment on the massive comments in my aggregator. Through a chain of reading, I see Nate talking about Clarence’s post, which discusses the concept of how students should be assessed [...]
March 24th, 2008 at 11:59 AM
I saw and read this post last night and thought about Dr. Lowell, I wonder if he paid Mr. Fisher to write it? I really thought we had found the pseudo writer here. I understand the process and thinking, but it took time. You figure it out at the end of the first semester with Dr. Lowell, or at least I did.
March 26th, 2008 at 12:42 PM
[...] off I went clicking on every link that was hooked up to the original blog spot from Dr. Lowell’s http://durandus.com/phaedrus/2008/03/24/a-single-word/ to [...]
March 31st, 2008 at 2:40 AM
The useful thing abut Elluminate, in particular, is that it provides a visual channel for communication and activities. This is particularly productive with math classes (trying to handle equations and the like in IRC, like doing so over the phone, is painful) and language learning… but in almost every case it opens the door, potentially, to much more interesting interactions and opportunities for students to be doing things that IRC and audio don’t allow for.
Unfortunately, Elluminate can be abused in many of the same ways other tools can, with the caveat that it is probably even MORE damaging– Death by Powerpoint is never so cruel as when it happens via remote.
The question of assessment in a networked classroom is interesting to me from a different perspective. I think there is something to the idea of Connectivism and it seems to me that if information fluency, network building, and participation in the networked world of information can be valuable, there must be some evolution in the way we assess learning to include them. So far I see almost nothing beyond strange extrapolations of the models we use for evaluating papers, essays, and face-to-face communications…