"Authentic" Assignments

Authentic assignments are all the rage these days, and with good reason: when designed and facilitated correctly, students apply learned knowledge and develop real-world skills.

This blog is an "authentic" assignment for a class on utilizing Tech Tools in the online environment. We are to use it as a scrapbook of tools we experiment with along with our reflections on the tools themselves, the results of our experimentation, and the potential we feel they have in our own teaching. This way, we can refer back to these posts later on. And, of course, whilst in the process we learn how to blog (that's the "authentic" part!).

We were given instructions the first week to set up our blogs, and reminders each week that we should be adding to them. We have now passed the halfway point in this course, and there is a "check-in" scheduled. Since everyone has completely understood the concept of blogging from the beginning and has been regularly engaging in posting in their own blog and reviewing others, this will go off without a hitch.

Except that this is not what is happening at all. Instead, most class members have been almost completely absent from their own blogs (and almost no one is interacting with their classmates' blogs in any notable way) for four weeks. Thus, this week several people are sitting down at their computers and publishing four or five post right in a row, within the same hour or two. Which, of course, is absolutely not how blogs are used in the "real world," but most don't know that because no time was taken to explore blogs, how they are used, and what their real applications are. Additionally, even the posts themselves in most cases aren't original. Since we are required to also post our thoughts about each tech tool in multiple discussion boards each week, most members of the class are simply copying and pasting those posts into their blogs. This is without concern for their role as author, their audience, the format itself, or the topic... you know, RAFT, the very basics of any kind of writing that we've been taught since elementary school.

But, the lack of authentic writing, effort, or even legitimate use of the blogs as a medium doesn't really matter, because the "check-in" requirement very clearly states that as long as the blog exists and has some content everyone will receive full credit. So no, there will be no actual investigation into whether students are "getting it" or not, and certainly no instructive feedback given. No, that will be reserved for the very end of the course when the final grade is given, and the people who have had no idea what they were doing all along will just cross their fingers and hope it was good enough. This is contrary to everything I have been taught about feedback in online courses from the previous seven ION courses I have taken, so it's confusing. I'm not sure how this assignment will end up for the students who don't know what they're doing.

One thing I am sure of, most of the students in the class new to blogging will not learn any of the benefits of it, since the blogs have not been used authentically.