The network offers many ways to support improved student evaluation. Student portfolios can be put online and subjected to peer and external professional review. The network offers many new opportunities to automate and track reliability, increasing the pool of potential evaluators and the consistency of their judgments. It is likely that network-based, for-fee evaluation services will spring up … [This] will have a major impact … throughout the precollege level, relaxing the need to have a nodding acquaintance with many topics and rewarding thoughtful engagement with a few … An automatic tracking utility might be able to note what kinds of information the student was exposed to, sample some interactions, and record exemplary work at the student’s request. The resulting record, itself a hyperlinked network resource, would be invaluable to students, teachers, and parents.
Predictor: Tinker, Bob
Prediction, in context:In 1995, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology commissioned a series of white papers on various issues related to networking technologies. The department convened the authors for a workshop in November 1995 to discuss the implications. The following statement is taken from one of the white papers, “The Whole World in Their Hands,” by Bob Tinker, the president of Concord Consortium, he has a Ph.D. in physics from MIT and a reputation as a pioneer in constructivist uses of educational technology. Tinker writes:”The network offers many ways to support improved student evaluation. Student portfolios can be put online and subjected to peer and external professional review. The network offers many new opportunities to automate and track reliability, increasing the pool of potential evaluators and the consistency of their judgments. It is likely that network-based, for-fee evaluation services will spring up that will have the confidence of colleges and universities and also will offer a far more thoughtful and intelligent way of evaluating student work than the current over-reliance on ‘objective’ tests. This development will have a major impact on teaching throughout the precollege level, relaxing the need to have a nodding acquaintance with many topics and rewarding thoughtful engagement with a few. There will also be valuable network-based tracking and database capacities that will support evaluation. Imagine, for instance, that a learner wishes to have her experiences in one corner of the Web automatically recorded for inclusion in her portfolio. An automatic tracking utility might be able to note what kinds of information the student was exposed to, sample some interactions, and record exemplary work at the student’s request. The resulting record, itself a hyperlinked network resource, would be invaluable to students, teachers, and parents.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: E-learning
Name of publication: The Future of Networking Technologies for Learning
Title, headline, chapter name: The Whole World in Their Hands
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.ed.gov/Technology/Futures/
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney