NetworkED

Live stream from NetworkED event Wednesday 1 March

As part of the LTI NetworkED seminar series, Professor Robert Allison Vice-Chancellor & President Loughborough University, will discuss ‘What is the place of technology in delivering an outstanding student experience?’.

 

More information about NetworkED and the upcoming seminar details can be found on the LTI website.

March 1st, 2017|Announcements, Events & Workshops (LTI), NetworkED, Teaching & Learning, Tools & Technologies|Comments Off on Live stream from NetworkED event Wednesday 1 March|

‘What is the place of technology in delivering an outstanding student experience?’

LTI are pleased to host Professor Robert Allison Vice-Chancellor & President of Loughborough University for our first NetworkED of 2017. Professor Allison will be discussing the role that technology and innovation have played in the success of Loughborough in becoming one of the leading universities in the UK, and the challenges he sees in the ‘uncertain futures’ for HE over the next 5 years.

The talk will be held on Wednesday March 1st at 2.30pm and will be held in KSW G.01.  Book your free ticket for this event here  http://bit.ly/2lgAlSy

 

Ahead of his NetworkED seminar next week we had a quick Q&A with Professor Allison.

 

Q. You have been the Vice-Chancellor and President of Loughborough University since September 2012, how has Loughborough responded to the significant changes that have occurred in Higher Education during that time?

Loughborough has responded by maintaining a degree of agility, allowing us to respond promptly to the expectations of our students and through working in partnership with them as stakeholders in the University, not as customers or consumers.

Q. Loughborough University has been successful in numerous university rankings during this time including being awarded 1st for student experience in the TES 2016 survey, what are the key principles at the heart of that success?

The most important factor in our success has been seeing our students as co-creators of their education and wider student experience and, through this, giving them a tangible link to the success and future of the University.

Q. What role have technology and innovation played in the enhancing the student learning and teaching experience at Loughborough?

In some areas the role of technology has been significant, in others not relevant at all.

Q. The theme of the 2017 NetworkED seminars is ‘Uncertain Futures’, what do you feel will be the most potentially disruptive (or transformative) issue facing Higher Education institutions in the next 5 years?

Disruptive: competition.

Transformative: marketisation.

 

For those that cannot attend the seminar will be recorded and added to the LTI Youtube channel.

You may also be interested in attending our upcoming NetworkED seminars:
Liz Sprout from Google education on Wednesday 10th May
Andy Moss from Pearson Education on Wednesday 14th June.

February 22nd, 2017|Announcements, Events & Workshops (LTI), NetworkED, Teaching & Learning, TEL Trends|Comments Off on ‘What is the place of technology in delivering an outstanding student experience?’|

Mapping learning and teaching

Death Star Logo - No ChalkOur next NetworkED seminar is with James Clay,
on 23 November 14:30-15:30

book a place online

James is a Jisc project manager and was previously the Group Director of IT and Learning Technologies at Activate Learning which incorporates City of Oxford College, Banbury & Bicester College and Reading College, where he was responsible for ILT, IT Services, Business Systems and Learning Resources.

We asked James to tell us more about his upcoming seminar on Mapping the teaching and learning

“Mapping is an useful exercise in uncertain times to think about practice and though any such map may not be accurate or complete, it does allow you to consider and think about actions and training required to change behaviours or how spaces and tools are used.

Over the last few years we have seen considerable use made of mapping the use of social networking tools using the concept of Visitors and Residendirection-by-23am-com-on-flickrts. This was developed by Dave White, Donna Lanclos and Lawrie Phipps into an exercise that could be used to think about a current snapshot of their practice.

The mapping exercise makes you consider how you are using various tools and what needs to happen to change that map, how do you become more resident when using a tool such as Twitter for example.  Or how do you start using a tool which is currently not on your map, such as a professional blog?

The key thing I like to remind people about when using the mapping that this is a continuum and not a distinction between two groups.  Your personal Visitors and Residents map is not, and should not be a static thing.  The mapping changes as new tools are introduced, old ones retire and your role and behaviours change.  The Visitor and Resident mapping exercise in the main covers digital communication, collaboration and participation.

This session discovers if we could we use a similar concept to map teaching practice, curriculum design and learner practices? Sometimes it’s not just about knowing where you are, and where you need to be, but how you get there”.

 

References

Clay, James (2016) Mapping the learning and teaching
http://elearningstuff.net/2016/01/14/mapping-the-learning-and-teaching/

Visitors and Residents: A new typology for online engagement by David S. White and Alison Le Cornu. First Monday, Volume 16, Number 9 – 5 September 2011 http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3171/3049

White, David (2016) Visitors & Residents – navigate the mapping
http://daveowhite.com/vandrworkshops/

Lanclos, Donna (2016) Ta Dah! The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Doing a Visitors and Residents Workshop
http://www.donnalanclos.com/?p=570

Phipps, Lawrie (2016) Mapping for Change
http://lawriephipps.co.uk/?p=8305

 

Constitution UK wins Campus Technology Teaching and Learning Innovation award

LSE has been awarded with the Campus Technology Teaching and Innovation (pg30) 2016 award for their innovative work on the Constitution UK project which ran in early 2015.  The Campus Technology article on the award was published on 17 August 2016.

Constitution UK was a collaborative project that aimed to crowdsource and hack the UK constitution. The project, led by LSE Professor Connor Gearty of the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) in partnership with Learning Technology and Innovation (LTI), invited individuals to share views and ideas on what should be part of a UK constitution in the 800th anniversary year of Magna Carta. The project generated over 1 million words, thousands of ideas and tens of thousands of votes and resulted in the writing of an 800 word crowdsourced constitution of the UK.  Over 1500 community members took part in this large scale public policy and learning project, with over 20 LSE students acting as moderators.

The project utilized innovative methods of engagement, used techniques such as ideation, crowdsourcing, informal learning and gamification conducted through an online platform (Crowdicity) in order to generate engagement that increased over the duration of the course.  We engaged social media organisations and special interest groups to ensure successful integration of learning outcomes and the effective and representative engagement of the community in the platform. If you want to know more about the project you check it out here. 

This prestigious Teaching and Learning Innovator award by Campus Technology magazine (an industry, leading magazine for online and blended learning professionals) recognises the project in that it ‘…delivered both a public policy success as well as a significant and innovative approach to online learning and engagement.’

 

 

“… The awards represent excellence in experimentation, design, collaboration and implementation, and the projects they recognize expand the possibilities for individual campuses and the field of higher education technology,” said Dr. John Hess, program chair, Campus Technology Conference.

“We are extremely proud to have been nominated and then selected for this prestigious award.  It recognises an incredibly innovative project that delivered far beyond our wildest dreams.  It also recognises the hard work and commitment of many academic and professional staff at the LSE” said Peter Bryant, Head of Learning Technology and Innovation.  “It remains the most remarkable project I have ever worked on.” noted Paul Sullivan, the Manager of the IPA.

 

June 2nd, 2016|Announcements, Constitution UK, Ed-Tech news and issues, Events & Workshops (LTI), innovation, NetworkED, Projects, Teaching & Learning, Tools & Technologies|Comments Off on Constitution UK wins Campus Technology Teaching and Learning Innovation award|

NetworkED – James Clay – 9th March 2016

LTI NetworkED seminar series to welcome James Clay (Jisc) to LSE 9th March at 2pm. CANCELLED

Mapping Teaching and Learning

Mapping exercises such as those used to explore the concept of Visitors and Residents are a useful tool to understand where you currently are and to think about where you would like to be and how you are going to get there. The mapping exercise for Visitors and Residents in the main covers digital communication, collaboration and participation and can be used to help individuals build their digital capabilities in these areas.

biopic

Tickets for this seminar can be found on Eventbrite.

Recently I have started to think about how we could use a similar concept to map teaching practices, learning environments and curriculum design. This lead onto thinking about mapping the “learning” of our learners. Where are they learning, is that learning scheduled and formalised? Is that learning ad-hoc? Is it individual, group, collaborative? Could we use mapping to help build capability in understanding how digital technologies can be used to enhance and enrich teaching, learning and assessment?

Mapping teaching and learning provides an insight into how the curriculum is designed and how learners interact and engage with the different spaces, tools and delivery mechanisms. It can also show how traditional methods of adding or blending learning technologies usually results in a bolt-on additional approach that results in a poor experience for learners and teachers.

The talk will reflect on how mapping the curriculum could result in a more coherent approach to the embedding of digital technologies and an approach that maximises the potential benefits of using digital over a scattergun approach of throwing technologies into a traditional mix of teaching and learning. This talk will discuss what we want to achieve through mapping teaching and learning, understanding that using digital is not necessarily a solution to every problem. It will also explore the potential enablers that will create new solutions, enable changes in behaviours and build digital capability.

 

References

White, David, and Alison Cornu. “Visitors And Residents: A New Typology For Online Engagement”. First Monday 16.9 (2011): n. pag. Web. 4 Feb. 2016.

Digital  –  Learning   –  Culture,. “Visitors & Residents”. N.p., 2014. Web. 4 Feb. 2016.

Donnalanclos.com,. “EDUCAUSE 2012, Part The Second | Donna Lanclos–The Anthropologist In The Stacks”. N.p., 2012. Web. 4 Feb. 2016.

Clay, James. “Mapping The Learning And Teaching”. e-Learning Stuff. N.p., 2016. Web. 4 Feb. 2016.

MacNeill, Shelia. “Some Reflections On “Mapping The Learning And Teaching”. howsheilaseesIT. N.p., 2016. Web. 4 Feb. 2016.

Biography

James Clay is currently on a 12 month contract with Jisc as their project manager for the building digital capability R&D project. James has worked in the further education (FE) sector since 1993 (as wells a short time in the museum sector) and has extensive experience in the use of technology to enhance and enrich learning. He has been a teacher, a project manager, a project director, an ILT manager, Learning Resources manager and an IT director. He has managed a range of projects over the years in various roles, including mobile learning, e-books, IT infrastructure, learner analytics, copyright, institutional resources, VLEs and student records

Book Tickets

As always the event is free to attend and places can be reserved via Eventbrite. All our talks are live streamed and recorded for those who can’t attend in person.

February 4th, 2016|Events & Workshops (LTI), innovation, NetworkED, Teaching & Learning, Tools & Technologies, Uncategorized|Comments Off on NetworkED – James Clay – 9th March 2016|

Q&A with Bonnie Stewart

NetworkED seminar series 2016 kick starts next Wednesday (20 January) with Bonnie Stewart. The session will be streamed live and can be seen by clicking here.

Ahead of the session we asked Bonnie a few questions:

Bonnie Stewart

Tickets for this seminar can be found on Eventbrite.

Your work focuses on scholarly identities – can you tell us more about how academics use Twitter and how it might enhance their professional identity?
Like any aspect of identity it’s complex. The promotional narrative of “use social media! It’ll increase your circulation!” has some truth to it, but tends to miss the point or the value that longterm embedded users express…which is that Twitter enables and enriches their engagement and experience as scholars. The boost in audience is a bonus benefit rather than the core.

I think of identity in performative, fluid terms – as the aspects of self that make one recognizable to oneself, but also to others. We are part of a society and an academy where the personal/professional divide is blurring; where employment has become precarious and our roles and titles seldom serve any longer – if they ever did – as sufficient calling cards for who we are. Thus individual, personal means of signalling identity have become increasingly important…but also increasingly pervasive, with the rise of digital and especially social media.

So academics can use Twitter to present aspects of self that are varied and personal and playful as well as strictly professional, which can help build ties with others and expands networks. And even in a professional vein, the absence of gatekeeping around who gets to contribute to Twitter conversations can enable junior scholars and graduate students and thinkers who may not have much institutional status to become known for their ideas or their identity performance rather than their h-index or their institutional prestige. It’s an alternate door to professional identity, in a sense, with some very real implications for academia as a result.

Your most recent study uses ethnographic techniques, can you say more about why you think they are valuable in this context?
Ethnography looks at the meanings made by individuals in a given context, and analyses the relationships between that context and those meanings. It allows us to grapple with the culture and flavour of a particular moment, and understand how it’s experienced by the people who belong to it. Narratives and meaning-making are particularly useful, I think, for helping us understand experiences of inequality and marginalization, which aren’t always made visible with other methods. And in a world as hyped on data as ours currently is, it’s important that there be research that engages with the deep meanings constructed and enacted by small populations, as well as the big pictures that scale enables us to construct.

How do you encourage members of faculty who are very sceptical over the value of twitter that it is useful for academics?
First, I’d never tell someone they *should* use Twitter. I think it is entirely viable to have a robust academic life and career without Twitter. That said, I think the questions of audience and public engagement that the incursion of a space like Twitter open up for academia are important. So my approach is to explore *how* Twitter opens those up.

I think the primary value of a space like Twitter is that it is a) a relatively open network socially, allowing and encouraging people to engage with people they don’t already know, and b) lots of academics and educators use it. It’s that simple, really – it’s not so much any particular affordance of Twitter as that people are there and there are particular, if shifting, social norms that operate. So being on Twitter in a regular, present kind of way expands your access and your visibility to colleagues interested in the very same questions and ideas that you’re interested in, even if you’re located halfway across the world from each other. Without having to pay for a conference, or travel. And that once you find and curate and get involved in whatever “The Conversation” is for your field or area of interest, being present on Twitter offers ambient benefits, like relevant research literally floating across your feed, from known and trusted sources. It isn’t really a new model for academic engagement – it offers many of the same types of access and benefit that associations and conferences do, but 24/7, without the gatekeeping and cost. It’s immersive professional development.

Can you say something about why you consider Twitter to be a fraught space for open scholars?
Because Twitter operates as a relatively open network, as mentioned, it makes participants’ communications visible to people they may not already know. This is at the root of many of the benefits of Twitter for academics…new audiences, new contacts, new perspectives and resources…but it’s also at the root of new vulnerabilities. Two factors combine to create risk in this kind of open public space – first, the overarching phenomenon of callout culture, which can be wielded to challenge or protect particular orthodoxies, and second, the collapse of oral and literate cultural habits and audience expectations.

Twitter, from its inception, has operated primarily as an oral social sphere, but one in which the artifacts of that sociality are still persistent, replicable, searchable, and scalable, like all social media. Those artifacts can be searched, screen-captured, and spread to audiences for whom they weren’t intended, including media…so public speech – even if intended to be casual, social, and ephemeral – has complex consequences and can be fraught for participants.

January 13th, 2016|Events & Workshops (LTI), NetworkED, Social Media|Comments Off on Q&A with Bonnie Stewart|

NetworkED – Bonnie Stewart – 20th January 2016

Bonnie Stewart

Tickets for this seminar can be found on Eventbrite.

Academic Twitter: The Intersection of Orality & Literacy in Scholarship?  presented by Bonnie Stewart.

Ahead of the seminar we’ve asked Bonnie a few questions.

The session will be streamed live on Wednesday 20th:

This presentation examines the intersection of Twitter and higher education, and how “academic Twitter” cultivates scholarly identities and forms of expression that differ from conventional institutional practices.

Based in a study using ethnographic methods and examining the practices and perspectives of a collection of globally-located scholars from across a range of academic status positions, the presentation explores the practices by which reputation and influence are cultivated on Twitter.

In open networks like Twitter, signals of scholarly reputation and influence are minimally codified, yet the influence scholars accrue intersects with institutional academia in grant-required measures of “public impact,” in media visibility, and in keynote and job opportunities.

The presentation outlines how both oral and literate traditions of communications (Ong, 1982) contribute to open, networked scholarly engagement on Twitter, and how these collapsed traditions trouble the terms of rank and bibliometric indexing which dominate the conventional concept of academic influence.

The presentation also lays out the operations of influence and reputation in this collapsed communications space, and theorizes its implications for scholarly engagement and higher education.

Finally, the presentation explores the complex logics of influence that networked scholars employ to assess the networked profiles and behaviours of peers and unknown entities, and suggests that the impression of capacity for meaningful contribution – key to cultivating influence and the regard of actively networked peers – may stem from successful navigation of the oral/literate collapse.

The substantive goal of the presentation is to offer a portrait of open, network scholarly influence and the practices that cultivate it, and to consider how the intersection of orality and literacy make academic Twitter a particularly fraught but beneficial place for engaged open scholars and educators.

As always the event is free to attend and places can be reserved via Eventbrite. All our talks are live streamed and recorded for those who can’t attend in person.

Meet Maggie Philbin

LTI meet Maggie Philbin

LTI meet Maggie Philbin earlier this year

Next week, Thursday 12th November we have Maggie Philbin, CEO of TeenTech and former TV presenter, coming to LSE to give a NetworkED Seminar:  Tea, Tech and Teens at 3pm. We still have a few tickets available for this event, but it is proving extremely popular, so hurry if you wish to attend.

I caught up with Maggie earlier this week at the TeenTech Awards at Buckingham Palace, where the winning student projects got to meet the patron of TeenTech, HRH the Duke of York. I was attended as a sponsor of the Research and Information Literacy Award, which was launched this year to recognise good practice in finding, evaluating and using information to underpin the project. I asked Maggie a few questions ahead of next week’s seminar at LSE.

Jane: Can you tell me a bit about what inspired you to set up TeenTech and why you think it matters?

Maggie: We set up TeenTech back in 2008 because I was aware of a yawning gulf between  companies who were crying out for people with the right skills and a generation who had never had so much access to technology but hadn’t realised they could be building and innovating rather than simply using it. Setting TeenTech up as a collaborative organisation was very important as I’d seen so many initiatives working in silos and unwittingly undermining good work done by others. So TeenTech is all about bringing together companies and organisations who share the same aim of helping young people understand they very much belong in the world of technology and the skills that will help them take advantage of more opportunities. We work with some very brilliant people who make TeenTech very special. 

Jane: What are some of the most inspiring products or innovations that young people have developed as part of TeenTech?

November 5th, 2015|innovation, NetworkED, Research Skills, Teaching & Learning|Comments Off on Meet Maggie Philbin|

NetworkED – Maggie Philbin – 12/11/15

image by Rain Rabbitt - Teapotty on display in V&ATea,Tech and Teens …

Introducing our next NetworkED seminar on Thursday 12 November at 3pm

 

When Maggie Philbin accepted a role on Tomorrow’s World in 1982, she had no idea what a life changing decision it would prove to be.  Immersed in a high tech playground, meeting inspiring innovators behind the technology we all now very much take for granted, it was a dream job.  It also gave her deep insight into what might make a difference to teenagers without any real understanding of where digital skills might take them and in 2008 the TeenTech initiative was born.  TeenTech now work with over 4000 young people face to face every year, giving them opportunities to explore their own ideas, turning teenagers into powerful ambassadors for science and technology.  Come and find out more. As Maggie says “It’s a great game but we need more people”

As always the event is free to attend and places can be reserved via Eventbrite.
All our talks are live streamed and recorded for those who can’t attend in person.  For more information, check out our YouTube channel.

 

September 16th, 2015|Events & Workshops (LTI), NetworkED, Teaching & Learning, Tools & Technologies, Uncategorized|Comments Off on NetworkED – Maggie Philbin – 12/11/15|