Submission as Part of Technology Enhanced Learning Module...
The OU Innovating Pedagogy 2012 Report can be downloaded from...
www.open.ac.uk/innovating
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www.open.ac.uk/innovating
Briefly describe your selected item.
Innovating
Pedagogy 2012 is a 38 page OER pdf resource, incorporating a series of short
reports focusing on ‘ten innovations that are already in currency but have not
yet had a profound influence on education.’ This is the first of what is hoped
to be annual Innovation reports.
Why did you
choose it?
I read through many of the other supplied readings,
but was especially taken with the pointedly futuristic view of this report. It
takes as its model David Wood’s 1993
Report to the UK National Commission on Education, ‘A Day in School: 2015 AD’.
I like the idea that we can create a vision of how we’ll be Teaching and
Learning in 10 years time, or in 20 years time. This is a valuable and creative
exercise, which can help us to cut through many of the challenges we face
today, whilst having the confidence that our core educational goals are being
preserved and enhanced.
On page 7, Sharples
and his OU team set the tone for the report…
We explore current and emerging innovations in education for the 21st
century, in the hope that it will guide teachers and policy makers in making
informed decisions about curriculum design, course development and teaching
strategies. (page 7 (end
para))
What did it tell you that you already know?
Much of
what’s in the report, and indeed in the associated reading and resources is
already in place. The educational opportunities and potentials provided through
new technology and social networking are there, but they need to be grasped and
(crucially) they need to be shaped into true hybrid teaching and learning
environments.
The challenge is to create a hybrid system
that can offer simple or complex assistance, or perhaps a link to a human tutor
where needed, embedded into the structure and content of a study text. P. 9
(last para)
We are already
creating such hybrid systems – most of our course materials have been
distributed as pdfs (and similarly open digital formats) for years. If we treat
pdfs (and similarly open digital formats) as our OER (Open Educational
Resource) course source materials, we start with robust and transferrable
digital material. Pdfs and similar formats allow for multiple documents to be
open at once, on tablets or on pc screens. Pdfs can be annotated, bookmarked
and (I would suggest this is very important) text and images (including
diagrams and charts) can be stripped out of pdfs to be quoted (always with
correct attribution) in the students’ subsequent ‘manifestations’.
Wiki and blog
platforms (either within the VLE or on outside platforms) can allow learning
groups to collaboratively assimilate the gathered material and ‘manifest it’ (as
LIT’s Bernie Goldbach says) to the wider audience. Free platforms like Prezi
can achieve similar results. These existing platforms can already incorporate
(at least links to) more dynamic ‘mixed media’ such as video. They can already
make use of the collaborative potentials of social media (through comments
etc).
If we use these
platforms (blogs and wikis) within our existing VLE, the human tutor (as
described above) can (and should) be directly involved in our ‘hybrid learning
system’. Assessment (including data tracking and some analytics) is already
built into our VLE. We shouldn’t underestimate our requirement to act as
‘guides on the side’, providing the ‘simple or complex assistance’ which helps
our students’ learning (less teaching and more facilitating learning).
One further point
relates back to concept, environment and design. Though the designed
limitations of current e-book readers as described in the Report may be
overcome in future iterations, that doesn’t mean that they can’t already form part
of a current hybrid learning system. The same with mobile phones, handheld
devices, tablets, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube et al… all of these can already
form part of hybrid learning systems,
part of our students’ learning environments.
However, for me a
laptop currently remains the best device for the creation of an student educational environment, with
internet connection, a keyboard, soundcard, speakers and (crucially) a larger
screen (for synchronous collation of multiple documents and OERs). I currently
have three text documents, three pdfs, a word doc and six webpages open as I
construct this blogpost on one of my four laptops.
If we look
beyond the nitty-gritties of the current technology, we can see clear
potentials and objectives for the next few years. In her DIY U book, Anna
Kamanetz quotes Judy Baker at Foothill-De Anza…
The way I see it, higher education, ten, twenty
years from now is going to look very different. It won’t be the brick and
mortar and the semester and a course in this and a course in that. It’s going
to be more outcomes based and skill based, project based. You don’t have to
take these sixty courses or whatever it is to be a journalist. Someone will
identify your gaps and then you address the gaps, in what-ever way is possible.
And that may mean taking an online course from New Zealand, being in a
discussion forum with people in Canada, an internship in Mexico with Habitat
for Humanity. You just need to get the knowledge and skills whatever way you
can and then test out or present a portfolio. And when you add it all up, a few
years later, you actually are ready to be a good journalist. (p. 133 (para 2))
This is the
future of education for me – a seamless integration of (possibly interwoven and
matrixed) undergrad courses, part-timers at work in your industry and
conventional full-time students, postgrads, distance learners, special purpose
award students and lifelong learners all learning together.
The potential
for this model, the demand for this model already exists. The need for this
model exists amongst the learners, but our education system can afford to complacently
ignore that need because our system is comfortably fuelled by thriving CAO
numbers and government funding.
In her Aug
2011 blogpost ‘Humanities Grad School and its Discontents’, Anna Kamanetz
quotes William Pannapacker…
“In order to reform higher education, many of us
will have to leave it, perhaps temporarily, but with the conviction that the
fields of human activity and values we care about—history, literature, philosophy,
languages, religion, and the arts - will be more likely to flourish outside of
academe than in it. As more and more people are learning, universities do not
have a monopoly on the “life of the mind.”"
I think it’s
possible that many of us may have to move out of the conventional IoT sector in
order to pursue our Teaching and Learning potentials.
What did it
tell you that was new?
I’d never heard of latent semantic analysis…
Technology-enabled
feedback can include immediate automated responses to open assignments and
written student reports. The computational technique of latent semantic
analysis processes a corpus of text (such as previous student work over a range
of marks, or a set of model answers) to uncover similarities in meaning
between words and
phrases, then uses this to simulate human judgements of the coherence and style
of a new piece of student writing. (P. 13 (para 5))
The badges
idea was new to me. With its immediate association with the Boy Scouts, it
strikes me as highly appropriate for young children, but not for third level. I
thought the conceptualization behind this was fundamentally flawed and very
badly worked out. However, the idea has some merit. I was struck immediately
with its similarity to the military ribbons system – where achievements, merits,
long-service and awards can be discretely displayed within a simple coherent colour-coded
system.
Briefly
discuss a question or puzzle that you have in the light of your reading.
The Report
mentions disruption twice…
In compiling the report it became clear that the
innovations are not independent, but fit together into a new and disruptive form of education that
transcends boundaries between formal and informal settings, institutional and
self-directed learning, and nd traditional education providers and commercial organisations.
(p. 6 (para 3)) (my italics).
If education is ripe for
disruption, it may be
that the assessment of training and the offering of examination services at
higher levels of education will provide a route by which publishers can develop
credibility in the assessment and award of an ever wider range of qualification
products based around their content offerings. (p.12 (para 3)) (my italics).
I’m not
arguing against the fact that our current environment, fiscal, political,
sectoral, technological, social is undergoing (and will continue to undergo)
disruptive change. We are in a storm and we must cope with the storm in order
to survive and to thrive (through the success of our students). Coping with
disruptive change is what we do. In order to cope, we are agile, we attempt to
lead, we attempt to be ‘ahead of the curve’ if possible, but we do this whilst
preserving and enhancing our educational goals, knowing that therein lies the
success and full potential of our students.
But I question
whether ‘disruptive forms of education’ is
a concept I’d value? Neither do I believe that it’s useful to believe that all ‘education is ripe for disruption’. I
think we must be keenly aware that the OU operate largely within a UK
environment, and the UK’s education model (at every level) is in tatters.
Without being complacent, we need to recognize that we work in an Institute, in
an IoT sector in Ireland, where innovation, autonomy and problem solving are
valued (even if they’re not wholly supported always). Our environment is not
perfect, but that doesn’t mean we have to continually defer to a huge,
neighbouring and defective model.
We must face
the challenging and disruptive storm, whilst having the confidence that our
core educational goals are being preserved and enhanced.
I don’t
believe we are the storm? Disruption for its own sake will lead to many chaotic
and broken educational models, thousands of students who are unable to achieve
their full potential.
Kamanetz, A.,
(2010) DIY U Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher
Education. Chelsea Green Publishing. White River Jct., Vermont
Sharples, M. et al (2012). Innovating
Pedagogy 2012: Open University Innovation Report 1. Milton Keynes: The Open
University.
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