Assessment in Adult Education

Well hello, it has been a little while since I posted on here, actually an entire class! I have been quite busy personally and just keeping up with the requirements of class has kept me busy. Well, enough about me... The current class (ending today) is all about assessment and evaluation. I thought I knew assessment but there is so much more than I realized which has provided me with valuable information in my job position. Well, Jim and I were assigned to be on a learning team together this class with another student, Tamela. I wanted to post this awesome PowerPoint we put together earlier in class. The assignment was to interview at least five adult educators in various types of learning about assessment. Jim designed the PowerPoint, we all worked on content, and I offered the voice. We hope you enjoy (sorry the sound quality is not the best)!

Web 2.0 for this week

My Learning Team (and PLN cohorts) are charged this week with creating a presentation of Web 2.0 technologies for the ostensible purpose of introducing them to adult learners as well as providing a demonstration or even a brief training for those learners on the use of one of the 3-5 online technologies we choose for our project. I've suggested that we take advantage of 30-day free trials for either Articulate or Captivate for this project; the challenge is to learn either in a short amount of time (before next Monday, as usual) but I am bored, bored, bored with PowerPoint.

In the run up to this assignment, we checked out 50 links or so of so-called Web 2.0 technologies (not all the sites were, strictly speaking, Web 2.0 as it's defined) and, although I knew a few of the sites, the exercise of clicking links was enlightening. Really, I was surprised at how much is out there and how many tools there are to move education well outside of 20th-century conventions.

I'm not going to go into any of those sites with this post (so, you're probably wondering, "What's the point of reading this, then?") but it has occurred to me that I would like to use this space to discuss, one or a few at a time, those sites, reviewing them and journaling my own experience using them. I'm inviting my PLN pals to join in the fun -- at a later date, of course.

Until then, we're apparently on the verge of speeding on to Web 3.0, apparently for the sake of making me feel like a dinosaur. For no good reason, then, I feel compelled to share this as an excuse for why I'm asking my Learning Team to take up the gauntlet of using a presentation application other than PowerPoint:



Collaborative learning, critical questioning and decompression

I have finally finished this week's individual assignment (you can view my work here as well as the lesson plan that accompanied it) and am ready to enjoy the rest of the day with some beer, baseball, and barbecue -- so nothing special about the last part, donchaknow?

Before calling it a day (and an end to Week 3), it occurs to me that I worked to include a collaborative learning element into my individual project and, in meta-fashion, asking my students to include a collaborative element into the PBL I designed for them. Additionally, I included two critical questions (one, the aforementioned collaborative element) for them to answer in response to the assignment.

Trying to walk the talk, here, it occurs to me that I need to ask a critical question for myself: Do I embrace opportunities for collaborative learning when they are assigned?

I have to say that I am enjoying this PLN immensely and, it just so happens, the current members are also on my Learning Team for school. I was fortunate that the instructor for this class accommodated us in honoring our requests for team membership. having said that, I have not always had the best experience with learning teams; indeed, I have griped in the past about being forced to work with people who seemed to have no motivation to learn or produce the best product possible but were only participating because they believed they would eventually acquire a credential but were seemingly uninterested in acquiring knowledge or skills.

Many assumptions are made about the benefits of collaborative learning and, I confess that I am largely a fan of the method. However, my critical question for today is: Is collaborative learning only effective when members are equally motivated to learn or is the potential for disparity inherent in the method, where the more motivated members actually become instructors (to a degree) when compensating for less-motivated group members?

OK, enjoy your Memorial Day Holiday and think about your answer when we're back on task. Have a beer and enjoy the barbecue!

Presenting the unpresented

In my last class (Facilitating Instruction for Diverse Adult Learners), my learning team was charged with creating a training for new hires as well as a diversity presentation for the new hire orientation at an imaginary company ("USA Corporation"). I was project manager for the assignment and, being the Type A personality that I am, took on more than I needed to - mainly, putting a shizz-ton of work into a PowerPoint presentation that didn't need to be done.

My objection with having to do PowerPoint presentations for class is that we never really present them; they just reside in whatever archive the university keeps or, at best, on a portfolio site.

So here it is to present - Ta-Da! - the slickest PowerPoint presentation I've ever made (integrating videos I made using MS Photo Story). If you click the above link, it will download the presentation.

Anyway, if you're not motivated to view the PowerPoint (I can understand that), I'll show off the two Photo Story videos. As I said, they were made for a new hire orientation at an imaginary corporation and for the videos, I invented a history and direction (based on the diversity policy the team developed) for the company. So this first video is about the company's history:



The second is about the company's path forward with its diversity policy:



At last! Presented!