Sonja Grussendorf

About Sonja Grussendorf

A learning technologist and very happy member of the Learning Technology and Innovation team at the London School of Economics (LSE). Main professional interests: social media, interactive classrooms (esp Electronic Voting Systems), theories of technology.

Pedagogy as an undisputed social good?

Recently, the LSE Media & Communications department approached CLT to offer a 15 minute perspective on the keyword “Pedagogy” for a small seminar group & without much thinking (or indeed time to think!) I volunteered. I don’t do it often enough, such spontaneous pontificating on what pedagogy means to us (me), and it turned out to be great discipline and a great opportunity to collect my thoughts on what arguably plays a great part in my daily practice. In the end, the thoughts remained jumbled, but the seminar itself turned out very interesting. This had a lot to do with an attentive and articulate audience, and of course with the first contributor, Julian Sefton-Green, a Principal Research Fellow in the Media & Comms, who spoke very intelligibly about pedagogy as a progressive theory and the creep of pedagogisation. Ellen Helsper, lecturer in Media & Comms, acted as respondent, pulling both approaches to the keyword together, calling attention to the undoubtedly normative elements of (current) education/ pedagogy discourse. In light of both Julian’s and Ellen’s more properly academic discussions, my contribution remains a cobbled together stream of consciousness/ thought piece, but I uploaded the presentation onto slideshare anyway, including the script. I don’t stand by all that can be read there, but I stand by one thing: there’s lots to learn about lecturing from Martin Heidegger. Unfortunately I never got to make that point very clearly… clearly I have to return to this at some future point. 🙂

Slideshare link: http://www.slideshare.net/SonjaGrussendorf/pedagogy-as-an-undisputed-social-good

December 11th, 2012|Teaching & Learning|2 Comments|

What CLT (can) do for you: Social Media

CLT – what we do for you…
An occasional series about stuff we support and promote & which we think you should know more about. Today’s post is about Social Media.

Social Media
‘Social media’ is a generic term that describes all those online applications you use to communicate, share and collaborate with others for variety of reasons, networking, fun, politics and of course learning. Blogs, social networking sites (eg facebook), twitter, wikis (eg Wikipedia), flickr – all these are social media. For a comprehensive guide, check out the JISC InfoNet guide on social software.
CLT have been promoting and supporting the use of social media in education for quite some time and especially in the last two years LSE academics have really started to embrace them. Blogging and twitter have become particularly popular, as their potential for making connections in learning, teaching and research has become more apparent. In our CLT NetworkED seminar series last year, Patrick Dunleavy indeed made a great case for academic blogging as part of a new digital revolution in the academic publishing world. Facebook groups are used by PhD students as a platform to share information and academic tips across the disciplines. Moodle wikis are used to facilitate collaborative writing to great effect. The new director Craig Calhoun has an established twitter presence and recently encouraged anyone out there to ask him questions via twitter (#askthedirector) which he answered in real time at a particular hour at the beginning of term. And if you still need convincing that twitter can (i.e. most emphatically not must!) have a place in academia, have a quick read of the LSE guide to twitter.

If you’re planning an academic conference or event, however small or big, you should really consider creating a hashtag so that the wider community can participate: online backchannels are now as important as face2face meetings. And if you’re not sure about which social media are right for you – teaching, networking, learning or research – then you should get in touch with us! Drop us a line, drop in on us, book on one of our training courses: we’ve been supporting the use of social media for a long time!

Our workshops change over the years of course – recently we have started to concentrate more on how to write effectively for the web and moved away from the more step by step learning of how to create and manage blogs. We can also tailor workshops to particular departments’ or groups’ needs. Get in touch if this is something that interests you.

Timeline:

2005	CLT start running blogs via wordpress
2006	CLT host first externally facing blog for Charlie Beckett, blogs.lse.ac.uk/polis
2007	Libraries & Social Software in Education (LASSIE) project, project blog still going strong and maintained by CLT’s Jane Secker
2008	Digital Literacy workshop programme, offering workshops on blogging, social bookmarking, twitter, using rich media (youTube, flickr etc) in teaching…
2010	set up the lse.ac.uk yammer domain – a sort of corporate ‘walled’ twitter application for all LSE account holders.
2011	Workshops on social referencing tools: CiteULike, Zotero, Mendeley
2011	#LSEnetED: CLT seminar series NetworkED: Technology in Education launched with funding from the LSE Annual Fund.

Update: Conor Gearty’s Reflections on ‘new media’ , published yesterday (12/11/12), is a measured and well-informed discussion of the pros and cons of academics’ (esp. Public Lawyers) use of twitter and blogging.

November 12th, 2012|Blogging, Research Skills, Social Media, Teaching & Learning|Comments Off|

September 26^th 2012 12 12:15 – 13:45

Any LSE Staff who missed our briefing sessions & workshops about New Moodle these past months you are cordially invited to drop in next Wednesday to our “New Moodle Open House” on 26^th September 2012 in STC.S169. This is an informal drop in session, but please book so we can arrange for enough lunch. Members of the team will be happy to chat to you about how best to use Moodle in your teaching – and we’ll answer any questions you might have (connected to Moodle and Learning Technologies more than existential ones, though we will do our hardest to answer both kinds…).

To book online: https://apps.lse.ac.uk/training-system/userBooking/course/243921

For more information on (new) Moodle, visit our page: http://clt.lse.ac.uk/moodle2/index.php

September 20th, 2012|Announcements|Comments Off|

LSE NetworkED 5th seminar: Patrick Dunleavy & the Republic of Blogs

Patrick Dunleavy will give our 5^th seminar in our NetworkED: technology in education series on 6th June 2012. His talk is entitled “The Republic of Blogs – a new phase in the development, democratization, critique and application of knowledge”.
He has given us a rough sketch of what he is going to be talking about, and from that I think we are in for an end of term treat. Essentially, Patrick will offer a provocative prognosis of the future of academic research, arguing that we are shifting it beyond the closed networks of traditional, institutional academics. Instead, we are seeing an opening up of debates, allowing access to a much larger public. And access here means not only access to view or read the debates/ research proceedings, but access to shaping them, by moving them onto blogs and allowing the online community to respond, without an outmoded or tribal insistence on academic credentials.
Patrick has been emphatic on the importance of this for a while. Earlier this year, he discussed the importance of blogging for academic researchers on the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog, insisting that “social scientists have an obligation to society to contribute their observations to the wider world” – but at the moment this is being done in almost resentful manner, which is somewhat unfair, if not immoral, if you consider that “the public pay for all our research, and then we shunt back to them a few press releases and a lot of out-of-date academic junk.” Patrick will continue to develop this point, giving it a historical perspective. He suggests that the current shift towards a “Republic of Blogs” mirrors the emergence of a “Republic of Letters” which heralded the age of Enlightenment. And where in that past event it was the dominance of Scholasticism that suffered its decline, this time Patrick predicts the demise of orthodox journals. The parallel makes sense: scholasticism was slow to adapt or even react to new scientific and technological innovations. Perhaps it could not, because it was inherently closed off to new ways of thinking. Traditional academic publishing too is failing to respond to our current paradigm shift, especially the rise of social media: technologies that enable easy, almost instant communication and information exchange. They allow participants to sidestep the slow, restrictive traditional publishing process. Though I am and always will be skeptical about technologies, and even more so suspicious about predictions about a rosy future due to technological revolutions, for some reason Patrick’s analysis of what is to come makes me happy. Because even if it won’t turn out as wondrously democratic as we would wish in the future, at least we can agree that the current academic publishing model will soon be on its last legs.

As ever, the event is open to LSE staff and students and we will also live stream it. Visit our CLT networkED Seminar Series page for more information, to view the live stream on the appointed time or to book online.

May 29th, 2012|Events & Workshops (LTI)|Comments Off|

LSE networkED: technology in Education 4th seminar: Dave White

In two weeks’ time we will be hosting the fourth seminar in our funded seminar series “networkED: technology in Education”. David White from the Department of Continuing Education, University of Oxford, will be talking on how contemporary students are developing their own approaches to learning taking advantage of online collaboration and abundance of information, while the educational establishment is struggling to adapt to the “implications of the web”. David will discuss how the convenience of the web might shift learning & teaching focus back onto critical and creative thinking.

Dave concentrates on learners; and he speculates that teachers are not only struggling to keep up with them but might be at a greater disadvantage for not appreciating or accepting the changes that the move online has brought about. His perspective should follow on nicely from our last seminar in March, when Martin Weller explored the meaning of “digital scholarship”, focusing on what academics might want to change and accomplish – and do differently.

Visit our CLT networkED webpage for more information.

As before, we will be live streaming the event as well as recording it and are hoping for active engagement within the room (Thai Theatre, NAB) and outside the room: use the hashtag #LSENetED to contribute via twitter. Dave White tweets as @daveowhite. We tweet as @lseclt (or @authenticdasein). Do join us, online or in the room! LSE staff and PG students can book online for the live event, externals who would like to be there in the flesh should contact either s [dot] grussendorf [at] lse [dot] ac [dot] uk or j [dot] secker[at] lse [dot] ac [dot] uk. But if you’d rather join our live-stream, visit our main NeworkED CLT webpage on 9th may at 3pm and watch online.

For more information on David White’s current research project, visit the JISC project page, “Visitors and Residents: What motivates engagement with the digital information environment”.

April 25th, 2012|Events & Workshops (LTI)|Comments Off|

Digital scholarship – Martin Weller speaks at our networkED seminar

This Wednesday is our third NetworkED (#LSENetED) seminar & we are very happy to welcome Professor Martin Weller from the Open University to speak about digital scholarship. Professor Weller will be offering us “10 digital scholarship lessons in 10 videos”, lessons that went into and came out of his recent book The Digital Scholar. The book, incidentally available in both traditional ‘pay-for-paper’ and ‘read-free-online’ formats, explores the meaning of scholarship in the digital age. The tools our digital age offers certainly have the potential to change Higher Education – but are they being used for that aim? And how does technology manifest its potential impact it can (or could) have on HE? Weller focuses on three main attributes: digital, networked, open. Each of these aspects of new technologies bear on teaching, learning and research in ways that might explode the old way of doing things scholarly and might give way to a whole different way of understanding scholarship. Above all, they open up the possibility of actually changing practice.
We’re certainly very excited to have Martin come and share his lessons & insights with us. More importantly however, I am excited about meeting him; because I’ve “known” him so far only as a digital presence. I’ve followed “@mweller” on twitter for quite some time now, occasionally benefitting from his 140 character nuggets of expertise – I say occasionally, because I am not half as disciplined a twitter user as I ought and want to be, not because these nuggets are only occasionally worthwhile… It should be interesting to put a human face to the tweets. Well, at least I assume that he is human, and I expect he will appear in full glorious Technicolor and… that he’ll be able to speak in chunks that exceed 140 characters. I am sure of it. But I’ll only find out on Wednesday, & I cordially invite you to find out with me. You can attend in person or online and find out all the lovely details on this page: http://clt.lse.ac.uk/events/networkED-seminar-series.php.

March 19th, 2012|Events & Workshops (LTI), Social Media|Comments Off|

February means Horizon!

This year, the New Media Consortium has decided to “hide” the 2012 Horizon report behind a (free) subscription wall – an additional layer of commitment not all of us are willing to cede.

Luckily, the NMC site explicitly states that “all NMC Horizon Project reports and papers are published as open content, under a Creative Commons Attribution License, so permission is granted to replicate, copy, distribute, transmit, or adapt the content freely.” I’ve added it to our emerging technologies page (near the bottom). Here’s a quick summary:

Technologies to watch:

The table below compares last year’s to this year’s expectations. Some technologies no longer features, perhaps because they didn’t quite keep their initial educational promise. To understand what they mean, you will have to read the full report. Alternatively, you could bribe a member of CLT (eg with a coffee) to make sense of it all for you.

	2011 Report	2012 Report
1 year or less	Electronic Books Mobiles	Mobile Apps Tablet Computing
2 to 3 Years	Augmented Reality Game-based Learning	Game-based Learning Learning Analytics
4 to 5 Years	Gesture-based Computing Learning Analytics	Gesture-based Computing The Internet of Things

6 Trends:

We want to work, learn, study whenever and wherever, which means that
Technologies need to be accessible from anywhere, so applications are becoming cloud-based; but
Collaboration as a working practice is becoming key so these applications need to support sharing and communication; and this
Means HE institutions need to react to collaboration as a new value, support it and embrace it in their educational practice,
For example shifting their educational paradigms to include online learning, blended learning, collective and collaborative learning.

5 Key challenges:

Economic pressures may lead us to want to capitalise on new technologies to cut costs, but that’s not the way to do it,
Relying on traditional ways of evaluating research won’t do justice to research that is now disseminated and/or conducted via social media, so new forms of approving and peer reviewing will have to be adopted,
Digital (media) literacy must become a key skill across the academic landscape – and we need to help our students to develop these skills, across the board. Unfortunately,
Traditional processes and practices can act as barriers to appreciating the innovative use of technologies by staff and students, so act as a disincentive.
Finally, libraries are “under tremendous pressure to evolve new ways of supporting and curating scholarship.”

(Those last two points fit in quite nicely with our first two NETworkED seminars!)

The report is worth reading for its assessment of current or emerging technologies and their educational value. It’s also worth bearing in mind that it doesn’t set out to make predictions, but to highlights emerging technologies which show educational promise and potential, as underpinned by “an extensive review of current articles, interviews, papers, and new research”, within the context of key trends and challenges.

February 8th, 2012|Uncategorized|Comments Off|

NetworkED: technology in education – A new seminar series organised by CLT!

We are pleased to announce that CLT have received funding from the LSE Annual Fund for our new seminar series “NetworkED: technology in education”. The series invites speakers from education,computing and related fields to discuss how technology is shaping the world of education, how it can help change the way institutions deliver teaching and how it impacts on students’s skills as well as their expectations of Higher Education.

The inaugural seminar will be delivered on 02 November 2011 @ 14.00 by our very own Dr. Jane Secker and Dr. Emma Coonan of Cambridge University Library, on their recent project developing a new curriculum for information literacy to support undergraduate students.

It is open to all at LSE, and it will also be live streamed to enable an audience from around the world to listen to the talk and to participate using a variety of technologies.

LSE members book here: https://apps.lse.ac.uk/training-system/userBooking/course/206894
Further details: http://clt.lse.ac.uk/events/networkED-seminar-series.php.
Information on how to join online will be added soon.

We’re looking forward to seeing you there (or sensing your presence online)!

October 25th, 2011|Uncategorized|Comments Off|

Mourning the loss of the past – and blaming it on the digital age

Discussions of digital communication (blogs, twitter, email, sms) in traditional media such as radio or newspapers can be predictable and unsatisfactory. Keeping Radio4 on for company & background noise, I caught how this morning’s Woman’s Hour invited writer Barbara Taylor Bradford and Emma Barnett, Digital Media Editor of The Telegraph to have a short debate on “how important is letter writing in the digital age”; in practice a piece to be filed under “nostalgia” (twitter hashtag #mythofthegoldenage).

The discussion was unfortunately set up by the presenter as a false dichotomy from the outset. She asked, rhetorically, if anyone would ever fondly re-read a blackberry message ‘c u @ nandos’ as they would a handwritten love letter. But this is a case of not comparing like with like. All three agreed that more work, and thus more care, goes into fashioning a handwritten letter on beautiful stationery, but in comparison to what? A successful blogger will take great care and trouble over crafting their posts. I can agonise over my responses on public political blogs, even when posting under a pseudonym. I want to be fair, I want to get my facts right and I don’t like typos. Sentiments such as friendship and love can be expressed very well in an email and perhaps more legibly if one’s handwriting, after years of keyboard use, resembles that of a deranged monkey. The art of slow writing hasn’t died out merely because it is now done electronically. Championing the handwritten letter is a charming cause, but it needs not be done in opposition to digital writing. While the medium matters, and is, pace McLuhan, itself a message worthy of focus independent of content, it seems to me a futile exercise to construct a hierarchy of media. Especially if, predictably, older ones will score more highly, because of that human condition, nostalgia. Nostalgia is a kind of home sickness, a longing for the familiar, an understandable emotion, but not one which ought to be overindulged.

Our foremothers in the 15th Century might have similarly asked “wither the Illuminated text in the Gutenberg age”. And some of them will then have projected forward rather than glanced backward, visualising that the printing press might enable them to focus more on what is being communicated and less on how prettily it is presented.

September 19th, 2011|Social Media|Comments Off|

CLT Moodle Tool Guide

Last year Joyce Seitzinger released her Moodle Tool Guide poster on her blog, under a creative commons licence (attribution, non-commercial, share alike). It’s a useful overview of the strengths and weaknesses of various Moodle activities. I’ve adapted and updated this to suit the needs of our LSE staff a little more. Specifically I’ve added the Book module, which is quite popular with our academics, and changed some of the wording as well as the ratings. As per the original licence, ours too has a cc licence, so please feel free to use and adapt in any way you see fit (except not for commercial purposes!). Feedback welcome, of course.