This document provides an overview of a module on learning in the digital age. It discusses key questions about learners' digital competencies and how educational institutions engage with digital contexts. It outlines assignments for students to critically evaluate the use of digital tools for learning and propose an educational intervention. Various topics are covered, including agency, freedom versus control, and transforming versus reforming education. Readings are recommended on topics like digital natives, social networking, games-based learning, and next generation skills. The module aims to help students understand current digital landscapes and critically analyze digital learning approaches.

1. 7ED017
Learning in the digital age
Cameron Furnival
Karl Royle

2. Welcome
• In today’s session we will cover…
• Where we are in terms of digital
affordance
– Personally
– Collectively
– Strategically
•We will cover what the module is about and
how it is assessed
•We will begin to look at the information world
we inhabit

3. Did You Know?

4. Key Questions
• Learners come to us with increasingly
high competencies in the use of
technology
– Is this true?
• To what extent are educational
establishments proactively engaging
with their learners’ digital contexts in a
transformational sense?
• Do students allow adults to share their
social networking activities/spaces?

5. ACTIVITY
• Introduce yourself briefly
– Eg
• What is your current experience with digital
technologies?
• Or…what is your immediate work history?
• What are your expectations from the
unit?

6. Key Questions
• Let’s discuss
– current practice
– Theory and pedagogy
– Politics
– Best practice
• You will need to grasp current
research and step away from your
perceptions!

7. ACTIVITY
• In groups, discuss and write down the
three most important things you can
think of that make e-Learning a
“good thing”
You may find you come up with more
than three – you will have to reduce it
to those you think are most important!

8. An Hypothesis
•In our desire to produce an
holistic and inclusive view of
the use of technology to
support and enhance the
entire learning experience are
we in reality creating a world
which will alienate those we
seek to help?
•Are we throwing out virtual
babies with real bathwater?

9. I
IMPOSED IGNITED
Formal qualification
Sedentary
Rigid
Hierarchical
Reductionism
Conventions
Competition
Linearity
Closed
Boring
Local
Theoretical
Slow
Reproductive
Transmissive
Reactionary
Ugly
PARADIGM SHIFT

10. I
IMPOSED
Formal qualification
Sedentary
Rigid
Hierarchical
Reductionism
Conventions
Competition
Linearity
Closed
Boring
Local
Theoretical
Slow
Reproductive
Transmissive
Reactionary
Ugly
IGNITED
Competencies
Mobile
Adaptable
Heterarchical
Holism
Empiricism
Collaboration
Modularity
Open
Joyful
Global
Applied
Quick
Creative
Constructivist
Responsive
Beautiful
PARADIGM SHIFT

11. Transformation
• Talking about transformation and
reform are certainly important.
• “Conventional institutions of learning
have changed far more slowly than
the modes of inventive, collaborative,
participatory learning offered by the
Internet and an array of
contemporary mobile technologies”
– Davidson, N. Goldberg, D. T. and Jones,
M. J. (2010) The Future of Thinking:
Learning Institutions in a Digital The MIT
Press Cambridge, Massachusetts

12. Transformation
• “When institutions do adopt digital
tools they tend to utilise technology
that can enhance existing practices
and live alongside established
systems of instruction. As McLuhan
(1967) noted society tends to make a
new technology do the work of the
old.”
– Royle, Traxler, Aljanazrah and Stager:
Unesco 2013
–

13. Transformation or reform?
Transformation by necessity includes altering the
beliefs, values and meanings-the culture- in
which programmes are embedded, as well as
changing the current systems of rules, roles and
relationships - social structure- so that the
innovations needed will be supported.
Reform, in contrast means only installing innovations
that will work within the context of the existing
structure and culture of the school
Schlechty (2009)

14. CCoonnttrrooll??
EExxppeerrttiissee??
JJIICC vvss JJIITT??
In the digital
world, the learner
and not the
teacher is in
control of what,
where and how
to learn.
Schlechty (2009)
This means teacher troubles

15. Digital transformational learning
model

16. 1969
There’s nothing new

17. 1969
There’s nothing new

18. Assignments
• Now is a good time to have our first visit to the
assignments.
• Part 1:
• You are required to critically appraise the use of digital
tools for learning by a designated group of learners either
in a formal or informal situation. Your case study should
detail the work that you have undertaken in this area by
presenting desk based research/enquiry into the digital
habits of learners and the aspect of digital media that you
have chosen to study,. Your case should be supported by
reference to appropriate texts.
• For example, you might look at the ways in which blogging
is used in social spaces and critically appraise its
functionality for learning purposes. Is their any research into
the habits of bloggers, what is the demographic etc., Is it
likely to translate to a school space? Does it fit any
particular theories of learning? Further you could
supplement this by looking at its use in education. Finally
you might supplement this by conducting a small scale
enquiry with learners about their digital habits with regard
to blogging or the potential of blogging. (1500 words)

19. Key Points
• Problem and challenge based
learning Boud and Felletti (1991) and
more recently product oriented
learning Zhao (2012)and agile
pedagogy Nikolic, J. and Gledic, J.
(2012)
• Mention Agency and Freedom
• Research Scrum/Agile Pedagogy

20. E-Learning as straightjacket?
•e-Learning “can” be
innovative but:
•Has it created a new
orthodoxy?
•Does it encourage the
“mundane”
•Is it tying institutions down for
the future?
•Is it a barrier?
•Is it being used to control
education?

21. Current Practice
• Try to move outside your current
practice, open your eyes to
opportunities…
• Meanwhile…let’s have a look at what
we are ‘selling’ to students…
• VLEs
• Web 2.0 apps
• Traditional learning pedagogy with
chaotic tools.
– Maintain control at all costs!

22. Other factors…
And… The e-Framework
Liberating or an opportunity for
more control?
• Web 2.0
• Not a physical
construct but a
philosophy on the way
the web should be
used?
– Sharing
– Collaboration
– Learner initiated
– Informal learning
– Diverse communities
– Outside institutional
control
• Unstoppable?

23. • We live in a society which seems
increasingly to see regulation as the solution
to all problems…
• In our desire to enhance the learning
experience with technology, have we
created a generation of learners who are
watched, monitored, measured, intervened
with, and controlled more than ever before?
Freedom vs Control

24. Agency
• The use of multimodal techniques to deliver learning
is called blended learning
• Focus is on ‘interactivity’ through a variety of media
• Teachers are firmly entrenched at the centre of the
learning teaching transaction
“Agency is defined as the ability to “play a part in their
self-development, adaptation, and self-renewal with
changing times.” (Bandura 2001)
“Among the mechanisms of personal agency, none is
more central or pervasive than people’s beliefs in
their capability to exercise some measure of control
over their own functioning and over environmental
events “(Bandura 1997 in Bandura 2001, p10).

25. Activity 2
• Try out some of the web 2.0
applications
• 20 – 30 mins

26. Where are we?
• Tutors and learners will build their
own toolsets from:
– what is provided by the institution
– what they have on their own
(personal) computer
– what is available on the Web.
• Learners will
– “opt out” of systems institutions and
tutors might prefer them to use for
formal learning activities
– initiate “sharing” and “community”
activities outside of formal learning
using tools they have chosen.

28. Final Thoughts.
Can we embrace the way students use technology out of
College and replicate those skills within the limitations of our
own institutional technology?
What do we have to do to encourage learners to use our
technology?
Should we be attempting to compete with commercial
(and free!) software?
Do we need to make our online delivery match that
experienced on the web? Should we even try?

29. ACTIVITY: How millennial are
you?
•http://pewresearch.org/mille
nnials/quiz/

30. Assignment part ii
• Your proposal should put forward a reasoned case for an
educational intervention. This should draw on the work that
you have done in the previous task. It should be a
reasoned and substantially supported argument for the
adoption of a particular strategy, activity etc. based on
the analysis of the learning context, the chosen tools or
tool and the digital habits and affordances of your learners
that you have critically appraised.
• You should set out the proposal in terms of a justification or
purpose for the intervention, why it is a good idea in terms
of pedagogy and how it might work in practice.
• In addition you should also set out any barriers or change
agents that you might need to set in train to implement
the intervention.
• You need to critically appraise existing pedagogy and the
changes that are required. You might also plan how it
might be sustained and developed on a larger scale or at
least have considered the potential outcomes and
knowledge transfer activities that might occur post project.
(1500 words)

31. • Use the guidance in the course
handbook
• Plan the work over a period of time
• Make use of the reading list in the
handbook

32. ?
Thank you
(This presentation is available electronically!)

33. Things to read
• Bohn, R.E. and Short, J.E. (2009), How Much
Information: Report on American Consumers 2009,
Global Information Industry Centre: San Diego:
University of California
ddp.nist.gov/refs/HMI_2009_ConsumerReport_Dec9_
2009.pdf
• Boud, D., and Feletti, G., Eds. (1991), The challenge
of problem-based learning. New York: St. Martin’s
Press.
• Boyd, D. (2007), “Why Youth (Heart) Social Network
Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage
Social Life.” MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital
Learning – Youth, Identity, and Digital Media Volume
(ed. David Buckingham). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Douch, R., Attewell, J. and Dawson, D. (2010)
Games Technologies For Learning, LSN:London
• Fisher, T. (2006), Educational transformation: Is it, like
‘beauty’, in the eye of the beholder, or will we know
it when we see it? Education and Information
Technologies, 11, 293–303. doi: 10.1007/s10639-006-
9009-1

34. Things to read
• Gee, J.P. and Hayes, E. (2009), Public
Pedagogy through Video Games
http://www.gamebasedlearning.org.uk/con
tent/category/1/1/60/ accessed 21 May 09
•
• Guardian online (2010), Creating the next
dotcom boom could be child's play,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/a
pr/25/boaki-social-networking-child-safety-online
accessed 4 May 2010
• Hadfield, M., Jopling, M., Royle, K. and
Southern, L. (2009), Evaluation of the Training
and Development Agency for Schools’
funding for ICT in ITT Projects. TDA: London
•

35. Things to read
• Paul Hamlyn Foundation (2008), Learning Futures: Next Practice in
Learning and Teaching. Innovation Unit http://www.innovation-unit.
co.uk/education-experience/next-practice/learning-futures-next-practice-
in-learning-and-teaching.html accessed 6 June 2009
• Jenkins, H., Purushotma, R., Clinton, K., Weigel, M. and Robison, A.J.
(2006), Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media
Education for the 21st Century, available from
http://newmedialiteracies.org/blog/2008/11/10/NMLskills.pdf
accessed 6 May 2010
•
• Kay, D., McGonigle, B., Patterson, W. and Tabbiner, B. (2009), Next
Generation User Skills Report, Sero Consulting: available from
http://www.digital2020.org.uk/skills/strands/nextgen accessed 6 May
2010
• Lenhart, A., Kahne, J., Middaugh, E., Macgill, A., Evans, C. and Vitak, J.
(2008), Teens, Video Games, and Civics. Pew Internet & American Life
Project. Washing ton: USA , http://www.pewinternet.org/ accessed 29
April 2010
• Channel 4 (2009) UK Tribes, available from http://www.uktribes.com/,
accessed 31 May 2010
• Nielsen Report (2009) How Teens Use Media, Nielsen: USA