Our research project aims to develop a set of guidelines formalising academic practices, standards and reporting relating to the use of "web 2.0" or social technologies for assessing student learning in higher education.
Web 2.0 forms of authoring or content creation activities include blogging/microblogging, photo and video sharing, podcasting, social bookmarking, social networking, virtual worlds and wiki writing. These activities can be undertaken using well-known tools such as WordPress, Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Second Life, Delicious, MediaWiki, and so on.
Students are increasingly being asked to engage in these social web activities as part of their formal education. However, little has been reported about the challenges involved in assessing these activities and the implications there may be for academic integrity and assessment standards and reporting. While there are various guidelines available pointing to good assessment practices in general, web 2.0 activities are sufficiently different from anything that has preceded them that such guides may not cover all of the issues raised by the assessment of student web 2.0 activities (abbreviated in this blog as ASW2A). Our project aims to address this gap by developing a set of guidelines based on academics' experiences in using Web 2.0 tools in a range of teaching and learning settings in the Australian higher education system.
Some existing resources about Web 2.0 and assessment include:
Bobby Elliott's (2008) report "Assessment 2.0: Modernising assessment in the age of Web 2.0"
Franklin and van Harmelen's (2007) JISC report on Web 2.0 in higher education
Boud and associate's (2010) report "Assessment 2020"
