Assessment in Education

The recording of the wrapup conversation for CCK08 is now available... 

I'd like here to briefly comment on George Siemens' view on assessment in education. According to George "assessment should be seen as matching patterns: what the learner knows and what she/he needs to know in order to achieve a degree/certificate". This sounds pretty much similar to what Vygotsky calls "Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)". 

Vygotsky distinguishes between two developmental levels:

- The level of actual development is the level of development that the learner has already reached.

- The level of potential development is the level of development that the learner is capable of reaching.

I believe that the "level of potential development" or in George's terms "what she/he needs to know in order to achieve a degree/certificate" can never be fully predetermined or predicted, given the complexity of learning. In my opinion, we do need a more open assessment model that brings together informal learning, lifelong learning, self-organized learning, and networked learning. Maybe something between self-assessment and peer-assessment (net-assessment)...