Friday, March 21, 2008

e-portfolios and e-assessment


Richard Kimbell came to Jordanhill earlier this week to talk about project e-scape. Note, not Richard Kimble but Richard Kimbell :-) He was taking about e-portfolios and e-assessment. I made some notes as he was talking but the super fast fingers of Ewan McIntosh have done a much better job of summarising what was said than I could have managed.

So instead of summarising all that was said, I want to consider briefly the idea of e-assessment he introduced. If I were to ask you what you thought of when you heard the term e-assessment, how would you answer? I suspect many of you would think of automatically marked, multiple choice style assessment. That's not what Professor Kimbell was talking about. In the form of e-assessment he talked about, teachers did the assessing. Teachers who knew the syllabus, who understood children, who could make intelligent and informed decisions about children's performance. In one picture of e-assessment, you have technology being used to dis-empower teachers - to reduce them to the level of technicians supervising students. The version of e-assessment Professor Kimbell talked about used technology to support teachers - to allow them to do their job more effectively.

I know which model I prefer.


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