We have almost completed data collection for our 17 pilot projects. For each pilot we have been examining how lecturers have designed, implemented and assessed a specific assignment in which students were asked to use social web technologies. During this phase of the project we aimed to: field-test our draft framework of good-practice guidelines, identify what more could be added to these guidelines, and develop rich case studies of assessment practices involving the use of social web technologies.
The pilots covered a range of university disciplines, levels of study, and various social web activities:
Blogging in Criminal Law, Cultural Studies, Cinema Studies, and Media Studies
Social bookmarking in Education
Social networking in Languages
Photo-sharing in Communication Design
Video-sharing in Economics and Business
Virtual worlds in Language Studies
Wiki writing in Accounting, Education, Science, Information Technology, and Languages
Combined Web 2.0 tools in Information Management and Information Technology
For each pilot we met with lecturers several times over the course of the semester. In some cases we also conducted classroom observations and collected assessment artefacts and examples of marked work. In addition, we recently ran focus group sessions with participating lecturers. The focus groups provided an opportunity for lecturers to talk about what they learned from taking part in our field-testing, to reflect on their experiences of assessing students' Web 2.0 authoring this semester, and to provide advice about what they would like to see included in the resources and outcomes from this project. The focus group discussions yielded valuable information about these issues and, overall, we have amassed an abundance of data from the pilot projects. In the next few months we will be closely examining our findings, writing up case study reports of each pilot project, and developing rich evidence-based resources to share with the higher education sector at the end of this year.
During July we also invited students to take part in a series of focus group discussions. We wanted to hear students' perspectives on what they consider to be good practice in the use of social web technologies for assessment activities at university. Students were eager to share their experiences and provided valuable information that sometimes differed substantially from lecturers' perspectives. The discussions were fascinating and we hope to be able to report on the findings later in the year.
If you would like to hear more about the findings from the survey and interviews we conducted last year, the Webinar presentation we gave in May provides an overview. The presentation is available here or on YouTube.
