January+2014

January 21, 2014
Forty months. I have been creating something like this entry every month since September of 2010. I find it a bit hard to believe, and since people often focus on the immediacy and seeming impermanence of information in the digital age, it is kind of fun to realize that I have kept doing this for forty months.

Not that all of my posts are good (however you care to define it). Some are terribly short, others are a little loopy, but for the most part I think that they capture a fair portion of my thinking about learning and teaching and information technology. Just like 40 months ago, I still teach at Dakota Collegiate. I still have a strong interest in figuring out good (however you care to define it) ways to use more infotech more often with my students. I am still learning, and that's a good thing too, however you care to define it.

Like most semestered high schools, Dakota is just finishing up the first semester courses. Exams begin next week, then we have a P.D. Day, and then we all start new classes with new students and new routines on Tuesday, February the 4th, 2014. Wrapping up the semester has made me notice that although we are including information technology in most of our courses on most days, our final exams still look pretty much like they would have in 1984; paper and pen based tests that every student does in isolation. Shhh. No talking. No sharing. Sharing is cheating, and cheating is bad (however you care to define it).

Not that I see an easy or quick solution to exam writing. I know that the idea of "Final Exams" has an awful lot of inertia in the education world, and exams matter here at my school too. Somehow we (read: the broader culture) see Final Exams as a rite of passage, a noble struggle, and proof of ability under pressure. The mythic pendulum has swung back and forth and all around about exams, and many questions arise when we start to put the "Final Exam" under the microscope. For example, in what ways are exams authentic assessments? How much should they matter? What percentage of the course should be given over to the exam? Should an exam stand alone (like an exit test) or be embedded as part of the course?

I know that I was exempted from many of my final exams as a high school student because that was the school policy at Hammarskjold when I finished up there in 1986. Prove you can learn in the course, and you don't have to prove it all over again on the exam. Worked for me, but now I am starting to question exams in a new way. In this age of digital learning and communication, maybe exams are antiquated. In fact, maybe they are counter-productive. What if exams were simply not allowed? What if they were viewed as cruel, unusual, and a waste of time, effort and resources? Going further, how would we know that students were learning if we never gave them any exams ever? Maybe there are other ways to think about how we ought to culminate courses of learning.

In a world filled with information technology, there has to be a better way to have students create authentic products within subject disciplines demonstrating levels of mastery that are better than traditional final exams. But inertia is a tough thing, and I have more questions than answers when it comes to exams. Maybe I should read some more [|Damian Cooper]. Or [|Rick Stiggins]. Or [|Nancie Atwell].

Forty months from now I bet that that students will still be writing exams in Manitoba, but I think it would be really cool if we could extinguish the practice and replace it with something newer, better, and different. Exams are an ok ritual, but there has to be a better way to showcase what students are learning. Information technology has a role to play in all of this, and so does sharing. We know that as people we are stronger together, and that the "weak link" metaphor does not apply since we are almost always organized in networks and families and schools, but rarely in chains. Maybe we can learn a new way to demonstrate what we have learned together; an evaluation that would reveal more about what we know together than about what we contribute as individuals. Where learning is concerned, maybe the whole is greater than the sum of the parts (no matter how you define them).