VOC I - session 3

And now for the third session, condensed like a can of condensed milk and just as delicious...

Session 3: 16.10.2013

For the third session, the Chair Group was Team Freire and the other three groups, mine included, had presentations to make on various interesting subjects. by this stage, I would say that the whole virtual session flow had settled down as everyone now knew how things went and everyone’s own presentations were developing and adapting according to what appeared to have worked in the previous two sessions. Also, we had all begun to know each other better now, so that helped make a nice, productive session.

Team Piaget: Portfolios and everything about them!

Our presentation was divided into three subsections: What is a portfolio, what is a good portfolio process and lastly, what is a digital portfolio.

Our jumping off point was to see how and how much others have used portfolios. We found that it is actually something that most people are aware of, but haven’t for whatever reason been active with and are keen to know more about, which is great for us.

For me, during the researching phase and in hosting the session, maybe the most useful tool was concerned with what was a good process. It includes being selective about what you put it your portfolio, putting your own personality in there, being sure to put projects and work into context in terms of what you’ve learnt and constantly refreshing the whole portfolio based on new developments or the current purpose of it.

I have in the past taught portfolio classes to students about to graduate and there’s some real gold tips in there that I will use in future.

In the end were able to give a hint about one digital portfolio website, Wix, which allows you set up your own easily customizable portfolio, with many templates to choose from, with a freemium level entry, which is something that I got the impression many people were genuinely excited about.

References:

Our whole presentations and the references can be found here: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0ByzDy4uXDKauOHpTYVNHamRuNkE/edit

http://www.wix.com/

Team Dewey: How to evaluate and asses learning

We started by discussing our own experiences of evaluation methods and then went on to think about the comparison between peer and self evaluation.

One of the really interesting things to come out of this session was the model by John Biggs: Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome (SOLO), which you can see below:

What I think this is telling us simply to aim for a much more nuanced and ambitious way of evaluating, beyond something as simple as (can the student do one simple task) towards something much more holistic and involving the student actively engaging in the subject. That, for me, is the key thing, the student involvement.

References:

http://www.johnbiggs.com.au/academic/solo-taxonomy/

http://www.pontydysgu.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/eva_europe_vol2_prefinal.pdf (a guide to the evaluation of e-learning, by Attwell)

Team Vygotsky: The student’s role in self-evaluation

In this presentation we covered such issues as what is self-evaluation, why it can be useful and how it works best. I must say that I remain yet to be convinced about the role and benefits of self-evaluation beyond the obvious idea that one ought to have a decent enough idea if one is learning or not, but then isn’t that automatically folded into the very concept of learning?

Well, maybe it isn’t. Maybe it is possible for people to blindly go through a learning process without giving much thought to whether they are developing in the right way and at the right speed. And the benefit of becoming aware of this as a learner is that it can take some of the burden off the teacher, so that there’s more than one party involved in evaluating the process.

And this seems to be the real key benefit to self-evaluation: independence! 

References:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Self-Evaluation-Global-Classroom-Whats-Schools/dp/041525826X