I finally handed in my blogging assignment last week – phew! Those of you who are interested can read the whole thing here on Googledocs, and the accompanying blog at www.metablog.edublogs.org.
So…less than a week later and here I am embarking on another unit in the MA programme – and this one’s on Assessment. I’m chuffed to bits that this time I get to share the journey with six other learners; Bill, Nina, Tim, Naeema, Nicola, and Debbie – we had some fun conversations this evening during our session and I’m already looking forward to next week.
In our first session we did a lot of thinking about the purpose of assessment, and some key issues related to assessment.
In my own professional context, three key issues important to me are:
- Relevance and authenticity of assessment (I work with professional distance learning students)
- Development of learning communities to facilite informal peer assessment & feedback
- Engaging students with assessment criteria (for example, through formal peer assessment)
It’d be interesting to share our top three assessment issues… readers - it would be great to hear about yours 
What I found most interesting about this session was that we looked at examples of assessment outside formal education – I found that this allowed me to look beneath my own past experiences and assumptions to get a clearer picture of what assessment actually is. The example of mothers engaging with their children in play was great - we could see a constant stream of assessment, feedback and guided participation taking place naturally and instinctively.
Over the next few days I’ll be posting my responses to some readings, plus having a think about a couple of assessment instruments in terms of dimensions of assessment – formative/summative, formal/informal, etc.
