ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how particular metaphors for networked learning create conceptual frameworks for assessing teaching and learning, especially those approaches with the goal of “optimizing” learning and learning environments. While optimization of any good thing seems inarguably worth pursuing, purely quantitative measures risk falling prey to an “optimization mindset” governed by proxy measures that do not account for complexity, often with disastrous unintended consequences. This optimization mindset, as described by Reich, Sahami, and Weinstein in their 2021 book System Error, often obscures or erases questions of value and purpose in the service of relentlessly quantitative methodologies. Unfortunately, this optimization mindset, enabled by an increasingly digital learning environment, dominates many approaches to learning analytics and, more broadly, learning assessment. More cautious, thoughtful, and philosophically rich approaches are needed. This chapter considers several such approaches, primarily the 2016 Association of College and Research Library's Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (2016) and Jean Claude Guédon's 2017 manifesto “Open Access: Toward the Internet of the Mind.”
