I was asked to present a presentation on "How cautious should we be when adopting digital technology in Education?" We should remain very cautious. Even the that which is presented as the best, remains nothing more than content replication.

1. Pre-title slide (Part 1)
• I am running a backchannel at
https://todaysmeet.com/TLConf11March
• The presentation is available at https://goo.gl/3JrcX7
• It is a low-bandwidth service, requires no registration, and it is
accessible through most browsers and on most devices.
• Feel free to participate under a pseudonym.
• Please feel free to ask questions, or leave comments about the talk.
• It will be good if you can focus your comments on the topic at hand,
and not, for example, my bald spot!
• In Part 2, we will use your text to build knowledge.

2. How cautious should we be when
adopting Digital Technology in
Education? (part 1)
2016/03/11
Prof D vd Westhuizen
University of Johannesburg

3. Very!!
Digital technologies are most often used to perpetuate fundamentalist
teaching practices!
Why?

4. While, the educational imperatives today are:
innovation creativity collaboration
digital fluency 21st Century skills ‘tech savvy’
digitally competent flexible adaptable
work-ready initiative critical life
skills communication media skills
information literate
These are the pathways to success and prosperity

6. Fundamentalist adoption of digital adoption
• Experienced instructors, protecting the status quo
• “It works, it always has worked. I’ve been teaching like this for 20 years”
• I possess the knowledge, and I’ll give it to you
• The closer the resemblance is between what is given, and what is
returned, the “better” the performance
• This is called assessment (knowing what was learnt)
• Learning is not about thinking, it is about knowing
• Performance is a consequence of diligence
• Failure is the result of laziness or ability
• The fundamentalist instructor is absolved from responsibility
• Naturally, this inhibits reflection on teaching practice

7. In the training rooms we still find
• Outdated teaching models
• Pedagogy: “telling”, “reading from the
textbook”, “study this section”
• Students activity limited to: “listening”,
“writing down”
• The tacit conception of the teaching and
learning methods that are embedded and
emanates from peoples experience of
teaching over many years
• However, the transmission model is ill-
equipped to teach creativity, critical thinking
and innovation

9. Social Darwinism
The strongest/fittest will survive and prosper, the weak will die out
Herbert
Spencer
Deriving
‘ought’
from ‘is’
Belief: Not all students can succeed – adherence to the bell curve
Previous ill-informed reforms killed the dream of being a teacher

10. Pedagogical Liberation
• Jerome Bruner: Learning to be
• From knowledge exchange to knowledge creation
• Authentic learning and assessment
• Teaching as learning activity design
• Learners whose learning experiences mostly required of them to function at the
lower levels of Blooms taxonomy, will be wholly under-prepared for university
studies
• Many (but not all) students who enrol, or who apply
• have weak numerical skills
• have weak writing and (English) speaking skills
• have little/no ICT skills or media or information literacy skills
• were taught in a system steeped in fundamentalism
• with the most basic of resources
• by teachers who could very well not be qualified to teach
• They are simply not ready for Higher Education (or high performance
work environments)

11. Learning ‘to be’
• Jerome Bruner showed that there is a difference between learning about
something like psychology and learning to be a psychologist
• The content as isolated facts do not have meaning and relevance until
students discover what this can do for them
• It is about creating connections at interpersonal level between those who
are learning, or apprentices, and those who are in the know, the mentors
• It is about creating intellectual connections between what is familiar and
what is novel
• Learning cuts across disciplines, and they connect learners with future
employers, with customers and clients, and with future colleagues
“Learning to be” requires “that the practices of the
knowledge domain (discipline or profession), which
include the dispositions, attributes, competencies,
activities, skills, procedures and values of the
knowledge domain, and how to best utilise the
conceptual frameworks of the domain to identify
and solve problems or address “real-life” issues”
are targeted

12. Who are we facing?
ICT Ownership
• Cell Phone – no internet: 23.7%
• Cell Phone – Internet (not Smartphone) 48.3%
• Smartphone 30.6%
• Computer or Laptop 26.7%
• Tablet 2.3%
How often did your teachers require that you use ICT in the
classroom during class time?
• Never 56.2%
• Seldom 29.3%
• Occasionally 4.2%
• Often 8.8%
• Almost always 1.4%

13. The fallacy of
“generations”

14. All hogwash! (sorry )

15. What do the meta-analyses say? 10 effects:
• Feedback to students .72
• Formative evaluation .70
• Time-on-task .60
• Mastery learning plan .53
• Small-group learning .49
• Homework .30
• Web-based learning .18
• Individualised instruction .15
• Distance education .09
• Television -.14

16. What does the research say about ICT and
learning?

17. What is online learning today?

18. Learning
Skype
online

19. A Road Map?

20. Social Networking Systems

21. How familiar is this?

22. So let’s call it …. Blended learning!
Pandora’s Box!

24. What are the affordances,
of ICTs, that will support
learning? (aka, when are
ICTs not dangerous?)

25. Is it content replication?
Can you tell the difference?

26. Dissemination?

27. Upscaling?

28. Process animation?

29. Aggregation?

30. 1. When digital tools ….
Knowledge
production and not
replication
Produces polished
products
Complex and ill-
defined
Requires engagement
over long period of
time
Has Real-world
relevance
Are used to for learning tasks that are authentic
Requires collaboration
and reflectionHas competing solutions

31. 2. And they advance 21st Century Skills

32. 3. They require performance across Bloom’s taxonomy
Create

33. 4. Appropriate formative and summative
assessment tasks are given

34. What are the digitals tools today?
• Mind-mapping on steroids
• VUE: Visual understanding of
the environment
• https://vue.tufts.edu/

35. What are the digitals
tools today?
• Curation
• www.scoop.it (e.g. follow
Innovative Teaching Technologies)

36. What are the digitals tools today?
• Word clouds
• Concept building
• www.tagul.com

37. What are the digitals tools today?
• Visualisation tools
• Visual Thesaurus
• http://www.visualthesaurus.com/vocabgrabber/

38. What are the digitals tools today?
In-class response systems
Todaysmeet
www.todaysmeet.com

39. What are the digitals tools today?

40. What are the digitals tools today?
Zoom: simple conference calling and hosting

41. End of Part 1
For Part 2, the presentation begins here – on a blank slate. It will
include the use of several of the tools that have mentioned to
developed of conceptual understanding. As it was indicated in the
beginning of the presentation, you could access the presentation,
and were allowed to make comments. Your comments will off
course be considered by me during the break, and will provide the
springboard for me for Part 2. For Part 2, there is now PowerPoint
…. yet!
Thank you for your participation.
Duan vd Westhuizen. duanvdw@uj.ac.za