The logical impossibility of Status Quo - Six disconnects that demand a digital pedagogy
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Paper presented at e-Learning and Innovative Pedagogies Conference at Pacific University, Forest Grove, OR 3rd October 2014
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The logical impossibility of Status Quo - Six disconnects that demand a digital pedagogy
- 1. The logical impossibility of Status Quo Six disconnects that demand a digital pedagogy (or at least a good debate about it) Peter Bryant – London School of Economics, UK @peterbryantHE
- 2. The ‘scary’ status quo 1. Learners arriving at university are already e-learners 2. 21st century skills for a technology driven society 3. There is no real and online world…there is just the world 4. Technology is not a class or category. It is a means, a society changing and generation shaping means 5. Not all students are experts in all technologies 6. Student adoption moves faster than institutional adaptation
- 3. We have reached a tipping point… 1. Institutional resistance to change (potential) 2. Pedagogy for the 20th (19th?) century 3. Critical shifts in the way information is acquired and applied 4. Student resistance to our use of technology
- 4. Modern pedagogy is often… SCAFFOLDED SEQUENTIAL ALIGNED STRUCTURED https://www.flickr.com/photos/verylastexcitingmoment/3980490179
- 5. LIFE WORK PLAY LOVE ETC. rarely are
- 6. Disconnects of expectation, practice and outcome There is a need to have a debate about the way we teach, what students are learning and how we assess
- 7. Disconnect #1 What is knowledge and where do we find it?
- 8. Disconnect #2 What is the purpose of university?
- 9. Disconnect #3 Jobs today/Jobs tomorrow
- 11. Disconnect #5 The ubiquity of technology
- 12. Disconnect #6 Speaking in tongues
- 13. Each generation prides itself on the fact that we are different to our parents… well guess what?
- 14. Our pedagogical approach may be seen by learners as akin to watching your mum trying to twerk at your 18th birthday party (or finding your granny on Tinder).
- 15. What does a digital pedagogy look like?
- 16. ELVSS and iCOLLAB projects at University of Salford @heloukee Ultimate goal - develop new ways of seeing and learning through collaborative study of internet technologies and emerging forms of digital creativity, learning from one anothers’ disciplinary perspectives and cultures.
- 17. Questions? @PeterBryantHE p.j.bryant@lse.ac.uk For the full paper, see my blog http://www.peterbryant.org
- 18. Photo credits Status Quo, live at Hammersmith Odeon, 1977. Q-tip https://www.flickr.com/phot os/nebarnix/4572798913 Push Start” by Braden Gunem https://www.flickr.com/photos/brade ngunem/3433135772 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 2.0 Generic Licence https://www.flickr.com/photos/shinyr edtype/349804601 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic Photo by Michael Tapp https://www.flickr.com/photos/59949757@N 06/10697360286/ Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 2.0 Generic Licence Dutch National Archive http://www.flickriver.com/photos/natio naalarchief/3922559924/ No copyright Where’s Wally Offices https://www.flickr.com/photos/heath erbuckley/8364484956Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic Photo by takato marui Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic https://www.flickr.com/photos/m-louis/ Photos by Lee Morley From the eye phone series Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic https://www.flickr.com/photos/spookman01/6790694167/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/spookman01/6790608295 Photo by Bill Ferretier Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 2.0 Generic Licence https://www.flickr.com/photos/plugusin/922 3386478/ “Typing the universe” by Feliciano Guimarães https://www.flickr.com/photos/jsome1/609 7841770 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic Licence
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Life is sequential to some extent. But the experiences of life not always are. We don’t watch people life their lives in order, we see bits and fragments, we hear stories told from different perspectives and we find out own way through the narrative. Work is often an aggregation of different people working on different parts of a project, with the left hand not always knowing what the right hand is doing. We survive, we flourish, we innovate and we create in the spaces between, where the tenuous threads are fleshed out by problem solving, imagination, experimentation and risk taking in an environment of unpredictability and rapid change. And to be honest, it is these things that modern HE seems to struggle a lot with.
- What I want to argue for in this article is the imperative to look at, analyse and evaluate the way we as higher education practitioners see the role of technology within our pedagogy. On one hand the many of the ways we teach and assess are predicated on a model of work, practice and learning that is at best dated, at worst obsolete. On the other hand, the way we as academics use technology in higher education can be seen by learners as akin to watching your mum trying to twerk at your 18th birthday party. Not totes amaze by any stretch of the imagination. #mumreally? What we experience from our students and staff in reaction to both of these scenarios is often resistance, embarrassment and sometimes disengagement, all of which compromise student achievement and learning. There are disconnects of expectation, of practice and of outcome that need to be addressed in our pedagogy. And we have reached a ‘beyond critical’ state to start that process with the rapid emergence of MOOCs a salutary reminder of how quickly things can move (even under less than reliable premises).
- Disconnect #1 – What is knowledge and where do we find it? Knowledge starts as something we are told. Plato argues that a statement must meet three criteria in order to be considered knowledge: it must be justified, true, and believed. What did that mean for me when I was at university? It came from a book. An editor checked it, and then by virtue of publication it was assumed to take on those three criteria. Further, an academic aggregated, summarised and interpreted that knowledge and presented to me, as a told lecture. There was no crowd-sourcing. There were very few places for the collective outside of the establishment to form and create knowledge, to challenge what was believed, justified and true. The way in which knowledge is constructed, justified and communicated has changed. Without getting all philosophical, the way learners find, evaluate and share knowledge is different. Ideas emerge and bubble up through social media, through experience expressed as games, creative media or interaction. The emancipatory power of alternative media like zines has been rent large for the internet generation. Learners find knowledge through searching the internet, asking wikipedia or putting a post on a board to get a collective response (amongst many other ways including books mind you). What happens when they arrive at the university experience? They are told that Wikipedia is not a valid academic source. They are told that collaboration can sometimes be seen as collusion and that their community and communications should be filtered through the firewalled VLE. So what do learners do? Exactly as they are told! They go on the VLE and post using the same language they are expected to use. And they leave the crowd-sourced, creative energy for the projects and activities they do outside university. As one blogger on Kineo notes ‘They (Gen Y) are engine that has fuelled Web 2.0 and, unfortunately, they seldom get a learning experience in the workplace that looks anything like the world they inhabit so significantly in their spare time. Learner: Knowledge drawn from a potentially limitless library of sources, both credible and credulous Academy: Knowledge filtered and curated, from established sources.
- Disconnect #2 – What is the purpose of university? ‘The fact is – you read for your degree. You don’t need to sit or listen – you just need to read, and occasionally join in tutorials to purloin ideas from other students.’ Daniel Stacey – ‘How much longer will universities exist?’ SMH 16th September 2013 Professor David Helfand of Columbia University noted that many of his students that have different views of why they are at university, with student stating in a seminar ‘I am here for a degree, not an education’. There are disconnects between both the purpose of attending university and the understanding by which learners engage in university activity. Some of it is predicated on the dated notion that students are empty vessels into which we pour the knowledge and skills that reside in our heads. But some of it is of our own making. We have changed the way we describe and structure our university programmes to make them fit an employability agenda or what we believe ‘employers’ want. It is once again didactic. Listen to what we say, do what we tell you to do and you will get a ‘good’ job. There is a place here for a two-way conversation so that the notion of a degree as a product doesn’t become the norm. The role of teacher will change from instructivist to facilitative, leading and supporting user generated and peer sourced knowledge (see Steve Wheeler’s excellent and positive blog about this and most of all the transactive nature of learning in the modern university is supplanted by a collaborative one.
- Disconnect #3 – Jobs today/Jobs tomorrow The idea that we are preparing learners for jobs that don’t exist at the start of their degree has been well explored. But how are we doing that? Has our curriculum shifted to one that is trans-disciplinary and trans-context? Do we assume learners are developing skills that can carried through the career changes they will undertake through their long lives? Alvin Toffler noted that ‘The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn’. The disconnect lies in the ability of the university to step away from the ‘this is how you do it’ mode of teaching and learning. Learners come to higher education with experiences and ideas. These are often not valued as they sit in their first lecture of a new degree. And in many ways they are not assessed or recognised either. It goes back to the empty vessel model. Learning how to learn, knowing how they learn already and being an active partner in those processes should be at the core of a digital pedagogy. Some of the work on the ‘new university of the 21st century’ addresses the need to make our practice of teaching and learning transferable, complex, socially engaged and constructivist (or connectivist). But that aspirational goal is difficult to achieve by small incremental curriculum shifts and natural attrition.
- Much of what the OU describe in their annual ‘Innovating Pedagogy’ report, especially in the medium and long term, describes learning that is connected, crowd sourced and peer-led. Good words. All of them. There is one problem. Apparently we know the answers. Assessment is often designed to ensure that the students have remembered the answers as well. How does connected learning, seamless learning, crowd sourcing or student-led learning sit with that assumption? Well, a lot of modern teaching is still question based. We ask the questions, students go away and answer them. There are right answers and wrong answers (and sometimes very wrong answers). But the internet is not about the answers. Information is stored and housed, more than at any time in human history and certainly more than could be housed in any library. The key to effective internet use is the question. The disconnect cuts to the heart of our learning design and teaching practices. We are still caught in the notion that there is one right answer.
- Disconnect #5 – The ubiquity of technology For me this is the big one. Technology is not new. Smart phones are not the latest thing, Facebook isn’t trendy and you won’t be hip talking about Pinterest. Technology is ubiquitous, yet we as academics often get excited when we finally get to test something new in a class, whilst the learners grown about their lecturers being behind the times. Equally technology activity is not all about work and education. Most technology is about fun, social interaction, play and peers. Academics telling students that we are going to appropriate their Facebook for a course? Or even worse, telling them how to use the technology they already know how to use? No Dad, I already know who Tinie Tempah is, and please, you really have to stop rapping now at the kitchen table! #shutthehellup. There is a lot of evidence that suggests that students resist using the technologies they think of as their own (including devices) for purposes that they have not chosen. They are comfortable using the VLE or desktops in the library, but asking them to use and share their own devices can be problematic. A more realistic approach from the academy would be, here is a problem, how would you solve it and let them come to the technology they find most appropriate. It is a co-constructed approach.
- Language varies between generations. Pretty obvious really. Words lose and gain power. But the way language is communicated also changes. The patterns of change even in terms of digital communications are astounding. Even now, smart phone usage amongst under 18 year olds is on the decline in favour of tablets. 43% of students prefer to find content through social media as opposed to search engines (privileging peer and crowd based learning). Instant messaging is replacing email. There are standards, ethics, behaviours and cultural habits that emerge from these different modes of communication. Yet, we have academics who honestly believe that unless the student is looking at them they are ‘skiving’ off and probably just checking their Facebook. Some lecturers even have a laptops closed rule. I was a conference a few weeks ago, head buried in my iPad, thinking through ideas whilst presentations were on. I must have look disinterested, yet it was noticed that I often made the most pertinent tweets. People (and not just yoof) can multi-task, listen whilst not looking and can learn from more than your words. The devices they have are powerful gateways to knowledge. Sure, there are times when interacting face to face is what is required, and having the geek sit at the back at the room constantly tapping away is inappropriate. But that is not and should not be the default.