never mind the optics

One of the two S3 classes has now completed the surveymonkey self-assessment survey on their current unit. I ran the survey as a “kiosk” by setting up a laptop with internet access on a table at the back of the classroom, well away from prying eyes. In a 50 minute lesson, I found I could get 10 pupils to complete the survey. It didn’t take 5 minutes each but I got them all to watch me go through the first two screens of the survey with them on a whiteboard each time they came to class.

I thought I had been smart by setting up two different collectors, one for each class, but it seems that the results are being lumped together as 40 respondents rather than 2 groups of 20. Luckily, I still have the custom data field with the unique identifier to help me sort them back into class sets of data. One of my concerns has been that each class has had a different experience with me and I want to see if this is born in the self-assessment. I’ll share some data over the weekend once the pile of prelim marking is out of the way.

I tried traffic lighting during one of the more conceptually difficult units of standard grade physics with my S3 class last year. The results were encouraging, not because they all considered themselves “green” but because the whole class engaged with the activity and I was able to do quite a lot with the responses I received.

I have two S3 classes this year and I thought that I would see how they thought they were progressing by repeating the activity. The first class I tried it with said they thought it was a waste of time. They thought I had my own opinion of their progress and whatever they thought about their own performance would not change my mind. The second class reacted differently to the idea. They were interested but privacy was a major issue for them. How could they express their true thoughts without revealing any potential shortcomings to their peers. They told me that one of the MFL teachers makes everyone close their eyes and she has pupils raising their hand when green, amber or red is read aloud. They don’t like this approach either.

Today, I decided to spend some time coming up with something different. I have signed up for a free basic account at SurveyMonkey and have prepared a series of 10 questions (the most you can have on the free account) for self assessment. As I don’t know their email addresses, I have had to use a partially-supported method involving a unique identifier at the end of the link to the survey (more about that here). I am going to try the web survey technique this week. I’ll share the results once I figure out what they mean.

I’ve noticed a lot of bloggers making comment on Google’s launch of their knowledge service “knol” this week.  There’s a lot of chatter on how move this is an assault on Wikipedia (here, here & here for example) but is it really?    
There are people who love  Wikipedia and there are others who, perhaps rightly, question the accuracy of the information, agenda of the contributors or the authority of the volunteers who do the editing.  With Knol, Google gets away from these arguments by having pages (knols) written by experts in that subject.   
Google has invited people it considers experts to contribute some knols for their beta phase.  These people will receive a 50% cut of advertising revenue from their own pages and a further element of competition exists in that Google anticipates more than one knol on a subject.  It looks as if authors can expect to go head to head with rival experts in terms of page rank, page views and advertising revenue but I’m not sure which of these is the best indicator of quality from our perspective.  Which knol page meets the need that drove us to the web for inforamtion in the first place? 
I have another problem with the knol idea.  In terms of learning it’s a backward step.  A move that I see more as an attack on Encyclopedia Britannica than Wikipedia.  The knol concept takes an expert who delivers content to the reader.  It’s essentially a traditional education model, the very model that Wikipedia is trying to break.  In education-speak, we have knol handing out information to passive learners while Wikipedia encourages active learning and participation – the Holy Grail of current education policy.