So this week Turnitin announced their automated marking service. My first reaction was to groan and wonder how long it would be before we were asked if we’d be supporting the service. Then Scott said something that made me think …
So I propose a new model of assessment to please the bureaucrats.
1. Set the students and assignment and tell them that they can use any text generator they want. Here’s one and here’s another and another. There’s plenty to choose from – the main thing is that this should not take time.
2. Upload all the submissions to the Turnitin Scoring Engine. Tweak the resulting grades as required to suit your students.
3. Get back to teaching what students need to know, not what is assessable.
This week in #rhizo15 the topic is about how to measure learning. Just for fun, I put some of his blog posts through Turnitin. Two of them came back with 0% similarity, this one came back with 4%.
Dave is now insisting that I grade him, but I think this calls for multiple markers. Is his low similarity score to be applauded, or does his lack of serious academic citations give cause for concern?
How shall we grade Dave? Shall we rate #rhizo15 in terms of its MOOCiness? By the amount of connections we are making? By the multitude of blogs and posts and creative artefacts that are appearing? By the fact that we’ve made a prof from Edinburgh revisit some writing she did 11 years ago? (sorry @sianbayne) (not sorry) 😛
Jane had the neat idea of mapping we #rhizo15 participants onto a Google Map (still time to fill in the form with your info, if you’ve not already done so ). 🙂 One of the questions that she asked us was this:
Tell us about your favorite photo of yourself (or post it somewhere on #rhizome15)
What can be seen there? What can’t? (Just a few sentences please … blog the rest!
I replied saying that it would probably be a picture of my cat Lacey in a bag or a box. That’s not because I think my cat is the cutest cat in the world (she is, but that’s a different issue), it’s a decision that I made a few years ago when I was involved in the student occupation movement here in Glasgow. Many of my friends have been arrested for activism, some of them were attacked by other students (I can’t find the link I want, but that one gives a flavour of the attitude of some towards us), at the time it seemed sensible not to use pictures of our faces for our social media profiles, and that’s become a habit.
There’s also another reason for choosing Lacey as an example of who I am in #rhizo15. When we got here, along with her wee pal Cagney, they were poor, timid wee mites who hated being picked up that we fell in love with at a local rescue centre. Ten months later they are confident and affectionate and Lacey now shouts at me to get me to pick her up and stroke her. Much like the difference in me from the beginning of #rhizo14 to now – my online confidence has grown as I have learnt to trust this wonderful rhizomunity.
Thanks to the amazing Kevin (@dogtrax) I am learning lots of new skills. Over the weekend he played some pictures of #rhizo15 and shared his method. I’d been meaning to do something about an image that Simon (@sensor) had tweeted over the last week, and this seemed ideal. So I downloaded Audiopaint (freeware, of course), found Simon’s picture and generated the audio. I am sure that with practice I could do more fancy things, but here it is in all its glory: D&G, the Score.
So I know Alan objects to us using “stealing” to mean “remixing with the author’s permission”, but it’s something I say quite often, along with things like “can I nick a chip?”, although bizarrely I get mildly irritated when folk want to “borrow” things that they clearly cannot give back, so go figure 😕
Anyway, here’s a little thing that Kevin (@dogtrax) put out in the rhizosphere a few days ago with an invite to remix. I’ve only changed a wee bit, just to work out how the software works.
Music by Kevin and Ron 🙂 Why not “steal” this from me and add your own improvements? Hit “remix” at the end.
There’s been lots of talk about objectives and subjectives in #rhizo15 since Dave set this week’s topic. I played around with words such as subjecting ourselves as subjects and objecting to being treated like objects, but then I gave up and played uke. So rather than setting myself any goals: objective, subjective or whatever, I’m going to think about the perspectives I want to take from this experience.
I started thinking about perspectivism because I am reading Deleuze’s Le Pli (in English) with a F2F reading group. I began writing something here in Fedwiki and it is something that I hope to do more of during the upcoming weeks. Leibniz’s monads each have their own, unique perspective onto the world. They don’t have any windows (or at least, in our modification, not any that open), and all of their possibilities are contained within themselves, unfolding over time. Deleuze talks about the Baroque and Leibniz, so the illustration accompanying this post is a chorus of monads singing “Hallelujah” to the glory of God.
So: I have a couple of perspectives that I hope to take:
a philosophical one, talking to others about some of the writing around D&G
a creative and collaborative one – pushing myself to actually make, play and compose songs, pictures and stuff in tune with like minded others
a reflective one – to try to understand why I love this process so much.
So here’s a funny thing. On Saturday I blogged about how I only played my uke in private. If you’d asked me about this at the time I’d have been adamant that nobody bar the cats was ever going to hear me play it. Not ever. No siree. End. Of. Story.
But then Kevin mentioned a collaborative recording site, and Ron suggested some collaboration, and before I thought about the consequences of what I was doing I’d tweeted:
Oh dear, what the heck did I just do? Long story short, this was a lot of fun. Scary, but fun. Read more about it on Kevin’s blog, and listen for yourself.
As Simon commented on my original post, sometimes we have to push ourselves into collaborative activities. So true. I advocate collaborative learning, I should practise doing it more myself.
I’m not a shy person. Ask anyone who knows me – I can be very fond of blowing my own trumpet. And I enjoy collaborative writing – the stuff we’ve been doing over the last year has been fun, and rewarding, and I’ve learnt a lot. But I don’t always learn by collaboration, and I don’t only learn from collaboration, and often I don’t learn best by collaborating – there are some things I learn best by practising, privately, on my own. So I think this is wrong:
One of the central narratives of rhizomatic learning is the idea that learning is at once a deeply personal, individual process and something that only happens in collaboration with others. We are all different, but we need each other. A practical guide to rhizo15
Here’s why. I’ve been learning to play the ukelele for the last few years. I’m not very good, but that doesn’t matter because I only play in the privacy of my study. Well, our old cat used to sit and watch me – her favourite song was the Internationale, which I cannot play anything like this:
… but apart from that my uke playing is an entirely solitary, private activity. And I think that practice is making me, well far from perfect, but a bit better than I used to be. I’ve learnt a lot of chords, and some basic strumming and picking techniques, and I can play a few of my favourite songs. And I have done all of this on my own. No collaboration. I think a lot of learning is like that.
