Making communications land - Are they received and understood as intended? we...
A positive principle: online distance learning as the privileged mode
1. a positive principle: online
distance learning as the
privileged mode
Dr Jen Ross, Digital Education
University of Edinburgh, Scotland
image: Ed Guzman, ‘human-technology relations’, https://www.flickr.com/photos/-ed/15673388214/in/dateposted/
5. beliefs about knowledge and the nature of learning are... revealed in
the ways teaching spaces are designed... recognisable patterns in
higher education ...are the result of choices that have been made,
sometimes consciously, sometimes without much consideration of
what the alternatives might be. (Toohey 1999, p.45-48)
http://www.magiceye.com
6. as long as we compare technology conditions to
no-technology conditions, the field will not move
forward, especially in our search for nuanced
applications of technology. (Bernard et al 2014,
p.272)
•It is not difference in instructional method that
determines student performance. (Black 2013, p.6)
http://imgkid.com/old-school-house-inside.shtml
7. • education concerns not only how people learn
‘naturally’ from their environment but also the
social interactions that support learning, and the
institutions and practices that have grown up
around them. (Beetham and Sharpe 2013, p.2)
• technologies work dynamically with pedagogies,
not for them, and in the process they become
mutually determining. (Cousin, 2005, p.118)
Ecofriend ‘praxis of flow’ http://www.ecofriend.com/praxis-of-flow-green-architecture-inspired-by-evolution.html
8. • The university… can no longer be seen as a bounded,
stable place – a static ‘container’ within which education
takes place. (Bayne, Gallagher & Lamb 2014)
http://www.absolutedp.com
17. collaboration, contact, community
‘The MSc was without a doubt the most rewarding
educational experience I have had, online or
otherwise. Intellectually challenging, highly
interactive and collaborative, and with a palpable
sense of enthusiasm and camaraderie... I stay in
touch with this community even after graduation
and consider them all my colleagues.’
Michael Sean Gallagher, programme graduate
18. Kathleen Gresham Everett, http://thecourseofourseasons.com/2013/01/27/small-stones-272013/
Matthew Gillon: In a strange way, I didn't feel that I wasn't in Edinburgh.
Phillip Walley: I may not be physically on campus, but … the campus
goes with me - as part of my cognitive real estate if you will.
Lilia Banton: [to be at Edinburgh university] means to be online but also
mentally, intellectually and even emotionally engaged with the course.
it's not about where you live and breathe, but what you're reading
about, studying, researching, creating. i think for me being at Edinburgh
is being intellectually stimulated, thrown into uncertainty, sort of crisis,
living with it, embracing it. i don't think i would do it while 'in' edinburgh
cos the sheer physicality of the place could overpower me.
‘new geographies of learning’ project - http://edinspace.weebly.com
a rethinking of homeliness
19. Kathleen Gresham Everett, http://thecourseofourseasons.com/2013/01/27/small-stones-272013/
a rethinking of homeliness
Home is that place which enables and promotes varied and
everchanging perspectives, a place where one discovers new
ways of seeing reality, frontiers of difference. (hooks, 2004,
p.155)
20. • the value of the ‘face’
• the place of the teacher
• the implications of the
massive
• the lure of instrumentalism
• the impact of the algorithm
a space of ‘not-yetness’
25. Consider a house... One might almost see
it as the epitome of immobility, with its
concrete and its stark, cold and rigid
outlines ...[but] our house would emerge as
permeated from every direction by streams
of energy which run in and out of it by
every imaginable route: water, gas,
electricity, telephone lines, radio and
television signals, and so on. Its image of
immobility would then be replaced by an
image of a complex of mobilities, a nexus of
in and out conduits. (Lefebvre 1991, pp. 92–
93)
‘ink wires’, INT3RLOP3R. http://int3rlop3r.deviantart.com/art/Ink-Wires-Abstract-Wallpaper-190511137
27. ‘wider themes in digital education’
• “This proposal provides a flexible ‘building
block’ structure supporting students to
participate in or create a portfolio of
learning activities or experiences, engaging
with emergent components of theory and
practice in digital education.” – from the
course proposal
41. • [e-learning] is about what we truly
value as a higher educational
experience. (Garrison 2011, p.124)
42. • Bayne, S., Gallagher, M.S. & Lamb, J., 2014. Being “at” university: the social topologies of
distance students. Higher Education, 67(5), pp.569–583.
• Beetham, H. & Sharpe, R., 2013. Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age: Designing for 21st
Century Learning, Routledge.
• Bernard, R.M., Borokhovski, E. &Tamim, R.M., 2014. Detecting bias in meta-analyses of
distance education research: big pictures we can rely on. Distance Education, 35(3), pp.271–
293.
• Black, L., 2013.A history of scholarship. In M. G. Moore, ed. Handbook of Distance
Education. NewYork: Routledge, pp. 3–20.
• Collier,A. & Ross, J., in press. Complexity, mess and not-yetness: teaching online with
emerging technologies. In G.Veletsianos, ed. Emerging Technologies in Distance Education.
Athabasca University Press.
• Cousin, G., 2004. Learning from cyberspace. In R. Land & S. Bayne, eds. Education in
Cyberspace. Routledge.
• Garrison, D.R., 2011. E-Learning in the 21st Century:A Framework for Research and
Practice,Taylor & Francis.
• hooks, b., 1990. Choosing the margin as a space of radical openness.Yearning: Race, gender,
and cultural politics, pp.145–53.
• Lefebvre, H., 1991.The Production of Space, Malden: Blackwell.
• Toohey, S., 1999. Designing Courses for Higher Education, Open University Press.
Notas del editor
I'm going to spend the next little while trying to convince you about something I believe quite passionately - that we can work productively with the idea online distance education can be the best way to teach and learn. I don't think I'm just preaching to the converted here, because even people who embrace online distance learning often do so with a deficit model in mind. Sometimes that's explicit - they say things like 'well, we can't get this group together in real life, so we'll do something online'. Sometimes it's more subtle, where we try to replicate the practices of the lecture theatre or the seminar room online.
The title of this talk comes from this document - the manifesto for teaching online...
The wider context of the work I’m going to talk about today is this place - the university of edinburgh. For about 15 years...
I thought you might like to know a little bit about me...
the design of learning spaces shows us a lot about what we value and believe about education. How we go about doing that work is revealing, too. it’s not just about technology, course design, and so on - it’s about what we believe.
I’m not going to talk about how online learning ‘compares’ with the classroom in terms of outcomes - learning happens in particular context and places and times, and these things matter more than the mode. we need to ask different kinds of questions about digital education.
the relationship between technology and pedagogy is incredibly fraught. it’s hard to talk about what teachers do, what technology does, in this current moment of what Biesta called ‘learnification’, where everything we need to know about education is boiled down to what learners do. But we have to try, because as Cousin says...
finally, we don’t get to stop at talking about online learning as if it doesn’t touch the other things we do, and our identities within higher education. Digital education forces us to take space, place and time seriously, and it has wider implications for how we define the university.
part-time nature, variety of spaces, energy of participants, creative assignments and activities, tutor engagement = contact.
