learning

Watch Helen Keegan’s NetworkED seminar online

A big thanks to all of those that joined us for our NetworkED seminar with Helen Keegan last week, whether in person or online. Helen shared some inspirational stories of her work on empowering learners to take joint ownership of their learning process together with staff. All of those who missed out or would like to revisit some of her points can watch the recording of her talk below. You may also be interested in our short Q&A with Helen Keegan.

LSE_StudentsAsProducers_Helen Keegan 05.11.14 – slides from presentation

LTI NetworkED Seminar series Helen Keegan ‘Interactive & Social Media’

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/

Providing insights and examples of projects that engage students as producers, Helen discussed 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 is of great relevance to those interested in innovative pedagogies, student led learning and media education in the digital age.

November 11th, 2014|Announcements, NetworkED, Social Media|1 Comment|

Weekly Roundup in Education Technology: Bullying, Faculty Views on Technology 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!

Faculty remain sceptical of technology(?) – Inside Higher Ed

Inside Higher Ed’s report on faculty attitudes towards technology in higher education seems to suggest that staff see little benefits in providing online education. However, it is striking that the demographic of the survey is heavily skewed towards more senior academics. Notably, the sample group included fewer academics under 30 than those below 70! Nevertheless, the reports’ findings definite deserve further study.

Culture of cruelty: Why bullying thrives in Higher Education – The Guardian

In the UK, the overall prevalence of workplace bullying […] across all working sectors is usually estimated at between 10-20%. However the percentage of people who have experienced bullying within academic settings is higher than the national average […], ranging between 18% to 42%.

No matter how much we would want it to be, Higher Education is not immune from bullying. Instead, it seems that the problem of bullying is more prevalent in our sector than in others. In light of the #Gamergate problematic discussed on this blog two weeks ago, it becomes even more important for us to address bullying and misogyny as an education technology issue.

The end of the average student – Usable Knowledge, Harvard GSE

Technology can help us to turn “personalised learning” into more than just a buzzword. Instead of building our education systems around the average student (we have yet to meet one), we can tap into resources enabling us to deliver a learning experience tailored towards individual needs.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/nickmorrison/2014/10/22/its-time-to-rethink-our-use-of-technology-in-schools/ – Forbes

It is only when we harness technology to the cause of education, rather than the other way around, that we will know if it is worth doing.

How should we react to continuing scepticism towards technology in education? Nick Morrison correctly emphasises that we need to rethink how we teach students and, crucially, to make sure to use technology to enhance education, not vice versa.

What is good teaching? – The Guardian

This Sutton Trust report on different teaching styles may not be remarkable for the Guardian’s misleading twist on it (that “progressive” teaching is inefficient) or for being a literature review that, well, lacks a methodology for a systematic review of literature. Rather, it is striking as it marks an endorsement of mixed ability teaching by a trust that is run by a significant donor to the Conservative Party. Perhaps the ground in education really is shifting?

November 5th, 2014|Ed-Tech news and issues, Roundup, Teaching & Learning|1 Comment|

Q&A with Helen Keegan

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

Q&A with Helen Keegan – Senior Lecturer (Interactive Media and Social Technologies), University of Salford, Manchester.

Q1.You have been involved in numerous projects which challenge the usual dynamics in teaching and ask students to be producers what has been your personal favourite and what did students produce as a result?

“It’s hard to choose one as they’ve all had their strengths and weaknesses, but I’d probably go with the ‘opera project’ as it was such a challenge and there was a live output as a result of remote collaboration. In this project, we worked with 120 students from the UK, New Zealand, France and Colombia. They formed eight international teams, and each team was responsible for producing the visual backdrop for a specific act in an 8-act opera. The visuals were entirely filmed and edited on mobile devices. Each team was given a one word descriptor for their act, along with the music, which was fairly avant garde so they really needed to demonstrate abstract thought. They collaborated through google hangouts and docs for the planning, so it was quite a challenge for them to negotiate the creative process remotely and across timezones. Complete chaos at times, but worth it to see their visuals become part of the performance at the Tete-a-Tete Opera Festival in 2013.”

Q2. Have you experienced any difficulties in getting teachers and students to engage projects which use social media and how did/do you deal with this?

“Yes, there are always difficulties – the main concerns centre on working openly, lack of confidence in using various tools and different platform preferences. Confidence in using tools and working openly tends to build through time, but the platform preference issue is interesting when it comes to international collaborations. We’ve found that students in different countries tend to gravitate towards particular platforms. It’s all very well setting up an international collaboration, but when students in country X insist on using Facebook while students in country Y insist on using Twitter, that’s a problem! We try to be as platform-agnostic as possible, then aggregate content from multiple platforms through a common hashtag. Eventually groups will settle on a common platform for communicating, but at the beginning it can be a challenge to negotiate platform preferences and the resulting power relations.”

Q3. What has been the most exciting/interesting outcome of a project so far?

“This year, we moved from international collaborative projects (like the opera project) to student-led (and initiated) collaborations. 250 students from the same 4 countries started to connect through a common hashtag, and we encouraged them to make one another curious through producing interesting/odd Vine videos and adding them to a collaborative Google map. It was a really neat way to build ambient awareness, and then the students started communicating and collaborating on the production of mobile films – however they didn’t have to do this, so it was great to see how many of them did begin to work together, and the outputs were fantastic! In the past, we’d done a lot of work in terms of organising groups and defining projects, so it was interesting to see the results when we stepped back and let the students self-organise through common interests.”

Q4. Do you think these projects change the way that your students view and use social media?

“Absolutely – these kinds of projects introduce students to the collaborative potential of social media. Although they’re all avid social media users (in terms of social networking) they still tend to view collaboration as working in small, local groups. Through working on large-scale international collaborations, they become comfortable with the idea of working across cultures and timezones, and they also benefit from learning from one another’s disciplinary perspectives. They’re much more likely to instigate collaborative projects themselves after taking part in these projects, as they become confident in their ability to work in international teams with people they haven’t met face-to-face.”

Helen will be speaking more about her work at LSE as part of the LTI Networked seminar series on Wednesday 5th November at 5pm.

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 31st, 2014|Announcements, Events & Workshops (LTI), innovation, NetworkED, Open Education, Social Media, Teaching & Learning|3 Comments|

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

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|

Register for LSE Teaching Day 2011 – Places are going fast!

Register now – Places are going fast!
Tuesday 24 May 2010

Registration is now open for LSE Teaching Day 2011.

This year academic staff, students and support staff will lead an exciting programme focused on:

Feedback and assessment
Innovation in teaching
Research led teaching
Student skills development in HE

Book your place and view the full programme and abstracts on www.lse.ac.uk/teachingday/

Registration closes on Monday 2 May 2011

April 4th, 2011|Announcements, Events & Workshops (LTI), Teaching & Learning|Comments Off|

Learning & Teaching Competition Winners

The Jorum* Learning & Teaching awards are given to innovative learning and teaching resources that have been created under a Creative Commons license. You can find out more about all six winners on the Jorum website and below I have highlighted two in particular.

All of the resources are free to use and can be linked to from within Moodle.

Making group work work

This video resource is aimed at giving students and tutors a better understanding of the challenges of group work and how to overcome them! There are 10 episodes such as Managing conflict and Assessing group work which can be used independently or worked thru’ in order.

The website includes help for students and staff.

Reading Skills Tutorial

Produced by the Skills@Library team at the University of Leeds, this is an online tutorial to help students (and staff!) improve their reading skills.

*Jorum is a JISC-funded online repository service for teaching and support staff in UK colleges and universities. It exists to encourage sharing, reuse and re-purposing of learning and teaching materials created by the community for the community

October 7th, 2009|Conferences, Open Education, Teaching & Learning|2 Comments|

eLearning 2020

On our last away day, the very (!) talented Athina, Jane & Steve came up with a novel way to present their take on the future of elearning: they created a 5 minute sci-fi video.The brief was to come up with a technology which might become the technology that will revolutionise… education, our lives, our society. They chose to explode the premise (& temporality) by offering a historical glance backwards, from a very distant future (in which, intriguingly, Lt. Uhura, and Mr. Spock have teamed up with Princess Leia) addressing the 2020 past. video still with Steve & Jane What I liked best was the underlying suggestion that in the distant future in which Stars Trek and Wars conjoin, the concept of learning has given way to (mere) data accumulation and information exchange. Spock, unable to escape his Vulcan psychological make-up, finds it illogical that humans might learn for the sheer enjoyment of understanding, applying and analysing concepts. To us humans (at least of today), information is that about which we will at a final stage be able to make judgments; we learn (by rote) “information”in order to apply our critical thinking in an informed way, ultimately to make sense of the world and us in it. Information has no value for its own sake, and learning is more than merely the acquisition of knowledge. Poor Spock overvalues rationality (or rather: logic) at the cost of creativity. Who’d be a Vulcan, eh…* Watch the video, it’s nicely provocative and entertaining.