ALT-C 2012 Session 229
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Pecha Kucha slides for session #229 at ALT-C 2012 13:40, Tuesday 11 September, Room 2.220
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ALT-C 2012 Session 229
- 8. Making the video unfairly demands specific skills and confidence in areas that many of us can't be expected to have... I'd be absolutely horrified if any of my clients found this stuff... The course seems to be designed for students who are in front of a computer endlessly. I find it difficult to navigate all these tasks across different spaces. Why can’t we just have a clearly laid out plan for how to get through the course? http://www.flickr.com/photos/
- 9. http://www.flickr.com/photos/ 51035555243@N01/11708783 I learned so much, and it really boosted my confidence. I can now update my own website, know how to blog, and use twitter regularly. I think that embedding the online learning into the structure of the course was a great way to learn about its benefits and drawbacks. I have recently been offered the opportunity to design a new online graphic design BA. I doubt I would have been offered the position had I not been through the online learning experience myself, and been in a position to discuss it with some confidence.
Editor's Notes
- I’m going to tell you a story about forcing people to do stuff they don’t really want to do. It’s about raising teachers’ digital literacy. All teachers. Not just the ones who want to have their digital literacy raised - enough to do something about it off their own back. I’m talking about the majority; the ones who know they need to engage more with this stuff, and start using it, but maybe it just seems like they’re already too far behind, and whenever they hear some keynote speaker at some conference gleefully gesticulating at an exponential curve of technological development it just makes them feel even worse...\n\nFortunately, I lead the core units of our postgraduate certificate course, which is compulsory for all our teaching staff, and this is very exciting because I can embed the kinds of learning technologies I think they should know about into the course activities and the course assessment.\n
- So one of the things I have them doing is carrying out collaborative reading activities through blogs. They each have their own blog and work in small groups of 4-5. Each month they have a different reading or topic to respond to, with specific questions to prompt their initial response and their feedback discussion. Last year most of the tasks explicitly mentioned writing... ‘write a blog post...’, and that’s what most of them did, but fortunately I work with a lot of very creative people who found other ways of responding to the tasks. \n\nFor example, one student responded to the task to “explain constructive alignment in a way that a child could understand” by videoing herself talking about constructive alignment with her seven year-old son and embedding the video in her blog. Others drew sketches, often alongside the text.\n
- So taking all mention of ‘writing’ out of the tasks is something that I’ve done this year to acknowledge and encourage this. One of the tasks did ask them to sketch out a map of the different communities of practice they were in; and some of their responses blew me away... there was an amazingly geometric one that reminded me of a spirograph - the kind shown on the box, not the kind you actually managed yourself - and this one from Geoff Coupland, who teaches Illustration - is both fabulous and hilarious - you’ve got the three subject pathways he works with, and they’ve all got their own thing going on and they’re not nearly as connected as they are in the real world... and you’ve got this big slimy brain-like thing up there which is the course leader, trying to organise everything and everyone...\n
- They weren’t just blogging... on the second unit I made them produce three-minute-long digital summaries of their teaching development projects. Most people just did a talking head - in fact some assumed it *had* to be a talking head, which caused a few problems - I’ll come to that in a minute - but again lots of people got a bit more inventive; either because they taught in digital media and had the skills to mix it up a bit, or because they really, really, really didn’t want their own face to feature. We had slidecasts with audio, common-craft visuals with voiceover, even an animation with a synthesised voice. One participant videoed his students talking about the project, which was a lovely way of doing it.\n\nAll these things were embedded in the course assessment. The digital summaries were an essential component of the project report; they weren’t graded separately but were taken into account when grading the final submission. Without a summary their submission was labelled incomplete and was referred.\n
- The blogging activities only carried 10% of the unit grade last year and were peer and self-assessed within the learning groups. On the first day of the course I sat them down and showed the the tasks and got them to discuss what they wanted to get out of them in terms of learning outcomes and define the criteria they were going to use to mark them. It’s quite stunning how well they did this considering this was before they’d even attempted any of the tasks.\nClarity\nRigorous critical analysis\nFocus on action\nEncouraging dialogue\n\n...and it worked brilliantly; just as I’d hoped it would. It worked so well that I decided to up the weighting of this element from 10% to a whopping 50% for the incoming cohort.\n
- \nHow did I get that past the validation committee I hear you ask? Here’s the thing... University validation committees are like Vogons. They seem intimidating but all they really want you do is just fill in the right forms and fill them in good. They don’t want to say no, they really do prefer getting busy with their rubber stamps. Our last set of minor mods - for quite significant changes to NINE units - was scheduled to be discussed between 10.40 and 10.50 on a Wednesday morning.\n\nNow, this all looks great, doesn’t it... but something else I have to unpack is if I’m actually seeing better learning here, or just seeing the learning better. I’m not entirely sure what the answer to that one is... \n\nAnd why am I dressed like this anyway? Because this was NOT EASY. This is the real coal face of educational technology development; it’s not pretty and it’s not for the faint hearted. \n
- ...it’s not for those nice educational developers who just want to be liked.\n\nMost of my students disliked doing the blogging activities and the videos. The others hated it so much they nearly left the course. And they hated me for making them do it. It’s a dangerous world down there at the coal face, and a fat lot of use a canary’s gonna be for you.\n\nI got a lot of hate mail. Okay, not hate mail, but it reminded me of those Howlers in Harry Potter - you know, the red envelopes that scream at you. There were some more strongly-worded ones than this but this is a family show...\n\n
- But how exciting is this?!! These people are being challenged! Their boundaries are being pushed. I am at the point exactly between what they won’t do and what they might do, given a big enough nudge - remember that first slide?\n\n
- This experience nearly broke me. I started to doubt myself, and I started to doubt the technology. But it all came right... it came right when 260 peer and self assessments flooded in through Google Forms on March 9th. It came right when I saw that, after six months on the course, they were producing work that was significantly better than what the previous cohort had produced after 12 months. Then the videos - 60 of them being uploaded to Process Arts; lots of panicky phone calls on that day but no Howlers. The tone had changed from one of indignation to one of excitement and pride.\n\nThe final boost was the detailed feedback so many of them gave me a couple of months after the units had finished; it was balanced and it was helpful and it brought a tear to my eye. And I’m not an emotional person.\n\nCan I achieve this level of challenge and learning while making the journey a little less painful? Watch this space...\n