In his unique style, Derek Keats asks for a grade on his Education 3.0 presentation. Of course this is a bit tongue in cheek, and what he is really after is the very important and difficult issue of how we assess and evalate remix practices in the context of formal education.

In the “informal” web 2.0 world, this is not really a problem anymore. Pageviews and reputations have replaced certificates. If I want to find great photos, one shortcut (in the same way a degree is a shortcut) is to look for the most popular pictures on flickr.com. (I am not saying that the less popular pictures – those are the ones I take – are never any good, just that the flickr.com crowd is pretty efficient at identifying quality, and that their opinion means more to me than a piece of paper that someone has completed a photography course). After all, one of the most consistently amazing contributors to flickr.com is – to my knowledge – a complete autodidact.

However, it’s more difficult for institutions to hand over assessment to an anonymous cloud of people on the Internet. After all: “Who are these people? They might not even have PhDs!” In the Rip Mix Learn project we tried to open up practices of teaching and learning to see what would happen – and found that the traditional ways of assessing students still worked quite well in most cases.

So, in practice, how could a professor at UWC (where both Derek and I work) assess his presentation:

• Top marks for originality of the idea, and presenting it in an engaging way.
• The references are a bit too haphazard, I’d like to see the individual stats linked to their sources, and maybe with Derek’s opinion on the reliability of those sources.
• There are some statements that don’t seem sufficiently supported by the text alone. Some statements I agree with, and others I might not agree with, but without seeing the background and how Derek developed them it’s difficult to grade them. Now, this might be an issue of looking at slides rather than listening to the actual live presentation where Derek might have explained these things in more detail.

So overall – good ideas, great pictures, a solid 3.0!

And I believe that the web community agreed, by making it Slideshare of the day when it first came online.

Posted on September 4, 2008