In King's timeline, serious innovation in assessments starts around 1992 with the rise of polytechnics, and further recognizes a much more recent shift toward marketing, and to my own work this is the most interesting development in that span - "Inclusive assessment is designed to provide all students with fair and
equitable opportunities for demonstrating their skills and knowledge
(Hockings, 2010). A higher education should encourage students to take
responsibility for their own learning as a transition to the more self-
regulated learning expectations in the workplace."
Students themselves are the most hostile to this, because it's not as easy to phone in. This results in complaints, which would be less disruptive if not for the very marketing-focused approach to higher education that administrators favor, which is an irony demanding faculty innovation to cope with.
Gibbs takes a superficially even-handed, but implicitly cynical view of student subjectivity as an attempt to outwit or circumvent or otherwise escape the obligation of being in a class. I am calling it this way because I felt like Gibbs was a more articulate and better-informed version of me. His 11 strategies and their focus on listening for cues betray, not an error, but an important position Gibbs occupies, in that he sees that students see that assessments are missnamed. They are not assessments, they are performances, and con jobs. I'm overstating.
If I were to take my usual critical approach here, it would be to say that a deeper adherence to the way game designers would use the same terms that Gibbs uses would make the ideas even more useful. So what would that be?
How hilarious that Gibbs, as late as 2019, writes about how assessments should be careful of allowing a student to "stop turning up for class after the last asignment is due" -- little did he know, students soon wouldn't be required to show up for class at all, so I guess we don't have to worry about fixing it so that they have to. And I'm in a class right now that has a really obvious way of doing this, and it's just pissing everybody off.
This quote from Gibbs is lovely "Assessed tasks capture sufficient study time and effort" - I like that because it suggests there is a way to make students feel that their close attention to the course materials was "captured" in the sense of noted. It's similar to when, in a game, a player can try a really out-there or unconventional approach to something, and find that the game not only accomodates it, but rewards it, signifying that some coder who worked on it knew there might be a player smart enough to try something like that. Ironically (again) it's probably by allowing students to "get around" the curriculum in clever ways, then catching them at it and instead of scolding them, rewarding them, that this would work... but I can't think of an example of how right now, I'll have to experiment...
The word 'tactics' is often used by experienced game designers to help newbies think more clearly about design. This happens because there's a difference between the two -- tactics is what you do when you're cornered. Gibbs recognizes that students see the classroom as a battlefield, as combat where their commanding officer is not on their side. He says students are "more strategic than ever" but it's probably tactics rather than strategy that he's sensing, especially when due dates falling on a Sunday encourage procrastination so that students are up against the last minute frequently when doing work for an online class. My question for myself is, how can tactics be acknowledged as a core part of the student experience, and gamified in order to make them feel lighter, and like part of being welcomed rather than being spied on or tricked or attacked?
CONCEPT MAPS: "Students report that concept maps benefit learning" precedes reports by students at Waterloo who say, as if at knife-point, that they didn't like what they did but that they see the value in it. I know that's not what they actually said, but their word choice betrays their true feelings. Words like "forced" and "challenging" are squeezed out from between their teeth. No matter, I LOVE the concept map and I cannot wait to see how my students (whom I think are amazing) react to the idea. I'm a sucker for anything with nodes.
The pattern I'm seeing here is that nothing our studies in this class recommends is experienced by students as straightforward, and yet straightforwardness is just about the only way I can my students to like my class. I'm not saying this influences me in any way, I'm just whining. There's two kinds of not-straightfirwardness. One is a difficulty that reflects the ill-structuredness of the workplace and the real world, and that's (to an extent) desirable in course design. Then there's MY brand of not-at-all-straightforward, which is a kind of structural gibberish at which my students are taken aback.
Presenter notes that a concept map has failed if it could also be presented as a simple outline. He uses games to draw a complex concept map with no obvious inherent hierarchy, which he suggests might also not be useful.
So, like most things I love, concept maps might be both confusing and useless.
EPORTFOLIOS: I'm looking forward to this, but with 140 students, I can't imagine how to make this work, because that's 140 * x% of students who are going to tell me they can't figure out the interface, whereas if I have them make a portfolio of whichever optional assignments they choose, it won't be as useful to them but at least they'll know how to do it. IRONICALLY (capitalized here because I know I'm using that word a lot, but I'm not using it incorrectly, there's a lot of irony going on here) if I tell students to build the portfolio in whatever way feels most comfortable to them, they'll REALLY freak out.
CONCEPTESTS: I would love to try these, but the example was live and for reasons known only to Him, God has not seen fit to let me teach a live class in anything.
TALK SHOW: Oh Patrick, don't ever change. (But this would never work for me... I guess I should try it first...)
Wittgenstein said games have no single attribute, but a familiar resemblance to everything. Someone might look like their sister, and still have lots of features that are unlike any of their sister's features. Games are not anything else, but they're like other things. It made more sense when Wittgenstein said it.