Assessment in the wiki world
Wow, now that I have my blog home all set up again, I’m 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 in a world where the classroom walls can extend globally and where collaboration can be made transparent through wikis and other web 2.0 tools.
In the original post to which they refer, the author relays an exchange that highlights a huge issue not just with the web 2.0 world of assessment, but with group assessment in general:
Jeff Utecht: How would you assess a student who changed a single word?
Ryan Bretag: Think about contributing one word from a poetry standpoint, how critical is one word? Writing in a hypertext society makes that one word critical.- From the Strength of Weak Ties.
If a group of students is working together and one student serves as the student who conceptualizes an idea, and the other students work diligently to carry out the idea at the direction of the first student, did the self-selected/group-elected leader contribute more? And now, when collaboration takes place through a more transparent record, for example, if you use a wiki, how do you ascertain individual student’s contributions. One of the references on The Strength of Weak Ties is to a wiki that uses a framework of significant contribution versus constructive modification. The creator of that rubric, David Kuropatwa noted previously on his own blog the distinction between these two varieties of contribution and the special challenge of “constructive modification” as a critical thinking process is addressed. In determining assessment strategies, one could also do as Ben Wilkoff did and turn it over to the students to discuss.
I encounter more often the issue raised by another blogger who noted failure to integrate wikis in a way that led to student creation of content. Even the earlier example of the math wiki is very structured, with questions I assume were determined by the teacher for students to answer.
Not in these posts and discussions but in society at large, I see a lot of confusion about the purpose of a wiki. And for that matter, a lot of suspicion about externalized collaboration in education. Though a wiki is in written form, it is, for me, at least, an externalization of thought process and collaboration. At its most elaborate (for example wikipedia), it can be a valuable resource, but most of the time it will reflect information that is targeted for a specific community. In some cases, the information gathered might have outlived its purpose (not unlike, by the way, many websites!). The wiki exists not to document forever and ever, but to provide an opportunity for collaboration as those collaborating make connections in their own minds and developed their own questions, ideas, and analyses. That too is the power of the wiki, that it can change and grow as its purpose and function expand. Wikis offer an opportunity to externalize the work of a collective mind, which directly contradicts the typical education model which requires us to assess each student purely for their individual contribution (most of the time). And there are a lot of students and teachers experimenting with how to make it work.