Ascilite 2010

Last week, three members of our project team attended the Ascilite 2010 conference in Sydney. We facilitated a workshop on "Students' use of web 2.0 technologies in higher education: Good practice in assessment and academic integrity". Eight people from a range of disciplines, backgrounds, and nationalities attended the workshop. We had some valuable discussions about the implications of web 2.0 assessment for good academic practice in higher education.

Here are some of the issues that participants raised in response to the question "what would good practice look like when university students are asked to demonstrate their learning using web 2.0 activities?":

• In web 2.0 activities there can be a shift of balance to the students. Students can have ownership and responsibility over their learning and content creation.
• Web 2.0 provides opportunities to develop students' abilities to self-evaluate and peer review. Web 2.0 activities enable the development of generic skills and graduate capabilities.Good practice means ensuring these skills are assessed: creating explicit assessment criteria that emphasise generic skills and graduate capabilities.
• There are good and bad aspects of making students' work publicly available. Students and staff need to be careful not to make personal information public.
• It is possible to create lifetime accounts in web 2.0 formats: e.g., alumni can keep in contact with universities and web 2.0 content can be used as eportfolios, enabling students to demonstrate lifelong learning.
• We need clear ground rules about behaviour in web 2.0 environments, particularly around netiquette. The facilitator/lecturer needs to model good web 2.0 behaviour.
• IP/copyright issues need to be addressed
• Policy is currently lagging behind technology and is not catching up quickly enough. It is difficult for educational developers to advise academics when policy is lagging.Within each university different faculties have different policies, which can be confusing for students who might be taking subjects from different faculties.
  

We also presented a paper at the Ascilite conference that gave a broad overview of our project. The paper emphasised the participatory approach we have taken, drawing on a range of experiences and perspectives to develop our project resources, which will be available soon. A full version of the paper is available in the conference proceedings.
 
It was a very enjoyable conference, with many interesting presentations, including several papers about the use of web 2.0 technologies in higher education.