Posted on 19th January 2010 by Judy Breck in Golden Age of Learning, Mobile & Ubiquitous, Mobile Learning, Open Content, Politics in the swamp and Schools We Have Now
assessment, equality, global, mobile, online, standards
Let any child anywhere use his or her mobile to take the school standards tests. All the time now the corporate training world, people learn, are tested, and are certified using their internet connection. Take a look, for example, at the Adobe Certification center.
The Washington Post reports this morning that the “Race to the Top” competition for federal grants to states for education is to increase to more than $6 billion. The core goal here is to measure how students achieve according to standards set for them. As the article reports: “Also, 48 states and the District have joined in an effort to develop a common core of rigorous educational standards to replace the current system in which states have wildly different benchmarks for what should be taught in school.”
Wow: one envisions layers and layers before the kids somehow learn — and prove their teachers have taught and they have the test answers — for whatever this common core is. Why not just put it all out there and let everybody develop and work on what students learn in the transparency of the open internet?
Why not just spend a few million dollars and put everyone’s idea of standard stuff we want kids to learn online, and test them there? Everything could be online: material that is rigorous, material that meets various benchmarks — Texas history for the kids there, and how to farm cranberries for the kids in Vermont. Very soon, tests that won respect of admissions departments and employers would emerge.
The reason this will work is that the individual mobile internet browser will belong to a single student. This ownership makes the opportunity equal for each kid who has a mobile because the nature (good, bad, or not there at all) of a classroom is taken out of the equation.
Each learner can come to the trough of online knowledge, and each can partake according to his or her own appetite. For sure, there are some youngsters in failing urban schools who could ace math tests at the college level. I have met them, I know this is true. There are struggling students in excellent schools who would benefit from studying, on the privacy of their mobile, subjects they “didn’t get” in earlier grades. Being able to get certified online gives them a way to catch up. There are young people in slums and poverty across the world for whom learning basics and more on a mobile browser is a key to their country’s future development. With a mobile browser in her had, a girl interested in astronomy, whose cultures forbids her to attend school, joins her global generation with access equal to every other student who is, for example, browsing images from the Hubble telescope.
A challenge for educators: Put online centers like the Adobe Certification webpages that teach, test, and certify school standards for math, science, technology, languages, humanities — and be sure to make those pages mobile friendly.
Posted on 22nd July 2009 by Judy Breck in Emerging Online Knowledge, Networks and Testing
assessment, Networks, online, Testing
The emerging networked system that increasingly links a student to knowledge, teachers, other students — and now testing — will release that student to compete globally. Treating a student as is our usual way, as a member of a class, traps her in the bell curve that evaluates her achievement in relation to others in her class.
This locks her learning into a notch within a group directed by a certain teacher and happening in a certain place or time. Doing this is an advantage if she is in a class of superior students at a terrific school. Not so much if she is a member of a class in a mediocre or failing school — where the student in her class who tests at the top of her class would score below the bottom student in a better school. This mechanism defeats all the optimism and cash dumps toward “getting scores up” in awful schools in Chicago, Detroit, New York — as well as many schools in developing countries, etc. etc, etc.. Analog student testing is affected in major ways by the school setting where it is happening.
The future online system will let a student anywhere take a test for Algebra 1, for example, and be scored against everyone else — in the world! — who takes it. The setting where this will happen is the emerging global network of learning individuals who are interlinked as individual nodes. And as Clay Shirky put it: Here Comes Everybody! In the next very few years virtually everybody in the younger generations will be connected — each becoming a node, free from the old time class notch.
One of the most elevating changes for a student that networking will bring to education is this transition of testing and assessment from the class group to the individual learner, accomplished by connecting an online test to a student being evaluated. We are just a little way down that road so far, but we are moving inexorably in that direction. An article this week in WebWire describes: Fifteen hundred college exams proctored online:
. . . Jarrod Morgan, co-developer of the unique online system [says]: “We have improved the system by adding live certified proctors, real time audio/video using TokBox, technical assistance, practice exams, identity authentication, and the ability to assist exam-takers by remotely controlling their computers during an exam,” said a proud Morgan.
“Now that we’ve perfected online live-proctor exams and coupled the service with identity authentication,” commented Morgan, “and actually proven the system by proctoring 1,500 exams, we’re attracting more and more interested colleges and universities each week.”
Posted on 7th February 2006 by Judy Breck in Schools We Have Now
assessment, schools, Testing
As she did in Internet Risk Aversion, once again Kathy Sierra tells us here how education should work in terms of a different human relations venue. Her diagram above (make the top box “student” not “employer”) tells us all there is to say about why the standards and assessment movement is turning our kids into middling test passers instead of stars. Have you ever met a child who was not or could not become f’n amazing? I haven’t.
I recommend Kathy’s entire article for reading in the context of what schools do with our kids. Here is some flavor:
By focusing on “areas of improvement”, we’re putting a square peg in a round hole. What do we end up with? A crappy, rounded off peg who meets the minimum thresholds at the expense of their most kick-ass attributes. What if let ourselves (and those we manage) spend a lot more energy in the areas where we are–or could be–amazing?
The higher tragedy here is that in focusing on the gray box of assessing the attainment of mediocracy, education misses the open connectivity that inevitably follows the pursuit of excellence in the 21st century. While kids grind away in a paper mill to pass tests, they are not free to pursue the grand knowledge of the open Internet learning ecology. That must change!
