Events & Workshops (LTI)

Details of forthcoming workshops and links to LTI workshop resources and presentations.

LTI NetworkED seminar series – Helen Keegan 05/11/2014

If you couldn’t make it to Helen Keegan’s NetworkED talk, click here to watch the recording on our YouTube channel.


LTI NetworkED Seminar series Helen Keegan ‘Interactive & Social Media’ Wednesday 05 November 5:00pm – 7:00pm, CLM5.02

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Helen Keegan (@heloukee on Twitter) is a UK National Teaching Fellow and Senior Lecturer and researcher at the University of Salford, UK. 

Her expertise lies in curriculum innovation through social and participatory media, with a particular focus on creativity and interdisciplinarity.  She is known for her work on digital cultures and identities, social technologies and the interplay between formal and informal learning. As a multi-disciplinary practitioner. Helen works across sciences and media arts, developing partnerships and creative approaches to learning and collaboration.

Alongside presenting and consulting, Helen has published in journals and edited collections including the European Journal of Open and Distance Learning, Selected Papers of Internet Research, and the Handbook of Research on Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies. For more information see www.acoustics.salford.ac.uk/profiles/keegan/

Announcing our second NetworkED for the 2014/15 academic year, we are welcoming Helen Keegan to the LSE on Wednesday 5th November at 5pm.  Providing insights and examples of projects that engage students as producers, Helen will discuss a number of projects that span her practice, especially looking at examples of leading projects that link students across networks, cultures and countries.  This talk will be of great relevance to those interested in innovative pedagogies, student led learning and media education in the digital age. For a taste of what to expect have a look at our short Q&A with Helen Keegan.

The event is free to attend and places can be reserved on the staff via the training and development system or by emailing imt.admin@lse.ac.uk

All our talks are live streamed and recorded for those who can’t make it. For more information, check out our website or have a look at previous talks on our YouTube channel .

October 28th, 2014|Announcements, Events & Workshops (LTI), NetworkED, Teaching & Learning|Comments Off on LTI NetworkED seminar series – Helen Keegan 05/11/2014|

LTI NetworkED seminar series – Josie Fraser 22/10/14

LTI NetworkED Seminar series
Josie Fraser ‘Digital Literacy in Practice: Making Change Happen’
Wednesday 22 October 5:00pm – 7:00pm, NAB2.06

JosieFraserTitle

Josie Fraser will be talking about her experiences of working on the Digi Lit project.
As the 10th largest city in the UK Leicester is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in Europe, with huge amounts of children living in relative poverty.  Josie has had to deal with issues of access and what it means to provide education that is available for all and works for everyone in the community.  Set up as a partnership between the council, De Montford University and 23 secondary schools the Digi Lit project is an attempt to work within existing power structures while making sure that learners are not being left out.

See our events page for more details: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lti/lti-events/

The event is free to attend and places can be reserved on the staff via the training and development system:  https://apps.lse.ac.uk/training-system/userBooking/course/7419982

The seminar series is open to all at LSE, but 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.  To view the live stream and for more details about the NetworkED events go to the LTI website: http://lti.lse.ac.uk/events/networkED-seminar-series-18.php

October 20th, 2014|Announcements, Events & Workshops (LTI), NetworkED, Teaching & Learning, Tools & Technologies|Comments Off on LTI NetworkED seminar series – Josie Fraser 22/10/14|

Beyond institutions: Stephen Downes at NetworkEDGE

Yesterday I attended our new series NetworkEDGE: The Future of Education online, because we live stream (and record) these things and therefore I could. We were lucky enough to have Stephen Downes inaugurate, and I watched, listened and tweeted along.

(I’m ambivalent about tweeting during talks. Tweeting is great for note-taking, sharing, interjecting, pondering publicly, chatting with others in the audience while keeping an eye on the main speaker. But it’s hard work, difficult to do well, and distracting from careful listening. It helped to have seen the slides beforehand, as Stephen posts them on his site.)

Downes shared his utopian anti-institutional view of education with us and that’s the kind of thing I lap up. He pleaded for “learning beyond institutions”, towards personal learning in a networked world. This is the impression I got: here’s a dedicated anti-establishment guy, who despairs at the capitalist ideology at the core of education; who dislikes that learning is now an industry; who thinks that most educators waste time and effort in their attempts to improve their teaching, their learning. Wasted, because it goes towards improving essentially capitalist systems, structures, models, even though these fail us (us = the learners, the educators) time and again. How much better to smash our educational idols, and to break away, move away:

  • Move towards learner autonomy.
  • Move towards anarchic learning, based on no models, no systems, no traditional ideals.
  • Move beyond institutions and towards self-organised networks of learners.

(“Smash”, “idols”, “beyond” – of course Downes is no Nietzsche, but there is a certain Nietzschean sentiment in his ideas).

“The right model is to do away with models” he told us. – this is an idea I can get behind, a nicely phrased aporia, along the lines of “O my friends, there is no friend”. Now, one might argue that Sugata Mitra’s Hole in the Wall, which Downes referred to, is itself a model, Mitra often suggests so: that’s why he was able to translate the idea from rural India to schools in England. His model is anti-institutional, it seeks to depose the teacher, but it is still a model. Like Downes, Mitra is interested in self-organising systems – and where you have systems, you have a model! The point is that there are no standards or rules which apply consistently or work universally and at all times. This is a good thing to bear in mind. Standards (rules, regulations) are always exclusive, limited and limiting. They hinder innovation, stifle creativity and reduce everything to sameness. We need people like Downes to remind us of this. We need to be asked that we do away with ALL such rules, so that at the very least we might discard some of them, and re-introduce autonomy into our sector. As he told us later “Autonomy, rather than control, is essential in education”. This is as uncomfortable an idea for institutions as it is for the individual. Control is something we desire (if not need), whereas autonomy can often be disquieting. However, some claim, control is an illusion anyway, so we might as well move away from trying to control our learners and allow them their autonomy.

I agree with many of Stephen’s principles, even if I do so at my peril (i.e. by sort of wishing the hand that feeds me would whither and die). Wouldn’t an anarchic utopia be fun? Yes it would. Will it happen? Not any time soon. Still I applaud Stephen for demanding it.

But I don’t agree with everything he claimed. Take his starting assertion that “pretty much anything works better than the traditional lecture method” – it’s neither true nor very scandalous. (But it is a standard opening in ed talks these days.) I learnt a lot from Stephen Downes’ lecture yesterday, and I know that discussing an article or blog post of his instead would not have worked better; it would have worked worse. Naturally, he addressed the irony of him lecturing (a full 90 mins!), but suggested that the lecture itself was secondary to its becoming  a resource to be shared. Yet my engagement was greatest at the actual time of listening, and throughout I wished I had been in the room with others. Yes, I agree that his lecture was “about creating the opportunity for dialogue and interaction” and that it served this purpose well. But surely this is what all lectures (can) do. No one working in education seriously believes that learning is about remembering, about recall. Yes, assessment practice tends to reward recall, and thus it places value on it, but this is what is fundamentally wrong about assessment practice, it is not evidence that we think learning is recall. Call the paradox a logical error, do not extrapolate that it shows a greater truth about our values.

Secondly, at some point I started to wonder if Downes equated learning too much with reliance on resources. Resources (and tools to create and share these) are central to his connectivist MOOC, as are the connections between learners and the conversations they have. But I missed a closer inspection of that elusive thing, ‘learning’. Sure, he reminded us: “content is only the MacGuffin” (think Maltese Falcon), there to move the conversations and relationships along, and he insisted that “learning is the conversations that happen’ – but this is not quite clear or useful enough for me. Learning cannot all be conversation, and often it benefits from leadership too. Autonomy and self-organisation are all well and good, but I’ve overheard serious conversations so dumb they’d blow your socks off, and they could have benefited from an expert gently pointing out that what had just been discussed was a) factually wrong and b) badly argued. But where does such expertise come from in self-organising networks? Also, in Downes’ self-organising networks, won’t the “filter bubble” prevent networks from being properly diverse? Won’t these self-selected online communities, be obstructed from benefiting from ethnically, socio-economically, politically different perspectives?

Finally, I am skeptical about his over reliance on technology. I tweeted a question to that effect, and he did his best to answer, but he thought I was worried only about “what happens when the lights go out” and reassured me that there are bigger threats (authoritarianism, big corporations – I know that, they too are technological systems!) than running out of fossil fuels. Rather, I meant to ask what effect our over-reliance on technology might have on our way of being: our relationships, attitudes and social behaviours. I don’t share Downes’ optimism about technology. I think it is important to evaluate our use of it critically at all times, and question its proliferation, especially in education. I imagine Downes doesn’t disagree with proper critical questioning, but I nevertheless suspect that he thinks technology overall is a boon.

And that’s fair enough.

@authenticdasein

Launching our new seminar series: NetworkEDGE

NetworkEDGE: The Future of Education is a new seminar series organised by CLT. Building on the impact and success of NetworkED, are are launching a landmark series of talks and debates about the future of Higher Education called NetworkEDGE.

Our first speaker is Stephen Downes works for the National Research Council of Canada. He has been a Senior Researcher since 2001. Stephen will present his thoughts and insights on the future of Higher Education. Being widely recognized to have taught (with George Siemens) the first Connectivist MOOC, Stephen has long been a distinct voice in the field of technology and pedagogy. His blog OLDaily, is the sector’s go-to site for considered and critical musings about the use of computers and the web in education.

To book a place to attend the seminar at LSE visit LSE online booking system. External guests are very welcome and should email Niamh Ryan to book a place. We will also be live streaming and recording the event which will start at 3pm BST.

July 1st, 2014|Events & Workshops (LTI), NetworkED|Comments Off on Launching our new seminar series: NetworkEDGE|

Changing the Learning Landscape: Digital Literacy workshop

On 7 May, CLT and HEA will be hosting the Changing the Learning Landscape – Digital Literacy Workshop here at LSE. This workshop will be a fantastic opportunity to hear from leading figures in this field, including Helen Beetham and Lesley Gourlay, on the many aspects of promoting digital literacies in higher education.

Events on the day will include Alan Cann’s presentation on the challenges of developing staff and student online identities, a workshop on using digital literacy in teaching, and updates from LSE’s own project to embed digital literacies into undergraduate teaching through the Student Ambassadors for Digital Literacy project.

A full programme is available here: Programme-CLL-7-May.

You can book your place here. The event costs £50 from HEA subscribing Higher Education Institutions, and £100 for staff from non-subscribing institutions. A number of tickets for this event have been reserved for LSE staff, but will be in high demand. If you wish to avail of this, please contact Jane Secker (j.secker@lse.ac.uk) as soon as possible.

April 14th, 2014|Events & Workshops (LTI)|Comments Off on Changing the Learning Landscape: Digital Literacy workshop|

Exploring social media as data sources for research – workshop

Yesterday, CLT ran for the second time a workshop exploring the use of social media AS research data (as opposed to using it as tools TO DO research). We first ran this in June 2013 as an experimental, exploratory workshop, which was a great success, but this time we wanted to shorten and improve it based on the feedback we received. By all accounts, it was a great success. I say “by all accounts”, because as misfortune would have it, I was struck with illness and could not make an appearance, after weeks of organising and preparing for it. Unfair beyond belief – especially since my colleagues raved about to me how good everyone’s presentations were.

March 20th, 2014|Events & Workshops (LTI), Research Skills, Social Media|Comments Off on Exploring social media as data sources for research – workshop|

Going Mobile: the ongoing story of HEC Executive Education

Gerta Karageorgi from the LSE Project Management Office writes about attending an LSE NetworkED seminar earlier this week.

On Wednesday 5th February 2014, Karine Le Joly, Director of Innovation and Academic Coordination for Executive programmes at HEC Paris (Hautes études commerciales de Paris), made a day trip on the Eurostar to LSE to present the 8th NetworkED: Technology in Education session. It was a topic I was keen to learn more about, having spent a day the previous week attending 7 brief seminars on mobile technology at the Learning technologies exhibition at Kensington Olympia, London.

February 7th, 2014|Events & Workshops (LTI), NetworkED, TEL Trends|Comments Off on Going Mobile: the ongoing story of HEC Executive Education|

First NetworkED Seminar: What the little birdy tells me

Our first event in the new run of NetworkED seminars is going to take the form of a workshop, run by Martin Hawksey. It is entitled ‘What the Little Birdy tells me: Twitter in Education.’ This workshop will explore some educational ‘Twitter hacks’ which cover a wide range of activities from a free SMS broadcast system, Twitter for classroom voting and the application of social network analysis to for mining Twitter for actionable insights. As part of this participants will be shown a range of free and open source tools to assist in Twitter data collection and analysis including the Twitter Archiving Google Spreadsheet (TAGS) and NodeXL. For more information visit our CLT webpage for the event.

Date: Wednesday 13th November

Time: 15.00-16.30

LSE staff can book onlinehttps://apps.lse.ac.uk/training-system/userBooking/course/7376384

Externals very welcome: No booking is required to watch the live stream, simply visit the event page at 3pm next Wednesday. If you would like to attend in person then please email: g.veschini@lse.ac.uk

Twitter: use the hashtag #LSENetED for comments & questions. Martin’s handle is @mhawksey

November 7th, 2013|Events & Workshops (LTI), NetworkED|Comments Off on First NetworkED Seminar: What the little birdy tells me|

October festival of learning

It’s October, term has started again, and CLT have an exciting range of workshops coming up in the next few weeks. These include sessions in the Learning Technology, Digital Literacy and Researcher Development programmes. Follow the hyperlinks to book now.

And there’s also our usual Moodle training running this month. You can choose from the sessions below. Follow the hyperlinks to book.

If you have any questions about the training we provide please contact: clt-support@lse.ac.uk

 

October 7th, 2013|Announcements, Events & Workshops (LTI)|Comments Off on October festival of learning|

Using tablets and mobiles in teaching and learning

CLT are facilitating an ‘iMeet’ workshop on Friday 2nd August at 12-1pm which is an informal get together for staff who are interested in sharing good practice around the use of tablets and other mobile devices in teaching and learning. CLT staff will attend but in no way dominate the meeting nor push any sort of agenda. Open to all interested in using, or at least in thinking about using, or in being critical about using, tablets in teaching and research.

Further details and bookings available at: https://apps.lse.ac.uk/training-system/userBooking/course/217140

Tea, coffee and biscuits will be available.

July 30th, 2013|Announcements, Events & Workshops (LTI)|Comments Off on Using tablets and mobiles in teaching and learning|