How to promote digital literacies among faculty

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.

One way of changing mindsets is for academics to to find some intrinsic motivation to leverage these emerging technologies. As Belshaw argues (slide 28), the trick is to identify an area where important issues overlap with personal interest. In other words, academics will upskill because they want to rather than because they have to. In these circumstances, the efficacy of preservice training/ professional development is likely to be enhanced.

Only after faculty have become au fait with the digital literacies (slides 24-27) and what they bring to their own personal learning environment (PLE), will they be able to respond to the increasing demand for personalised learning from their students. As the Horizon report notes (p.4):

More than ever, students are using ICT and new always-connected mobiles outside of the classroom to explore subjects that personally interest them. Institutions need to leverage and promote these informal learning experiences while integrating them with on-campus learning.

This is why it is important for institutional learning management systems (LMSs) to become more open and accommodate the PLEs of learners (slide 61).

 

The Digitally Connected Worker

The embedded biases within the LMS and the impact on learning

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.

Perusing a Big Think piece the other day, I got to thinking about how relatively little debate there is in academic circles about the limiting effects of the proprietary learning management system (LMS). This has been a bugbear of mine for some time, but reading about the observations of media theorist Douglas Rushkoff (author of Program or Be Programmed), has provided me with greater clarity on this issue.

Rushkoff notes that people tend to think of technologies as being neutral and it is only their use that determines their impact. For instance, he points out that guns don’t kill people, people do. People can also use pillows to kill people through suffocation. Guns, however, are much more biased toward killing people than pillows. Similarly, educational technologies come with their embedded biases, and some will be more biased towards deeper learning than others.

Herein lies the problem in the way the LMS is typically employed in universities. Far too often, the platform serves as little more than a receptacle for the storage of PowerPoint files, and when there is some capacity for interaction, it takes place within the confines of a clunky threaded discussion forum where the user experience bears little resemblance to that of the popular social media platforms used routinely by learners in their private lives. The net result is that creativity is stifled, engagement is lower, and learning is constrained.

As academics, we are far too accepting of the LMS. It must be OK because the university has just upgraded to the latest version. The reality, however, is that outside the walls of the proprietary system, people are unshackled and free to curate, connect and create. This is what it means to be literate in the digital age, and while individuals will develop these so-called 21st skills despite the rigidities of the formal education system, if there were a genuine commitment to a learner-centric, participatory pedagogy, in which an individual had more control over how they learn, the returns to society on education dollars spent would be much greater.

As Clay Johnson has acknowledged, the role of software developers is becoming increasingly important. In the context of higher education, how this will play out will depend very much on whether universities can free themselves of the lock-in they are experiencing with the likes of Blackboard. Instructure’s Canvas is, without question, a serious challenge to this monopoly power, and its open, outward-facing platform is a very exciting development because, among other things, it effectively allows the student to engage via the social media platform of their choice.

 

The adoption of digital pedagogies in Singapore

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?

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.