I’ve come to ALT-C for the day to participate in a symposium debating effectiveness and efficiency in assessment and feedback representing the work of the project. I’ll be joining representatives from several other projects in the assessment and feedback.

This post will offer a few passing thoughts in the presentations I attend:

There was a fascinating and somewhat provocative presentation from Bridgend College on the use of Facebook raised a few hackles. It’s interesting to see how it is still generates such anxiety in the ALT community including the concern that it devalues or discredits the institutional VLE. I was concerned with their statement that ‘all students use it’ which I know to simply not be true. A small but significant proportion of my students refuse to use Fb for all sorts of very sound ethical and moral reasons so there’s no way I could require them to use it in the way Bridgend require their students to. i would find it very troubling to require a student who doesn’t want to to use Fb but I have no problem requiring them to use the VLE. Their response to my question was that in the music industry (for which their students are preparing to work) this is the standard and they’ve never had a student who doesn’t use it. I do wonder about its value (in their design) in other disciplines where the use of Fb is less likely to always already be 100%.

The next session offered some fascinating work from Brian Mulligan from the Institute of Technology Sligo and Penn State on open learning badges. The idea of mastery learning is central to this and is something related to the assessment analytics work we’ve been doing in the project. The simple statement that grades don’t guarantee competency is really troubling to the normative discourses of education. This presentation proposes a different way of thinking about this and an infrastructure to support it. Brian asked some provocative questions: is HE a cartel? Why do employers value our qualifications so much? Why might they like badges as an alternative? How might this drive change? What do we need to see to certify that someone can DO something? It could raise employers expectations and could even challenge long standing reputations. We could even stop using degrees. These are questions and ideas that strike to the very heart of the pedagogy on assessment and feedback, not to mention the technologies used to support and facilitate it. It’s clear that trust is at the heart of all of this – which is true of how things stand at the moment. This raises the possibility that employers trust the current qualifications and accreditation system because that’s all that’s available for them to trust. The spectre of this operating as an open market is one about which I’m a little wary. MOOCs were mentioned and I suspect are something of a thread or theme running through this conference. The role this might play in adult learning, work-based learning and simply as a way of shaking up HE is really fascinating. The issue of course and learning coherence and aggregation runs the risk of getting us no further than where we already are (as one of the questioners put it, giving students a rag bag of badges to replace the current poorly articulated learning outcomes within degrees). Another questioner liked the terminology of the ‘democratisation of accreditation’. And the final question was a corker: from someone from the Girl Guides. This was the sort of thing I was interested in asking: related to things like gamification and folksonomy. She actually mentioned that the Girl Guides are interested in introducing digital badges which turn into real badges which sounds fascinating. I’m going to put her in touch with RITH to see if there are some ways they can help each other out. On the whole, I’m with Brian on this one – I would really like to see this succeed.

Brian came to talk to me after our symposium so I was able to share my thoughts with him about how this might connect to assessment analytics. I think this might be worth pursuing not simply because Brian seems to be as iconoclastic as I like to think I am but also because it might bring some interesting new dimensions to the project.

Our symposium seemed to go well. We were certainly kept sternly to time by Marianne (thanks!). It was good to once again hear from the other projects and remember just how many connections there are between them. The questions and discussion from the floor tended to focus on the knotty issues of eSubmission and eMarking which is a shame to a certain extent as the issues to do with the core pedagogy of assessment (which Gunter focussed on) was I think the more interesting issue. But this kind of goes to show just how much of the institutional concern at the moment is getting the mechanics of this right first. Brian’s question to me from the floor was to do with the limits of efficiency. My answer to him was that of course there are limits to the efficiency gains we can make, but I can’t wait to get there! I guess this is at the core of the matter – getting the basic efficiency gains in place is something pretty much everyone is desperate for.

I also had conversations with folks from Manchester and the Open U after the session. I’d like to follow up the suggestion from the OU that the use of tablets and iPads is degrading the quality of marking because the typing is so poor. But this comes back to another point that Brian made – we need to ‘recipe’ for what are the infrastructural needs: is it dual screens? iPads?

I’m rather excited about an invited presented on knitting which is of little relevance to this project but hey – it’s knitting! And it’s started with a bit of social ‘knitworking’ as little bundles of wool get passed around the room. The heart of this is how can we revive the role of coding into computing particularly within schools.

After a very pleasant lunch, spent talking Pebble Pad with folks from Wolverhampton, next was the keynote by Natasa Milic-Frayling. Her paper is about network analysis which, of course, overlaps with the assessment analytics work of this project. Her talk started by exploring different aspects of collaborative learning and the role that technology plays and can play within it. She then turned to consider network analysis by taking us back to 2004 and to UseNet. She mentioned that this was the first time that sociologists had data on human interaction. She talked about the challenge of bringing together the ways that sociologists and computer scientists think about networks together. It really is absolutely fascinating but its usefulness still seems to be limited to sociological rather than pedagogical outcomes. Her final statements were about why it is so important. Ben Shneiderman’s work which explicitly uses this strategy to encourage social participation is getting closest to the where I’m imagining this might be useful pedagogically.