3rd Blogpost Prompt
Our topic for this week is “Assessment.” Donna Riley of VT’s Department of Engineering Education will be visiting class to discuss her ongoing work with ABET standards, so please make sure you’ve read her draft paper, “We Assess What We Value” before class.
I’m planning to have us watch one of the Dan Pink videos posted on the Schedule this evening, but if stuff happens and we don’t get there, you will definitely want to familiarize yourself with Pink’s perspective before proceeding further. (Choose between the 11 minute animated version and the 18′ 30″ TED Talk). Then read “The Case Against Grades” (Alfie Kohn) and “Imagination First” (Liu and Noppe-Brandon). If you get to Lombardi’s piece on “The Role of Assessment in Authentic Learning,” that would be great.
You may post about whatever issue (or set of issues) raised in these materials resonates with you the most. We know from the discussions we have already had that assessment is a complicated topic and that we have complicated (and sometimes contradictory) ideas about how it works (in general and in our particular field.) This should be an interesting session, and I am eager to read what you have to say.
One more cool thing: We’ll be exploring a relatively new web annotation tool called Hypothes.is over the next few weeks. To get us started, I’m posting some questions and annotations on some of the readings. The links are below. If you want to respond and play with the tool yourself, that would be great. Just follow the directions on the Hypothes.is site.
Alfie Kohn: https://via.hypothes.is/http://www.alfiekohn.org/article/case-grades/
Marilyn Lombardi: https://via.hypothes.is/https://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI3019.pdf
Image: Public Domain
