robyn jay

I wonder how many primary school teachers retire surrounded by their now adult students? 27 year old son #1 traveled for 6 hours today to farewell his primary school teacher along with a number of his peers. Extraordinary really.

Deborah Brown has been teacher/principal of Afterlee School for something like 26 years. We moved into the community there in 1985 and like many others who bought in when the land was still relatively cheap, did so in search of a healthy, sustainable place to raise kids. Like many others we were poor but happy, growing food, kids, and a productive community of like-minded people. Central to the community was Afterlee School which for most of its life has had one teacher. Deborah both lived and worked in the community itself and her son was one of my boys friends.

The kids benefited from Deborah’s creativity and her partner Rodney’s IT skills. They created and learned in a small mixed-age group, working at their own level and from each other. Parents were always present, encouraged to be part of their kids education; sharing their talents with the kids via activity afternoons. I was lucky enough to do a bit of casual teaching there and we had some great times with paper, clips, tape etc exploring science challenges etc.

What I see now are a bunch of confident, sociable, creative, self-reliant and determined young adults. Schooling experiences are not everything but I am quite certain that the years my children spent in Deborah’s care have helped make them what they are today. Their presence at her farewell is testament to their respect and fondness for her, and their positive recollections of their earliest years of learning.

Thank you Deborah. I wish you many relaxing years up to your elbows in creative pursuits, travel and family.

[CC Flickr image shared by robynejay]

In my last post from the DEHub summit I’ll cover what was a very interesting keynote by Diana Laurillard from the London Knowledge Lab on ‘The critical role of teachers in optimising technologies for open learning’. Lots to cover in this one…

Diana introduced work on a new tool (starter kit) to support collaborative learning design. Strangely enough I had been describing something similar only weeks before but was totally at a loss how the technology would work, so I’m excited to see how the tool might be adapted for our work in VET.

Diana began by presenting some major challenges:

• the best people to take forward thinking in L&T are the practitioners themselves however time and funding are lacking and we are NOT going to get this from Governments
• lack of teacher training and confidence
• lack of senior staff involvement
• lack of reward
• need for documented case studies of good practice
• dislocation between research and practice
• top down strategies and policies are not followed through
• bottom up activity is plentiful but not improving – market driven by software companies and localised

So what to do about it?

• trust the professionals if we give them the right tools
• a middle out approach where we focus on supporting teachers as collaborating innovators
• a learning design support environment providing tools for design, development and sharing
• focus on an iterative loop to support innovation – sharing learning designs → innovating pedagogic patterns → evaluating learning designs → implementing courses → expanding knowledge of teaching and learning

The aim of the design tool was to:

• expand knowledge and encourage progression to new methods,
• encourage thinking outside the box,
• encourage reflection and sharing,
• enable teachers to build on the work of peers
• import existing ‘pedagogical patterns’ of good teaching – patterns of digital versions of what teachers do now
• model pedagogical and logistical benefits and disadvantages
• allow play and experimentation, testing in practice
• allow redesign and adaptation

To do this the form and content are separated; content is stripped out and the pedagogy/design/form is left – fill in the gaps style. Each teacher, regardless of field of study, takes, adapts, improves and gives back. teachers are able to create a new design or import one. A range of outcome categories are presented and a choice of L&T activities (simulations, discussions etc). All properties are editable and can be dragged/dropped onto a timeline and then resized by emphasis/ % of time. The design data is presented via pie charts on the types of learning (practice,inquiry,production,acquisition,discussion) and the implications on cost (staffing etc).

You can try out the draft tool here!

[CC FlickR image shared by Giant Ginkgo]

In her DEHub summit presentation Gilly Salmon spoke on continuity and change, and the critical challenges facing us to address both what Governments want vs what learners want, and referred to the work around a new definition of quality and CALF.

Governments are calling for:

• competition
• face to face learning contact
• the pursuit of excellence
• tight budgets and constrained funding
• research

What learners really want is:

• visibility/connectivity – for peers and employers and to make lecturers more visible
• openness – personalisation, customisation, their own learning pathways, to ask more and prepare better
• virtualisation – using many media
• purposefulness – tell me what I’ve learned and what I can do with it
• expression – search, research, express

[cc FlickR image shared by mikebaird]

‘If you don’t like change you are going to like irrelevance even less’

Notes and reflections on the Openness panel @ the DEHub Summit.

There was quite a lot of talk around Open Education REsources (OER) at the event so it was good to see this panel focusing more broadly on openness in general.

Terry Anderson began by speaking on ‘open scholars’ who he said:

• are transparent with a key critique element
• self archive
• do open research and openly apply research exposing the learning that happened
• filter and share with others
• support emerging open learning alternatives
• publish in open journals
• assign open textbooks
• induce open students
• teach open courses
• build networks
• are change agents

Rory McGreal reminded that one third of internet connectivity in the world is ONLY via mobile devices and that our current model of elite education is simply not sustainable:

• a balancing act is needed between bandwidth and performance etc
• fluid design is needed to enable displays for different screens etc
• OERs include games – titanic, mudball wall..

He asked how do we recognise what people learn on their own?

Don Alcott reminded that nothing is ‘free’ – so who does the work? who funds OER? – and stressed difficulties in a climate of competition and closed learning organisations.

Grainne Conole stressed the need to move from a focus on content and resources to practices, activity and use in open education (hear, hear!). Shae introduced her projects based in cloudworks and asked:

• If learners and their context have changed, we need new approaches to L&T. How can we harness sophisticated tools and OERs
• What are the quality implications?
• Will a focus on OER practices lead to improvements in quality and innovation?
• Will openness enable or restrict social inclusion?

I’ve pondered the last point myself for years.

Are we producing an elite group of learners?

The assumption that any potential learner is capable of finding, filtering, engaging with OERs and establishing connections is unfortunately absurd. So what is needed to support this – community OER mentors and Govt funding/resourcing?

[CC FlickR image shared by Paul Downey]