Beyond critical thinking

Michael Wesch of A Vision of Students Today fame gave a TEDx talk last year that I revisited the other day when I found myself (frustratingly) having to justify the case for authentic assessment. “But they’ll cheat won’t they?” is the classic response I get when I present the case for an open-book, open-web summative assessment. Some research I did with Amy Wong back in 2009 suggests the contrary but a much more important question is why someone would want to cheat in the first place.

If the test of a person’s ‘knowledge’ is the ability to dredge information from the brain and use this to piece together something resembling a coherent argument in the unnatural setting of an examination hall, then resorting to unethical means for the dredging process will never be beyond temptation.

If, on the other hand, the knowledge to be tested is a person’s ability to think on one’s feet to solve unstructured, real-world problems, generating unique, meaningful and useful responses, how is it possible to cheat?

Wesch uses the term knowledge-able to describe this attribute, which amounts to a little more than being ‘knowledgeable’. The difference between the two is that the latter does not necessarily require you to practice your knowledge, where you go beyond critical thinking to actually create meaning.

Acquiring knowledge-ability effectively ‘future-proofs’ your learning … it is learning that lasts way beyond the ‘test’.

Occupy Education

I’ve been monitoring the nascent Occupy Education movement with interest over the last couple of weeks, not least because there are so many dimensions to it. The complexity of it all has been addressed far more coherently than I ever could over at Tenured Radical, but my crude interpretation is that it essentially revolves around access and relevance (or lack thereof!)

These two factors would appear inextricably linked, in my mind, as access to an affordable education is obviously more worthwhile if it also happens to be relevant and useful, yet few of the Facebook contributions and Tumblr pages I have perused so far seem to make this connection, there being a tendency to focus on one or the other.

I understand how — given the origins of the Occupy movement — the socioeconomic dimension takes primacy, but if there is to be reform to provide equity of access, I hope an equal amount of energy is expended in ensuring it is access to a quality education, that accommodates the learning styles and life styles of individual learners, and not some factory model that caters to the lowest common denominator.

An Occupy Education movement that focuses on flexible delivery of programmes, allowing people to fully participate, assessing learning outcomes in an authentic and engaging manner is one I would happily sign up for, because I think it would have a good chance of addressing both the inequities and irrelevancies that currently plague the education system in the US and elsewhere.

The Future of the Learning Management System

Image source: tech-faq.com

Joshua Kim wrote a nice piece in IHE a couple of weeks ago that posed some very candid questions about the future of Blackboard. This company is the Leviathan of the proprietary learning management system market, and suffers somewhat from Microsoft-syndrome on account of its market domination. Very few educators I know have anything nice to say about the platform, other than the fact is tends to be pretty stable. This, of course, is very necessary, but also very dull. It is also a sad indictment on the quality of the student learning experience in higher education.

In an age when there is so much action going on within social media, it is most unfortunate that the market leader continues to trot out something that is quite so pedestrian. The problem, simply put, is that when you have such a large market share there is no pressure to innovate. You can make all the feature requests you like, but there will be no response until there is a critical mass of users making the same request.

Like Dr Kim, I wonder how much longer this strategy will continue to deliver. Monolithic LMSs are very 20th century, and to stay ahead of the game these days, versatility is everything. In short, a key consideration now is whether your delivery platform is going to be able to incorporate the new tools next year that no-one has even invented yet.

Digital Native: Fact or Fallacy?

Image source: 4.bp.blogspot.com

Poor old Marc Prensky has come in for a bit of a bashing lately, and unjustifiably so in my opinion.

First of all, he first used the digital native-digital immigrant typology 10 years ago. If one were to consider the extent to which digital literacy has advanced in this time, it is perhaps a little unfair to criticise his original thinking. Indeed, Prensky himself stated in a 2009 article:

In 2001, I published “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,” a two-part article that explained these terms as a way of understanding the deep differences between the young people of today and many of their elders (Prensky 2001a, 2001b). Although many have found the terms useful, as we move further into the 21st century when all will have grown up in the era of digital technology, the distinction between digital natives and digital immigrants will become less relevant. Clearly, as we work to create and improve the future, we need to imagine a new set of distinctions. …

Second, as White and Le Cornu (2011) have noted, Prensky is not the first to try and analyse perceived behaviours of learners using typologies like this and — while they have their drawbacks — they at least initiate a dialogue for us to refine our thinking.

Third, maybe I read too much into his original work, but at no stage did I ever assume that there was native and immigrant and never the twain shall meet. It was a useful generalisation at the time and nothing more. It may have less applicability a decade later, but it can be treated as a stepping stone to alternative typologies, or something theoretically more sophisticated.

In summary, I’m not sure the notion of a digital native was ever treated as ‘fact’, and thus, it might also be inappropriate to refer to its ‘fallacy’. Let’s give Prensky some credit for sticking his neck out in a highly dynamic domain and acknowledge his contribution to the debate if nothing else.

The ubiquity of m-learning

Image source: mobl21.com

I spoke with a group of training professionals at a large company last week and, for the first time in a long time, I found myself presenting the argument that there is more interactivity in an online class than in a face-to-face (F2F) class. I’ve had to do this on many occasions over the years, but I hadn’t realised that this question had all but disappeared off the radar.

That so few people now would venture to suggest this in the post-Web 2.0 era is testimony, perhaps, to the maturity of online learning. But it’s not just about the increasing popularity of social networking per se. The growing sophistication of handheld devices — or what we used to call ‘mobile phones’ — has added fuel to the social media fire, such that connectivity and interaction levels have reached fever pitch.

In an F2F setting, interaction will always be limited to the number of people who can talk at once. In an online setting, numerous conversations take place concurrently, more people can participate, and they participate with people they perhaps wouldn’t otherwise have participated with.

This is facilitating student engagement on a scale few educators could have dreamt of just a few years ago — myself included. I poured scorn on the idea that anyone would want to read a large amount of text from a mobile device, but then that was before iPhones and iPads, and the advent of ‘the App’. Astonishingly, Apple now claims to have 140,000 apps in the App Store, and some 40,000 of these are educational apps.