Personalised learning, various literacies and how teachers actually fit into al this

Please note that this is my take on two presentations – I hope that I have not misrepresented anything said by the people that I mention.

I have decided that I do not find the word ‘literacy’ useful other than in its original sense of being able to read and write. It seems that now we must be media literate, digital literate, academically literate – if we are to function as teachers of 21st century learners. Is that all true? Is it sometimes true? Is some of it true, some of the time? As with anything in life, do we not need to select and return to the menu again at a later date with a different set of ‘hungers’ to satisfy? Chatting with another delegate at a conference today I was struck very forcibly by this point. (I will not name her here unless she wants me to!)

Steve Wheeler’s keynote speech gave me further thoughts about this idea because, as he said (hope I’ve understood this properly), personalised learning is about acknowledging that we each get something different from a stimulus – and I think that could be a digitally produced stimulus or anything else: a picture, music, a book, something on the internet, a video, a football match, a game. George Dafoulas put it this way: “Each member tailors its individual learning space”
Steve quoted David Warlick: “For the first time we are preparing students for a future we cannot clearly describe.”

And how, as teachers do we accomplish that?

The diagram below is from Steve’s presentation which he has kindly posted on http://www.slideshare.net/timbuckteeth/digital-tribes-and-the-social-web




I like this very much because it sums up, for me, the fact that every learner does indeed design her/his own learning environment and I think we can take this further to consider how we support less experienced learners to structure, and adapt, this for themselves – by modelling, by demonstrating, by collaborating in its construction with them. Steve also quoted Don Tapscott: “It's not what you know that counts anymore. It's what you can learn.” So, as teachers, perhaps it’s not what you know anymore, it’s how you become an exemplar learner and support others in that process.

I teach in both a secondary school (UK – ages 11-18) and have some influence on policy there, and for the Open University education programme (all ages mostly 22 and up). I am wondering how we make students’ learning experience truly ‘web 2.0’ (or even ‘web 3.0’) and I think that it is about working with their online and other digital engagement – not trying to learn everything before they do, because that would be nigh on impossible – not just trying to cut and paste our existing or previous practice into a 21st century world. I am struggling with just how to do that. Maybe it is about that old ‘Sherpa’ versus ‘petrol pump attendant’ analogy of teaching, except that Sherpa image still implies that teacher knows best. How can teachers retain their credibility whilst working with students to solve problems? Anyone help me with this one?

Note: Steve Wheeler and George Dafoulas were both speaking at the Annual Learning and Teaching Conference at Middlesex University 29th June 2010

A bleak view?

Activity 1b Week 17 H800
Digital Diploma Mills David Noble (1998) First Monday

Noble paints a somewhat bleak picture of educational technology in Higher Education – seeing it as a vehicle for the commercialisation of academic and scholarly activity and as a cost saving measure on the part of university administrators.

He does raise some issues that I have some sympathy with. For example, do we tend to rush into the use of technological innovations in order to be seen as forward thinking or to meet customer demand? There are some inherent dangers here such as effectively making a rod for our own backs if we cannot keep up with the supply. Similarly, there are issues concerned with, for example, developing the next cohort of teachers since many institutions find that research activities are more lucrative than curriculum based training. And, of course, the whole problem in the UK of student grants being replaced with loans has likely led to a reversal in the trend which saw more higher education students coming from a working class background (Thomson, xxxx). It is also certainly true, in my experience both as a teacher and learner at higher education level that students value face to face opportunities. However, my son dropped out of a traditional university after two years due largely to a lack of tutorial support – one of the things that the Open University in the UK gets highest ratings for year after year in student surveys.

Where I start to diverge from Noble’s thinking is in the construction of scholarly debate and sharing of practice. He asks, quite rightly, if the pedagogical claims made for technology enhanced education will stand up under scrutiny. He also points out the very real issues of time and workload for lecturers and other academics. However, I cannot help but wonder if his concerns about loss of ownership of materials are such a big issue – maybe I would feel differently had it happened to me. As a teacher i both secondary and higher education, I have always viewed the free sharing of resources and materials, and collaborative production of these, as a major means of ensuring best practice. I do think that some research and collaborative work on the nature of online pedagogy is needed.

It has to be considered that Noble was writing before the explosion of web 2.0 and associated concepts such as social networking and networked professional learning communities. These provide such a wealth of opportunities for self directed and institutionally led professional development that I tend to think that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. In the area of scholarly debate, they can open up a whole new means to encourage those educators who might never have taken part in journal based discussion.