As we get ready for the academic year 2010-11, I am preparing our Post Graduate Certificate in Teaching in Higher Education.

This involves: updating the Handbook for this instance of the course for the last time. We will be revalidating a new PCTHE for 2011-12; updating the VLE (Brookes Virtual/Blackboard) and Wiki (Confluence).

There are a lot of new features on the VLE, particularly Voice Tools and related Wimba applications. I hope to start using these “for real” this year.

I am also resolving to keep a Course Leader’s blog here in my BrookesBlog site. A. J. Cann at University of Leicester has written a piece on “Why blog”  http://www.microbiologybytes.com/AJC/why…) on his excellent (for biologists) Microbiologybytes site. What he said …

I have to confess that I have become something of an on-line learning luddite. Fifteen years ago I was something of an Internet pioneer, developing Web-based support sites for professional development modules as part of a postgraduate certificate in in the management of the international energy industry. I did my MA in education by distance learning and wrote my PhD on community information technology centres. I am active in the social networking world (my Google Profile is here: http://www.google.com/profiles/georgebro…).

So, what gives? I feel an almost visceral antipathy to virtual learning environments (VLEs). OK, I know they are only sets of tools. James Clay keeps a wonderful blog on the virtues of using VLEs  http://elearningstuff.wordpress.com/cate…). When Blackboard bought WebCT, the predecessor to the current BrookesVirtual, I wrote a few pieces on the political-economic implications as I saw them at the time (e.g. here: http://my-world.typepad.com/rworld/2006/…). But, I don’t just feel an antipathy only to Blackboard. Moodle for all its open-source loveliness doesn’t do it for me any more, either.

I used to love VLEs. But as we all know, when you fall out of love it is really hard to re-ignite the flame. So, maybe me and the VLE need a little relationship counselling. I promise to listen more and sulk less, focus on the strengths and “accentuate the positive”. Maybe that is a lesson for my life in general!

Engage!

Posted via web from George’s posterous

I am going to be leading a workshop on “Investigating teaching in your discipline” next Wednesday. The outline is attached to this page (below).

Discipline is an interesting word, which we often use without reflecting on the complex valency of meanings that it bears. I have been reading Foucault’s Discipline and Punish in preparation for the workshop.

Foucault sees discipline as largely a coercive function, with emphasis on that part of its semantic field that is about correction. And, while the corrective function has largely been polished up (or at least rolled in glitter) and sanitised by the academy for use as a synonym for “field of study”, much of the structure of domination and normalisation still lies below the surface of our academic disciplines.

Discipline… is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets… And it may be taken over… by institutions that use it as an essential instrument for a particular end (schools, hospitals)… (Foucault, 1977: 215)

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. (A. Sheridan, Tran.). London: Allen Lane, Penguin. 

workshop1summarydisciplines

This experience mirrors ours, though I only have anecdote to support it. Courses where PebblePad is used do not seem to engender an extended adoption of the platform for ongoing personal/professional use. We do not expect students to want to take the VLE with them and it isn’t designed for that. The wiki has a liminal status. It could be adopted as a personal web-builder if a student were keen to. We do not promote this and there does not seem to be any pent up demand waiting to pile in to Confluence. It gets used when it is designed into the curriculum and not when its not. But my question is does it matter? And, if it does, when and why? It is safe to assume most students have web presence via FaceBook or mySpace or other networks. Similarly many are using IM services and nearly all text.

I think the key issue here is appropriate information (or academic) literacy for a networked, social-media era (not just the “digital age”).

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The question of whether you can rely on Twitter to filter your reading is problematic. Yes following 8,000 people (or however many) will probably serve to satisfy most information needs. I am sure that by some number (10? 100? 1000?) a Twitter follower will be deep into a long tail of duplication. The other 40,000,000 people who tweet just aren’t relevant to them. The number of sources may be large, but it is finite. My reading list is not in any sense unique or even, compared to serious bloggers (@Downes springs to mind) or Twits really wide. My feed reader (BlogBridge http://www.blogbridge.com/ ) is currently consuming 47 feeds, none particularly odd-ball, which together syndicate about 800 articles/day. I scan most of these, probably read the slug from about a quarter and click through to maybe 20 or 30 articles. I am no serious newshound. I am adding about 2 or 3 feeds a week: feeds I find from the ones I follow already, feeds I find from following my Twitterverse and feeds from things I hear about in other conversations, conferences, reading student essays, reviewing articles, subscribing to email lists, etc. Broadly and with some overlap my feeds are Project-related, Ed Tech-related, Tech-related, Ed Policy-related, Policy & Politics-related, Environmental activism-related, Global Justice-related. Most are from sources and people not known personally to me. Some are blogs of my RL friends. Some of my RL friends are blogospheric authorities. Some are just folk who are read by me, their kids and cats. Even within my little list of feeds there is a lot of echo. Maybe the whole world is just an echo chamber. Maybe we do only listen to what we want to listen to and then repeat it. Maybe I am deluded to think that if I find stuff out outside of Twitter (which has probably been brought into Twitter somewhere by someone before me) and bring it in that I have something of more value than if I only followed up items from people I follow on Twitter (a paltry 159 people) and retweet or bookmark my interests. For me the value of Twitter is the community, not just the information. Twitter is an important professional tool, but it is also a social tool. It is an evening stroll, my fag break, a pub, my sounding board. It helps me to get a sense of the relevance of some of my activity outside Twitter. Even if that activity may be pursued by someone else inside Twitter I value it differently. A quick scan of the people I follow suggests that by and large they are people like me. They have a couple of hundred followers and follow about double the number that follow them. They follow a few key professional celebrities. But, and here is the value for me, they all give the impression of thinking for themselves about things that matter to me and they widen my horizons. They show me a world beyond their own Twittersphere. They show me the world is not just the Old Dog and Duck. The best thing about Twitter is that it gets me out of Twitter, not that it makes it possible for me to stay in.

Posted via email from George’s posterous

Posted via web from George’s posterous

Posted via web from George’s posterous

Chris Rust sent me a link. He said:

An Innocuous list you might want to give to the new staff course? Even better, you might get them to discuss adding their own?! Best wishes Chris

————————— Original Message —————————-
Subject: TP Msg. #961 The Ten Worst Teaching Mistakes
From:    “Rick Reis” [deleted]
Date:    Tue, September 1, 2009 12:56 am
To:       tomorrows-professor at mailman.stanford….
————————————————————————–

What might he mean adding their own?

Adding to this list? If it is an innocuous list why bother? Or, adding their own list? That might be more interesting. Could we use a mail list for discussion of our subject matters? In the past we have used the discussion forums on the VLE.

Some groups of tutors and participants have chosen from time to time to minimise their use of the VLE forums. Others have made good use of them and pushed the genre to new limits.

Are maillists the way we want to communicate?

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Further to the last post, Sustaining Communities, the tension in higher education is between: open educational dialogue and institutional pragmatics.

Open educational dialogue is concerned with networks or communities for information sharing, which take a user-centred approach to learning and design for learning on all scales. These networks make use of user-generated content for learning resources, including novel audio & video resources. Assessment, feedback and feed forward is conceived dialogically for learning. Among the benefits of open educational dialogue should be improved student induction and retention in situated learning communities. Among the technical enabling practices by which open educational dialogue might be supported, projects are working on systems mapping, business analysis (BA) and work flows. Information aggregation practice and content syndication (RSS) are being implemented using increasingly open web services and service oriented architectures (SOA). While institutions are traditionally seen as being located in physical space, mobility and location-based services are increasingly re-articulating the relationships between people, space and institutions: domestic, commercial, cultural, civic, language, faith, education, state and their various concrete reflections in houses, offices, systems, stores, transport ways, networks, authorities, maps, corridors and campuses.

Innovation themes supporting open education dialogue appear to be:

• Portals and personal portals (programmes, eportfolios and PLEs) to CPD aligned with
• Flexible frameworks for accreditation, underpinned by
• Multimedia epistemologies, the semantic web and a peer-to-peer participatory culture in disciplines

Sustaining participation as principal, agent, volunteer, affiliate, staff for:

• natural and built environments
• food, water, energy
• economies
• polities and communities

Managing participatory identity

• learning (peripheral participation)
• authentication
• trust (accreditation)
• access (privileges)
• openness

The innovative potential of these themes depends on and is set against an enabling apparatus of social institutions – institutional pragmatics. These are the means by which order is brought to, or structures educational practice along rational lines. Institutional pragmatics may be resolved to nine categories:

1. Learning teaching and assessment
2. Research and development
3. Business and community engagement
4. Learning resources
5. eAdmin
6. Institutional ICT services
7. Physical estates and learning spaces
8. Mobile, location aware and pervasive computing
9. Green ICT