5.1 - Intro to Pedagogy and Assessment

Welcome to the Ph.D lab in Digital Knowledge, formerly known as the Haiti Lab; for short, we call it the Ph.D lab. This is where we're going to be filming today's session. To our colleagues in the Franklin Humanities Institute, this is known as the MOOC Lab under construction; sorry for the mess. You will soon see why we're apologizing.

This is what our life looks like behind the camera, and one metaphor we've been using in this class is that education always has someone behind the camera. There are institutions, there's planning, there's theories, there's methods, there's ideas, there's pedagogies always happening and supporting the education we live in. You're now getting a good look at all of that. Panning around this is, this is our work life as we're creating a MOOC for you by which we can all learn together.

Welcome. We're back again for the History and Future of Higher Education. This is Week 5, Session 1. You've just gotten to see the behind the scenes of how we make The History and Future of Higher Education happen. And since one of our theories and our ideas is that you learn best by doing, we'd thought it would be really interesting for you to see what goes into the making of a MOOC. Behind the scenes each week we do a storyboard of what we're going to be presenting to you, and what you just saw on the walls of what used to be the Haiti Lab-- and what is now the PhD lab-- are the cue cards we use each week to keep me a little bit on task and a little bit on time as we do the sessions.

As I mentioned in the earlier walk-through, that Haiti Lab is not going away. It's become an even project to do called Scholars in Publics, which is designed to make sure that the work we do-- the research we do-- actually has a potential endpoint in the world.

Let me begin as I always do with a little bit of a recap of some of our biggest concepts, and what happened last week, and a little preview of what we're going to to be doing this week. First of all, the three concepts that I think are most important in the History Future Higher
Education:

1) There's always someone behind the camera. And that's our metaphor for all the institutions, the assumptions, the theories, the people, the nations, the ideologies that bring any kind of learning to us. Learning is never happening in a vacuum. Learning is a almost a consolidation of
many, many cultural practices. Society's consensus on what it wants to teach to its youth in order that the youth can eventually become full citizens in that world.

2) The idea of proximity. Especially as we look at the future of higher education, we're trying not to stray too far. We think it's very important that, in fact, instead of always looking for the most expensive, or the most radical, or the most exotic example, we look for things that people are doing right here in our midst; the wonderful and kind of inspiring things that we can find our neighbors and our friends doing every day to improve the future of education.

3) Our idea of history, our metaphor, our paradigm for history-- or what is often called historiography-- is that everything that's about the past is actually really the present retelling the past. And we have a purpose of activist idea of history; that we look to the past in order to help inform the future. So those are three guiding principles of our MOOC.

A little bit of a recap about what we did last time. We switched last time in Week 4 from the history to the future of higher education. We're focusing in these future-directed episodes on 10 ways to shift the paradigms of higher education. Last week, we looked at digital literacies, we looked at ways to model unlearning, and we looked at ways to rethink liberal arts as a start-up curriculum for a resilient, to use this term, a resilient global citizenship. We interviewed our colleague Laurent Dubois, who's one of the directors of the Haiti lab, about what
it means to be a resilient global citizen.

This week, we're going to be looking at two other main categories. Last week was curriculum, this time we're going to be looking at pedagogy and assessment. In different ways, we can shift the paradigm for the future of education focusing on pedagogy and assessment. Why those two things?

1) Pedagogy's important because how you teach shapes what you teach: it shapes the content, it shapes the method, it shapes the lessons, shapes how we learn.

2) Assessment is important because what you count is a society's best way of saying what it values. If we count bubble tests, does that mean we want the future to be divided up into bubbles? How does a bubble test prepare us for the future world in which we live? Way back, several lessons ago, we talked about Frederick Kelly inventing the bubble test specifically for the Taylorist industrial age, an age of standardization, hierarchy, specialization that was primarily designed to get farmers to be factory workers and shopkeepers to be corporate citizens. How does a bubble test really, really help us in the world we live in now, in the "Do It Yourself", interactive world that's happened since April 22nd, 1993 when the Mosaic 1.0 browser went public?

Those are the issues we're going to be talking about this week. Stay tuned.