4. Introductions
Where did I come
from?
Edinburgh
By Stuart Caie from Edinburgh, Scotland (Flickr) [CC-BY-2.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
5. Introductions
Where did I come from?
Via the Yorkshire Dales
http://www.flickr.com/photos/acradenia/2580545327 Ingleborough by
Acradenia, on Flickr CC-BY
6. Introductions
Now living in Hamilton
Kirikiriroa
The Tron
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bluepolaris/4588591079 Waikato Hospital by
blue polaris, on Flickr
18. How do students
think they learn best?
“I prefer practical learning as I like to do things
and get bored when just listening to someone
talking. I do quite well when working in a group as
well as it gives me more ideas and opinions”
“Through repetition. I like to study independently initially
but then to consolidate the learning I like to discuss it and
have feedback on it. I have a low attention span and so
find a lot of reading and quiet time very hard work. I like to
interact with people and so the discussion and debate of
ideas appeals to me greatly”
“I learn best from doing things or thinking
through a problem with other people or by
writing something down, drawing it. I don't
learn much by just reading something”
20. Thanks to Joyce Seitzinger http://www.cats-pyjamas.net/2010/05/moodle-tool-guide-for-teachers/ and Gavin
Henricks http://www.somerandomthoughts.com/blog/2012/03/15/a-moodle-2-version-of-the-moodle-tool-guide/
Use a guide
21. Engage
"If we believe that
learning is
anchored in
engagement,
...then we really
need to design
for engagement.
22. Open
What is Open?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mag3737/1914076277/
by mag3737, on Flickr CC-BY-NC-SA
25. Open as Sustainable
How many people teach the same thing as
someone else in the room?
In your school or college?
In other places in NZ?
In the world?
We gain by being open, as users and creators
26. Giulia on Open
Material reused, remixed and redistributed thanks to
Giulia Forsythe and an Open license CC-BY-NC-SA
27. Open, Open, Open
Open Access
Open Badges
Open Books
Open Data
Open Education
Open Knowledge ".. significant creative and economic
Open Research benefit for New Zealand"
Open Science
Open Source
Open Textbooks
28. OERu
New models of
access to education
Image cc-by-sa courtesy of Professor Jim Taylor,
DVC University of Southern Queensland
29. Open
Audience
Participation alert!
What can you do to be
Open?
Discuss!
Examples - Use CC licenses, release your lesson plans, publish openly,
persuade someone to be open?
35. <literate></illiterate>
"It is really not possible to speak of illiterate
and literate persons as two distinct
categories" (unesco 1957)
Source http://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2011/11/22/how-to-develop-digital-literacies-in-yourself-and-others-presentation/#.UGEM26T9F60
36. "Digital literacy defines those capabilities
which fit an individual for living, learning
and working in a digital society" JISC
37. Be Different
"As educators, we need to stop doing the things
for our students that we used to have to do
under a system where we didn't have access
and we didn't have some of the technological
affordances that we have today. We need to
restructure education so students do the
things that the Internet allows them to do for
themselves and we as educators start to take
advantage of the different ways of interacting
in a class setting." George Siemens 2009
38. Horizon Report NZ 2011
Digital literacy is a key skill in every discipline
and profession
Most academics are not using new and
compelling technologies for learning & teaching,
nor for their own research
The abundance of resources & relationships
easily accessible via the Internet challenges us
40. Summary
Design learning which requires activity, to
foster deep engagement with the concepts.
Construction is good!
Be Open. The world will love you for it
Approach the digital world with wonder.
Explore and experiment with it
41. End?
Stay social, keep sharing
@easegill
#mootnz13
Image courtesy of ryancr and a CC license
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryanr/14245503
3
42. So now it's over to you!
cc licensed flickr photo by Hamed Saber:
http://flickr.com/photos/hamed/843786226/
You are going to see a lot of each other over the next couple of days so make some connections now with your neighbours. Talk to 1 or 2 neighbours that you don't know (or know well) and share who you are and where you currently live and a town or country where you used to live.
You will hear a lot about Moodle in the next 2 days and my guess is that Martin Dougiamas will mention Moodle at some point during his keynote! I want to take this opportunity to think about 3 aspects that I believe are important when using Moodle or any digital technology in education. Learning - it's why we are here. We help others learn, we learn ourselves. Open - We work with one of the worlds leading open educational technologies; what is my contribution to Open? And Digital Literacies - how do we operate successfully in environments which are infused with digital technology?
From our earliest beginnings, we learned how to live and survive. We didn't learn this in a classroom, we learnt it where we needed it. We learnt from each other and we also had to put in collaborative effort to create things such as this neolithic village at Skara Brae in the Orkney Isles. It's about 5000 years old and shows a lot of skill in its construction and design. This is one building from a whole village and the people who created these clearly learnt from each other. I'm sutre that they would have tried different configurations out of time, experimented with the placement of elements. Where do you put the fire so it doesn't smoke you out, Where do you put the beds to keep warm, Where do you put the entrance to reduce draughts?
Here's a young man doing an apprenticeship. He learns by doing. But not on his own. He is mentored in his role so in Vysgotskian terms he is scaffolded through zones of proximal development, learning each process to allow him to move onto the next one and finally master his trade.
I read something. I may feel that I understand it straight away but if I'm reading about things that are new to me, there's a good chance that I need to consider that text in a different way. I need to work with it in order to go beyond the surface and to stimulate some deep learning from it. For most people, it is difficult to do that in isolation. Perhaps I need to discuss or debate it with somebody, a teacher or fellow learner. In today's online world, that could be in a discussion forum, a blog, on Twitter
Here's a teacher actively engaged with her students. She's giving audio and visual feedback to students through a tool called Panopto that we have connected to Moodle. Students design an individual project, discuss it, create it, and write a commentary on it. This is submitted in Moodle and then our teacher uses Panopto to give meaningful, and personal, feedback on the artifacts created. For the students involved, they have a teacher who is actively engaged with their learning.
For me, learning means getting your hands dirty. I'm not trying to dismiss text here because text is a massively important medium for sharing ideas, thoughts, instructions. Text is the substrate for activity and our activities should force contemplation and critical reflection of text we use in our teaching. I've always liked the idea that Moodle placed activity and resource at the same level when editing a course page. It's now even better with activity being highlighted first in the Add dialogue!
Why do I think it is so important to design for active learning rather than passive? It's the old Confucian statement about tell me and I’ll forget, show me and I’ll remember, let me do and I’ll understand. This diagram indicates that we only remember a small proportion of what we read but a large part of what we 'do'. When we design our courses, we often invert that pyramid so most of what we put there are things for learners to read and the least part are things for them to do. We must aim to create activity and use resources to inform that activity. Doing it the other way round tends to lead to the electronic filing cabinet scenario with our course pages just becoming big repositories of text and documents.
You will hear about a lot of different approaches to using Moodle over the next 2 days. All of the elements here are important but higher order thinking skills are developed through the terms towards the top of his list. Consider what you want your students to learn and create activities which support it.
If you need some guidance on how you can translate some of Blooms digital taxonomy into Moodle then ask for help! Joyce Seitzinger's Moodle Tool Guide is a good place to start. This is Gavin Henricks version for Moodle 2. There are also the Moodle forums at Moodle.org where you will find a community of people open and willing to share their knowledge.
While it is possible to learn on one's on and in isolation, our role as teachers is crucial. Many times we will act as a catalyst for learning, encouraging, stimulating and creating the situations where learning can occur. If we want engaged learners, then we have to be deliberate and design for it.
At the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony in London, Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web made this statement. This Is For Everyone. Really important. We work on the web everyday. It's not a closed place, locked away or only available to an elite. It is open and free. Much of what runs the web is also open, the Apache servers, the code, some of the browsers that you view it on, and of course for us here today, Moodle is Open.
Before the Internet, there were no tools which would easily allow us to share resources with others. That meant the default was to create your own resources. That has continued as the default position for most people because that's all we know. But the Internet has fundamentally changed what we can do including making sharing text, images, data a trivial task. It's so easy now that the Earthquake Commission shares it's files with complete strangers! When people are Open, then I have access to a rich seams of resources. Things that I couldn't have created myself either through a lack of expertise of time. And economically I couldn't afford to pay for them either. All the images in this presentation are licensed with a Creative Commons license including my own. That is the sharing part of open, the Free bit of Open if you like. The Freedom bit of Open takes us much further. Now what I can do is take the resource that Stuart made, or Martin Dougiamis made or Martin Weller made and remix it, adapt and adjust it to my context and the needs of my learners. In a further twist to Open, you can actually share the creation process. By working openly you can generate and create materials through co-construction and collaboration. And what I find is that this makes the products of such collaborations stronger and more valuable. They have been sanity checked, there is knowledge added which existed within the network but wasn't in your head. Crowd sourcing isn't dumbing down to the lowest common denominator and remember, 3's a crowd!
I've put this image together using excerpts from a number of drawings by the fabulous live illustrator Giulia Forsythe. I could do that because she made them open, free to access and with the freedom to rework as I saw fit. Teachers are always sharing - knowledge, experience, feedback; learners are sharing - questions, new interpretations, feedback; the past shares - when it isn't restricted by copyright. Giulia has drawn the virtuous circle of Reuse, Revise, Remix, Redistribute. In "The unreasonable effectiveness of open data" John Wilbanks states that "The opposite of open isn't closed, the opposite is broken" http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6o4_LHyXmq4J:digitool.library.colostate.edu/webclient/DeliveryManager%3Fpid%3D87734+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk As educators, we have a moral obligation to steward our knowledge and to that end we must make Openness our culture and our practice. And for our coders in the audience, ensure our culture remains free and uncapturable by keeping that code Open!
Open is prepended to many things and this is only just a small selection. We are all using Open Source Software when we use Moodle. An open Badge framework is about to be released for Moodle 2.5. Open Access allows us - and our learners - to view current research outputs. Open Data lets us >work< with the research inputs. In ANZ the government adopted NZGOAL the NZ Govt Open Access & Licensing framework which promotes the use of Creative Commons licenses when releasing government agencies release material because " significant creative and economic benefit for New Zealand"
Bringing quality education to learners challenged by economics or circumstance. Walk out with proper credit on courses designed by universities in NZ, Australia, Canada etc and created completely with OERs.
What style of writing is this? Lolcats! And don't mark me down for my spelling or grammar! I'm using this image because digital literacy is very much an elephant in the room. We have difficulty seeing it in relation to our work but particularly in relation to ourselves!
Some rights reserved by hugojcardoso
3 minutes. A video from our digital literacy awareness week last year.
So some important concepts in the digital literacy field. For those of you working in schools, you will be aware that the Digital Citizenship is the key term being used and digital literacies appear to be subsumed into that. I actually think that model is back to front (or inside-out) but that argument is for another day. Paul Gilster wrote the original text on digital literacy where he argues that the fundamental aspect of digital literacy isn't knowing what key to press but understanding the concepts behind why you might press a key. So digital literacy isn't about gaining an ICDL for instance Digital literacy also means knowing when not to use digital tools. Critical thinking trumps technical competence
Alan Martin reiterates this point when he says that Digital literacy is a condition not a threshold. They are both saying that developing literacy in a digital world is about attitude and approach.
One reason that we can't talk about digital literacy as a threshold is because our literacies exist along a continuum which is 4 dimensional. I might know how to operate and be comfortable in Facebook. I might feel much less able when in Twitter or on a wiki. I might realise that many of my understandings from using Facebook can transfer into my use of Twitter so over time my literacy in sharing information on fundamentally public sites has developed, however my understanding of how to share information in a wiki hasn't. In the latter I may have to develop a higher trust level with other participants to have my edits accepted, I need to understand the protocols for editing and sharing for instance.
As Doug concludes - "Digital Literacies are subjective and need to be developed." 'By digital literacy we mean those capabilities which fit an individual for living, learning and working in a digital society. For example, the use of digital tools to undertake academic research, writing and critical thinking; digital professionalism; the use of specialist digital tools and data sets; communicating ideas effectively in a range of media; producing, sharing and critically evaluating information; collaborating in virtual networks; using digital technologies to support reflection and PDP; managing digital reputation and showcasing achievements.'
Use the affordances of technology. Don't do the same old, same old with the new, new tech. Do something new, add value
DL is important for all. Only by developing our own DL can we hope to help our students develop theirs in academic contexts.
Technology and fear: is wonder the key? Emilio Mordini TRENDS in Biotechnology Vol.25 No.12 http://www.cssc.eu/public/Technology%20and%20fear.pdf How do we manage our different faces online? Friends, family, work Trust Reputation We're giving people permission to explore, to try things, to make mistakes. If they are willing to try things then they will transfer their learning to other situations. Overall, we are pushing the concept that online and technology are not things to be afraid of. We should approach them as land to be explored.
Image courtesy of ryancr and a CC license http://www.flickr.com/photos/ryanr/142455033