Contemporary shifts in the landscape of learning and teaching in tertiary education pose a number of fundamental questions regarding the role of educators. As the educator becomes increasingly decentred and displaced as gatekeeper to the repository of knowledge, there is a need to reconsider the pedagogic principles underpinning learning and teaching practices and to align the educational opportunities provided by emergent electronic technologies with these principles. Reflecting on the experience of enabling and promoting student engagement with e-learning technologies, this presentation will question the potential of established pedagogic practices to underpin learning and teaching in a technologically-enhanced environment.

1. Rattling the cage: disturbing pedagogical
orthodoxy in the landscape of ‘e-learning’
Dr Neil McPherson
Lecturer in Sociology
School of Social Sciences
University of the West of Scotland
0741 414 5745
@neilgmcpherson
neil.mcpherson@uws.ac.uk

2. Is there a pedagogy of e-learning?
mapping established theories of learning and associated pedagogic strategies
re-locating the educator and learner in the dynamic landscape of the digital age
challenges and opportunities
pedagogical challenges for the educator

3. Defining ‘ pedagogy’
‘the linked processes of teaching and learning’

4. Monolithic instruction
historical emphasis on educator-centred didactic
teaching and acquisition of declarative knowledge
reproduction
production
contemporary emphasis on student-centred learning
and development of procedural knowledge
Learner-initiated personalized learning

5. Competing but not mutually What is assumed? Pedagogical approach
exclusive perspectives on
learning
Associative Acquisition Learning by association
Banking Cumulative extension
(Behaviourism) Building
Instruction
absorption Declarative knowledge
Cognitive Interpretation Learning through interaction and
Construction activity - cognitive toolbox
(Constructivism) Evaluation
Activity/collaboration/communica
activity Procedural knowledge tion/feedback
Situative Socioculturally located Learning as practice mediated and
Authentic/contextualised developed through learning
(Social Identifiable with self/community relationships/networks
constructivism/connectivism)
Situated knowledge Engagement/participation/extens
ion/supporting of social learning
participation/discovery networks, spaces & practices
Adapted from Mayes & De Freitas 2004, 2007

6. Tilting at funnels
hical field
Banking edu cation in a hierarc
‘the teacher teaches and the students are taught
‘the teacher is the Subject of the learning process,
while the pupils are mere objects’
(Freire 1996)
‘The current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search
for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for
each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and
caring’
(Illich 1971)

7. Tilting at funnels
“A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all
who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives;
empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn
it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public
with the opportunity to make their challenge known”
(Illich 1971)

8. “The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning,
ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has
experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity, the former, too, is
jeopardized by reproduction when substantive duration ceases to matter. And what is
really jeopardized when the historical testimony is affected is the authority of the
object.”

9. Space & time
compression & expansion
‘Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked
eye—if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a
space consciously explored by man’ (Benjamin 1935)
“Reception in a state of distraction…is symptomatic of profound changes in
apperception… The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one” (Benjamin 1935)

10. ‘Aura’, authenticity, space and time in the digital age
decentring of the ‘teacher’
reconstitution of the ‘knowers’
demythologizing of knowledge
de-hierarchising of knowledge media
fluid & dynamic egalitarian communities
shift in production and reception of knowledge
fragmentation of disciplinary authority
socialisation and individualisation of space & time
the digital flaneur

11. ‘Aura’, authenticity, space and time in the digital age
“Digital reproduction both accelerates and shifts processes of textual of reproduction.
Digital reproduction might be said to open up new spaces, social relations and domains of
textual play…In the age of digital reproduction, material moves in different circuits at high
speed. Virtual centres gather textual material together and offer new combinations and
opportunities and modes of access. Access is dispersed and distributed anew. Models of
inert consumption are displaced by models of active engagement.”
(Peim 2007)

12. The emerging ecology of the technology-enhanced learning environment
“What we have here is a transition from a stable, settled
world, of knowledge produced by authority/authors, to a
world of instability, flux, of knowledge produced by the
individual in her or his life world, out of resources available to
her or him, and in relation to both needs and interests that
come from the reader’s life-world”
Kress and Pachler (2007)

13. Locating learning in the life-world of the learner
web2.0/
social media
formal learning
environment
digital world
socioeconomic/cultural life-world

14. Re-imagining the Panopticon
“the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form?”
(Foucault 1977)

15. Opportunities for learning & teaching in a technology-enhanced environment
enables acquisition
motivates interpretation possibilities for personal learning networks
contextualizes authentic engagement
supports & stimulates active learning
stimulates critical thinking beyond the curriculum
harnesses just in time learning
fosters collaboration
negotiated spaces for learning

16. Challenges for learning & teaching in a technology-enhanced environment
mapping and navigation
legitimation
overload cannot simply relocate past structures of teaching &
learning into technology-enhanced environment
inclusion
playing the field – transcending habitus and limited capital

17. Pedagogic challenges for the educator
• harness pedagogical potentials of emergent learning & teaching technologies
• ensure pedagogical alignment of technology interventions w/ learning & teaching aims &
objectives
• ensure use of technology-enhanced learning is a transformational experience
• harness the inclusive potential of technology-enhanced learning & teaching
• construction and maintenance of safe environments for student-centered learning
• develop robust mechanisms of evaluation of technology-enhanced learning tools & spaces
design & facilitation

18. Do we need a new pedagogy of eLearning?
“sociological learning can be seen to occur in three…modes: literal, interpretive and
reflexive…
“We suggest that as instructors in sociology we should attempt to construct a social
space in which students are encouraged to engage in a reflexive mode of learning…
“In this practice, instructors locate themselves within the presentation of course materials and
employ the three modes of learning—literal, interpretive, and reflexive—to assist students in
placing themselves within the learning process.”
(Harling Stalker & Pridmore 2009)

19. Do we need a new pedagogy of eLearning?
“we don't need a new theory of learning or a special approach to teaching. We need
to understand what it means to learn in an environment where information and
communication is ubiquitously available. There is no part of learning that is not
touched by the digital: even if a teacher and student choose to isolate themselves
from digital opportunity, the meaning of that isolation is changed by virtue of the fact
that they have had to make those special arrangements”
(Beetham 2012)

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