Teaching & Learning

by Clint Lalonde on EdTech, Teaching & Learning

Over 70% of faculty feel they are not proficient using online web space to teach

Going through some lit for my thesis this evening I came across this study on higher education faculty self-perceptions of technology literacy and how it relates to their pedagogical practice. Not surprising, the research shows that faculty who perceive themselves as technology literate are more likely to integrate technology into their teaching and learning practice.

What I did find interesting about this study was that 71% of faculty do not feel proficient enough to publish content to the web.

Perhaps the most overlooked area of software use has been in website/web page construction and/or personal web spaces. According to the survey results, only a mean response of 2.18 (16.5% of faculty felt that they were proficient in creating learning-based websites/pages, and 19.9% of the faculty felt that they were proficient with the integration of word processing software and websites/pages). Using online web space to teach or add breadth to a course ranked even lower, registering a mean response for faculty self-perception of 1.61 (71.2% not proficient).

It’s not that this is a particularly surprising result, but given how important the web is these days it does feel like a bit of a clarion call. After all, if faculty don’t feel like they have the necessary technology literacy to do something as trivial as post content onto the web, then having them move beyond this relatively basic function and onto more engaging models of pedagogy is going to be a big ask and, as the researchers note, a missed opportunity.

This may be a missed opportunity for faculty; students are working with learning-based web spaces from the time they enter elementary school until the time they graduate from high school. It may be time that faculty became more familiar with technology tools in order to better facilitate student learning.

David A. Georgina and Myrna R. Olson, “Integration of technology in higher education: A review of faculty self-perceptions,” The Internet and Higher Education 11, no. 1 (2008): 1-8.

 
by Clint Lalonde on My Masters, Social Networks, Teaching & Learning

How students benefit from open networked learning

Helen Keegan is a Senior Lecturer in Interactive Media and Social Technologies at the University of Salford, UK, and recently wrote a post outlining one particular experience in using social media with her grad class. Working with MSc. students, Helen had the students blog and use Twitter as part of an exercise in developing a digital identity. She goes on to describe “the eureka moment” for the students on how powerful these tools can be in connecting and engaging with people who are working in their field of study. For some context on the excerpt below, Jeremy Silver is (among other things) the acting-CEO of  the Featured Artists Coalition in the UK and a prominent figure in the UK music industry.

There were some hugely influential and heart-warming examples of the benefits of students developing a professional online ID. One of these took place after our IP/Digital Rights week, when each student was asked to write a post in response to Jeremy Silver’s blog. Silver had found this post (pingback?) and left a really positive comment. That was a eureka moment for all – the idea that they could write a post, and one of the industry’s leading figures value their perspective, treat them as peers, and take the time to enter into conversation with them. This was soon followed by one of the group telling me how he’d tweeted his Audioboo blog post, and ’this guy retweeted it, said something really positive about my post – think he might actually work for Audioboo’. It was Mark Rock, the CEO…

When Jeremy Silver and Mark Rock took the time to read the student blog posts, comment positively and re-tweet, they added so much to the learner experience and i’m pretty sure they won’t have realised just how influential those acknowledgements would be – not just to the two students, but to the whole group. They were the missing link between our students seeing themselves as apprentices and professionals, the whole ‘linking education to industry through social software’ idea, which although we have been focusing on for a few years now, has never been experienced in such a potent way.

As a student, I have experienced moments like this. It is an exhilarating feeling to see that your words and thoughts have moved someone you admire or respect to action, and provide a response. It is a highly validating and motivating moment as you begin to realize that you are moving beyond being a student of a subject to being a practitioner in a field.

 
by Clint Lalonde on Teaching & Learning

What research has to say for practice

This looks like a really useful set of online learning resources. Created by researchers with the Association for Learning Technology in the UK, What research has to say for practice is a wiki containing nine guides on various topics related to online learning. The topics are:

  1. Tutoring on-line – Gilly Salmon and Mike Keppell
  2. Web-based course design – Robin Mason and Frank Rennie
  3. Learner acceptance of on-line learning and e-learning – Allison Littlejohn and Brian Whalley
  4. Learning objects and repositories – Allison Littlejohn and John Cook
  5. Learning using mobile and hand-held devices – Mike Sharples and Agnes Kukuluska-Hulme
  6. On-line communities – Frank Rennie and Mike Keppell
  7. Technology-supported assessment – David Nicol
  8. Learning environments – Bob Banks and Gilly Salmon
  9. Using social software in learning – Frances Bell and Frank Rennie

Not only do the guides provide a strong overview of the topics, but are well referenced and (being that it is a wiki) editable by anyone who creates an account.

via Stephen Downes