teaching

It does not matter what is in your hands: Good teaching in the digital age

Picture by Chris Bull
www.chrisbullphotographer.com
679/16
ALT Conference day two.

Peter Bryant is the Head of Learning Technology and Innovation. In this post (which is reposted from his personal blog he debates what makes for good teaching in a digital age and advocates for a debate about the right questions, not the wrong technology.

Some strange things seem to be happening in the learning technology and T&L debates at the moment. There appears to be a growing presence of an anti-tech resistance, challenging the efficacy of technology (and those who use it). Some of these ‘think pieces’ question the motivations of those using technology in their class (both students and teachers), demean the status of social media as an active and fertile ground for intellectual debate, try and institute blanket bans for the good of the learner and actively argue that we need to ‘get back to chalk’. These have become battle lines in a fake war between protectors and challengers, defenders of the faith versus the barbarians at the gate. The innocent victims in all this posturing and puffery are the engaged teachers and learners (thanks @antonycoombsHE for the input). We can see the small bubbles of evidence for this assertion increasingly breaking through to the surface Let’s take Facebook as the canary in the coal mine:

There are universities who ban Facebook from fixed PCs in labs and student spaces (on the suggestion of other students, apparently)
The continued resistance (and active calls to ban) the use of student devices in lectures and tutorials, because of the assertion that ‘they will just be checking their Facebook’
On the other hand, a lot of Facebook led pilots at a delivery or curricula level have failed because students don’t like ‘their’ Facebook being hijacked for learning (although there is a lot of evidence that they are stopping using Facebook entirely, or use it to talk to each other, not the teacher!)
Universities wanting to hold some sway of what their staff say on social media to present a unanimity of opinion (including Facebook).

In the end, these are pointless battles in an entirely distracting conflict. We are arguing about the toss and not about the game. It doesn’t matter what devices are in their hands. What matters most is good teaching. Does it matter that you have a pair of red shoes on? No. What matters is that they make you feel good. It matters that they help people identify or find you. It matters that they stop that puddle you stepped in from making your socks a squidgy mess. What matters is the experience that people participate in. Good teaching at its heart is the creation and facilitation of experience. There is an old marketing truism that I have always found insightful. People don’t buy ¼ inch drill bits, they buy ¼ inch holes. Good teaching is not the fact that someone has a MacBook open or that you have created a PowerPoint slide or even that you have knowledge that you believe someone else needs to become an expert. Good teaching creates environments and conditions for learning experiences to happen. And the creation and nourishment of any experience is a product of a complex interplay of environmental factors. Good teachers hold and move the faders on those factors in order to achieve some form of synergy. Technology is without doubt one of those factors but by itself is like breathing only the nitrogen part of the air.

Good teaching is device/platform/OS agnostic
The kind of devices that people use or the sometimes desperate need to find a use for a piece of technology in teaching (Pokémon GO, it is the new Snapchat) become the easier conversations to have, especially amongst learning technologists and educational developers. Yes, the type of technology being used can and does influence the experiences people learn from. And yes, if the technology doesn’t work it can impact on that experience as well. And yes again, maybe a new platform or social media will seed good ideas and promote innovation. None of these assertions are wrong. But (and there is always a but), by themselves they are the less confronting conversation to have, because they are ignoring the elephant in the room. Good teaching is a hard thing to do. Good teaching is a challenging and emotionally draining thing to do. Good teaching lifts you high and can smack you down, sometimes in the space of a single class. Good teaching sees devices and uses them when they can contribute or challenge or transform what you are trying to do in your class.

Denial is not an instrument of good teaching
Making someone turn a device off in order to help them learn is not a critical approach to teaching. I used to work with a teacher who brought a bucket of water into his classroom and said ‘if I hear a phone go off, it goes into the water’. Why have we become so afraid of a phone? Sure, you may want a debate or discussion that asks people to engage, visually and actively. But what kind of learning can devices help with? Learning about how people learn. So, what actually goes on behind that sea of glowing white apples you see in your lecture? Have they all got Facebook open? Probably. Are they chatting with their mates? Yeah. Are they looking up words and definitions on Wikipedia? Almost certainly. How about providing them with a backchannel for conversation using a twitter hashtag, so that you can answer questions. How about providing them with a list of sites where they can check up definitions of words that match the kind of materials you use. Denial just leads to resistance and rebellion. Nothing good will come of it.

Good teaching is enabled by good communications. Technology changes the way we communicate
I am not describing all technology as simply instrumental tools, without power to influence good teaching. The way technology is used to collaborate, share, critique, engage (this list is endless) shapes the way we communicate. Creativity is democratised. Identity is fluid. Spaces are safe and dangerous. Risk is minimised and multiplied. People learn differently. To ignore social media and its transformative community of practices would be a dangerous ignorance. That doesn’t mean we have to all communicate through twitter in 140 characters, nor does it mean that crowdsourcing and Yelp recommendations will replace academic knowledge as the purest form of thought. But it is in those very defences against using technology that one of the most fundamental tensions in higher education lies; you are either with us or against us. It is a polarised debate, with no middle ground and a series of entrenched positions backed with rigid institutional structures and policies and with all the risk dumped heavily on the shoulders of students. If they choose to deny themselves the use of technology to live their lives, will that help them pass? How strong is the gravitational pull of a 2:1? Does the view of Professor Dr Jones requiring them to only use printed book sources for their essay outweigh their need for employable skills? So, how do they respond? They tell us to use our technology better; we want better PowerPoints, we want the VLE to do stuff to help us learn. And when we can be left on our own to study and prepare and learn (like we are for 90% of our HE experience), we will do things our way. We will use social media, we will chat with each other using whatever apps we like, we will share cool stuff and be visual and we will communicate and engage with people all over the world sharing knowledge, experiences and expertise. Because that is what we do. That is how we communicate and live our lives.

It doesn’t matter what is in their hands, it will be there and it will be used. It is none of our concern whether it is in their hands or not. Knowing it is in their hands empowers both them and us to make better learning experiences.

Title image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/karolfranks/7266270182

Reposted from The DIGITAL Stranger

September 30th, 2016|innovation, Teaching & Learning|Comments Off|

Digital is not the future – A UAL/LSE online hack

Digital is not the future – Hacking the institution from the inside

Background
Within many higher education institutions, the patterns and responses of resistance to change make anything different from the norm forced into the position that has to justify ‘why?’ Debates about the potential of technology, the tensions of techno-determinism and the fears of replacement and redundancy have centred the discourse on service rather than pedagogy. The problem is that the genie is already out the bottle. There is no going back to chalkboards and overheads,we won’t be shutting off the internet any time soon. Technology and the digital are already integral to what we do but the presence of technology does not automatically equate to a shift in practice.

So, we came up with the idea of this hack. How do we change the discourse and empower people like us to actively shape teaching and learning at our institutions? What are the key messages, tools and strategies available that put the digital in the heart of the conversation and not as a freak show, an uncritical duplication of institutional norms or a fringe activity of the tech savvy?

The aim of this hack is to design collectively the solution to the problem. A problem that we all know exists but perhaps have never cracked. The problem of potential. The problem of resistance and acceptance. The problem of teaching and learning in the post-digital age. The problem of defining what a university is in the same.

An open document?
We have made a Loomio community, which open for anyone to edit. You can find it here, and registration is simple and easy!

http://bit.ly/1RWSq79

This is a conversation that will be made better by involving more people. The aim of the community is to frame the discussions and debates we need to have at our institutions in order put innovation and the digital at the heart of the institutional approach to learning and teaching. There is a case to be made that institutionally, we have failed. ‘Traditional’ custom and practice is legitimised in the digital, whilst practice based innovation can be banished to the fringe or the grassroots. Techno-solutionism is equally legitimised, where ‘solutions in a box’ and services drive our activity; an activity that often replicates existing practice rather than transforming it. This widens the gap between ‘academic’ practice and the changing nature of learning in a digital era, masked by the procurement of new, and by implication, ‘innovative’ technologies

What do you have to do?
What we seek from the physical and online hacks is a form of radical pragmatism. You are in the room, because you are the institution, you are the senior management, you are the expert.

The rules of this hack are simple.

Rule 1: We are teaching and learning focused *and* institutionally committed
Rule 2: What we talk about here is institutionally/nationally agnostic
Rule 3: You are in the room with the decision makers. What we decide is critical to the future of our institutions. You are the institution
Rule 4: Despite the chatter, all the tech ‘works’ – the digital is here, we are digital institutions. Digital is not the innovation.
Rule 5: We are here to build not smash
Rule 6: You moan (rehearse systemic reasons why you can’t effect change – see Rule 3), you get no beer (wine, juice, love, peace, etc)

We have chosen 5 common scenarios which are often the catalyst for change in institutions. As we noted above, you are in the room with the new VC and you have 100 words in each of the scenarios below to effectively position what we do as a core part of the institution. Why is this going to make our institutional more successful/deliver the objectives/save my (the VCs) job? How do we demonstrate what we do will position the organisation effectively? How do we make sure we stay in the conversation and not be relegated to simply providing services aligned with other people’s strategies? Anyone who has been around the system for any length of time will recognise these scenarios and will have been through many of them. They are critical junctures at where momentum for change peaks.

Scenario 1
Strategic review of the institution and budget planning for 2020
Scenario 2
Institutional restructure because of a new VC
Scenario 3
Undertaking of an institution wide pedagogical redesign
Scenario 4
Responding to and implementing TEF
Scenario 5
Institutional response to poor NSS/student experience results

Write on the basis that you are pitching your responses to the above to the new VC and senior management.

April 4th, 2016|Conferences, Teaching & Learning|3 Comments|

papercraft for LTI by Helen Page

As part of our LSE2020 series which looks at what teaching and learning could look like in 2020, Peter Bryant (Head of Learning Technology and Innovation) has published three thought-provoking posts on his personal blog (http://www.peterbryant.org) that make the case for how technology can facilitate and transform the experiences of learning and teaching in a post-digital age.

Re-imagining learning for a post-digital world (part 1) – Solutions not problems
‘Re-imagining learning for a post-digital world (part 2) – Introducing Post-Digital Learning Experiences’
Re-imagining learning for a post-digital world (part 3) – A design for learning?

December 8th, 2015|Blogging, innovation, LSE 2020, Projects, Teaching & Learning|Comments Off|

Next NetworkED 16th December @ 3pm: ‘Harnessing the power of the ‘Massive’ – Innovative approaches to participation, digital citizenship and open learning on-line’

Update > Constitution UK project has been awarded a Campus Technology for Innovation (pg 30).

Chaired by Peter Bryant – Head of Learning Technology and Innovation at the LSE

Panel:
Prof. Conor Gearty – Director of the Institute of Public Affairs and Professor of Human Rights Law (LSE)
Darren Moon – Senior Learning Technologist, Learning Technology and Innovation (LSE)
Paul Sullivan – Manager of the Institute of Public Affairs (LSE)

The next NetworkED will be held on Wednesday 16th December at 3pm. Get your FREE tickets for the event here.

The idea of the ‘massive’ has been at the heart of some of the most disruptive and transformative debates in Higher Education, dating back to the growth of the large scale lecture and the era of mass education right through to more recently, where the massive has been one of the movable concepts within the MOOC acronym. In many ways, the massive has been the least understood and explored idea within revolutionary or hyperbolic discourse around MOOCs.

What happens when the massive is more than just a measure of scale or numbers of students? What kind of learning emerges where the massive stops being a community of individual learners, and becomes a learning community, drawing on the power of the collective and the crowd to solve problems, engage in civic debate or write a constitution? How do you surf the sometimes chaotic, informal, unpredictable and unstructured interactions, conversations and debates that occur within a crowd to deliver a collective solution to an intractable problem? Can the massive transform the ways we undertake and promote civic engagement in a digital age? What does on-line learning and teaching look like in the crowd?

In January 2015, the London School of Economics and Political Science (UK) launched an innovative civic engagement project, which aimed to crowd source the United Kingdom Constitution. One of the key intentions of the project was to leverage and magnify the power of the community and the ‘massive’ in order to empower participants to engage in debate, identify solutions and come to a common agreement about the need for and the content of a UK Constitution. Involving over 1500 participants and generating tens of thousands of on-line interactions that increased as opposed to decreased over the 14 week duration of the ‘course’, Crowd Sourcing the UK Constitution challenged some of the dominant paradigms of Massive Open On-line Learning.

Featuring a panel of the key people involved in the project NetworkED will present the findings arising from a critical evaluation of the project and pose a number of questions that emerged from both the School’s engagement with the project and from the participants themselves centred on enhancing the effectiveness of a pedagogical design to harness the power of the massive, and leverage a large community of engaged participants working together in order to solve a problem, effect change or develop capacity. The panel will challenge some of the dominant paradigms of civic engagement and open on-line learning in a active and participatory debate.

Make sure you get your free ticket from EVENTBRITE

November 23rd, 2015|Constitution UK, NetworkED, Projects|Comments Off|

Five reasons why using technology could make your teaching and learning better!

The use of technology is an issue that is danced around quite a lot, especially here at the LSE. Technologists, academics, students all debate the notions of pedagogy before technology and how we can avoid the pitfalls of technological determinism or the replacement of every one of us with the robot Sheldon from the ‘Big Bang Theory. The reality is that this should never have become a polarised debate, where the choice was either the unregulated and ill-defined change agenda driven by technological adaptation or the last line of defence of the ‘way it has always been’. Technology (if such a concept can be simply defined) is a means; a society changing and generation shaping means for sure, but a means nonetheless. LTI are here to be part of your approach to engaging with technology to enhance learning and teaching. From the simplest innovation to the most transformative intervention and at a pedagogical or instructional level, technology is a critical part of modern teaching. So, if you are thinking about whether you should use ‘technology’ in your teaching or learning, contemplating a change in pedagogy or simply finding out what your colleagues or learners are doing with their technology, then maybe these five reasons might help shape your thinking.

1. All your students are already using technology to a wide variety of degrees
This is a simple assertion. All of us are using technology; from cash machines, to smartphones, to laptops to tablets to our oyster card. Each of these pieces of technology serves a purpose. They change the way we do things. They change the language we use and they shift core practices around processes (such as paying, communications, processing and thinking). There are no universal rules about this. Generations after us are not naturally better than their parents at being technologically adept. These technologies are simply there. They develop, change and progress like most other means. In your classroom you have an array of devices more powerful than any of the ones that went before. There are ways to use that technology for the benefits of learners and learning. Instant communications, collaborations, interactions outside the classroom, annotations, engagement with readings, critical thought, right down to managing the calendar. These skills are not native, nor are they uniform. Learners and teachers may need support, training, mentoring and practice. That’s where we can help.

2. All the jobs students will do are shaped in part by technology
We use technology to do all our jobs. You are reading a blog now. Almost every discipline has been impacted by technology; from research practice to visual rhetoric through to open access. How do we integrate these changes into curricula, teaching and assessment? Like any other programme/design process, we are research informed, we maintain rigour and we understand what skills and knowledge graduates will need to be develop expertise and understanding. Technology is just another part of that. Technology can help simulate real world employment situations, global phenomena or inter-personal scenarios. Technology can develop the communication, collaboration, identity or teamwork skills required in most modern workplaces. Technology skills such as media making, coding, social media or searching are critical trans-disciplinary concepts. Either inside or outside teaching and learning, having access to these skills enhances the employability of your graduates. LTI have a number of great cases where courses and programmes have embedded these skills. Maybe some of those practices will work for your course/programme or have an impact on your student satisfaction?

3. Technology is not a scorched earth approach to teaching
No institution wants to replace you with robots after recording your lectures. There is no replacement for the interaction and engagement face to face contact supports (either live or facilitated). However, you can add aspects of innovation to your teaching that build on and magnify that impact. Encouraging students to interact and engage through collaborative assessment, support each other and provide peer feedback, comment and discuss your lectures and tutorials or annotate and debate your PowerPoint slides. Technology does what it says on the box. It enhances, it adds, it disrupts and it transforms. Whether this is technology students use outside the classroom, or the innovative, flexible spaces were are looking to create within; Technology does not teach. Technology does not make people learn. You do. Students do. We want to work with you to enrich the student experience through innovative approaches to pedagogy, to the embedded use of technology such as Moodle, lecture capture and social media and through encouraging your students to use their own technologies to enhance their own learning.

4. Technology can make things possible that you previously thought impossible
One of the great potentials of technology is change. Technology for education represents a wonderful catalyst for change. One department commented to us recently that they have been waiting for the technology to catch up with their thinking. Maybe thinking about technology will change the way you think about assessment, challenge some of your assumptions about feedback, maybe it will open a door or close another. Maybe technology will shift the lecture from being bounded by transmission pedagogies to being discursive and interactive. We advocate for technologies to be more than an economic replacement of one practice with another. They are a chance for a rethink, a chance inspiration or a series of experiments that allow you to embed some play and fun into your teaching and learning. One of the most important roles here at LTI is innovation, thinking about and making available cutting edge ideas, practices and platforms in order to provide all staff with opportunities to rethink and experiment with their teaching.

5. Technology does enhance learning
Give it a go. The gap between what our learners see and understand as their online learning experience and the face to face experience is narrowing. It is all just learning. The capabilities required to search quickly, determine the veracity of information and do this whilst doing three other things are developing rapidly. These skills are by no means universal or natural, but they are developing and they are shaping how people learn. From students being able to re-watch lectures 8 or 9 times to make sure they understood concepts to being able to access a support network at 4am through twitter (or just to know when the Library lift is out of order @LSELibraryLift) technology is enhancing learning right now. LTI are here to help you, offer ideas and a critical (but friendly) perspective. We can offer you money, technology and expertise. We are happy to share with you all our experiences, knowledge and coffee. But most of all we share our confidence that we can help you make your teaching and learning better.

Want to get in touch? Drop us an email lti.support@lse.ac.uk

November 17th, 2015|Digital Literacy, Ed-Tech news and issues, LTI Grants, Teaching & Learning, TEL Trends|1 Comment|

Weekly Roundup in Education Technology: The Rules of Learning Technology, Yik Yak and More

Education technology is rapidly moving, sometimes divisive and always interesting, especially to us working in Higher Education. Every week, we share and comment upon a selection of interesting articles, posts and websites relating to education and technology we stumbled upon during the week. Do comment, recommend and share!

Teaching lecturers to teach – Graham Gibbs

“Whether lecturers should be required to have formal teacher training has been a subject of much debate in recent years.”

Let’s consider how this reads if we replace the job titles with other professions:

Whether dentists should be required to have formal dental training has been a subject of much debate in recent years.”

To read this sentence in a journal of dentistry would be utterly extraordinary (and worrying for the state of our health care system). Despite all efforts, we still inhabit a strange world of work in Higher Education – a world in which not just learning technology, but learning and teaching in general deserve increased attention.

Can technology make us smarter? – David Robson

Let’s question the claim that technology is making us too lazy to think and learn. Regardless of whether the claim that even average students can reach the top 2% of a class is accurate or not, adapting to different learning styles is likely to have a positive impact on thinking and learning. If technology can help us to do so (whether now or in the future), it might not make us smarter by itself, but it offers possibilities that we should make use of.

The latest trend at US colleges – Yik Yak

This latest app to spread across US college campuses provides users with a location-based live chat. While the idea of a “hyper-local forum” is certainly innovative, the combination of being anonymous and location-based throws up issues around bullying, trolling and institutional reputation that users, institutions and the provider itself will have to address. Initial proposals have included banning the app in schools, but it would be unfortunate if the only way to manage the service is by shutting it down altogether.

The rules of learning technology – Peter Condon

“Remember that for e-learning technology is the means to the end, not the end in itself. Unless we see technology as a tool, we will not question its effect upon our learning and our learners.”

This blog posts presents us with a good opportunity to revisit our earlier blog post on what learning technologists do (and don’t do). At the same time, it also serves as a reminder to everybody working in education not to lose sight of our most important objective: to improve teaching and learning.

Scarf vets happy – What3Words

We are not aware of LSE turning into a veterinary college, but those are the three words assigned to LSE on What3Words. What3Words divides the earth into 3x3m squares, assigning three random words to each square. The result replaces unmemorable number coordinates with, well, 3 words – maybe a useful tool for those of us teaching and studying geography?

October 29th, 2014|Ed-Tech news and issues, Roundup, Social Media, Teaching & Learning|Comments Off|