eLearning at New College

Following this week’s mLearn 2008 conference I’ve heard a few colleagues question what they consider to be an overly ‘academic’ focus on new technologies within education. There is a good post by Bob Harrison on Futurelab’s blog Flux which addresses this issue by referencing both Marc Prensky’s talk at mLearn and Diana Laurillard’s keynote lecture.

Although there are undoubtedly some academics who are making a career from over-theorising eLearning rather than ‘getting their hands dirty’ with new technologies, I tend to agree with Laurillard that it is the pedagogy (thinking about the practice of teaching and learning) that should drive the technology and not the other way around. Technological determinism – the idea that technological developments are (and should be) the main drivers for social and institutional changes – may no longer be the academic flavour of the month, but it is still popular in some educational settings and establishments. The problem with this view is that it encourages us to attribute a mysterious and autonomous power to educational technology in the process of which the complexities of the learning experience itself is largely forgotten. So rather than uncritically celebrate the latest and greatest technologies in education let’s start with what is genuinely innovative, collaborative and creative about teaching and learning in F.E and then start to look for new technologies that can enable these new learning experiences.

Stephanie and I attended a workshop yesterday at mLearn 2008 run by Palitha Edirisingha (author of this book) on Podcasting and Learning. The focus was both practical (in groups we planned and made a 3-min podcast using Audacity) and theoretical (we discussed a 10-factor framework for considering how podcasts can fit into teaching and learning). Most of the data Palitha used was based upon the UK HEA-funded IMPALA project (Informal Mobile Podcasting and Learning Adaptation) which took place across seven universities and involved 500 students.

A couple of things that I took away from the workshop which I thought were really useful (apart from a free copy each of the book which came out of the project – see myself or Stephanie if you’d like to borrow a copy):

1. To do properly podcasts take a lot of planning. Even short audio podcasts require a clear beginning, middle and end and need to be planned within an overall scheme of work or course overview.

2. Podcasting is perhaps best thought of as enabling new and creative ways of learning rather than reinforcing traditional ways of learning. I suppose there is still a place for the video podcast of the lecturer ‘lecturing’ to her/his students, but we ought to think of how podcasts can enable collaborative, reflective and active learning by students.

I will be shamelessly stealing some of Palitha’s ideas in the podcasting basics workshops that I will be running over the next few weeks (email Eileen Treanor to book yourself on these sessions which are limited to 10 people at a time).

Reading an interesting article at the moment by Allison Druin (University of Maryland) on the role that young people can play in the design of new educational technologies. Often when we design learning environments we assume that the “teacher knows best” and our involvement of learners is, at best, tokenistic. Druin argues there are major benefits in including young people as design partners when designing technological tools for learning:

We cannot expect very young people to program as well as computer scientists. We cannot expect them to know what educational goals need to be covered in a school curriculum as well as a teacher does. But we can expect children to tell us what excites and bores them, what helps them learn, and what can be used in their homes and schools. We can expect children to be creative, honest collaborators. Children can also help us adults to think beyond the traditional needs of the workplace. Instead of productivity, efficiency or cost saving, they can help adults think about tools that can let people laugh, enable creativity and support collaborative learning.

Druin’s argument surely has implications for how we design our VLE’s home page and other pages. How do we involve learners in creating an exciting and collaborative learning environment that is centred on their needs and requirements rather than us as teachers?

The role of children in the design of new technology by Allison Druin Behaviour and Information Technology, 2002, vol. 21, no. 1, 1-25