Sharing Knowledge: Building a Community of Practice at Post Graduate level.

Knowledge is dynamic. Knowledge is not static. It is continually in motion. (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002 p10)

The PG Cert has given me the incentive to further explore areas of pedagogic theory and how that might be applied both to my own teaching practice and to the development of my course, and helped me set my own role as a course director into a context from which I can further engage with developing teaching and learning at LCC and UAL in general in my secondment to CLTAD. As a direct result of this, I have been fortunate enough to have a paper outlining my approach to building a community of practice on the Masters accepted at several leading educational conferences.

There are two main areas I wish to reflect on in this statement; the enhancement of the individual leaner and their abilities in relation to the collaborative group learning experience; and the issues involved in pedagogic innovation, particularly in  technology enhanced learning and teaching.

Major influences on my pedagogy

Through the PGCert, I have deepened my understanding and engagement with the theories and concepts of several major theorists and attempted to integrate their insights into the delivery of my course and my teaching, particularly the writings of Donald Schon and Etienne Wenger. Although I was familiar with their concepts before the PG cert, the course has given me the encouragement to examine their work more deeply, and to try to apply their concepts in a more proactive way to my teaching. One very satisfying element of this process has been the validation of much of our course’s existing teaching practice that is based to a great extent on professional experience as practitioners; it has been reassuring to discover that much of our approach, acknowledging tacit knowledge and understanding, relates directly to the theories put forward by both Schon and Wenger.

Another significant influence on my teaching is Michael Wesch at Kansas State University. Wesch teaches an undergraduate course in social anthropology focusing on new media, and has for me some of the most engaging insights into how education needs to respond to the wholesale shifting of the landscape that has been engendered by the rise of technology as a mediator of our lives at every level. Wesch argues that

As we increasingly move toward an environment of instant and infinite information, it becomes less important for students to know, memorize, or recall information, and more important for them to be able to find, sort, analyze, share, discuss, critique, and create information. They need to move from being simply knowledgeable to being knowledge-able. (Wesch, 2008)

I will return to how I have applied his concept of ‘purpose driven research’ (2009) later, but for now suffice to say that his analysis has led me to engage with the relationship between the delivery of my vocational course content and the need to equip students with the new skills of digital literacy necessary to operate in the 21^st century arena of social media.

Tutoring the Reflective Practitioner

Reading Schon in parallel with Wenger, I was struck by the similarities between his ideas and those of the community of practice model. Schon’s concept of the ‘Reflective Practitioner’ closely mirrors the experiences we have had on delivering the course, especially in tutorial sessions where much of the work revolves around establishing a sense of the student as a professional, and much of the debate and discussion centres on how the student can work out the solution to a problem for themselves. As Schon notes, this requires a certain leap of faith from the student,

The paradox of learning a really new competence is this: that a student cannot at first understand what he needs to learn, can learn it only by educating himself, and can educate himself only by beginning to do what he does not yet understand (Schon, 1987, p 93)

Schon’s work has made me even more convinced that in tutorials especially, there has to be as open and supportive an environment as possible, so that the interactions can be as honest as possible,

A student’s learning is enhanced when she can voice her confusions, describe elements of what she already knows, or say what she makes of a coaches’ showing and telling. (Schon, 1987, p301)

A major part of this ‘coaching’ is the use of established industry figures as tutors and guest lecturers on the course, enabling them to share their wealth of professional experience. However, Wenger points out that  it is key to ensure that this is not simply a one way process of information flow but rather a ‘generational encounter’ (Wenger, 1993), in which the energy and excitement of the aspiring entrants to the profession interacts with the wisdom of the established practitioner, in what he characterises as ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (1993). My reading of Wenger and Schon has cemented this understanding that there must be certain equity in the relationships between students and mentors,

An expert will certainly have more power than a novice, but this power derives from the ability to contribute to the knowledge of the community, not from the formal authority to control resources, give orders, or grant promotions. (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002 p43)

The tutorial session  must provide a relatively safe place, in which the students can experiment with problem structuring and solving, building up an Schonian  ‘repertoire’ (1983) of experiences that they can then apply in their future professional lives. Wenger supports this concept that a supportive collaborative environment is an excellent way to share knowledge,

Sharing tacit knowledge requires interaction and informal learning processes such as storytelling, conversation, coaching and apprenticeship of the kind that communities of practice provide (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002 p 9)

Harnessing the power of the collective

A major shift in my thinking over the last year has been in moving from a position focused on the individual learner to one that situates the student as part of a much larger collaborative enterprise. As Kevin Kelly remarked, ‘Nobody is as smart as everybody’ (Kelly, ). Again, Wenger provides a useful formulation of this

The days of Leonardo da Vinci are over. We need others to complement and develop our own expertise. This collective character of knowledge doesn’t means that individuals don’t count. In fact, the best communities welcome strong personalities and encourage disagreements and debates. Controversy is part of what makes a community vital, effective and productive. (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002 p10)

I have therefore explored how Wenger’s concepts of communities of practice can be applied to the delivery of postgraduate higher education. Much of his writings centre on their use in corporate and business environments; but as the concept relates so intimately to the professional sphere, and our courses are vocational, the translation from one arena to another makes sense. However, although in my exploration of the literature I have found considerable research of how communities of practice can be used by professional educators to support their teaching and learning practice and the dissemination of knowledge and experience (Kimble, Hildredth & Bourdon, 2008), there seems relatively little on how they can be used to deliver teaching and learning itself in a higher education context.  In this light, I was been particularly struck by Schon’s concept of a ‘practicum’, and have now taken this onboard as a key underpinning to the course, providing a ‘sandbox’ in which the students can develop their professional practice in a controlled environment. As he elaborates:

‘The practicum is a virtual world, relatively free of the pressures, distractions, and risks of the real one, to which, nevertheless it refers. It stands in the intermediate space between the practice world, the ‘lay world’ of ordinary life, and the esoteric world of the academy’ (Schon, 1987 p37)

To attempt to enhance collaboration on the course, I have therefore introduced a variety of group collaborative projects on the course this year. In negotiation with the students we collectively discussed what possible projects the group might work on and then chose ones that seemed to benefit the whole class. However, these have not been without their problems, especially in one project where the group built a portfolio website to showcase their individual projects. This resulted in a minority of participants carrying out the bulk of the work required to build the website because it demanded relatively specialist skill sets. It was difficult to manage the relative workloads and contributions to the project of the whole class; this caused  problems in assessment too when it was clear that a small number of students had essentially produced the final product to a high standard, their work deserved a distinction but is was hard to justify this level of award for the groups’ efforts as a whole. I therefore explored alternative models for group working which led me to trial one of Michael Wesch’s approaches, which is also the subject of my action research for the PG Cert.

Purpose driven research

One significant issue that I have wrestled with in delivering the course to date is the balance between a practice based, problem solving approach that seeks to replicate as much as possible real world scenarios, with the need to ensure that a level of academic rigour is also applied to the course. To this end, I introduced Michael Wesch’s concept of ‘purpose driven research’ (Wesch, 2009) to the theory element of the programme this year.  This concept seeks to ensure that as much of a students activity as possible is based on activities that have a real world outcome, and that students are involved as collaborators, co-researchers and co-producers  with the staff as expert ‘guides’ and principle researchers. In this way, the learning is authentic and natural. Wesch’s approach stresses that the art of collaboration is trying to find a balance between individual responsibility and trying to leverage the group energy so that the end is greater than sum of parts. Within this, every student has own specific assignment or role in the group, and develops their own project within the larger project. This should result in more motivation and a better project, as they know more about their own expertise and knowledge than the staff, and are better able to formulate their own research questions.

Following Wesch’s model, we initiated a one year research project into the field of citizen photojournalism, with 3 consecutive groups of students from both the full time and part time modes of the course each working on their own individual research paper on the subject, but then sharing their results together in the form of a collaborative wiki. The intention is for the final group of students to also work as editors for the wiki, to ensure that the research of the other students is of an acceptable level; and then to make the whole enterprise available to the general public as an open resource on the subject. So far the results have been very promising, with some excellent and insightful pieces of research that fill substantial gaps in the available research and literature on this area.

The living curriculum

This has led me to interrogate what kinds of knowledge and what approaches to working with that knowledge are appropriate at Master’s level discourse. A significant problem with this lies in the exponential speed by which new paradigms of interacting with the world are emerging, which affect our students not just in their academic lives, but also in their practice fields and in their personal spheres as well. Many of the tools I now use to deliver both my face to face course but more especially my online course did not even exist when we first validated it, nor did many of the necessary critical engagements with the technology that are needed to make sense of it. This throws up significant issues for course development, how to maintain a cutting edge feel that is responsive to rapid changes, but simultaneously retain the rigorous underpinnings in terms of academic quality that university education demands. Matching learning outcomes for a course that was validated 5 years ago when platforms like Twitter and You Tube were unknown to the needs of contemporary media practice is a challenging one. Again, the community of practice model helps navigate this complex issue by emphasising that much of the experience is embodied within the community itself,

What makes managing knowledge a challenge is that it is not an object that can be owned, stored and moved around like a piece of equipment or a document. It resides in the skills, understanding and relationships of its members as well as in the tools, documents and processes that embody aspects of this knowledge. (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002 p11)

I have increasingly tried therefore to adopt a course design philosophy that is organic, and operates as a ‘living curriculum’ (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002 p31)

in collaboration with the student body, referring and negotiating with them changes and modifications as much as possible. I have also taken an ‘edupunk’ (Groom 2007) or ‘best of breed’ approach to finding the most suitable available technological tool to solve the particular pedagogic problem at that point, abandoning it in the future if a better alternative emerges. This approach acknowledges the concept that the world is in ‘perpetual beta’ (Boyd, 2008), with a pace of change that is so fast that course design needs to be flexible and responsive, whilst  recognising Wenger’s advice that the focus should always be on creating a learning environment which is student led

Design and development are more about eliciting and fostering participation than planning, directing and organising their activities (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002 p13)

As much as possible then, in trying to establish a community of practice with the students, we have used the introduction of new features to the course to enhance collaborative spaces rather than imposing a top down vision of how things must be. Some elements have worked better than others, some have met with resistance from the students, some have  been abandoned and others are still to be explored, but  Wenger’s idea of ‘design for evolution’ (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002 p15) now underpins my thinking. As he emphasises, course development must be flexible to accommodate the needs of the students, not a fixed, monolithic structure that cannot be modified,

Rather than designing finished structures, it uses design as a catalyst for community growth and development. This approach intermingles design and implementation, making design a recurring aspect of the life of the community, not a precursor to its existence – a part of the community itself, not an outside-inside activity (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002, p64).

Conclusion

In conclusion then, for me the major insight of the last year has been the necessity of equipping our graduates with a set of relationships both to themselves, their peers and to a wider social context that can guide them in their burgeoning careers, and how a community of practice model can enhance this. Again, Wenger et al provide an excellent summation of my current philosophy in this regard

It is still important to remember that some of their greatest value lies in intangible outcomes, such as the relationships they build among people, the sense of belonging they create, the spirit of inquiry they generate, and the professional confidence and identity they confer to their members. (Wenger, McDermott & Snyder, 2002 p15)

The major challenge for the future for me is how to maintain a course development that is innovative and forward thinking whilst retaining academic credibility and without alienating the students with an overload of technology; my pedagogic research is now focusing on how to obtain this balance.

References

Boyd, D. (2008). Understanding Socio-Technical Phenomena in a Web2.0 Era. MSR New England Lab Opening, Cambridge MA, September 22 http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/MSR-NE-2008.html (last retrieved 25 09 2009)

Groom, J. (2008) Groom, Jim (2008-05-25). “The Glass Bees“. Weblog bavatuesdays. http://bavatuesdays.com/the-glass-bees/. Retrieved May 12 2009

Kimble, Hildredth & Bourdon, (2008) Communities of Practice, vol I&II

Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate peripheral participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Schon, D. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner. New York: Basic Books.

Schon, D. (1987). Educating the Reflective Practitioner. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. 09 2009)

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wenger, E., McDermott, R., & Snyder, W. (2002). Cultivating Communities of Practice: a guide to managing knowledge.

Wesch, M (2008). From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments. Academic Commons http://www.academiccommons.org/commons/essay/knowledgable-knowledge-able (last retrieved 25 08 2009)

Wesch, M (2009)  Purpose driven research, online presentation April 15h 2009

Etienne talks about ‘walking the landscape of practice’ recorded at the iped 09 conference on a flip video camera

Live online research seminar

For some time I have been aware that in most of  my teaching practice I am emphasising collaboration and student centred learning, but that in most of my lecture presentations I am still delivering a relatively traditional lecture using slides etc with me as the ‘expert’ interlocutor, in both online and f2f contexts.

I have been thinking about how to adapt this format so that the necessary ground can still be covered on the course, but that the students can be empowered to learn themselves during the class, with me acting more as a lead researcher, or mentor, to them in real time.

On my online course, during lectures the participants use the text messaging box within the web conferencing software we use to provide a constant stream of feedback, questions, weblinks, analysis etc about the presentation, allowing me to answer their questions and elaborate on points they are unsure of without having to break the flow of the presentation by asking for verbal questions. Of course, due to the virtual nature of the class, this kind of multitasking is a given, as they are all using computers from the onset. However, the idea of students using their laptops or mobile devices during traditional f2f lectures is often met with considerable scepticism and even hostility, with the usual response being ‘they will be just texting their friends or playing games or on facebook’. However, such comments are potentially answered by my experience in the online space.  I therefore would like to experiment with using real time messaging within an f2f class using twitter. Here is an example of Cole Camplese using twitter during a session at Penn State University in the US

My proposal then is to carry out a series of live online research seminars, each lasting for 2 hours, where we will seek to collectively research a particular subject relevant to our practice area, and then build a publically accessible digital artefact using web 2.0 collaborative tools – e.g. wikis, rss feeds, Ning, twitter, Diigo etc.

This will serve as an action research into how to make a typical 2-hour class session more collaborative and meaningful, empowering the students to research a subject that is authentic to them and generating new insights.

The sessions will be evaluated on how effectively they enhance collaboration, research skills, understanding of the Internet and sources, understanding of how to reference Internet sources and plagiarism, etc etc

We will carry out an initial survey of the classes’ web research skills and then a further evaluation after the sessions to see to what extent these have been enhanced.
A record will be kept of the interactions during the sessions by using the digital artefact itself and video recording the project is inspired particularly by the teaching methods of Michael Wesch, Ass Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas University,  in particular the video ‘A portal to media literacy’ and the paper ‘From knowledgeable to knowledge-able’.

1.    INTRODUCTION
This proposal outlines how an online community of practice for the professional photojournalism industry can be established, using web 2.0 social networking tools and live web conferencing to provide an arena to encourage serious debate about the direction of the profession. This would bring together professionals, stakeholders and interested parties ranging from individual photographers, photo agencies, large-scale news operations like the wire services, editors, consumers of images, galleries, academics and critics, educators and aspiring entrants to the profession in the form of postgraduate students and early career photographers. A global network of institutions and individuals from a range of backgrounds and interests would thus be created, which would give unparalled access for students to the highest levels of debate from industry professionals. Our experience in delivering a fully online Masters Programme in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London (UAL) has convinced us that successful communities of practice (Wenger, 1998) can be built online that link industry professionals with students and other stakeholders, but this requires leveraging the synergies between the engagement of real time live webinars with the more reflective, analytical spaces of asynchronous tools like blogs, social networks, wikis and forums. In the initial phase, such networks need support to maintain and develop them until they gain the critical mass within an industry to become self-sustaining, ideally through the role of a community co-ordinator (Wenger etc). The development and evaluation of such a network would provide an excellent case study for the BCE programme in how to build an online community of practice around a specialised area that combines freelance practitioners, industry contacts, companies, academics and students.
The proposal presents plans to establish a virtual network centred around a series of live webinars and discussion sessions presented by leading industry professionals to an invited audience of peers, academics involved in the critical debate around images, aspiring photojournalists from the majority world, and masters level students of photography. The webinars will be delivered using the Wimba live classroom web conferencing platform, a tried and tested delivery system that is ideal for the discussion and analysis of images in an online environment. Wimba has been used by UAL as well as by hundreds of other programs in education worldwide to successfully deliver online programmes. This will be supported by a blog, shared bookmarks on Diigo, and a social networking group run on Ning, which has proven to be a stable and easy to use platform for the building of online communities, especially in education. Together, these various tools will create an open research network. Debates will take place monthly over a one-year trial period, and will seek to ask challenging questions about the future development of the industry. All the presentations will be archived and available for later viewing online. Also, as Wimba is available 24/7, rooms can be easily made available online at short notice for any other debates, discussions or working groups that might emerge organically from the network. The network will thus grow and develop over a one year period, initially under the guidance of an editorial board but then increasingly by the network itself.

Industry Context
The landscape of professional news photography and photojournalism has been transformed in the last decade by a combination of technological changes, economic developments and ethical challenges, creating an overwhelming need for the industry as a whole to debate, discuss and open dialogue both within itself but also with interested parties who engage with visual news media, a process that is difficult to undertake conventionally because of the disparate nature of the profession, spread out geographically and economically with a large number of freelance practitioners.. A discourse between the industry and the academic world is essential to both for critical engagement with the issues facing the media but also to involve those studying photography in debates about its future role in society. One need that is absolutely key is to make the forum for debate global, and to involve practitioners from the majority world as well as from the West. What follows from this is the potential of peer and collaborative learning amongst the student group, staff and external agents and industry contacts, collectively generating a ‘community of practice’ with much learning involving ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ (Lave and Wenger 1991) as those aspiring to join the profession interact and debate with established professionals.

Initial partners
The project will begin with a trial period involving a limited number of partners who already have established a ‘real world’ network, based around already established links between the UAL, the World Press Photo’s educational programme and the Drik photographic education programme in Bangladesh. This network has worked over the last 10 years to develop the skills of photojournalists in the Majority world; a programme that has brought together highly regarded and experienced practitioners with photojournalists from countries from all over the developing world. WPP has delivered training and development to hundreds of professionals in these areas, greatly building their capacity for independent journalism and enhancing the contribution they can make to civic democratic discourse in their respective countries. Together UAL, Drik and WPP have an extensive range of contacts in the industry and related areas, ranging from academics to editors, photographers to NGO’s, critics to photographic agencies. This initial network of approximately 400 students and professionals will be the starting point for the online community, and will seek to link industry, students and academics in the West with those in the Majority world, so that an interactive collaborative dialogue can be established.

There were several really good examples of how Wimba can be used to bring the world of business and work into the institution. On my course, we regularly bring practitioners in to talk about their work, but the focus from some of the other universities was different, and more clearly focused on employer engagement and enhancing the employability of graduates.

Alice Bird and Alex Spiers of Liverpool John Moores University LJM introduced Wimba in 08, and have trialled it out in a variety of ways, on which more later, but specifically in employer engagement they have a programme called WoW (World of Work), and are starting to use various Wimba tools to enhance this. They are creating employer podcasts using Wimba voice, where they get someone in business or industry to describe a typical day in their life, to give students a better idea of the realities of work.
They are also using live classroom to bring in industry professionals talk directly to students in a Q&A format. There was a great idea from the floor where one institution  sends a headset/mic combo, webcam and a small present to everyone who presents instead of the travel expenses they would otherwise have paid, which makes the industry professional feel valued and respected.

Ideas came thru as well of how to use Wimba to run open days for prospective students, and for outreach to the parents of K12 children to help them understand how to help their children.

The other main theme in this regard was in how Wimba products can be used internally for communication within the institution. Ivy Tech Community  College has rolled out pronto to an impressive number of students and staff, with some 17k students and 1400 professors signed up. They use pronto for helpdesk support, with library, blackboard, tech, admin and financial service desks at both a global and local level, many open 7 days a week from 8am -10pm.

LJM also demonstrated how they used voice tools for formative feedback, describing it as their ‘killer app’, for me the real insight was how the same 2 minutes of staff time could be used to write 150 words of feedback or say around 500, so giving the student much more in depth feedback for the same amount of effort, and feedback that was sent back to the student immediately. They felt that audio feedback gave  flexible delivery of feedback in an authentic voice. They also used the Wimba podcast feature for revision, subject expert debates, community building and employer Q&A’s. They saw some barriers, however, in that its non searchable, the length of recording vs engagement needs to be monitored, its not suitable for large group discussions, and accessibility is a major concern.

Finally they had some good stats on student feedback to Wimba, 25% responded that Wimba was much better than other distance learning software they had used, 100% said it had a positive impact on their learning,100% would choose to study on a wimba enabled course again,  and it had an overall 8.75 /10 satisfaction rating as learning tool

So many good lines it’s almost impossible to list them all, but I’ll note a few highlights for me. Firstly, his title, the need to shift from knowing facts and figures to knowing how to find facts and figures, how to analyse them, and how to collaboratively create new knowledge: knowledgeable to knowledge-able.

He started with a great analogy that there was something different to the classroom of today from that he studied in as an undergrad, that there is ‘literally something in the air’ between the students, that being the ‘digital artefacts of 1.5 billion people’, part of the staggering figure of 70 Exabyte’s of information that will be produced this year, less than 0.1% on paper. The pace of change is now so fast that concepts like digital natives become irrelevant; there is no native to something that is less than 5 years old and nobody will ever be native again. His survey of futurist writers gave him his ’20 second vision of the future

‘ubiquitous networks ubiquitous  computing ubiquitous  information at unlimited speed about everything from everywhere  and anywhere on al kinds of  devices,’

One thing that really resonated with me from this presentation was the idea that the way media is generated by the smart people, and appears to be targeted at you, the individual, it’s very flattering to one, it makes you feel special. The real world, however, say mountains and deserts has the opposite effect, it is humbling, because it’s not made just for you.

He weaved into the presentation a wonderful analysis of the changing meaning of a phrase in his
“A brief history of ‘whatever’”, following its shifting emphasis from:

1960s: that’s what I meant
Late 60’s: I don’t care, whatever
1990s: MTV gen the indifferent ‘meh’ of the Simpsons
1992: The of nirvana, there are so many huge issues out there in the world that the response becomes ‘whatever’; I can’t do anything about it.

This culminated in his ending takeaway, an invitation to rescue the word, and to transform it into the clarion call of

‘A new future of whatever – I care! Lets do whatever it takes to change the world by whatever means necessary’

http://www.diigo.com/user/mapjdlinks/wimbaconnect

and here are the references

Boud D, Cohen R and Walker D (1985) Reflection: turning experience into learning. London: Kogan Page
Brockbank, A., & McGill, I. (2007). Facilitating Reflective Learning in Higher Education. Maidenhead: OU Press.Eskow, S, and Trevitte, C. (2007) Reschooling Society and the Promise of ee-Learning: An Interview with Steve Eskow. Innovate 3(6) http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=502. Retrieved June 9, 2008.
Moon, J. (2004). A Handbook of Reflective and Experiential Learning,  London: Routledge.Moon, J. (2006). Learning Journals: A handbook for reflective practice and professional development. London: Routledge.Nonnecke, B. & Preece, J. (2001). Why lurkers lurk. AMCIS Conference, Boston, June. http://snowhite.cis.uoguelph.ca/~nonnecke/research/whylurk.pdf . Retrieved May 21 2008
Schon, D. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner. New York: Basic Books.
Schon, D. (1987). Educating the Reflective Practitioner. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice:Learning, Meaning and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wenger, E, McDermott, R, Snyder, W, Cultivating communities of practice, Harvard business school press, Boston, 2002

but now it is coming back to life again for 2 very specific reasons, one that i have just stated a pg cert in teaching and learning in art and design at cltad, the other that i have been awarded funding from jisc to develop an online community of practice around photojournalism.

So this blog will become a space for me to write about both of these new journeys.

‘If we were going to modify assessment as if making a contribution to their ability to learn after their course rather than during it was the primary need, how would it be different?’

His focus was then on how to reshape assessment policies so that their main intention was to help the learner build their capacity for self and peer judgment to further their lifelong learning.

David went on  to define current approaches to assessment in HE, which he saw as broadly to certify achievement (summative) and aid learning (formative). This often leads to too much emphasis  on current learning to meet requirements of a specific module at a specific time. He argued that we should be fostering the learning needed beyond end of a course –what he defined as sustainable assessment- which should serve to build their capacity to do something over and above an immediate task.

He suggested that we need to change  from:
Norm referenced to standards based
Testing what has been taught to assessing learning outcomes From exams to diverse approaches
Unilateral to active involvement of students
Separate domain to aligned with learning

His argument developed by describing what he called the Practice turn which has followed the reflective turn of recent years, which has these key features;
Practice is necessarily contextualised, embodied and  involves whole people with motives feelings and intentions; and it cannot be discussed independently of practitioners. It is co-constructed in relationships to others and their views of practice construct it –client and professional co-construct their practice together, and therefore only has meaning in light of its social location/construct.

He described the changing context of work, with a shift from the individual to the collective, and that it is becoming increasingly multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary, which involves the  co-production of practice and co-construction of knowledge.
This has created a serious clash of cultures between the complex collaborative culture of work vs. the individual character of educational assessment.

What this means is that we have to build capacity for learning in the future, essentially enhancing  a Judgement developing capacity. This then generates this question for any assessment exercise, ‘What are the consequences of this assessment for learning – does it build capacity for judgements about learning beyond this  course?’
The focus should then be on fostering reflexivity and self-regulation throughout the course, exposing and revealing the processes of judgement, not just thru assessment tasks. This demands that we recognise the variety of contexts in which learning occurs – and that judgement is not independent of context.

One major failing of many attempts to introduce new assessment models is that they fail to stage opportunities for developing informed judgement throughout programmes – there is almost always a failing  to be consistent across modules and programmes

What does all this mean? Well for Boud, students need to be involved in all aspects of assessment processes especially in practising judgements – they must be active agents in assessment rather than passive recipients of it.

Essentially then assessment becomes the  calibration of judgement – learners act on basis of belief in their own judgements need to know that they don’t know – identifying  knowledge gaps is more important than identifying knowledge.

He made a fantastic point about why students often resist new assessment models because students are behaving rationally in resenting changes in assessment because they have learnt how to behave in traditional assessment environments, and then we capriciously change the rules on them. So we need to be able to persuade them why it will be beneficial to them, and how this will aid them in meeting the formal requirements of the course, that we are doing it because its for real, the single most important and valuable thing we could imagine doing with you now in this module.

All assessment activities need to equip students for future leaning – we must ask in what ways is this particular task building their capacity for future learning, how does this help them make judgements.

His advice to achieve this is to:
Actively engage students
Let students give and receive feedback
Develop authentic activities that reflect real world practice
Raise awareness of learning and judgement
Integrative activities across modules and programs
Let students design assessment activities
Realise that the potential for developing capacity for informed judgment is central to all practice
Plan programs and course units to scaffold students to become increasingly sophisticated judges of their own learning
Make the design and selection of assessment tasks a key part of T&L

And consistency is important, we must think about all of the tasks and run the argument for them all – not just one innovative bit and everything else reinforcing old ways.

This started out as a metaphor for how the blog in our teaching  sits at the centre of the various  synchronous and asynchronous spaces we use, binding them together into a coherent whole. The  blogs act as the glue connecting the synchronous spaces for lectures and tutorials with the asynchronous spaces such as the discussion boards and students’ photographs in a real-time environment where posts can be quickly read and reacted upon individually or collectively.

But last night’s discussion, in addition to some other comments by Harold  on how blogs serve as a kind of repository for one’s thoughts or by  Michele Martin as an aid to reflection, and as a kind of ‘back up brain’ in Amy Gahran’s terminology, got me thinking that they effectively act as as the glue that binds together the e world and the tangible world, acting as a bridge between the two, and as a sace to think about how they relate to each other. Harold talked in a post on the work literacy workshop about how his blog is

‘a key component of personally managing my knowledge and that the act of blogging forces me to move from implicit ideas to explicit descriptions of these ideas. The discipline of blogging hones my thoughts and helps me to learn, while exposing these thoughts to others makes it more social, and human. I still believe that the blog is the most powerful social media tool available.’

and Amy talks about how to use a blog for 3 main reasons; to blog your initial brainstorming, to blog your research & discovery  and to blog your interactions. she goes on to say

‘The clincher to all this is to use your blog as your backup brain — or at least as a public notebook. Why not get more mileage out of work you would have done anyway by changing your habits toward managing information and communication publicly? Instead of keeping your thoughts, notes, and conversations to yourself, post them……this information will probably become more findable and useful to yourself as well as to others. Ever tried to find that old notebook where you stored conference notes from three years ago? See what I mean?’

So the blog is sticky, gathering up all of those thoughts, interactions, ideas, research, half finished concepts and glueing them together into a one place, that can then be searched, researched, edited and reedited at any point in the future.

Kind of like having an ‘open brain’ out there in the world for both the blogger and the audience to use, transparent, searchable and open source!