China!

Not a standard topic for Grid Knowledge, but I did go for a symposium on creating positive change, so I'm making the leap that anyone interested in emerging trends will be fascinated by the sites, smells, sounds and solutions now seen in the world's new super-power.

Amazing, astounding, breath-taking. A new China. It was an enchanting trip, better told with 100 pictures than 1,000 words so here's my Picassa sets semi-sorted and labelled:

• Sias and the World Academy for the Future of Women Symposium
• Xi'an and the Terra Cotta Warriors
• Beijing
• Shanghai
• The Shaolin Temple, birthplace of Kung Fu, and high in the mountains near Zhengzhou.

Now the words, for there are so many stories and so much learned:
At Sias International University (site of the WAFW symposium), I saw college students studying from 6am til 11pm. At Xi'an, I saw a city weaving it's place as ancient city with a new focus on smart industry.

In Beijing, I saw a city reinventing itself overnight. Light rail anywhere you might want to go, installed in a few short years. (In Phoenix, we fight for years to run one short line and still quibble over the value of public transportation in a West owned by the wealthiest drivers.) Beijing was Ming's Tomb and the Forbidden City; the Summer Palace and lessons from Dr. Tea. It was the crazy, all-night "walking street" of food and trinkets and treasures. It was elegant meals and live centipedes eaten on a stick. It was breath-taking.

In Shanghai, oh the sites and sounds and smells and markets and gardens. They say Beijing is China's DC and Shanghai is the mainland's New York City. I suppose that's right. It was exciting from early morning till I couldn't keep my eyes open at night. It was Old Town Shanghai and endless skyscrapers; the public gardens and the crowded, colorful markets; it was high culture and all-night massage shops. It was a shopper's dream, and although I am NOT a shopper, I couldn't resist visiting the beautiful pearl and silk markets and the not-legal designer back alley stores. I loved it all, spent too much, ate almost everything (rank, "stinky tofu", yes; live centipedes on sticks...no). It was my favorite city because I was there with my friend Elena Zee, where she was raised and her family showed me more kindness than I deserved. Plus, I got my colleague and symposium travel partner/pal, Kathy Puckett, to come with me - so even the travel from Beijing (including missed connections and 24-hr layovers) was a lifetime memory of fun.

I can't begin to describe how little I understood what Fareed Zakaria speaks of when he writes about "Post American World 2.0" until I saw China with my own eyes. There, children in kindergarten are learning English. The government is moving to create a strong, modern infrastructure. The people have a hope, energy and enthusiasm about the future that the USA seems to have surrendered to bickering and internal discord. There is excitement in the streets and people do their best or "eat bitter" without complaint, working to create something new.
I want that for my people as well. I want that for students at ASU. I want that love of the future to exist in me.

Not that it was all good. Many believe it's moving too fast, and there are consequences to ignoring problems with environment, growth, relocation, and the taste of capitalism becoming a hunger incompatible with a firm, Communist government. There's also Tibet, Mongolia and the Western China regions beginning to raise up and ask for recognition of identity. We don't hear much about this, and the Chinese hear less, but it's happening. Because the 21st Century is a new time and a new story for China.

It went by too fast: I saw so much, learned so much, have already forgotten too much. I have to go back, and travel that massive landscape more slowly. Till then, my memories are recorded in piles of digital shapes and colors up at Picassa. They're only a poor simulcra of my experiences over 17 days, 5 cities...but it's a start.

Revisiting Plagiarism

In an age when collaboration, teaming and consensus-based decisions become more important and emphasized in the work place, incorporating these practices into meaningful assessment continues to challenge higher education. How do we know that our students know what we need them to know?

Adding to the challenge, thoughtful instructors attempting to foster digital literacy and the use of technology in rich ways in the course experience find that the most effective tools also make it easier for learners to "collaborate" where not intended by the instructor.

One of the most challenging tools for instructors is the use of online testing. The affordances include the ability to offer more small tests with lower stakes because the burden of grading is lightened. But how do we know they're not cheating??

In "traditional", face-to-face courses, online tests also save valuable class time both in delivery and in eliminating paper return. And they include the value to the student of instant feedback on understanding. The consequences of this transfer of exams to the digital space means we hear more stories of extending study groups to the exam taking. Students gather, enter the exam, and compare responses. Many honestly are surprised when "caught" and informed this is not allowed.

Here, the burden has to lie with the instructor who assumes their notion of assessment and ethical behavior is the same for the students. Unless directly stated in the syllabus or in the directions for the test, collaborating on an assessment may not be wrong in the eyes of the students. If the instructor believes it is wrong, they need to state that. And, once stated, if the instructor realizes that their values and ideas on assessment is not the same as that of many students, the instructor has a number of options. Electronic options; not whining like the crazy fellow in Florida because students had access to a large pool of possible questions and studied them all.

Keeping up with practices seen, technology enables an instructor to prevent collaboration as surely as it enables the learners to compare answers. Especially if the LMS is Blackboard with its plethora of unused assessment options. Creating an exam using a) randomized questions, b) randomized answers, c) pools where each student gets a different set of questions, and d) multiple formats for questions makes it very, very hard for students to compare questions during a timed test. Ok, there's a bit of a tech challenge in setting up these options as each is done in a different place when creating the exam, but ASU has some very good documentation and how to do it, and if you run into trouble, "operators are standing by" to help! Here's a start:

• How to set up a pool
• How to display random order of questions in test creation settings
• How to display random order of answers in deployment settings

Digging deeper, Tom Angelo would ask if the assessment is being used to effectively improve student learning and would suggest we do much more with the technology. Used thoughtfully, electronic assessment enables students to learn more, learn deeply and to create a formative, lasting understanding of the course material. Instead of cursing the technology that creates a different kind of assessment, why not leverage online assessment to allow the student to try and try again to improve their understanding (and score) and to be better prepared for the next course, the next level, the next step in life?

Along with the randomized questions and unique question pools, Blackboard allows a) multiple attempts, b) accepting the highest attempt, and c) many, many formats of questions. Designing an assessment that allows students to examine, modify, and demonstrate what they have learned has never been easier. Leveraging technology in building assessments takes a bit of work up front but provides great return on investment. Tom Angelo would be proud.

Hot off the presses: Horizon Report 2011

Eagerly awaited each year, the New Media Consortium's Horizon Report is out! I don't always agree, as I'm more of an affordance and value fanatic than the techie types that work very hard to come to consensus here. Still, each year I eagerly await, digitally rip open, and comb their effort to "identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have considerable impact on teaching, learning, and creative expression within higher education."

Work hard they do, and always come up with some provoking, leading-edge, out-there technologies that will (they claim) influence how we incorporate technology into higher education initiatives. Check it out and see how some of us will be teaching 1, 2-3, 4-5 years up the road.

With eBooks, mobile devices, augmented reality, gaming, gesture-based computing and even incorporating learner analytics into the stew, there's a lot to consider in this release.

Note on the analytics bandwagon that so few understand but lots are tossing about:

We should start a drinking game for each time we see 'analytics' used to mean something else. Like assessment. Or data analysis. Or accountability. But the Horizon Report has good intention and some reason to suggest accountability and results will be demanded of HE up ahead. Kudos to them, even if the mentioned emerging technology is not about learning and/or analytics and/or emerging technology at all. Not at all. For more on my rant on this topic see recent article in EDUCAUSE Quarterly re Nudge Analytics)

So, could all these hot technologies wind up in the HE teaching and learning stew within next few years? It could happen. Will any of them be the disruptive innovation that changes the "industry" for the better? Not likely. I think that's eLearning, or the market-driven/customer culture of the new proprietary schools, but that's another post.

Read the Horizon Report!