eLearning For Teachers: Di Goodman (Epoff)

Last week I attended the UNSW Winter Partnership “Technology Based Teaching and Learning Conference” at Kensington. The School of Education presented two days of workshops and lectures covering ICT pedagogies and current research related to eLearning in our schools.The conference was valuable for me in terms of my role as Director of eLearning as well as a classroom teacher.

Dr Matthew Clarke’s Plenary address explored the idea of technology as a ‘fix’ for education and questioned its potential as a tool to change the world. He proposed that the rise of educational technology is increasingly ‘commercialising’ education and warned that it must be perceived as nothing more than a tool. Its relevance should be determined by asking: Does it add pedagogical depth? Clarke cited a 2007 research project that surmised the slowness of teachers to take up ICT as the result of their need to reflect on the pedagogical efficiacy and potential prior to adopting, rather than technophobia. He maintains that the way forward with technology in our classrooms should proceed via evolution as opposed to revolution.

One of the most enlightening points of his presentation for me, provided a light-bulb moment when he explained that children see technological devices as cultural forms whereas we see them as technology! This perception is crucial to understanding the huge divide between the perceptions of students and their teachers. Schools need to adopt technology, not for the sake of having whizz bang devices and hardware, but for its potential as a cultural form that allows teachers to create learning environments and experiences that match the needs and ‘intelligences’ of their students.

Learning Technologies 2008 Conference
Friday 7th November

Nancy White:

Full Circle Associates: Stewarding Technology for Communities

This workshop was delivered via videoconference.

Nancy White started Full Circle to provide assistance to business through internet technologies. Her research and specialization focuses on how technology creates learning in communities.

Stewarding technologies for communities is all about learning together. During her research technologies have changed rapidly and she realizes the need to focus on pedagogies – the way people learn with technology, rather than the technology itself.

She outlines different ways of perceiving communities:
•    Learning communities
•    Knowledge Networks
•    Communities of Practice
•    Online Communities

Communities involve me, we and many:

Me: the individual (personal identity, interest trajectory
We: communities (bounded membership group identity shared interest
Many: networks (boundaryless, fuzzy, intersecting interests

These ideas have opened up new areas of understanding in relation to technologies:

Technologies enable people to:
•    Discover and appropriate
•    Build communities
•    Create identities

Key roles in forming communities:
•    Community leaders
•    Technology stewards: people with enough experience working with communities and enough knowledge of technology to support the community in using the technology. Selecting and configuring technology as well as supporting its use in the community. This role is about guiding learning, noticing things and making them happen now for individuals.

•    Network weavers
Read her great book “ Digital Habitat: Stewarding Technology for Communities”: an ecological view of technology in communities

Important polarities of communities:
Togetherness – Separateness: shifting engagement from the group to the individual
Interacting – Publishing: conversing, experimenting, practicing, learning, planning and the tools and processes used to publish
Individual – Group: designed for groups, experienced as individuals. Does not imply homogeneity: need for customization when individual outcomes are required. Multimembership requires attention to both.

Orientations - selecting appropriate tools to support a community:
Develop community activities oriented to:
•    Meetings
•    Open-ended conversations
•    Projects
•    Access to expertise
•    Relationships
•    Context
•    Community cultivation
•    Individual participation
•    Content publication
Steward the activities to nurture the community so that the technology becomes less of a focus and the community becomes the point of practice. Consider carefully the point of the exercise: what is it the community needs to learn, practice, collaborate on?

The technology should become invisible. Building communities is what its all about!

Learning Technologies 2008 Conference

Thursday 6th November

Twittering at the Speed of Light

Howard Effey’s workshop

This is a mind-bending session that explores ideas that link technology with psychology.

In his workshop, Howard asks:

How does technology intersect with polarity or opposite ways of thinking/being?

He mentions some possible polarities to illustrate his point:

- Masculine and feminine

- Introversion and extraversion

I think he is suggesting that technology can shift our way of thinking and being, and can alter previous ideas about ourselves and our personas, enabling us to interact and develop knowledge about ourselves in new ways.

He seems to be saying that technology allows us to exchange information to reduce the distance between ‘opposite’ ideas of ourselves and others.

Perhaps he is referring to the ways in which we use technology to explore aspects of ourselves in ways we may not have previously been able to. For example, when we create avatars online, we can choose to reinvent ourselves and experience opposite ways of being, acting and interacting with others, in virtual worlds closely aligned with reality.

As a counsellor he recognizes that young people often interface online in a more extraverted manner.

Howard refers to Twitter and its potential to develop an exchange of information that furthers our sense of knowing and connectedness. He sees a significance in these new ways of ‘knowing’ and relates them to very traditional ways of knowing - ie intuitive knowing. Twitter has the potential to carry information faster than most other ways. He likens it to being a passenger on an ‘indian train’! During the US election, Twitter was used to exchange information and forecast news.

Twitterers can break news to the world faster than traditional media sources can. I remember when China was devastated by an earthquake in May 2008. Twitter was recorded as beating the media in breaking the news to the world. The following article points out however, that whilst speed is the issue here, quality of journalism isnt.

article: Twitter didnt beat the media: it was quicker

I think that perhaps the point of all this, is that networks like Twitter enable instant connectivity to cyber spaces where our identity and persona can be stretched to the point of our imagination. Exchange of information is potentially lightning-fast, personal and instant. Our fellow twitterers are at our fingertips.

I have written this article in response to the Learning Technologies User Group’s online pre-conference forum of the same name. I am attending the LTUG Conference in QLD from 5th-7th November 2008.

Has technology Revolutionized Education?

Technology will revolutionize education when it is used as a wholesale instrument of pedagogy, rather than as a resource.

Technology on its own is of little benefit to many teachers: a data projector is a good substitute for an overhead projector, perhaps. Unfortunately I have observed this in many secondary and tertiary classrooms.

If real change is to take place, teachers need to learn how to effectively use technology as a tool for student learning, rather than use it merely to display resources or source information. In most Australian schools, a digital education revolution seems light years away!

Installing computers in any number of classrooms will not effect change until teachers change their way of teaching. This can be achieved through subtle shifts in pedagogies: posing questions that encourage students to use computers to discuss-collaborate-research-interact-analyze-answer problems-present solutions, rather than source information-find facts-copy-paste-print.

The key is to create a paradigm shift through pedagogy and teaching practice so that the way our students learn is revolutionized! The shift toward student-centred, problem-based learning environments will empower Gen Z and Y students to do what they do best: use technology as a primary language to learn everything they need to know, just-in-time. For these new generations of students, authentic learning is technology-centred and their chief native language is digital.

Educators can theorize the need for change and manufacturers can invent amazing whizz-bang technology, but the revolution will not even begin to take shape until teachers are assisted and supported in the process of creating new pedagogies to embrace ICT as a learning tool in their classrooms.

The real revolution must be facilitated by administrative bodies and governments, not merely through the installation of hardware, but more importantly, through the supply of ICT focused professional development opportunities and support for teachers.

The technology itself will not inspire revolution. However, the meaningful use of technology may revolutionize education. Such a revolution will be human-centred, driven not by the technology itself, but by the wisdom and insight of teachers, and the enthusiasm and engagement of their students.

In November I will be attending the 2008 Learning Technologies Conference, where George Siemens will be the keynote speaker.

George is a prominent writer and researcher on learning, networks, technology and organizational effectiveness in digital environments. He is the author of Knowing Knowledge, an exploration of how the context and characteristics of knowledge have changed and what it means to organizations today.

Read more about George and his ideas at these web spaces: eLearnspace, Connectivism and Knowing Knowledge.

In his session George will explore the seemingly obvious ‘networks and connections as the foundation of learning’ and present new perspectives on how to foster deep, critical, understanding through effective implementation of learning networks. He will address:

• What are the characteristics of learning networks?
• How do they differ from social networks?
• What types of attributes are evident in conceptual networks versus social networks?
• What about neural networks?
• How can educators utilize attributes of networks for teaching and learning?
• How do we foster networks of a particular type to serve intended learning goals?

Check out his webspace: it has amazing links to events, articles, interviews, sites and blogs

eLearnspace: everything technology

His elearnspace blog includes daily posts on a wide range of eLearning topics