IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

150 Chapter 7
of the process. Technology becomes interesting when it facilitates new
kinds of interaction among teachers, students, and the external world—
and this does not need to be expensive. To get the most out of technology
and networks, new skills and attitudes are needed—and these either are
free or can be taught. Search skills are important, for example. With billions
of pages and countless educational objects already on the Web, the skill
of understanding how to search for things and how to evaluate online material
is critical. The new learning economy values hits and links: Learning
how to be found and how to link is also a core skill. Vital, too, are the editing
skills students need as they find, evaluate, organize, and communicate
all kinds of media assets: video, photographs, or computer files. Different
ways to share knowledge and experience also need to be explored: file sharing,
peer-to-peer knowledge exchange over the Net. File sharing is not just
about music: It is more important as an infrastructure and a culture that
enables collaboration and interaction among learners.
Design Factor 5: Testing and Assessment
Student-centered and self-organized learning is not the same as laissez faire.
I’m continually impressed by the energy with which students search for
new ways to assess and document their own progress. As lifelong learners,
we all need systems of assessment that can provide us with feedback on
our performance. Self-assessment places more responsibility on the student
than assessment by others, but students are well aware that waiting for
their institution and/or teachers to assess and guide their learning is not a
promising option.
Some feedback can be enabled by technology. One of the most interesting
uses of IT in education is digital portfolios of the kind already in use at
ICT companies such as Sun. Digital portfolios provide an ongoing record of
work that can be continually added to and reshaped. 44 Portfolios collect
detailed information on the development of students over an extended
period of time and serve as what Howard Gardner describes as a ‘‘record of
growth’’: They can include the history of a specific project or a broader picture
of progress over a longer period of time. According to Gardner, portfolios
can be assessed (by instructors, but also by the learners themselves)
against a variety of measures: the number and richness of entries, the