The new JISC guide Effective Assessment in a Digital Age has just been published. Assessment lies at the heart of the learning experience and this guide draws together recent JISC reports and case studies to explore the relationship between technology-enhanced assessment and feedback practices and meaningful, well-supported learning experiences. Effective Assessment in a Digital Age complements the excellent  Effective Practice in a Digital Age, the 2009 JISC guide to learning and teaching with technology, and Effective practice with e-Assessment (JISC 2007) by focusing on the potential enhancement to assessment and feedback practices offered by both purpose-designed and more familiar technologies.

Many of you will have come across Wordle a web site that generates “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. Worldle describes itself as a ‘toy’ but may have a more serious application. Derek Morrison, one of the authors of Transforming Higher Education Through Technology Enhanced Learning a new book from the The Higher Education Academy has used  Wordle to generate a visual representation of the text for each chapter. As he says “As well as providing an aesthetic and navigation artifact for web sites they may also provide useful meta information about the relative emphases in the content”, and in his blog entry provides links to some other educational suggestions for Wordle.

I recently started a Masters course at the Open University in Technology-enhanced learning and was pleased to see one of the first references for discussion came from Dr Ian Rowlands who is at the Centre for Publishing here at UCL. The focus was a fascinating 2008 report Information behaviour of the researcher of the future commissioned by the British Library and the JISC about the ‘Google Generation‘ born after 1993 and described by Dr Rowlands as ‘brought up in an immersive, rich and media-interactive culture’.

The report was highlighted again following UCL’s involvement with the recent BBC2 series The Virtual Revolution.

The aim of the report was to find out if there was something ‘qualitatively different’ about this new generation and if so, as they migrate through school, university and become academics and researchers, what should the British Library be doing to cope with those changes. The team analysed a number of websites young people used and identified a distinctive pattern of search behaviour.

In a UCL interview Prof David Nicholas, Head of UCL Information Studies, suggests young users “skitter over the surface of the web rather than going deep into particular areas.. they don’t understand how to evaluate information – they have developed a ‘pick and mix’ mentality”. Of course without longitudinal studies it is hard to say this is really ‘different’. Furthermore the ‘generation’ terminology may be misleading. As Prof Nicholas remarks “adults behave similarly – we’ve all become the ‘Google generation’…it’s the way we all work these days”.

Dr Rowlands presents the research in an Open University webcast The Google Generation A Crisis of Information Literacy?.

The 2010 Horizon Report, an ongoing EDUCAUSE-related initiative,  is just out and attempts to answer the question “what’s next for technology in HE”? By reviewing expert articles and research the report identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative inquiry on college and university campuses within the next five years. And a fascinating read it is too. The key trends are open source content, mobile access, cloud computing and collaborative work. Critical challenges are how to prepare students for their future lives, new scholarly forms of research, the need for digital media literacy and of course limited funds. The six technologies to watch are mobile computing and open content on the immediate horizon, electronic books and simple augmented reality (e.g. GPS map overlays) in the medium term and gesture based computing and visual data analysis (of large and complex data sets) over the next few years.