Uncertainty principles

In the lead up to eAssessment Scotland where I will be speaking later this week, I offer some thoughts on assessment. There are some things you just can't assess. One is creativity. Another is character. Yet another is how tenacious or resilient a student is - do they persist in their learning despite the odds? Attempting to measure such things actually makes a nonsense of assessment. It's a bit like over-analysing a joke. What makes a joke funny? Is there a formula involved? Look at it too closely and it's no longer funny. It begins to disappear in front of you as you stare at it.

In 1927 Werner Heisenberg proposed a theory of quantum mechanics that became known as the Uncertainty Principle. In essence says Heisenberg, you can measure the position of a particle, or you can measure the future momentum of the particle. What you can't do is measure both at the same time. The more precisely one property is measured, (say the Wikipedia article) the less precisely the other can be controlled, determined, or known. Applying this outside of particle physics could be problematic, but let's try (because we're all made up of particles).

So you want to assess creativity? What are you actually trying to measure? A child's natural imagination? The creative outputs that are a result of that imagination? The value of their creativity in relation to that of the rest of the group? Against your own creativity? Against the standardised norms of the creative expectations of the entire society perhaps? Oh dear. You can identify that a child is talented in a particular area and their art is easy on the eye. They are good at painting. They have a propensity to be able to play a musical instrument pleasingly. Can you attach a value to it though? So what about Pablo Picasso? Or Karlheinz Stockhausen? Picasso wasn't particularly pleasing on the eye, Stockhausen was not easy to listen to. Although not everyone agrees with that last statement - even if they don't understand the art of the music - few would dare to suggest that Picasso and Stockhausen lacked creativity. Creativity is a very subjective thing, so should we attempt to assess it?

If you try to measure the current state - the effects of creativity on your emotions, the atmosphere, the ambiance of the experience, you will not discover where the creativity is leading - the message, the genre (sometimes) the theme. What are we doing with assessment of learning in our schools? Are we measuring the worth of the learning, or (as is inevitably the case) the worth of the individual? If we do the latter, we are betraying the trust of the child, because they will own that grade for the rest of their lives, citing it on every CV and job application form they complete. Is this fair? Is it fair that the grades they are awarded do not reflect their personality, their creativity, their tenacity, their resilience, their uniqueness? Standardised Testing and end of term examinations are absolutely unfit for this purpose. They are great for testing the recall skills of students, but useless in finding out more meaningful information about the knowledge and skills of the individual.  And yet we measure children's worth in exactly this way. Unfortunately, in this society that is what seems to count the most. Unless we value creativity, character and resilience (and resist measuring them), we will only create uncertainty in the minds of the young people who are in our charge.

"The person who scored well on an SAT will not necessarily be the best doctor or the best lawyer or the best businessman. These tests do not measure character, leadership, creativity, perseverance." - William J. Wilson


Uncertainty principles by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Computers are useless

The ubiquitous presence of computers in our world can evoke a variety of different emotional responses. Sherry Turkle defined this influence in 'Life on the Screen' when she stated:

“Computers don't just do things for us, they do things to us, including to our ways of thinking about ourselves and other people.” (Turkle, 1997 - sleeve notes)

The artist Pablo Picasso was a little more pessimistic when he declared:

“Computers are useless. They only give you answers.”

His meaning might be seen by some as obtuse, but to me it is quite clear. Computers can be emotive. They have the capacity to create disagreement and consternation. They are both the solution and the problem. This is because computers are electric idiots - with less brain power than a slug. They do exactly what you tell them to do with no question and without reasoning. And yet we invest in them some sort of human intelligence. We talk to the machine, we plead with it, cajole it, we get angry with it, and in some extreme cases, we argue with it and punish it with violence.

Some shy away from using technology because it is so alien and impersonal to them. Others are so addicted to their relationship with the screen they neglect their real life relationships. If we can somehow position the learner within this challenging, dynamic and baffling conceptual field, we may be able to understand why some students have problems trying to use technology successfully. Computers are not much good at teaching - they are much better used as mind tools to extend the mind's ability in terms of memory capacity and visualisation. The provisionality of tools within the standard desktop or laptop are also ripe for use as a means to express creativity. If used well, computers have a deep impact on human learning. If used badly though, all a computer can do for us is to perpetuate our errors.

"My computer may be able to beat me at chess, but it's no match for me at kickboxing..."

Image source by Todd Stadler


Computers are useless by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Giving it all away

How much do you freely share on the Web? If you are a user of any Web 2.0 tools, it's likely that you give away your stuff for free, and in doing so, you make a digital footprint for yourself. My digital footprint grows each time I post new content, whether it's on this blog, one of my Flickr accounts, or YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn or Slideshare. The killer apps for me though, have to be Delicious and Twitter - both give me the ability to make my content highly visible to anyone who might be interested.

Look, as altruistic as it may seem to give away all your content, ideas, lecture notes, videos, slides and even articles and books, for those who actually opt to do so, there are also excellent rewards. Give your content away, and you don't lose it - but you do get some great benefits. I have given away a lot of my content on the web - see for example my Slideshare collection of slideshows and published articles. My reward for doing this is multi-faceted. Not only do I get the pleasure of having thousands of interested people from all over the world viewing my slides, they may also favourite them, comment on them, or give me valuable constructive feedback which can I learn from. Some also embed my slideshows into their own websites and blogs, which disseminates my ideas even further afield. I couldn't pay for that kind of distribution. And as if that isn't enough reward, I sometimes get some really nice invitations to speak at events, or participate in really interesting projects, as a direct result of some content I have created on the web. Web 2.0 tools have that affordance - they make your content very visible to people who are interested.

Increasingly, due to the good offices of Creative Commons, much of the content on the web can be legally repurposed or appropriated for other use. I think this is a good thing. None of us want to waste time re-inventing the proverbial wheel, and we could bear in mind what Pablo Picasso once said: 'Good artists borrow, great artists steal'. So OK, 'steal' is an emotive word, which we probably don't want to associate with, but I get the sentiments behind the statement. A lot of art and music could be said to be 'derivative' - and there have been many court cases and fallings out over this grey area of creativity, but here's my point: I don't mind at all if other people borrow my content for their own purposes, as long as they attribute it to me and don't make any commercial profit at my expense. Many already have - some people have actually translated my content into other languages or used as a part of larger works. I'm an advocate not only of Open Educational Resources, but also the idea of Open Scholarship, which is where academics and scholars not only make their content available for free, they also open up themselves to constructive criticism from their peers. I hope we see more of this in the coming years and I am confident we shall.

Image source

Giving it all away by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.