Nov
17th
Thu
17th
Assessment from the point of view of a designer #3: social, creative, dynamic and personal
It’s time to cover the part about “personal assessment”, in the ”assessment of deeper learning online” blog series that I am doing as part of my work at p2pu.org . So (if you haven’t done this already) and you are interested in the scope and context of these blogs please check out assessment related post number 1 (social) here and assessment related post number 2 (creative+dynamic) here.
Why self assessment is important in learning?
Having the ability to assess your individual characteristics plays two roles; first it helps you make learning decisions connected to your interests, strengths and aspirations. Second, a personalized assessment environment helps you adapt your learning pace and style to your individual needs.
How can we design a space that supports that?
To support personal assessment, the design of the space needs to be able to showcase the diversity of what each learner knows, cares about, is able to do and wants to do. It also needs to include mechanics that help learners adjust to their own pace and style as well as discover new things.
Track metrics: the data tracked by the system and the user is reflecting what each user knows, cares about, is able to do and wants to do. The design of the space can provide both automatic data, tracking activity for things such as time taken to complete different tasks, but also self-tracking data such marking how many times you went jogging this week. There are 3 types of automatic data/metrics according to UI wiz Joshua Porter; vanity metrics, the data that you can’t take action on but they make you feel good (i.e. likes) then there are the actionable metrics; data that gives you enough information to take decisions from (i.e. measuring lifecycle events over time) and finally there are emergent metrics, that come out the use of the system (i.e. there is the friend feed example, once a user has 5 friends they noticed that the user becomes active). Rescuetime is an application which collects actionable and emergent data by tracking your productivity over time and comparing it to other users who run the same program. Daytum, made by Nicholas Felton, who is this really interesting guy who chronicled his life for a year, is an application that has you track data yourself for whatever interests you, for example the contents of your daily lunch, what music tracks you listened to during the course of a week. You can then choose to display your data in different graph forms and compare it to other users who might be tracking the same topic. In a peer learning community one can imagine both automatic and non-automatic metrics collected and displayed to help both the learner self reflect but also showcase the diversity of individual learners in the community.
Rescuetime
Daytum
Display them in a learner dossier :users are able to track their achievements (metrics), analyze their past interaction behavior and share their data with their friends. A common system that gives players these abilities is found in games and is known as a player dossier; Medler explains it in his paper Player Dossiers: Analyzing Gameplay Data as a Reward “a data-driven reporting tool comprised of a player’s gameplay data (..)These reports are mediators connecting players to the vast collections of gameplay data being recorded within games from Farmville (Zynga, 2009) to Halo: Reach (Bungie LLC., 2010). A player’s in-game actions, created content and achievements are organized into dossiers representing each player’s identity, morphing over time as the player continues to play. For example, Giant Bomb (Gerstmann and Davis, 2008), a game wiki and gamer community website, creates player dossiers by visually combining achievement data from a number of gaming platforms (Blizzard Ent., 2004; Microsoft Corp., 2002; Valve Corp., 2003). Achievements are broken down by game, used to rank registered players against the average community member’s achievements and aggregated to discover the rarity of achievements within the community (Figure 1). ”(Medler,2011) In a peer learning community we can rename a “player dossier” into a “learner dossier” were metrics work similarly to a control panel/dashboard found in a car, plane, spaceship. It will become a tool that helps learners understand and drive their own learning as that evolves and shapes over time.
Figure 1 from Medler’s paper: Giant Bomb aggregates player data from multiple achievement systems to display player dossiers that cross genres and platforms.
Create tools that allow discoverability: the design should allow for easy discovery of more resources or communities of practice to diversify ones’ interests and passions. Pandora was one of the first applications to help its users discover more music. Turntable.fm also helps one discover music but this time not through algorithms but instead through the contributions of its members who get recognition for playing good songs. A peer learning community could support learners in finding what they want to do next, through the contributions of the peers and also connections to other communities.
turntable.fm
Embrace point of view: this ties back to the earlier point about showcasing a diversity of autonomous learners. In order to do that we can imagine taking several perspectives on a problem or a situation and examining the problem from several sides, taking note of the benefits and limitations of each point of view. A Point of View tool can play an important role in assessment in both formal and informal ways. An informal example is when someone asks the crowd “Do you think this thing I’ve made addresses all the main criteria? Here’s is why i think it does…” and when friends like it, comment on it, or add ideas. At a formal level, the same tool can provide a debate and response to formal scoring of an artifact or piece of evidence, if desired. The space should provide channels for discussion that go beyond commenting to embrace diverse opinions. Debate structures are a good example for different points of view to be discussed. An example is the youth social network i-remix which has a debate feature that allows students to pose debates over topics of their interest. The voters have to provide arguments for why they prefer one over the other. Quora and Stack Overflow are other good examples were discussion is formed dynamically through a voting system (best answers get voted higher), often allowing for the rise of constructive and in depth answers.
Special thanks to David Gibson for helping me edit part of this post.
