A short presentation for SEDA Summer School 2012

1. Is Digital Different?
Lawrie Phipps.
A discussion for the SEDA Summer School 2012:
Academic Development for the Digital University

2. Introduction
This ‘slideshare’ is only designed as a supportive tool
that will sit on a blog post as a way of framing a
discussion and an aide memoire.
David Baume invited me to SEDA summer school to
provide a discussion that perhaps challenges the notion
of digital as a separate thing in academic development.
The discussion I am facilitating challenges the
delegates and importantly the other facilitators to find
the distinctiveness in digital.

3. Discussion Structure
Acknowledging that it probably won’t run in order, or the way I want it. If you’re a
delegate accessing this post event, then I changed it because I’m adaptable and
agile. If you’re accessing it but you weren’t at the event, the delegates were
difficult and the discussion went all over the place.
• An open question to the floor, what’s different about
digital?
• 6 things that I think might be different
• MOOCs: a case study generated from the floor
• Tools to understand where you stand digitally, so you
can support others.
• Post-digital

4. Open to the floor: what’s
different about digital?

5. What I think is different?
• Geography is smaller
• (potential or theoretical) Business models
• Possibly less ephemeral (informal)
• Not quite real time
• Easier to distribute (I refuse/refute open – but
accept cheap)
• Scale (hypothetically)

6. MOOCs
(Massive Open Online Courses)
• MOOCs are in a lot of the press lately, they are
the ‘hot digital topic’
• But an open question to the floor: How
radical, how different are MOOCs to what is
available now?

7. Two final things
• A framework for reflecting on where you
stand, and where the staff you support may
stand, and
• Some food for thought?

8. Visitor and Residents
Visitors Residents
• Web as similar to an untidy • Web as a place
garden tool shed • Somewhere that they can
• Define a goal, select an share
appropriate tool, task information, participate in
over, it goes back in the
shed community
• Driven by benefits • Express and elicit opinion
• Visitors think of the Web as • Build and extend
one of many tools to relationships
achieve goals; categorised • When they log
alongside the off, something may
telephone, books, pen and remain, a status update, a
paper and off–line software.
post LeCornu and White
From

9. Professional
Visitor Resident
If Visitor – Residency is mapped
against professional and personal.
Individuals may find they behave
differently depending on if they
are at play or at work – visitors and
residents should be seen as a blur
and not as categories, or worse a
‘digital learning style’
Personal

10. An ignored warning
In learning particularly the postdigital signals the end to interminable debates of the
benefits of 'elearning' 'eknowing' 'blended learning' and a host of other digital ways of
thinking. It posits that these distinctions only cloud over the lessons that can be
learned and the value that can be garnered from the ecologies in which we live and
learn. Mobile learning, at the time of writing, is a victim of this kind of digitalism.
Mobility in learning should refer to location independence, or widening participation.
The term and the agenda has been hijacked by "e-learning specialists" and "digital
gurus". Mobile Learning has become a discussion of different mobile applications and
application platforms and has moved away from the discussion of whom these
applications need to be serving. The MUVE may offer a clear advantage in exploring
gender over a dress shop in a downtown mall, but those advantages are about access
and enabling rather than about any inherent value in the technology. The space being
explored is a social space, not a digital one. Whatever the next digital technology may
be is already at risk of the same treatment: becoming the focus of concern rather than
the platform upon which change is enacted.
52group. (2009) Preparing for the postdigital era
http://docs.google.com/View?id=aqv2zmc9bgm_51ft65rbn2 date accessed 5 July
2012.