Postsecondary Play: The Role of Games and Social Media in Higher Education

6. The Open Laptop Exam: Reflections and Speculations

henry jenkins and adam s. kahn When Henry Jenkins relocated to the University of Southern California (USC) several years ago, his new teaching obligations required him to oversee a large lecture hall course on new media and culture, the first such course he had taught in many years. He was surprised by his students’ responses to practices that had once seemed unproblematic. Specifically, he planned to give an opennote , open-book final exam, one where students would have access to the questionsaheadoftimebutwhichwouldrequirethemtoentertheirresponses under the time pressures of a scheduled exam. Past experience had suggested that this approach lowered stress, allowing students to feel more in control as theywerepreparingforandtakingtheexam.Inpractice,afewstudentsworked really hard, writing out their answers in advance. Others studied their notes, prepared an outline, and improvised on the exam. And some, for their own reasons , did not study and performed badly on the exam. No sooner did Jenkins announce this policy than he got a question from a studentwonderingwhether“openbook,opennote”meant“openlaptop”given thatallclassreadingshadbeenpostedonline(insteadofusingacoursereader). Given the class was about technology and culture, Jenkins started to break downthecomputerintotwoelements.First,thecomputeractsasastand-alone word processing machine and source for the course readings and previously takennotes.Hehadnogreatobjectionstostudentsusingthecomputertowrite their answers or access their materials. But, the laptop, in a wireless classroom, is also a networking device. Allowing students to use a laptop would mean students could access any information anywhere on the web and more significantly , trade information with each other throughout the test in ways which The Open Laptop Exam Reflections and Speculations chapter six the open laptop exam 147 would be extremely difficult to monitor. An open-laptop exam only seemed to make sense when these potentials were honestly and openly factored into the assessment process. Jenkins became intrigued by the challenges of designing a meaningful test under those circumstances. What would it mean to create an exam that could be taken not by individual students but by networked study groups? Could collective intelligence be incorporated into test design? Could challenges be created that allowed students to demonstrate their mastery of the material through the search strategies they deployed and the knowledge they produced together?Intheory,suchanexamholdspromise,asmoreandmorejobsrequire the capacity to collaborate with others to solve complex problems. One could arguethatlearninghowtomobilizeexpertiseundertheseconditionsshouldbe core to our educational process. But would students raised in a culture where grades are based on individual performance know how to act fairly in a context where grades are based on group performance? As Jenkins began to contemplate these issues, he started to choke. As much as he wanted to be the cool, open-minded teacher, the model pedagogue for the digital age, there was no way he could work through the implications of this radical shift in classroom practice in time to apply it that first semester. Ironically , having failed to create opportunities for collaboration inside the exam space, the students did what might easily have been predicted: they formed study groups outside class and worked through responses together. Many students had written entire answers to the preprovided questions in advance and simply copied their prewritten answers into a blue book. In some cases, as many as 30 or 40 students got the same question wrong and in the same way, which suggests just how expansive the study network (scarcely a study group) had become. The experience illustrated that the question may no longer be whether learning is going to be networked but rather how much control teachers are able to exert over the networks where learning and studying take place. We offer this chapter as a provocation that derives from the topics raised throughout this book. Our hope is to raise some core questions and spark debates about the nature of testing and assessment in a world that is increasingly shaped by the networked production and exchange of knowledge. In doing so, we highlight how social media are changing the nature of teaching and learning in the academy. This chapter draws on the current literature on collective intelligence, transactive memory systems theory, and affinity spaces to reimagine the open-book exam. As we do so, we recognize that there can be no one-size-fits-all solution to these challenges, so we should be clear that the typeofexamonwhichwefocusisforalargelecturehall,introductory-levelundergraduate exam—the kind that is widely deployed, alas, across many public and private universities. Some aspects of collective intelligence are already deployed within smallerscale classes, especially graduate seminars, but...