Tag Archives: pedagogy

approaches to teaching and learning

Writing about my teaching

A Teaching Profile focuses on the core values, signature pedagogies, personal style and beliefs in our teaching. Various ways to formulate a readable profile include the use of metaphors, illustration or drawing, lists of guiding values, attitudes or ethics, signature pedagogies, past influential experiences and details of student expectations and achievements.

What is my Teaching Philosophy and Approach?
As an early career academic, I aspire to be an inspirational and research-informed, responsive teacher. I always think of teaching and learning design as a smart balancing act. Very much like a trapeze artist, you need to be brave and bold to take risks, and accept that one fall will potentially inflict long-term damage but recovery is possible. The whole experience is important to perfect the act, if perfection is at all possible. My teaching philosophy and aspirations are best represented by a famous Richard Bach (n.d.) quote: You teach best what you most need to learn. With the rapidly changing technologies and transforming classrooms, teaching in the area of elearning is always a personal learning experience. There is a considerable amount of balancing required based on the context, skills and experiences of target audiences, access and availability of media and technologies and above all the learning approach. I prefer to take an eclectic approach to “use what works” (Mergel, 1998) and do frequently draw on a combination of learning theories as and when appropriate.

Continue reading →

Book review

Leave a reply

Lee, M. J. W. & McLoughlin, C. (Eds.). (2011). Web 2.0 based elearning: applying social informatics for tertiary teaching. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference.

Use of Web 2.0* tools in contemporary tertiary education is debatable. While technology advocates (e.g. Marc Prensky) recommend blanket adoption; researchers (see Kennedy et al. 2010) are concerned about the adaptability of social technologies in educational contexts. This book, through various authors, and their respective contexts, provides an informed and balanced view with sections dedicated to theory, practice and future directions of the educational application of Web 2.0 tools.

The first section covers emerging paradigms and innovative theories in web-based tertiary teaching since Web 2.0 tools and practices are challenging and redefining scholarship and pedagogy. The idea is that the emergence of new tools by itself will not revolutionise education but its affordances provide the opportunity to: a) create new models for education for the knowledge society and, b) innovate tertiary teaching and learning.

Affordances of Web 2.0 tools are well illustrated through case studies and exemplars of evidence-based practices in section two. As a practitioner, this section was most useful for me. The authors refrain from pushing the technology agenda but address the important decision making questions like what to use, how and when. Pedagogical relevance is emphasised with reference to learners’ digital literacies and personal knowledge management skills and teachers’ capabilities and capacities.The final section addresses the challenges in educational applications of Web 2.0 due to the theoretical gap in literature and concludes with two approaches to harnessing the power of Web 2.0 in education:
1. Applying social web practices to facilitate greater dialogue and sharing of learning and teaching ideas.
2. Using metaphors as a mechanism for understanding educational application of Web 2.0 technologies.
Overall, this book is a great reference for anyone contemplating the use of Web 2.0 tools in education hence a valuable addition to the reading list.

*A second generation, more personalised, communicative form of the World Wide Web that emphasizes active participation, connectivity, collaboration, and sharing of knowledge and ideas among users. Also referred to as the “read/write Web” (Price, 2006; Richardson, 2006).

Good teaching in large classes

References:

McKeachie, W. (1980). Improving lectures by understanding students’ information processing. In McKeachie, W.J. (Ed.), Learning, Cognition, and College Teaching. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, No. 2. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Learning spaces e-book by EDUCAUSE
Good, M. (2001). On the Way to Online Pedagogy (Chapter 13) in John Stephenson (ed.). Teaching and Learning Online: Pedagogies for New Technologies. [Online]
Lyman, F. (1981). The Responsive Class Discussion. In A. S. Anderson (ed.), Mainstreaming Digest. College Park: College of Education, University of Maryland, 1981. (Think-pair-share technique)
Thiagi, S. (2005). Thiagi’s Interactive lectures: Power up your training with interative games and exercises. USA: ASTD Press.
George Brown (1978). Lecturing and Explaining. London: Methuen. (Peer squares-peer assessment technique)
Shenk, D. (1997) Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut, San Francisco: HarperCollins.