Henry Jenkins: How can we test collaboration?
Henry Jenkins asks an interesting question at SXSW Interactive today. Today's jobs and pastimes require people to share information and work effectively together to reach consensus and share information. Can we imagine a world in which schools measure the ability of their students to share information and work collaboratively? Is this fundamentally incompatible with the current mania for standardized testing of individual ("standalone") capabilities?
Posted Mar 08, 2008
Jim Cowie
Responses to this thread:
Jim Cowie:
Shimon:
I think testing this is rather easy. For the best current work on this, look at job interviews. When we consider a candidate for a software developer position, we test this by giving a "do-at-home" programming challenge, ideally involving application of unfamiliar software libraries and web services.
vscordo:
I think collaboration is a given in today's below 20 crowd, young end users colloboraet in the playground and via chat rooms.
Shimon:
The obstacle may be around that word, "easy". That test is easy to describe but it's not easy to execute. It takes a lot of labor, and the people who execute that labor have to be good enough to make the right judgment. Perhaps the reason an analogous approach won't work in education is that the appeal of standardized tests is their ability to remove subjective human judgment from the equation.
todd:
Collaboration may be natural for the under-20 crowd but it is not uniformly well-executed. Lots of younger (and older) people think that they're collaborating, when really they're just wasting time and pissing off their coworkers.
vscordo:
I suppose the distinction should be made between collaboration of the sort which aims to produce and colloboration which is driven by communicating, sharing stories, and interacting socially.
