Nils Peterson's Profile

Clearly, a world-class research university cannot long
stand on such a shaky IT foundation. In fact, in
the  generally glowing accreditation report filed
by the Northwest Commission on Colleges and
Universities about our university this summer, one
recommendation read: “The Committee recommends
that Washington State University provide contemporary
information management systems that will address the
needs of the future for its student, academic and
management support requirements.”

First, an analogy: Games are to puzzles as mysteries are to secrets.

Second, a claim: The more you know about a mystery, the more mysterious it becomes. The more you know about a secret, the less secret it becomes.

Fourth, an observation: Schools tend to pose problems to students in the form of puzzles far more than in the form of games. This can result in students being taught to think that there is an answer to every question, a solution to every problem. There is an endless array of secrets that others know and you don’t. When students leave school they frequently find that problems in the “real world” tend not to have “once and for all” solutions. Many problems seem to have no solution at all. People create problems themselves and solve problems created by others. They begin to think in terms of strategies for coping with their problems, strategies that serve their ends but can be expected to conflict with other people’s goals. Therefore a puzzle-based education might not prepare people for life after school as well as a game-based education might.

At a kickoff event tonight in Richmond, Virginia, I got to participate in a panel discussion and hear questions from an audience of college students and professors. One of the questions posed was how those in academia can best put the social web to work for themselves. Far beyond Facebook and LinkedIn, how can this community harness the Internet to be smarter, more efficient, and more productive? Read on for our top five ideas.

If we “crowdsource grading,” we are suggesting that those without authority can also determine excellence.

I’m fascinated that the blogosphere was so annoyed with me for wanting to teach responsible judgment practices as part of my pedagogy. I think it is because grading, in a curious way, exemplifies our deepest convictions about excellence and authority, and specifically about the right of those with authority to define what constitutes excellence.  If we “crowdsource grading,” we are suggesting that those without authority can also determine excellence.  That is what happens in the non-refereed world of the internet, that’s what digital thinking is, and it is quite revolutionary. 

Electronic portfolios can follow a student beyond
graduation into careers and other life pursuits--
but not if the university can't guarantee access,
or if the data won't transfer from one system to
another. A look at how ePortfolios can be true
repositories of lifelong learning.

This paper reviews the corpus of research on feedback, with a particular focus on formative feedback—defined as information communicated to the learner that is intended to modify the learner’s thinking or behavior for the purpose of improving learning. According to researchers in the area, formative feedback should be multidimensional, nonevaluative, supportive, timely, specific, credible, infrequent, and genuine (e.g., Brophy, 1981; Schwartz & White, 2000). Formative feedback is usually presented as information to a learner in response to some action on the learner’s part. It comes in a variety of types (e.g., verification of response accuracy, explanation of the correct answer, hints, worked examples) and can be administered at various times during the learning process (e.g., immediately following an answer, after some period of time has elapsed). Finally, there are a number of variables that have been shown to interact with formative feedback’s success at promoting learning (e.g., individual characteristics of the learner and aspects of the task). All of these issues will be discussed in this paper. This review concludes with a set of guidelines for generating formative feedback.

In a series of speeches at the end of 1999, Lee S. Shulman, who was then president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, urged scholars to give more-sustained attention to how college students learn. The speeches were part of a then-nascent foundation project aimed at "the scholarship of teaching and learning."

Colleges and universities have plenty of tools, but they must learn to use them more effectively. That is how George D. Kuh describes the state of assessing what college students learn.

Response rates vary, but maybe more importantly, so do the instruments and, more importantly yet, the way the evaluations are used. I won’t go into detail about the differences in the evaluations instruments we’ve encountered, but online or not, the quality and fit for a variety of pedagogies is for me much more of a concern than the mode of delivery.