Tag Archives: scholarship

teaching, learning theory and practice

Digital citizenship

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Thinking about Online identity, Professional social networks, Research profiles or your institutional policy on social media?

The constitution of citizenship is up for debate in this era of rapid technological change. Technology can equally well facilitate good or bad citizenship, and there are many reasons to argue that it does not create a neutral or democratic environment. Rules of social engagement, knowledge creation and ownership are shifting. One argument is that most academics come from a generation referred to as ‘digital immigrants’ and are expected to teach ‘digital natives’, and so it would be likely for these natives to get restless – frustrated by their teachers’ and institutions’ misuse or lack of use of the social networking tools and concepts that are everyday features of their lives. But is this the case? Researchers like Bennett & Maton (2010) have debunked the idea of digital natives/immigrants a decade ago. So what constitutes ‘good citizenship’ in this environment? Any discussion of digital citizenship should focus on two broad questions:

How is Internet technology fuelling educational and social change, and in what ways does this challenge and facilitate concepts of citizenship in the current context?
How should teachers and institutions respond to the ‘digital’ demands?

Defining digital citizenship
An ability to practice and advocate online behavior that demonstrates legal, ethical, safe, and responsible uses of information and communication technologies (Greenhow & Ribble, 2009, p. 125).
Digital citizenship represents capacity, belonging, and the potential for political and economic engagement in society in the information age. Digital citizens practice conscientious use of technology, demonstrate responsible use of information, and maintain a positive attitude to learning with technology. (Alam & McLoughlin, 2010, p14)

Developing digital citizenship
Some of the issues that arise are: digital persona (professional and personal), privacy, participation (in politics and society) and liberation/democracy (massification of education). How do we manage our identity as educators in the age of open and massive education and how do we define the rules of engagement with digital media? Netiquette is one way of building awareness of the code of conduct online but does digital citizenship support academic freedom? One thing we tend to forget is that we don’t need to share everything, we have control over the amount and type of information we share. The interaction equivalency theorem shows what the reality of educational communication and interaction is in today’s day and age. Alam & McLoughlin discussed how educators are grasping the concept of digital citizenship in formal courses a decade ago.

ITEL: inclusive technology enhanced learning

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Related project: Technology for equitable learning opportunities and design
(Learning Enhancement Grant 2019-2020)

Top 10 issues in higher education in 2019 (EDUCAUSE)

What can technology do to create barriers to learning? Seems like plenty… EDUCAUSE in its 2019 elearning initiative, identified accessibility and Universal Design for Learning (UDL) as a key teaching and learning issue. Our presentation (2019 Scholarship of Technology Enhanced Learning conference) on the core consideration for inclusivity in design – audience, tools, content and legislation – opened up some interesting discussions. Many at times we make assumptions about our learners and their digital skills; accessibility and usability of tools; content creation quailty (re-packaging rather than re-purposing) and the law (accessibility standards). How can we ensure that our learning designs and content facilitation through technology offers equitable learning experiences? 

What do our learners find useful?

Even though students in Australia and New Zealand report high levels of digital activity than UK students, they agree that technology can have negative impacts on their studies. Unless designed well and integrated into the core learning outcomes, these learners rather not have digital technologies used in their courses (Beetham, Newman & Knight, 2019).

What tools are useful?

The use of digital technologies don’t always lead to creative, collaborative, participatory and hyper-connected practices. Henderson, Selwyn and Aston (2017) indicate that rather these are the activities, practices and processes that students feel compelled to undertake in order to ‘do’ university.

...many of the reportedly ‘educational’ benefits of digital technology…are more accurately described as concerned with the ‘logistics’ of university study rather than matters related directly to ‘learning’ per se.

Henderson, Selwyn & Aston (2017)

Bond, Marín, Dolch, et al. (2018) reported differences in how learners and teachers perceive the usefulness of tools such as lecture recordings, the learning management system (LMS) and reference management systems. For example, close to a quarter of all teachers they researched, thought lecture recordings were not useful but close to 50% of the students found them useful.

Comparison of teaching and learning tools (Bond, Marín, Dolch, et al. (2018)

What guidelines apply for accessible and intuitive content development?

Web content accessibility guidelines (WCAG 2.1/W3C)
European Union accessibility act
Web accessibility guidelines (Australia)
Proposed changes to web standards (New Zealand)

Dressing and styling

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A search on writing, dressing and style, revealed a rather humorous, unrelated article on styling and dressing, in the sense of, you guessed it, fashion! What resonated with me, however, was the implied message in the article. Irrespective of the designer style or label, the height of the wearer has an impact on the overall impression of the garment. Much like the stage we are at in our research career, has an influence on the liberty we have to make bold statements with our writing. This post is very much a reflection of my own writing journey, not research writing per se but writing in general.

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First reflections on the new ACADPRAC 703

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Off to a ‘not so great’ start as there are many enrollments issues to be sorted. However, considering the class sizes I have had before, 2 being the minimum, I think having 5-8 people this time is a real bonus. Panic has set in over student pages as I have realised there are glitches in the system that allow student editors to see the hidden pages. Though they cannot edit or see the content-which is displayed as work in progress- I feel it is not a professional look. Also, linking to unpublished sites in image map makes it go to edit view where access is compromised for hidden content. Answered the first student query as I did not have access to the right CECIL instance of the course, I couldn’t see the students enrolled. Then there was the palaver over enrollment caps, ACADPRAC 703 somehow had a capacity for 5 students on SSO which isn’t correct at all. If anything there could be 50 students which I rightly pointed out to admin and they realised it was a typo!

This confusion between ACADPRAC 703F City 2014 and ACADPRAC 703FX 2014 certainly exists and needs to remedied through CECIL admin. I finally got access to the correct course.
Design aspirations:
>> interactive course with focus on peer-peer communication and collaboration.
>> input from students to negotiate the assessment 2 format and timing.
>> clear guidelines on what is required and what is desirable but not essential e.g. links to Fellowship and CLeaR Lights programme.
>> information to lead into further exploration and personalisation of the learning experience.
>> journal for student reflections, collaborative glossary and student pages to create an online presence. 

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Writing about my teaching

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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.

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