Web-based learning and teaching (WBLT) exists in a continuum from courses that are completely online to more blended approaches where F2F teaching is either supported by use of ICT or, and this is a more contested proposition, ‘enhanced’ by ICT in some way… Now I love the fact that the web is there to support my teaching, my learning – and a whole heap of other things as well… (who could not love something that offers you access to the Banana Song - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYqvGWBkiBc - when your class is getting a bit sleepy from all those big heavy thoughts?) – but given that Education has and can adapt to continual technological advances – printing press, radio, television – why the continual top down Government emphasis on eLearning (our critique of Government policy on e-learning https://www.academia.edu/3433954/A_Journey_into_silence_analysis_of_government_e-learning_policy_in_Social_Responsibility_Journal_V5_N4_2009) – and where does it offer the opportunity for bringing the ludic (http://www.ludiclearning.org/ - the play-to-learn opportunities) into education?
What
about the pedagogy?
My
preparation for #WBLT was to engage lightly with @HybridPed’s mini-MOOC: http://www.digitalpedagogylab.com/subversion-and-instructional-design/
- which starts with the argument that much of what happens in eLearning is
influenced by Instructional Design emanating from the Computer Aided Instruction
models that emerged in the fifties (see http://www.digitalpedagogylab.com/hybridped/a-plea-for-pedagogy/).
My problem is that this model seems to emerge from a form of technological
determinism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_determinism)
rather that a critical engagement with education itself: who and what is
education for? How can education be emancipatory and transformative? How can education
facilitate action – especially by the previously powerless? Viz. Freire (http://www.freire.org/paulo-freire/).
When exploring “E-learning and Digital
Cultures” (my first MOOC taken January 2013 – and interesting because it was a
five-week MOOC taken by some 44,000 people – and embedded within an MSc module:
http://digitalculture-ed.net/digitalculture-ed.net/index.html
at Edinburgh University) we started with the culture – and models of utopia and
dystopia; transhumanism and post-humanism. We explored these ideas through
engagement with theoretical texts and videos freely available on the web and
the final assessment was to produce an artefact that reflected on the course –
and to peer review at least three artefacts produced by other participants.
Tell
them about #edcmooc mummy
#edcmooc
itself modelled for me in practice what the web does offer educationalists: a
chance to develop ludic approaches to thinking and learning – and to
assessment. Our artefacts were produced often collaboratively as we reached out
to other participants for help and guidance – and we all poured much thought
and effort and dialogic behaviour into the production of our digital things.
The very act of being part of that MOOC helped me to begin to create my own PLN
(personal learning network) – which has since grown as I have participated in
other MOOCs – and I have followed the rhizomatic threads and connections of the
people I first encountered in my web-enabled learning journey.
Given
that that experience was so positive and so life- and learning-enhancing, I am
now re-reading Sian Bayne from Edinburgh University to help with wrestle with
#WBLT – especially as Bayne critiques the field in an emancipatory way (Bayne,
S. (2014) What’s the matter with ‘Technology Enhanced Learning’?. Learning,
Media and Technology, DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2014.915851.
What
is it like to be a learner in the 21st century?
To
be a learner today is to live in a world designed by high-functioning
socio-paths: never have I in the UK seen so much inequity and injustice. Never have
I seen education so trammelled and controlled by rules, regulations;
surveillance and control (http://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/feb/23/england-schools-extremists-europe-tests-excludes-elitism).
This world of SATs and tests and League Tables and the corporate takeover of
schools by the so-called Free School initiative contributes to what Mayall
calls the ‘scholarisation of childhood’ (http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Education/documents/2007/11/23/livesreport.pdf):
a valorisation of what is called education at the expense of learning, joy and
growth.
Yes,
this world also has the world wide web in it – but whilst it is argued that this
is busily re-wiring our brains and the ways that we think – and it is argued
that this facilitates access to information (and it does!) – I cannot help but
place successive Governments’ policy for eLearning within the context of their
desire to control citizens – rather than seeing this as any emancipatory
thrust.
At
the same time, I must live with hope – and so attempt to harness technology in
my practice to enable students to collaborate, to be creative, to play to learn
– and to write themselves as they develop their own voice and power negotiating
the arcane and exclusionary practices of HE (viz. https://becomingeducational.wordpress.com/2016/02/18/getahead/).
So - in my teaching - I ask my students to Develop a Digital Me – a wide ranging brief that allows them to play with different animation and comic book tools to develop their own stories about themselves or about learning. Some of their most recent digital artefacts are captured here: http://learning.londonmet.ac.uk/epacks/posters-digital2/ - please do have a look at them – and see what you think.
So - in my teaching - I ask my students to Develop a Digital Me – a wide ranging brief that allows them to play with different animation and comic book tools to develop their own stories about themselves or about learning. Some of their most recent digital artefacts are captured here: http://learning.londonmet.ac.uk/epacks/posters-digital2/ - please do have a look at them – and see what you think.
I
think this brief enabled them to play with – rather than be controlled by - either
the technology itself or the overarching control paradigm that inhabits all of
the education narrative. It also helps to shift the essay’s monolithic
domination of the assignment repertoire – allowing students to collaborate and
cooperate; to explore and discover: to be discursive and emergent rather than
recursive and controlled… Now that’s got to be worth something – hasn’t it? Now how to bring that into a Web Development Module!
So, I turn the question back on you – given that education can mean ‘leading out’,
given that we can be with Freire and want to empower our students for action
– how and why do you use technology in your teaching and learning?
