Final Exam Wiki

I am using a wiki to work with my students to create their final exam later this week. I do not think many of them have done this before, so this is a learning experience for all of us.

One thing I have noticed; while I am trying to encourage democratic education, they have been so infused with top-down instruction that they seem to be having trouble letting loose with this as an opportunity to shape their own final.

I think this will be an interesting experience to debrief with them.
—–
Jeffrey Keefer
Website: www.jeffreykeefer.com
Blog: www.silenceandvoice.com

6 thoughts on “Final Exam Wiki

  1. It is kind of ironic that you might have to give your students a push forward to get them from a passive to an active state of learning… But sometimes, that’s all it takes to give them the momentum they need to get started!

    Good luck with your experiment and keep us updated!

  2. I shall.

    To be fair, while we may speak about democratic education (at least on the college or graduate level), but I have been burned by this as a student at times when I tried to give my own thoughts but what the professor really meant was “think freely and explain what you mean (as long as you ultimately get to what I want).”

    This is what I am trying to avoid.

  3. Are you seeing that the technology is a little difficult for some of your students (not sure what you teach..). I have seen that with my classmates – I am tech support for my group. I don’t mind doing it, but it’s annoying the technical instructions were not a little clearer for my non-tech classmates. I feel like I am doing more support than learning the lessons (CSCL Computer Supported Collaborative Learning).

  4. @Jeffrey
    Assessment is not easy when you have to give more freedom to your students. I guess this is something that has to be discussed from the beginning, to make sure that students will understand that the more they pitch in, the more they get out of.

    @Gina
    Technical documentation is always a pain point. I think the worst behavior is to assume that once it is done, it is done. Technical documentation should be improved over time, so I guess the next time you end up debugging all your colleagues, you should contact your prof with ideas to make the support doc better (or publish your own and promote your services ;-).

  5. Gina, all my students are graduate students or otherwise adult continuing education / professional certificate students.

    The issue, as the best I can describe it and with only my own experiences to go on here is that nifty Web 2.0 “technology is technology, but this is not a technology class.” I still feel the same separation of content over here and technology over there that I encountered years ago when I taught high school.

    I really thought we were beyond this, but I still feel it in my classes (populated by working professionals, by the way).

  6. Mathieu, I agree with you completely.

    Have you ever seen a bird fly into a Home Depot or other big box store, and no matter what happens, they refuse to fly back out of the box?

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