Tag: new literacy

Want to eliminate cheating? Ask better questions

30th June 2013

There was an excellent piece in The Conversation a week or so ago written by Beverley Oliver (@DVCEdDeakin) entitled, Proving knowledge by degrees: MOOCs and the challenge of assessment. The reference to MOOCs in the title is a useful device for attracting attention, but the content of the article focuses on the quality of assessment design, and has broader applicability beyond the context of MOOCs.

The design of assessment tasks is critical to the creation of authentic learning environments. Student engagement and the deep learning that ensues, is far more likely if students can see the point of what they doing (see, for example, Lizzio & Wilson, 2013). As Professor Oliver notes:

Perhaps instead of focusing on how we test students, a more purposeful question might be: presuming we know what outcomes we need students to achieve, and at what standard, what evidence will enable us to judge that this student is ready to graduate? In other words, assessment tasks are opportunities for students to create evidence of learning achievements in an array of formats.

In other words, if we look upon assessment as learning, rather than of learning, the approach taken by the learner (and faculty) takes on a completely different complexion, as Dr Adele Flood describes in this video clip.

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How to promote digital literacies among faculty

7th May 2013

In the recently published NMC Horizon Project Regional Analysis, Technology Outlook for Australian Tertiary Education 2013-18, it stated (p.3) that (shock, horror) there is a need for more faculty training to improve digital media literacy ‘before being asked to teach, and for more professional development opportunities once in the profession’. More significantly, though, the report points out that:

While a lack of adequate training opportunities is a part of the challenge, ultimately a change in the mind sets of disciplines and individual faculty will be required, along with cultural shifts within institutions, before emerging tools and technologies are routinely adopted and implemented as a matter of course.

 

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The embedded biases within the LMS and the impact on learning

26th January 2013

After almost a decade away in the corporate world, I don’t think I could have picked a better time to return to mainstream academia. Universities are changing — largely because of external pressures it must be said — and I can sense an openness to new thinking about pedagogy that wasn’t in evidence before. A key driver, I think, is the ubiquity of technology.

Whether we are talking about desktops, laptops, tablets or hand-helds, access to ICTs is no longer strictly the realm of the geek. Walk into any classroom in a university these days and its like a technology park. The big question, of course, is the extent to which all this hardware is actually serving to enhance learning.

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The adoption of digital pedagogies in Singapore

27th March 2012

I have blogged about Singapore’s FutureSchools projects in the past, and this latest clip from Edutopia would seem to indicate that serious progress is being made. The true success of this initiative, of course, will be the extent to which these practices will be rolled out to all schools in Singapore, and in this respect, professional development will be critical.

An interesting point to emerge from this video is that the approach taken to professional development in the FutureSchools project is to embrace the same participatory learning culture they are nurturing in their classrooms. Using technology, there is group peer observation of class sessions with the dual objective of learning from one another and providing constructive feedback.

More formal education and training in the use of ICTs in the classroom (in K-12 or higher education) is not that widely available. The Asian International College in Singapore is aiming to fix this with the launch if its Postgraduate Certificate in Education (Digital Pedagogies) this year.

Digital Native: Fact or Fallacy?

28th October 2011


Image source: 4.bp.blogspot.com

Poor old Marc Prensky has come in for a bit of a bashing lately, and unjustifiably so in my opinion.

First of all, he first used the digital native-digital immigrant typology 10 years ago. If one were to consider the extent to which digital literacy has advanced in this time, it is perhaps a little unfair to criticise his original thinking. Indeed, Prensky himself stated in a 2009 article:

In 2001, I published “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants,” a two-part article that explained these terms as a way of understanding the deep differences between the young people of today and many of their elders (Prensky 2001a, 2001b). Although many have found the terms useful, as we move further into the 21st century when all will have grown up in the era of digital technology, the distinction between digital natives and digital immigrants will become less relevant. Clearly, as we work to create and improve the future, we need to imagine a new set of distinctions. …

Second, as White and Le Cornu (2011) have noted, Prensky is not the first to try and analyse perceived behaviours of learners using typologies like this and — while they have their drawbacks — they at least initiate a dialogue for us to refine our thinking.

Third, maybe I read too much into his original work, but at no stage did I ever assume that there was native and immigrant and never the twain shall meet. It was a useful generalisation at the time and nothing more. It may have less applicability a decade later, but it can be treated as a stepping stone to alternative typologies, or something theoretically more sophisticated.

In summary, I’m not sure the notion of a digital native was ever treated as ‘fact’, and thus, it might also be inappropriate to refer to its ‘fallacy’. Let’s give Prensky some credit for sticking his neck out in a highly dynamic domain and acknowledge his contribution to the debate if nothing else.

Education’s Internet moment is now

8th September 2011

Having mucked around with computers in education for almost two decades, from something we used to call computer based teaching (CBT) to what commonly became known as ‘e-learning’, I am confident that, today, the use of ICTs in education is sufficiently ubiquitous, that it’s okay now to simply refer to it as ‘learning’. My rationale for this statement is very simple: this is what people do in spite of the formal education system. The data for the US in the infographic below is fairly compelling. One point it makes that is worth emphasising relates to the current crisis in education where students are so disaffected they are dropping out in record numbers. This is why — as the infographic states — it is Education’s Internet moment! If paradigm shift does not occur now, it never will.

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The next generation digital book

1st May 2011


Now here is a clever young bloke. Mike Matas — through his company Push Pop Press — has just launched a full-length interactive book for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch that includes swipeable video and graphics and some of the best data visualisations imaginable. The book is Our Choice, Al Gore’s sequel to An Inconvenient Truth.

India’s chalk and talk problem

21st October 2010


Image source: sidedish.dmagazine.com

There was an interesting piece in the The Chronicle of Higher Education earlier this month entitled India’s Company Classrooms Challenge ‘Chalk and Talk’ Colleges. The reason it is interesting, is that I’m not entirely sure the corporate universities are challenging the didactic pedagogy so commonplace in Indian institutions of higher education. In the Infosys case cited, the key difference, it would seem, is that PowerPoint is preferred to the chalkboard. The fact the wifi is turned off during class time would seem to indicate that Web 2.0 approaches to learning are yet to be readily accepted.

The Indian corporate sector has been complaining loudly about the inability of the higher education system to produce ‘job ready’ graduates for some time, some estimating that only one in four graduates possess the requisites skills. As a consequence, a new market player has emerged that is rather quaintly referred to as ‘finishing school’. This is not somewhere in Switzerland where the British aristocracy send their daughters to learn deportment, it’s a modest looking facility in the outskirts of an India metro where recent graduates learn the soft skills to enable them to participate as fully fledged members of the global workforce.

There is every chance that this segment of the Indian education industry will continue to expand for some time yet because success in education and success in the business world is chalk and cheese [pun intended]. Indian students will continue to ‘mug up for exams’ — a phrase in common parlance in the UK in the 1950s — because very little has changed within the Indian university sector since the 1950s. The focus is on teaching not learning, and testing memories not problem-solving skills. Industry, meanwhile, requires life-long learners and problem solvers.

Apologists for the system will no doubt point out that at every top university and leading corporate in the world you will find well-educated Indians. This, of course, is a product of the law of large numbers. These people have succeeded in spite of the system. Imagine what could be achieved if there were widespread acceptance of a learner-centric, technology-enhanced, participatory pedagogy with authentic assessment. To date, there has been very little incentive for institutions of higher education to change. With the opening up of the Indian education system to foreign competition, domestic institutions may be forced to reflect on their outdated practices.

The Facebookese: citizens of the 3rd largest ‘nation’ in the world

8th May 2010

Socialnomics author, Erik Qualman, has updated his original social media stats video from last year. One of the changes is that if Facebook was a country, it would now be the third largest country in the world, having passed the US earlier this year. Another amazing statistic is that Facebook beats Google for weekly US Internet traffic which says a lot about the exponential growth of social media in the last year or so.

Other stats that stand our for me in terms of the implications for the education industry include the following:

• More than half of the world’s population is under 30;
• 96% of ‘digital natives’ are members of a social network;
• 50% of mobile Internet traffic in the UK is on Facebook;
• More than 100 hours’ worth of video is uploaded to YouTube during the 4:25 minutes it takes to watch the video; and
• Amazon sold more electronic books for the Kindle than physical books at Christmas … and this is before the arrival of the iPad!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFZ0z5Fm-Ng&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]

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