Evaluation+and+Assessment

How can new paradigms of evaluation and assessment better support peer-to-peer collaborative principles and the way students learn in today’s digital world?
One place I start is to consider the emerging technologies of data discovery, automated learning by machines, and their potential partnership with humans in making more informed judgments and in extending the range of our inquiry and expression through the process of disintermediation that seems to travel alongside technology developments (e.g. writing replacing oral tradition and leading away from shaman as sole authority, digital hyptertext replacing paper text and leading away from publisher-scholar as authority). This general movement, it seems to me, leads to personal empowerment in assessment as in most everything else.

Then I remember that the "assessor" (As [|Grant Wiggins] reminds us) is a helper sitting next to a "judge" - so if we put the person as the judge and ask how assessments can play the role of assisting in judgment, I think we get on a good track for thinking about how technology can be used in today's world.

The techniques I'm aware of in pre-digital world performance assessment have a foundation in Teresa Ambile check out her "Creativity in Context" for the validity argument about human judgment concerning creativity. You might also find Victor Turner's "The Anthropology of Performance" interesting in this regard.

I hope to come back to add more later after others have joined in.

--- I think about assessment as an integral part of the peer-to-peer learning question. There is a credentialing side of the question, but I'm more interested in the learning side - assessment in the form of useful feedback contextualized by a community. Pedagogy is another part. What happens if one relaxes the assumption that teachers are meeting students in classrooms and explores the “effects of reflective practice within an optimistic, constructivist pedagogy” on learners in Internet communities? see Beyond the University ~nils peterson