In the healthcare context, I see a major opportunities for using technology to support patient’s in having a greater understanding of their own conditions to improve self-management. A particular example of this is the Bant app that helps diabetes patients better self-manage their blood glucose levels. One of the major challenges of using technology to support patients is that there is a certain level of basic computer and digital literacy that is required on the part of the user. If that basic level is not present then the technology will not serve its purpose. Technology in this case may result in a greater digital divide between those who can afford the technology and those who cannot. Often times it is those who are less educated about personal health that require more support but do not have the means to obtain it.
Another example that is more in line with the Gibbs and Simpson (2005) reading is with healthcare students. A key opportunity for technology to support assessments is immediate feedback on certain types of assessment questions. In healthcare, critical thinking and analysis are usually tested in the form of case scenarios. Learning occurs most often when students are able to justify their answer and use clinical reasoning to rule out alternatives. These types of answers are not well suited for technology to support them through automated response or feedback. Although the feedback may be immediate, is it “sensitive to the unsophisticated conceptions of learning that may be revealed in students’ work”? (pg22). As such, I feel that feedback is where teachers provide the most value for student learning and requires the most thought that technology may not be able to support at this time.
Gibbs, G., & Simpson, C. (2005). Conditions under which assessment supports students’ learning. Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, 1(1), 3-31. Retrieved from http://www.open.ac.uk/fast/pdfs/Gibbs%20and%20Simpson%202004-05.pdf
Hi Edwin,
You make a great point about need for qualitative teacher feedback and how it can be tailored more to student needs than automated technology can (at least at this time). Part of the grand problem with automated feedback is that there are so many different pathways that a learner can take, err on, or examples they could give to respond to a particular case; this creates many possibilities for the technology to react to those scenarios. Developers of any modern technological assessment tools, particularly qualitative assessment tools, would have to anticipate that – a pretty tall order.
The apparent inability for technology to read and assess human accounts of information and assess it might be changing, though. Take IBM’s Watson or Apple’s Siri, for example. Though developed for different purposes, not educational assessment, they are beginning to scratch the surface of providing ease of information and function, assessing input and creating appropriate output as a result. While not perfect, they both provide a neat glimpse into what could be possible as computers learn to assess increasingly nuanced human inputs.
Victoria