Video for assessment

I have always believed that assessment should be primarily for the benefit of the student, not the teacher. I concede that teachers need to know how their students are progressing, and this is very much a part of the assessment process. However, assessment of learning is not as important as assessment for learning. When it comes to supporting a student's progress, showing them what they can do to improve, or perform better is the key. Formative forms of assessment are therefore more important in the process of learning. As I have previously argued, I believe summative assessment methods are only useful to mark an end to a specific period of learning, a gateway into the next stage of the learning journey (and I'm not convinced we should even be doing this in many cases).

In my teaching I have therefore focused on assessment as a means of scaffolding student progress, and I employ a variety of methods to achieve this end. I don't like end of module assessments much. They are there to confirm the level the student has achieved, but more importantly, they should be used to inform students how they should proceed to achieve higher grades next time. This can be quite a superficial exercise, especially if the student learns nothing from writing the assignment.

One recent assessment method I have used is to get students to make videos. Here's the process: Students are introduced to a new concept, presented with some basic content and guidelines, and asked to go away and research more deeply around their topic. Each student in the group is given a different topic to research. They are then asked to create a video (or other form of presentation) and show it to their classmates. What ensues is an open discussion, with tutor participation, to explore more deeply the topic in question. In parallel to this, the student presenter is challenged to defend their perspective, to think critically about their own views, and to discuss the process they went through to create the video. The latter promotes metacognitive processes, because the student has to reflect upon how they have learnt what they know, and to examine their own thought processes. All the students learn about all the topics through watching the presentations, and asking questions. Student presenters receive feedback on their work from their peers, their tutor, and ultimately when they publish their video on YouTube, from viewers who are beyond their own learning community. This forms a very powerful mix and progression of learning through making, thinking, questioning and interaction.

Below are a small selection of the videos my own second year teacher education students have made this week around the theme of learning theories. In this instance, these videos represent the next level of learning to that described in the process above. They have already blogged about one specific learning theory, and have then combined it with another theory to create their own synthesis of understanding about how theories relate to each other to better explain learning. The videos depict this synthesis in a variety of styles. It goes without saying that your constructive feedback to my students on their work would be very welcome.

Read More

                        Stories without words

This week I gave my first year education students a new project. In pairs they were asked to produce a short video - without words - to tell the story of a part of the history of Plymouth. They were given two days to complete the project, and the first day involved a 6 hour history walk around the city, where they were given opportunities to capture still and moving images and do some research. On the second day of the project they assembled their images and videos together, added sound effects and music, and then presented their videos to their peers and the module tutors for feedback.

Plymouth has a rich heritage and is steeped in history. There are many iconic places and buildings that speak of this history including Plymouth Hoe, where Sir Francis Drake reputedly played bowls before sailing to do battle with the Spanish Armada in 1588, the Mayflower Steps in the old part of town, where the Pilgrim Fathers set sail for the New World in 1620, various sites commemorating the Blitz of the Second World War, when the city was heavily bombed by the Luftwaffe, and many famous figures who lived in Plymouth or were associated with the city, including Nancy Astor (first female member of the British Parliament, explorers Robert Falcon Scott and Captain James Cook, inventors William Cookworthy, Charles Babbage and John Smeaton (Smeaton's Tower is pictured), artists including Sir Joshua Reynolds and Robert Lenkiewicz, and writers such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

The students produced several videos varying in format and style, each focusing on a different aspect or age of Plymouth's history. Although they were deliberately given few guidelines, the students were able to interpret their brief successfully, fill in the gaps, and reported learning many new skills, some technical around the use of their cameras, editing and the use of MS Moviemaker, iMovie and other tools; problem solving and creative skills, learning to work in a team, decision making, negotiation of new ideas, and researching the sites they visited. Essentially, the product was less important than the process by which they reached their goal. This method of minimal instruction, maximum participation, was appreciated, and several thought they would apply similar methods with the primary age children they will soon be teaching. Below is a fine example of the work they produced in their Stories without Words project.

Read More

                       Vlogging and learning

Hawaiin educator Amy Burvall is well known for her series of videos in the History Teachers series. They are well worth a view, even if you are not that much into history.

Her recent keynote speech in Texas was entitled 'Leveraging for legacy and cultivating new literacies' and was replete with great, and some might claim, radical ideas. One slide in particular resonated with me, and that was her notes on vlogging. Vlogging - or video blogging - has been a growing trend, especially among the twenty-something age group, and is defining itself as a new genre of self expression in the digital ecology. Even my eldest daughter, also called Amy (Amy Hacks Life - not the name on her birth certificate) has created her own YouTube channel and is regularly vlogging on a range of topics including how to hack life. Amy Burvall outlines 7 great reasons why vlogging is a useful method of reflective learning for students. Here ther are with my own annotations included:

1 - It is personal and facilitates the student voice. It supports personalised learning through self expression, and through the act of thinking out loud and performing one's learning for a public audience.

2 - It is a natural part of the confessional culture. The current generation self discloses a great deal more than those in previous generations, and can be brutally honest in telling of their personal stories. This is clearly becoming a key part of the new digital cultural capital and feeds their perceived need to connect through reciprocal disclosure of personal details.

3 - Vlogging is easy, cheap and fun. All you need to begin vlogging is a video camera, such as the one included in all smart phones, and an topic to talk about. Many vlogs are unedited, recorded in real time, and posted direct to YouTube.

4 - It is less stressful for some. I recall several of my own students recently choosing a video as their preferred format of assessment, because I offered it as a legitimate mode of assignment. They said they felt more comfortable expressing their learning in video format, but of course, as a teacher, one should always ensure that students are assessed in as many different modes as are available. And remember, vlogs can include text in the form of subtitles or overlaid commentary.

5 - Practice new literacies. For those less familiar with vlogging, creating your first can be quite a challenge. A number of new literacies need to be learnt, including video camera use, editing (possibly), audio production, presentation skills, reflective communication and posting content to the web. This is not an exhaustive list, but reflects the extent to which new ways of working need to be learnt to vlog successfully.

6 - Vlogs are hard to plagiarise. It may be easy to copy the ideas found within some vlogs, but the personal signature of a vlog is virtually impossible to duplicate. Many well known vlogs attract parodies, but these in themselves could be seen as original works, with creative merit of their own.

7 - Dynamic - vlogs can be augmented. In this statement I believe Amy means that vlogs can be just the start of self expression through video, and can be supplemented with music, animation, editing, remixing and a host of other additions which can enhance or even transform the messages found within them.

I can add number 8 to the list, by suggesting that vlogging can be very expressive and can unleash the creativity of the person creating it as well as capturing the imagination of those watching it.

Read More

                           Digital habitus

The writings of philosopher and anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu focus predominantly upon the power structures and dynamics of society, and highlight the importance of cultural capital. Cultural capital can be described as the human assets each of us owns, including our intellect, personal navigation of society and its artefacts, our cultural awareness and even our sense of style and the manner in which we publicly present ourselves. Whereas capital (in a monetary sense) is the accumulation of the fruits of labour, cultural capital is the accretion of all that has been learnt through immersion within a specific culture. Education has been described as the social transmission of this learning to younger generations. Cultural capital is premised upon shared symbolism, acting as the social glue that binds a specific society together.

One of Bourdieu's better known dimensions of cultural capital is habitus - the process through which the activities of everyday life shape and order our values and expectations. Habitus is a useful explanation of the way we live our daily lives, including the habits we acquire, and the manner in which we conduct our behaviours.

So what of our habitual use of digital media? What are the effects of our fearsome fascination with mobile phones, our predilection to video games, our inexorable gravitation toward social media? Do these constitute a digital habitus? When we observe our digital representations, our lives portrayed on screen, and our ideas played out in a virtual simulacrum of reality, what do we see? Does the digital trail we leave online represent any part of our real lives? Does our digital presence accurately represent any aspect of the self? In the view of Jean Baudrillard, a simulacrum is a copy that has no original. This is representative of the manner in which we habituate into digital media, believing that we are laying down versions of our thoughts and behaviour from real life. In fact, it is possible that the digital versions of ourselves that exist online are in fact original and have never previously existed. We shape our technology and then it shapes us, suggests Marshall McLuhan. If this is the case, then our simulacra might indeed represent new and emerging versions of ourselves, versions that would be impossible or improbable without the affordances of our technologies.

This discourse is highly relevant in the context of education. Such questions can relate specifically to both the nefarious use of technology, including cyberbullying, sexting, illegal hacking and trolling - and to more appropriate uses, including the creating, repurposing and sharing of content and the use of technology to connect and build new communities. They also speak to us of the means through which schooling has been used to convey to each successive generation the values, belief systems and behaviours of those preceding. Might the digital habitus explain a significant interruption of that age-old transmission process? Exactly how the use of digital media might influence the emergence of new social identities and the acquisition of digital literacies is a subject in need of deeper exploration. As ever, your thoughts and comments are very welcome.

Read More

                    A little more conversation

I went on public record several times this year to say that the best continuing professional development (CPD) I have ever received has been through Twitter. Now it depends on how you define CPD, but for me it is the personal learning you require to sustain, enhance and extend your own capabilities within your professional practice. This learning can come in many forms. My Personal Learning Network (PLN) is the vehicle that carries me to this learning, and social media is the highway that enables me to get there. All of my learning right now, at this stage of my career, is self determined. It is informal by nature and is essentially conversational.

The dialogue I enjoy is accessed via my PLN, often through Twitter, but can also come from LinkedIn or Facebook, Google Hangouts or even YouTube and any number of other of the social media platforms I use. What strikes me most about learning through PLN conversations is that the topics are always fresh, the discussions are on point, and the subsequent outcomes continue the learning process, through blogging, videos and other activities, leading to further dialogue. Blogging as conversation is increasingly popular and there are now numerous global chats on Twitter, many of which identify themselves with exclusive hashtags. Here's a short video I made about three reasons why Twitter is important for educators.


This is Learning 2.0, learning that involves self determined forms of education, the creation of new content, peer production of learning, and of course the widespread sharing of this back into the global community of learning. This ever virtuous circle of learning as dialogue through creating and sharing is what has propelled countless numbers of communities of practice to higher levels of understanding, and is a valid template to also apply to the compulsory education sectors and other formal learning ecologies.

We don't know what the future will bring us, but we can be sure that this kind of learning will continue and will gather impetus, discovering new ways to do things, new ideas to apply, new explanations, and of course - new people to connect with and with whom to enjoy new conversations.

Read More

                   The unGoogleable question

Are there any questions that you cannot Google? It's a provocative question I have asked several times to audiences in the last few days. It's a tough question to answer, as my audiences in Amsterdam and Dublin discovered this week. Try it yourself and see. What is there that is not discoverable, if you know what questions to ask?

If we can search for and find just about any knowledge on the web these days, the key question must be: what is left that we cannot search for? This question has huge implications for education, for schools, colleges, universities, indeed any organisation that has learning at its heart. If all knowledge is now available online, what place is there for formal education processes, for academic courses, for classrooms, indeed... for teachers? One response of course, is that formal education will always have some relevance in human society, and there will always be a place for teachers. This is because education is, and has always been more that simply content. Learning involves a process that is lifelong, incorporating a great deal more than the acquisition of knowledge. Formal education is partly responsible for helping us to learn what it is to work together, and it is where we acquire many of our (transferable) skills, develop specific attitudes and beliefs, and where we are inducted into some of the specific roles we need to play in society.

The unGoogleable question never the less raises some hugely important philosophical questions however. One relates to the nature of knowledge, and how we come to 'know'; another is how we manage and organise knowledge once we have it. There are at least two specific areas of questions that are unGoogleable. In future blog posts I intend to explore each of these and draw out some important principles about how we are living our lives, and learn about our world, in this century. In the meantime I would be fascinated to hear about what you consider to the the 'unGoogleable questions', and what they mean to you. The comments box is open...

Read More

        Preparing our children for the future

In my last post I asked if there were any unGoogleable questions. This was not actually a question about search engines or the power of the Internet. It was a question about the fundamental nature of knowledge. I was interested in exploring how we learn in the digital age and specifically, the constantly shifting nature of knowledge.

My focus turned to what we don't yet know, and how we discover what we need to know, by asking the right questions (I expand on this theme in this post). I would argue that the best, and most powerful forms of education are based on asking questions rather than being given answers. Learning through conversation has always been more powerful than learning by rote or instruction. No matter how clever or persuasive certain so called experts' arguments appear to be about the need for children to memorise facts and receive their knowledge from teachers, we should not be taken in by such rhetoric. We need to see these people for what they actually are. They are dangerous individuals who are trying to prevent progress by perpetuating a restrictive method of schooling that ultimately, will rob our children of their futures. They are self acclaimed experts who wish to maintain control over our education system by perpetuating standardised testing, rote learning and whole class instruction, while demonising alternative approaches such as personalised learning, games playing and problem solving.

They wrap up their ideas in a cloak of respectability and present them exclusively as the answer to today's education crisis. They snipe and sneer at those who advocate progressive approaches to education, as they fight desperately to preserve what control they have over schools. In so doing, they are depriving an entire generation of children the right to discover for themselves just how wonderful learning really is. They rob this generation of students of their human right to receive a good, dynamic and relevant education.

They are like King Canute trying to hold back the tide. Given time, their ideas will fade into irrelevance, because there is a dynamic alternative. If we concede that transmitting knowledge is no longer the sole function of education, if we believe that schools should not be training children exclusively for the workplace, we will see it. Children need to be prepared to live and work in a rapidly changing world where they will be employed (or even employ themselves) in many new and unfamiliar contexts. Children will need to gain a wider and deeper appreciation of their changing world, and need to know what questions to ask when they are met with previously unknown challenges. This cannot be founded solely on the knowledge we already have. It requires the ability to create new knowledge, and the development of new skills, competencies and literacies. The problems our students will encounter when they reach adulthood will be unique to their generation, possibly created by the new technologies they use, and no amount of knowledge acquisition from today's curriculum, nor teaching from today's experts, can prepare them for that. They will need to be entrepreneurs and innovators, problem solvers, inventors and creators to survive.

How can you educate children to be entrepreneurial or innovative? You might do so by creating learning environments in which they can safely take risks and experiment, and where they can fail and learn through that failure. You work with them to create their own curriculum, one that is relevant to their future needs, and one that exploits their current skills and interests. The success of this will be based on being able to frame the right questions to meet the demands of future society.

When my students do their research projects they start with questions, and invariably end up with many further, related questions. In my classes I practice a Socratic method of pedagogy, which includes the setting of challenges. Inquiry based learning is the foundation for deeper understanding. It is the prime ingredient in all progressive learning methods. It is the essence of knowledge production, and the thread that runs through all entrepreneurial and innovative behaviour. It is also the only hope we have for the future. May the coming year be a successful one for all those educators who see children as creative individuals rather than as commodities.

Read More