I am looking forward very much to the online/lockdown version of the Networked Learning Conference next week. A lot more people will be able to attend now that it's gone fully online so it will be a very different experience in various ways.
I'm delighted to be hosting a 'round table' discussion on the first day from 13.30-15.45. I'm expecting a lot more people in the room but also, because there's no
physical movement required to room-hop, I think people will be far more
transient in their attendance - there will be drive-by's.
The topic of 'disposition' is one that has been gnawing at me for a while. The round table format should allow plenty of time for others to also chew back at it. The question I have is whether there is a disposition towards being the ideal networked learner. It relates to a previous question I framed on this blog in 2008, 'what characterises the networked learned'? Are there things about you (apart from sheer privilege!) that make you a good match for networked learning? This is not the same as learning styles although some of the trait words used there may crop up here. I've been working up a mindmap about disposition and I'm looking to my partners in next week's round table discussion to help with developing and refining ideas and implications of this for networked learning practice, design and research. The mindmap for that is embedded below - it's a wikimap so if you want to, go ahead and add some ideas. It makes sense to try and write it all up and I'm keen to acknowledge any contribution. Probably there are whole swathes of knowledge about 'disposition' I'm unaware of so even a tip-off would be appreciated. If you wish to suggest any, please go ahead and add them to the References GoogleDoc: https://bit.ly/nlc2020dispositionrefs
For a bit more context, Michael Gallagher took up the idea of 'disposition' for his paper at Zagreb's NLC2018. His paper is in the NLC archive and his blog post includes the slides. Among many excellent points, he addressed the critique of 'disposition' being deterministic: post-human perspectives of shared agency should also allow us to avoid that dead-end.
It was great to share the same session with Michael to present my paper on mobilage, originally blogged here in 2017.
Showing posts with label pedagogical distance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pedagogical distance. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 12, 2020
Thursday, March 19, 2015
Networked Learning as a pedagogy again
I can't quite escape from the ideas I was talking about in 2008. Media choice and the pedagogy of and around that choice impacts behaviour and somehow we're liable to miss that.
Scenario: Evaluation. You have a large class of students (say 200) and you want to get a good response-rate to the routine end-of-module evaluation. The organisation would quite like this process to cost nothing at all. So, from paper-based, or perhaps optical mark read forms, the organisation has moved to online evaluations. This has coincided with a dramatic drop in response-rates. The choice of media has distanced the student from anything but the slightest amount of pedagogic influence over them (a paper just published refers to this kind of thing as 'pedagogic distance' - see Westberry and Franken 2015 - I think it is a massive issue). Even in a large lecture setting, if a lecturer hands out paper forms and requests students to complete them, the students are likely to comply. This is likely to do with the social form of the lecture as an event within which students immediately cede control to the person managing the session. Once out of the lecture, the spell is broken and all kinds of things come between the student and the online form.
Given that it is not very manageable to troop them all off to an IT room, unless you have the facility and could tie the evaluation in with some other desirable learning opportunity.
You could try an audience response system but that would be expensive and quite clumsy to administer. Apart from anything else, an evaluation with more than a few summary questions is going to feel like an imposition on the students and would, in my view, be an abuse of the lecturer's pedagogic power. There have been many discussions about the issue of students using their mobiles in lectures.
I suggested projecting a very large QR Code that points to the online form. Google's URL shortener serves up a QR Code and still works even though it gets a bit blurry when enlarged. [Note of caution - check URL's unless you can absolutely trust the source - perhaps use something like https://scanurl.net - good to use a checker that looks harder than just what's at the other end of your click - thanks to Martha for suggesting this edit 😁)
Any student with a smartphone ought to be able to follow the link. Clearly that is fantasy. It would be a good idea to warn the students in advance or at least to ask them to ensure they have or know where to find a QR Code Scanner app.
Even if they don't complete the form there and then, at least their browser is at the right page and they may go on to complete it later.
So it is hoped that merely by using the lecture setting to display the QR Code and allocating a few minutes to complete the form will increase response rates. Whether this will work after the novelty factor wears off, and what proportion of students who are not capable of scanning the code will feel disenfranchised and possibly put in a worse evaluation than they might have otherwise...!!! As they say, that's an empirical question...
But has the lecturer's action of introducing the QR Code in this scenario promoted connections? Is that an example of networked learning pedagogy in action? The definition says nothing about having students having to be learning at a distance...
Then there's the whole thing about the way that my role here means that I get to sit in meetings and try and join the things that I hear with the 'stuff I know' to come up with useful suggestions. Its serendipity. If learning technologists want to influence learning and teaching practice, they may have to sit in and tune in to yet more meetings.
Westberry, Nicola, and Margaret Franken. “Pedagogical Distance: Explaining Misalignment in Student-Driven Online Learning Activities Using Activity Theory.” Teaching in Higher Education 20, no. 3 (April 3, 2015): 300–312. doi:10.1080/13562517.2014.1002393.
Scenario: Evaluation. You have a large class of students (say 200) and you want to get a good response-rate to the routine end-of-module evaluation. The organisation would quite like this process to cost nothing at all. So, from paper-based, or perhaps optical mark read forms, the organisation has moved to online evaluations. This has coincided with a dramatic drop in response-rates. The choice of media has distanced the student from anything but the slightest amount of pedagogic influence over them (a paper just published refers to this kind of thing as 'pedagogic distance' - see Westberry and Franken 2015 - I think it is a massive issue). Even in a large lecture setting, if a lecturer hands out paper forms and requests students to complete them, the students are likely to comply. This is likely to do with the social form of the lecture as an event within which students immediately cede control to the person managing the session. Once out of the lecture, the spell is broken and all kinds of things come between the student and the online form.
Given that it is not very manageable to troop them all off to an IT room, unless you have the facility and could tie the evaluation in with some other desirable learning opportunity.
You could try an audience response system but that would be expensive and quite clumsy to administer. Apart from anything else, an evaluation with more than a few summary questions is going to feel like an imposition on the students and would, in my view, be an abuse of the lecturer's pedagogic power. There have been many discussions about the issue of students using their mobiles in lectures.
I suggested projecting a very large QR Code that points to the online form. Google's URL shortener serves up a QR Code and still works even though it gets a bit blurry when enlarged. [Note of caution - check URL's unless you can absolutely trust the source - perhaps use something like https://scanurl.net - good to use a checker that looks harder than just what's at the other end of your click - thanks to Martha for suggesting this edit 😁)
Even if they don't complete the form there and then, at least their browser is at the right page and they may go on to complete it later.
So it is hoped that merely by using the lecture setting to display the QR Code and allocating a few minutes to complete the form will increase response rates. Whether this will work after the novelty factor wears off, and what proportion of students who are not capable of scanning the code will feel disenfranchised and possibly put in a worse evaluation than they might have otherwise...!!! As they say, that's an empirical question...
But has the lecturer's action of introducing the QR Code in this scenario promoted connections? Is that an example of networked learning pedagogy in action? The definition says nothing about having students having to be learning at a distance...
Then there's the whole thing about the way that my role here means that I get to sit in meetings and try and join the things that I hear with the 'stuff I know' to come up with useful suggestions. Its serendipity. If learning technologists want to influence learning and teaching practice, they may have to sit in and tune in to yet more meetings.
Westberry, Nicola, and Margaret Franken. “Pedagogical Distance: Explaining Misalignment in Student-Driven Online Learning Activities Using Activity Theory.” Teaching in Higher Education 20, no. 3 (April 3, 2015): 300–312. doi:10.1080/13562517.2014.1002393.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
