learning, teaching and research (archive)

Last Tuesday I went to the latest event in the excellent Talking about Teaching series put on by SDDU at the University of Leeds – Challenging or conforming: the art of blended learning presented by Allison Littlejohn, Chair of Learning Technology at Glasgow Caledonian University. I found this extremely useful and got a number of ideas to follow up in my own teaching and to develop further in discussion with colleagues. The presentation and supporting materials are all available on-line now and the session was videoed but I’m not sure if or when that will be available.

A particularly useful aspect of the 3 hour session was the way it alternated between presentation to introduce both the more conceptual and pedagogical aspects of blended e-learning and concrete examples of blended learning activities. This included an introduction to a number of tools for designing and planning activities, from a simple proforma to specify the problem the proposed activity will address, a brief and general description of the solution, i.e. the activity itself, and the aims and objectives, to much more detailed and concrete specification of the activity – its timings, specification of tutor and student activity, the activities themselves and assessment. We then had an opportunity to work in pairs to propose problems in our own teaching and activities that could provide solutions and begin to construct the more detailed designs. The sharing of these problems and the discussion of the activities suggested was very interesting – from dentistry, the Business School and others.  Allison also pointed us to a number of repositories of blended learning designs and activities that have been constructed in such a way that they can conveniently be repurposed for a variety of different subject areas.

A few points came out of the afternoon that I found particularly thought provoking. Allison is involved in researching and advising on e-learning for large corporations including Shell. Self-paced, self-initiated and self motivated continuous professional learning is becoming a common requirement of employees in the corporate world that many of our graduates will be joining. Employers now claim that it takes approximately 5 years in the job for new graduate employees to bridge the skills deficit for operating in this way and that this deficit is growing. It has also been observed that the massification of HE has led to less student learner independence and self direction than was previously the case. What is required was described as helping the students develop their ‘social capital’, in the sense of developing the networks of resources and people that will provide them with the social learning contexts that underpin much personal and professional development and becoming an expert life-long learner. The recommendation is that we look hard and critically at and learn from the parallel developments in e-learning in the corporate sector.

The opportunities to address these general problems by exploiting blended e-learning are compromised by a lack of understanding of the affordances and possibilities the new technology has by staff and by the difficulty of motivating students to work in this way. This suggests students need to be much better informed of why this is important and why it is to their advantage. This is not the first time I have heard a presenter point to the paradox that students are often very familiar with some of the e-tools and aspects of social networking and often operate in vicarious virtual learning processes without being able to consciously bring that knowledge and facility to the more formal learning arena. I think there are a number of interesting questions raised here about students’ prior experience of formal education and the expectations they come to us with. This ties in with the very revealing account about contemporary secondary education given to us by a ‘super head’ at last January’s L&T Conference. On the issue of motivating and engaging students in blended e-learning activities, Allison said the chief driver of student learning behaviour is still assessment and changing assessment tasks and strategies will be key to our success. Although this is probably true it is a little dispiriting, that we will need to manipulate students’ satisficing tendencies to make progress. This is not quite what I would like to see – students and staff working together in a community and culture of enquiry and knowledge construction in a spirit of collaboration and sharing. But then I am a child of the sixties!

I have nearly finished Clay Shirky’s new book ‘Here Comes Every Body‘ that is being much commented on in the blogosphere at the moment. For me at least it helps make quite a lot of sense of the current explosion of social networking, web 2.0 developments and the renewed interest in open source software. It has given me a great deal to think about and it will take some time to work through the significance of many of the issues explored, particularly in the context of HE institutions in the UK. I’ll just mention for now two of the things that struck me immediately of interest, starting with a quote from page 249 on the risk averse behaviour of large organisations

In business, the investment cost of producing anything risks creating a systematic bias in the direction of acceptance of the substandard. You have experienced this effect if you have ever sat through a movie you didn’t particularly like in order to ‘get your money’s worth”. The money has already gone, and whether you continue to watch Rocky XVII or not won’t change the fact. […] Curiously in that moment many people choose to keep watching the movie they have already decided they don’t like, partly as a way to avoid admitting they’ve wasted their money. So it is in many organisations. The systematic bias for continuity creates tolerance for the substandard.

This applies to the protection of large scale investments and the prohibitive costs of doing something else once the system is in place and embedded. Examples would include investment in VLEs where a great deal of time and other resources have been invested in staff development, fixes and fiddles to make it do what you want it to do (sadly this often means changing your methods and procedures to fit the technology – A about F as far as I’m concerned), and for many a large personal emotional investment in the system.

Another thing that I found particularly interesting was Shirky’s report on some research on originality and ‘good’ ideas within organisations. The methodology, at least as reported, seemed reasonably OK. The most consistent source of innovative and useful ideas are individuals and groups that operate across and therefore partially outside of specifically functional groups. In general terms they can see the broader context but at the same time understand the purposes and needs of the narrower functional groups as well as the strategic objectives and needs of the wider organisation. These individuals have a wider spread of links and more connections between groups. Within the more compact and focussed functional groups the exchange of ideas has something of the character of being in an echo chamber of accepted ideas, customary and implicit attitudes and procedures and a natural tendency to reinforce the comfort zone and the status quo. This is a bit of a gloss, influenced by what i see going on around me, but I think is in the spirit of the report.

This seems to me an argument for developing networks and making it possible for staff to operate or at least think outside their particular silos. I’m sure the social network we now have at my University, based on Elgg,  is making a valuable contribution to this end already. It is also an argument for looking at how units already working across the whole University can contribute to innovation, like the staff development and support units, educational technologists, Library staff and teams and no doubt others. It also is an argument for secondments and internal sabbaticals.

This is a comment I made on a topic of blended learning in the new Space Central forum on Eduspaces. I reproduce it here in my own blog because a) it needs more work and b) it suddenly occured to me that it is possible for the creator of a thread in Elgg to  delete a comment – this can happen accidentaly, I have done this myself in the past) and I would lose it.

Misja. I think you are right in the early days when computers were seen as an opportunity to create ‘teaching machines’ – program the machine to program the student, a one-to-one transmission model of teaching. Things have moved on a bit I think thanks mainly to the human networks and interaction and the many-to-many communication that is now possible. However, there is still a tendency to see how technology can be used to replicate traditional teaching techniques (on-line lectures, on-line tutorials). As George Siemens says somewhere, the tendency is to force new technologies into old boxes until, one day, possibly provoked by wider contextual and social changes, we realise that they also make new things possible. I think it is these ‘new’ things that can make technology based blended learning different in kind to the old type of blended learning we have always done in one form or another.We hope to exploit blended learning to help us with a number of important educational agendas. Part of the answer to Emma’s very valid concern that blended learning does not simply add to already heavy workloads for academic staff is the skilling of students to become independent and self motivated learners. As someone else said (you can see I’m not much good at referencing!) if you go home at the end of a day’s teaching more tired than your students you’re getting it wrong. They should be doing the work. We want to use blended teaching to induct students into the research and learning culture and processes we are all involved in, staff and students. Staff aid students learning not by doing lots of different things but by exemplifying what they are doing anyway – research and scholarship. We want students to learn the research and evaluation skills, the communication, collaboration and presentation skills and the problem solving skills that will make them their own continuing teachers, individually and collectively. This means we want to help them to develop their own personal learning ecologies, to blend and exploit their most effective learning techniques and strategies, formal and informal, active and passive, and situate themselves proactively in a network of people, objects and resources with a view to develop their knowledge and practice. I have increasingly come to believe that learning is social, through and through, that formal education has tended to over emphasise quite a small subset of learning skills and strategies, and even reflective learning is best achieved in dialogue with others. So, hopefully, we are developing a notion of blended learning that is more than a set of varied teaching techniques and more work for teachers. The blend is of learning strategies, learning contexts, formal and informal, structured and vicarious, and increasingly constructed and maintained by the students as developing ‘expert’ learners in their own right.

How this rather high blown rhetoric translates into actual teaching practice on a day to day basis is another story we are still trying to write!