This paper was written and presented at the Open University's 2007 Curriculum Teaching and Student Support Conference. It describes Open Comment, a formative feedback tool we are developing to help build skills in answering questions involving critical thinking in the domain of History.

This paper is about our experiences in the design and development of an open source tool to help tutors reflect on their use of student feedback. This tool, Open Mentor, is a web-based application where tutors can upload graded assessments, with their feedback, and build up a picture of their use of comments to students. In particular, the tool helps to reveal how tutors use feedback in practice, and can help them reflect on their use of language in their comments. This paper describes how we designed and developed Open Mentor, and how it has helped us change the methods and the tools that we use to develop innovative educational systems and technologies.

Assessment is central to learning, yet often in awkward tension with constructivist pedagogy. It is a source of frequently negative emotions, which actively inhibit the reflection needed to make it an effective part of the learning process. By casting assessment as a fictitious place - 'Assessment Island' - populated by a range of characters, objects, and landmarks that illustrate the many influences on the process, this 3D game-like environment can reveal sources of insight into assessment, both through telling stories with other learners, and through dialogue with representations of other aspects of the process.

Open Mentor is a learning support tool for tutors in further and higher education, which assists them through analysing and then providing reflective comments on their assessment and feedback of student assignments and coursework.

Keywords:

assessment

URL:

http://www.editlib.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Reader.ViewAbstract&paper_id=25906

Keywords:

assessment, assessment island

Abstract:

This paper describes an interactive and exploratory environment, designed to enable learners to reflect on their experience of assessment. The environment, cast as a fictitious place ? ?Assessment Island? ? is populated by a range of characters, objects, and landmarks, which illustrate the many influences on the assessment process. This is underpinned by a blog-like narrative ? travellers tell and share stories of their experiences as they navigate the Island. Although still in the early stages of development, by revealing and grounding the abstract assessment process through a well-developed series of metaphorical narratives, Assessment Island will help to provide a more inclusive and participatory approach to assessment in education.

Keywords:

assessment, open comment

Keywords:

assessment, open mentor

Keywords:

assessment, open mentor

Although I've been guilty of the occasional tweet, it's been ages since I blogged. Time to correct that mistake. Why? Well, for most of the past month I've been abroad, passing through Canada and Ireland, and even England (that probably counts, since we live in Scotland). I was at two academic conferences, both in Vancouver, separated by a couple of weeks real holiday. The conferences, EDMEDIA and IERG, were both learning-related, but entirely different in almost every way. We were presenting at both of these, mostly on assessment, learning, and technology, and had a chance to meet with some great thinkers about learning and about the web, including Terry Anderson, Bebo White, and David Berliner.