"That is not it all all,
That is not what I meant, at all."
(taken from T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Purfock and used very cleverly by Gardner Campbell)
I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the OpenEd Conference this month in Vancouver, B.C. It was an almost overwhelming experience. As someone new to this field, I learned an incredible and am still trying to process it all. But I must say for me, the absolute highlight of the conference, was Gardner Campbell's keynote address, Ecologies of Yearning, which you can access here: http://openedconference.org/2012/program/archive-of-sessions/day-1/day1-9am-c300/.
It was as though he scratched an itch that I have had for years. He talks about the "double-bind" of education. For example, we want our students to be creative but structure the creativity out of any assignment we give them. It must be 5 pages long, double-spaced, APA format, cite 5 sources and 2 of those must be peer-reviewed, etc. And while there is a need for students to learn how to write a research paper, is this what we really want to assess? Does this effectively show us what students have learned? Is this the best measurement of learning?
I don't have the answers to these questions but I know I want them.
