Friday, 30 June 2017

Workshop on Learning Design with Prof. Gráinne Conole


I recently had the pleasure of visiting Mary Immaculate College for the first time.  David Maloney from the Blended Learning Unit had organised a workshop on Learning Design with Professor Gráinne Conole, who is currently Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Digital Learning (NIDL) at Dublin City University.

The half day workshop aimed to empower participants to prepare courses for online and mobile environments.  The premise for the workshop, and the design process, stems from Conole's 7 Cs of Learning Design framework:
  • Conceptualise
  • Create
  • Communicate
  • Collaborate
  • Combine
  • Consolidate
Before the crowded room got to any actual design, we were asked to discuss topics such as the challenges posed by technology and how to ruin a course.  It was useful to hear the different angles with which users approached these somewhat loaded topics. I was seated with an educational developer and an academic, which proved to be quite the useful triad.  The educational developer and I, as a learning technologist, were able to work with the academic's course content to complete the exercise like we might do in one of our own training sessions or workshops. Many of the academic staff spoke extensively about how students affect teaching and learning, while so much of the work we do from the support side focuses on how the teacher affects teaching and learning,  

Next on the agenda was a pedagogical features sorting exercise that utilised materials from the Open University Learning Design Initiative (JISC-OULDI) project. Groups were tasked with analysing a course and determining which features were very important, somewhat important or not important. The cards were categorised as:
  • Orange = Guidance and Support
  • Blue = Content and Experience
  • Green = Communication and Collaboration
  • Purple = Reflection and Demonstration.
Participants were soon to realise that everything couldn't be labelled as 'very important'!

It soon became clear to participants that there was a necessity to balancing the categories and choosing pedagogical features carefully in terms of the learning outcomes, course content, platform, and assessment.

In the next exercise, participants were asked to design a typical student that might be taking the course:

Resources for this exercise can be found here.  Overall, the personas were quite specific to the variety of courses on which we were working.  In our case, we created a mature student working in early childhood education undertaking a blended learning course to advance their professional goals.  We assessed our students' technical skills and motivations before moving on to the final portion of the afternoon, creating our course map.
In this exercise, we used the four colours/categories to decide which tools we would use, and what roles/responsibilities correspond to the use of each tool.  I found this part of the day to be useful, as we had to triangulate the roles of teacher, learner and tool.  A recurring theme in our group was modelling of tools by the instructor, both technically and in terms of best use.  We found that communication tools such as discussion boards can often fall flat in terms of student engagement. This can occur as a result of a lack of exemplar content, rubrics, or modelling by the instructor.  We decided that students needed to see for themselves how the tool could help them learn, and not just earn easy points for participation.

While this might have been a whirlwind session, there was much to take away in terms of the relationship between the course, pedagogy, learner, and tools.  Events like this remind us to be cognizant of the many facets of learning design.  We must think about processes, relationships, skills, and attitudes.  Thank you again to David and his colleagues at Mary Immaculate College for hosting, and thank you to Prof. Conole for providing us with resources to use in the future.

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Monday, 19 June 2017

ILTA EdTech 2017 Conference - TEL in an Age of Supercomplexity Challenges, Opportunities and Strategies



As our own CELT Symposium looms at the end of the week, it seems fitting that I finally reflect on the last conference I attended.  

This year's EdTech theme allowed us to pause and reflect about TEL in a complex age. Throughout the two day event, it was evident that we are indeed facing challenges, but also using those challenges to create strategies and opportunities.  

The first keynote of day one was from Gráinne Conole, who is currently a visiting professor at DCU. She focused on the future of learning and harnessing technologies.  Her presentation encompassed so much of the landscape and set the scene well for what was to come.  In discussing the characteristics of the 21st century learner, necessary digital literacies, the integration of OERs, structures of MOOCS, and the benefits for students; she arrived at a heutagogical approach that allows students more affordances in the Web 2.0 landscape. 
In summation, she called on us to rigorously approach learning design, to harness the power of analytics, and implement pedagogies that support the supercomplexity of the future.  Her slides can be found here:

The next session that I attended, Assessment and Feedback in the Digital Age, was rife with ideas, but one in particular stood out to me.  Mark Glynn from DCU posed a simple idea:

I really appreciated how such a nuanced idea could sum up the whole TEL landscape so succinctly.  It's clear that even in our terminology we can accidentally place the focus on the technology rather than the pedagogy.

The Global Challenges in Higher Education session was led by Lawrie Phipps and Donna Lanclos. The discussed Leading with Digital in an Age of Supercomplexity, and namely on the JISC Digital Leaders programme. As a bit of a fan, I get presumptuously excited that Donna was in Sligo, but I was to be disappointed.
At the same time, I unfortunately missed Mary Loftus speaking about her work on learning analytics, but her slides are available here:

The second keynote from Professor Paul J. LeBlanc, President of Southern New Hampshire University.  He discussed the success of competency based learning at SNHU. He also joked that Americans don't talk about MOOCs as much as the Irish do at an ed tech conference!
The Jennifer Burke award went to Antonio Calderón of UL for a fantastic project with initial teacher educators in PE.  This project, #CoolPE, is definitely worth looking at, as it could be adapted across sectors and subject areas.
On a beautiful Friday morning, we launched into day two of the conference.

Mark Glynn outlined Turning off Turnitin.  This might sound like a frightening challenge, but Mark was open and candid about the process, and the difficulties they faced.
Niall Watts from UCD, again quite candidly, discussed the creation and use of MOOCs in first year Geography to largely positive feedback from students. His slides can be accessed here.
I unfortunately missed our NUI Galway colleague, Bonnie Long, talk about the Flipping the Flipped Classroom:
One stand out presentation for me was from Sam Cogan of the National College of Ireland, who discussed dual delivery in his lectures.  I've flagged this one for follow up, as he seems to be actively and progressively focused on changing the dynamics of the lecture hall.
Professor Meg Benke's keynote was refreshing in its reflective nature and its focus on scholarship through the work of Boyer.  She discussed the importance of education, communities of practice, and new methodologies in the age of supercomplexity.

It was also announced that ILTA would co-sponsor ten people going forward for CMALT certification.
In closing, ILTA made a call for members to get involved in the coming year.  It should also be noted that submissions are welcome for the Irish Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning.
Reflecting on the two days, it's evident that in age where we as practitioners are faced with complex challenges, that we must remain vigilant and become involved, reflective, and active practitioners. The keynote speakers and presenters at this year's conference are working through challenges and planning for an uncertain future, while focusing on learning and success that is only enhanced through technology.

And on a final note, videos will be available soon!



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Tuesday, 9 May 2017

My #100CommonsDays Challenge

Regular readers of this blog will know that I strongly support the use of Wikipedia (and Wikimedia generally) in teaching, and that I'm a member of Wikimedia Community Ireland. I'm still very nervous about editing, and until recently have only made very minor contributions to the online encyclopedia. It's one of my own development goals.

I am completely in awe of anybody who takes on the #100wikidays challenge - to write an article a day for 100 consecutive days. I first heard of this through our community member Rebecca O'Neill, who completed the challenge in 2015. Mourning my mother through a hundred days of Wikipedia editingis another, more recent, account of the challenge. Given that I've only written one article from scratch, I'm a long way from even contemplating the challenge.

However, earlier this year I saw that Rebecca had started the #100CommonsDays challenge - to upload an image to Wikimedia Commons every day for 100 days. I thought that sounded very much more manageable. I have contributed a small number of images before, mostly of the University, and have also been using the Commons as a gateway strategy for introducing academics to the notion of contributing content to Wikipedia.

And so, on 27th January I uploaded my first image of the challenge - an image of the diving board at Blackrock in Salthill, Galway.

Over the next 100 days, I added a new image every day. My final image of the challenge was uploaded on 6th May. They are mostly of buildings, or plaques, or statues, or places. They are all my own work, and are shared under the default Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license. This means that anybody is free to share or remix the images, but I (as the author) have to be attributed, and any use of the images must be shared under a similar license.

So, the images can be used to illustrate any of the articles on Wikipedia (in English or any other languages). But they can also be used for other purposes - making Wikimedia Commons a very useful resource for finding images for teaching purposes.

Commons-logo-en

What did I learn from completing the #100CommonsDays challenge?

I had to be organised. While I like to take photos, not all of them are suitable for the Commons. I created a dropbox folder into which I dumped photos that might be useful. Each day, then, I had a source of images that could be uploaded.

Sharing helps. From day 1 I started to share my uploaded images with my friends and family on Facebook. This meant that if I missed a day, somebody would know! It helped to keep me on track, and also elicited some questions from friends about the Commons. So - another teaching opportunity!

I had to do my research. There's no point uploading an image if I can't remember exactly what it is of! Sometimes, I had taken a photo of a monument, but couldn't remember what monument it was. I just had a vague recollection of where I had been. Sometimes google maps was quite useful to do some detective work.

Categories matter. I quickly found out that the category structure is how files are organised and found on the Commons. Every file (image) should be associated with a category. Categories form hierarchies, and a file should be associated with the most specific category in the hierarchy. It will then also be associated with all parent categories. It took a number of edits of the categories of my files (mostly by bots) for me to figure this out!

Look for gaps. There's no point in adding yet another photo of the Empire State Building - somebody, with a better camera, has been there before me. Instead I had to do a little investigation before adding an image, to make sure the subject wasn't already well covered.

You can't upload just anything. I was careful to only contribute images that I had taken myself, and that meet copyright requirements, and that are suitable for the Commons (i.e. not my holiday snaps). Anything else may be speedily deleted!

I am still a new user. Having completed the challenge, and made some contributions previously, I now have 139 contributions - but I'm still classified as a new user and my uploads are actively monitored. A new user is anybody with fewer than 150 edits on Commons. Nearly there!

Uploading from a smartphone is a hassle. From the mobile site, although you can login, there is no option to upload an image. You have to force your browser to switch to the desktop version. There are rumours of an app, but if it still exists, it is not available on the  app store in Ireland, at least.

Would I do it again?

Possibly, but not for a little while. I want to focus on my Wikipedia editing and build up to another article there.

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Monday, 13 March 2017

Making Connections - Computers in Education Society of Ireland

On Saturday the 4th of March 2017, I had the good fortune to travel to the 2017 annual conference of the Computers in Education Society of Ireland (CESI) at the St. Patrick’s Campus of Dublin City University.

The theme of this year's event was on "Making Connections: Transformation through technology and teamwork", inspired in part from two recent policy documents. Firstly, the Department of Education and Skills have published their Digital Strategy for Schools 2015-2020 report, setting out a vision
clear vision that is focussed on realising the potential of digital technologies to transform the learning experiences of students b - See more at: http://www.education.ie/en/Schools-Colleges/Information/Information-Communications-Technology-ICT-in-Schools/Digital-Strategy-for-Schools/#sthash.CQNqSJM7.dpuf
focussed on realising the potential of digital technologies to transform the learning experiences of students - See more at: http://www.education.ie/en/Schools-Colleges/Information/Information-Communications-Technology-ICT-in-Schools/Digital-Strategy-for-Schools/#sthash.CQNqSJM7.dpuf
focused on realising the potential of digital technologies for enhancing student learning, and secondly, the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning’s Roadmap For Enhancement In A Digital World 2015-2017 that recommends:
 “a multi-level approach to foster digital literacy, skills and confidence among students at all levels of education needs to be developed”.
Against this policy backdrop, the focus in two of the keynote sessions was on mainstreaming technology in education, with inspiring keynotes from Brendan Tangney, Bridge 21, Trinity College Dublin (see slides), and Anne Looney, Interim CEO of the Higher Education Authority in Dublin.

Both the venue, the organisers (including my colleague Kate Molloy), and the conference team conspired to showcase the best use of technology in action by streaming, captioning and tweeting events as they unfolded. The Youth Media Team interviewed several of conference speakers and have made podcast recordings available. Other slide resources were shared by the PDST on http://www.pdst.ie/cesi2017 and more individual links to follow up were also posted to Twitter (Iain MacLabhrainn's presentation on All Aboard included).

The flagship Lego® Education Innovation Studio (LEIS), was a particular highlight, with Deirdre Butler of DCU giving us a tour of the facilities, and the inspiration behind allowing students a space to create, make, and build.
Lego® Education Innovation Studio in DCU

In the sessions I attended, innovation was clearly evident - in using educational mobile apps, animations, minecraft, iPad coding, digital storytelling, and more. A summary Storify of tweets is here (note this isn't a comprehensive catalog of the conference hashtag tweets), and a link to all the conference abstracts is available online.
@Seomraranga - a whirlwind tour of the best educational apps   

@michaeliteach using the iPad to make a drone fly   
The All Aboard digital skills map on display (developed by colleagues in CELT)
Many presentations were informed by action research and displayed considered pedagogic reflection on their use. Several presenters were researching practice at masters or PhD level, whilst others were deeply involved in enhancing their classroom practice in a variety of educational contexts. It was the first CESI event I had the opportunity to attend, and look forward to connecting again in future. 
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