Conceptual Models of Social Software Activity

Purpose:

Expose WASC workshop participants to the affordances of participatory technologies such as wikis without technical barriers

Activity:

1. Using the large sheets of paper on your tables, grab a marker and answer the following question: - What counts as evidence of student learning? What counts as evidence to your different stakeholders?

2. Then, write at least 3 'tags' above your work. A tag is a single keyword that represents what is in your longer text

3. Finally, use scissors, tape and anything else you can find to organize all of your group's answers

4. Share out your group's product with the rest of the community

Helen and Dan's Points:

- wikis are easy for multiple people to author

- it is significantly more challenging to collaborate on the same piece of text and even harder to change frameworks

- as easy as it is for you to interact with pen and paper – that’s how students today interact with keyboards and web

Participants' Reflections:

Table 1

similar categories, similar terms, what those terms meant at our schools, different definitions

testing, assessment, test samples - may fit better in different categories

move things around, see connections, blending together, making connections and creating clusters

grades, closely related criteria, standards, assessment of students, writing samples, test samples, portfolios, student and teaching portfolios

pre/post testing, supervisor feedback, course evaluations, narratives, interviews, alumni

students' own sense of self-change, their own self that they have learned something - own sense of satisfaction that they have grown and learned, articulation may or may not be important depending on the institution

Table 2

piles look at student performance

performance measure is value-added by program based on grades, course completion, program completion, and job placement; student performance in the program when they begin and when they end

statistics - scores, passage rates, standardized and course completion scores, grades, satisfaction progress reports

scores, portfolios - collection of outcomes-based evidence, extra-curricular, student scholarship, eportfolio content

process: worked well when "organize" then started to share and flowed well; 2 people from same institution and on same projects; other people joined the community using the same technology

Table 3 health-oriented schools

#1 tag: licensure

descriptor of evidence - national licensure exams, board scores

commonalities - evaluation by preceptors or other folks who are looking at our students, difficult to evaluate and how do we do that; what do the faculty think our students are doing; do they know what they need to know

process: engaged face to face, having fun because of social contact, chance to talk before the activity started, social network before the activity, suspicious of who else is in the community and to what degree are they appropriating your work or not

Table 4

Testing

licensing issues

5 institutions, each institution is different

global consistencies among our selves

international students who might have challenges communicating in a face to face setting, communicating in a different setting might be helpful

Table 5

• student centered global perspective vs. assessment, official ways of evaluating student learning

  process not the outcome

  list: external evaluations, projects, portfolios, tests, transformation, official, personal, performance

  process: revelation to try to respond to question and realize where my institution is relative to other institutions