I attended the fourteenth International Computer Assisted
Assessment Conference (CAA2013) in Southampton on the 9th
and 10th July. As always, the standard of presentations
was high – CAA is one of the rare conferences where I'm always
wanting to be in more than one session at a time.
The keynote this year was given by Don Mackenzie, who I first met
at CAA in 2002 when he was presenting papers based on his TRIADS
assessment software. Don discussed how the web has had a rather
negative effect on the interactive element of computer assessment –
TRIADS was a particularly visual assessment tool, particularly well
suited to subjects such as medicine and geology (Don's subject). It
certainly is true that current web based assessments lack the visual
impact of TRIADS, though QTIWorks, SToMP II and JAssess probably can
manage a decent approximation of most of TRIAD's question types.
Maybe with a bit more HTML5 in the interactions we can catch up with
the pre-web world...
One talk I particularly liked was “Perpetuating
the cargo cult: Never mind the pedagogy, feel the technology”
presented by Lester Gilbert (and co-written with Gary Wills and
Onjira Sitthisak). Lester et al. would like to see better theories of
pedagogy guiding research, go get away from that rather familiar
situation of “technologists
and associates with no effective theory of pedagogy ritualistically
deploy technology in teaching and learning situations with no more
than well-intentioned hope of successful outcomes. It is in the
nature of magical activities that this
sometimes works and sometimes does not…”
The proceedings, including the full text of that paper, are
available online at http://caaconference.co.uk/proceedings/.
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