Tag Archives: curriculum

The purpose of education


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 9 February 2011

I’m always banging on about the purpose of education. So, I wondered what some of my friends [not in education] would say when asked “what is the purpose of education?

“about empowering people, gaining a sense of responsibility and self-worth, learning social skills and improving confidence which in turn, gives everyone equal opportunities to succeed”. [AR, NHS executive assistant, fab charity trustee]

“opening your mind to ideas and experiences beyond your own small life and surroundings. Learning to challenge, test, implement, innovate.” [HM, home-maker]

“passing accurate information between people, in formal education, vocationally, socially, or even self-teaching. It is about self-enlightenment and our beliefs.” [SS, friend]

“not just about achievement, or the ability to speak eloquently and with knowledge. It should enable us to think for ourselves and hold our own in society. Ergo it becomes a thing of great beauty.” [AG, social care manager]

“to open the minds of those being educated to provide them with the tools to reach their full potential.” [DR, footballist, management accountant]

“society’s way of giving its citizens coping mechanisms to survive within their environment; to learn and adapt that learning to your needs or those of your community.” [CE, anarchist-plummer, drummer]

“learning something new, and can be intentional and unintentional – when we set out to learn something from school, or elders and peers, or research. [Or it’s] from life experience where we absorb knowledge but perhaps don’t realise it until we reflect or act on it.” [CC, dog-walker]

“the apprenticeship of the mind, body and soul in preparation of everything life throws at you… a lifelong process of self-discovery.” [DY, car driver, festival-goer]

“a huge force for good; inspired education supports the self development of the human race. Ignorant education or the education of ignorance is the planet’s greatest enemy.” [DF, spent the first 20 years of life avoiding education; spent the following 20 years wishing it was otherwise]

“about offering possibilities – understanding what is, what might be, what you want to be, what you don’t want to be. It is a right and a privilege.” [PD, Mom, Office Manager]

“to inspire dreams and provide the means to follow them.” [MH, Dad]

“to empower the individual by learning from others’ experiences, and to encourage a sense of society and one’s place in it.” [RD, engineer]

“to help people realise their potential and have a greater understanding and appreciation of the world and all its inhabitants.” [JD, electrician]

“the opportunity to open doors. The chance to explore and develop our own beliefs, shape our ideas, and give us the information to challenge what happens in our world.” [DE, Artistic Director]

“to teach you the lines, then to see the lines and draw them for yourself, and finally to read between them, for that is where just about anything that is worth a damn sits.” [NW, child psychologist]

So my friends highlight a purpose that isn’t about accreditation or employability. It is about self-discovery, sociability, dreaming, place and resilience. The purpose of education is us.


Internationalisation, student voices and the shock doctrine: disrupting business-as-usual


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 24 January 2011

This post complements my keynote at the 11th Teesside University Learning and Teaching Conference, held on Wednesday 26th January. There are two slideshows. The first, entitled “in solidarity”, is a rolling piece to be run without commentary at the start of the session. It presents some images of student activism across the globe, limited to the period since 1968. It intersperses these with comments from the current UK coalition government and some detail on the financialisation and privatisation of UK higher education, in order partially to describe hegemony.

This slideshow highlights that student activism against the state has been, and continues to be, met with state-sanctioned violence. In the accelerated implementation of neoliberalism within the UK, opposition is branded as outlaw or is brutalised in the kettle. As societies are disrupted by climate change, debt, food production and energy availability, there is a quickening of the transformation of the state towards an iron cage of control, in the name of business-as-usual, growth and capital. And all this is a world where, as Žižek argues, our liberal aim is “to democratise capitalism, to extend democratic control to the economy by means of media pressure, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws, honest police investigations and so on.” Žižek queries whether it is enough that “the institutional set-up of the (bourgeois) democratic state is never questioned.” Framed by this critique of the failure of liberal democracy to humanise, and in the face of the State’s oppression and antagonism, Mike Neary notes that we must question whether in education “The struggle is not for the University, but against what the University has become.”

In the face of disruption, and framed by an agenda that promotes internationalisation as a space into which UK HE can grow, steps the student.

The second slideshow is entitled “Internationalisation, student voices and the shock doctrine: disrupting business-as-usual”. I wish to ask two questions, from which spring a further set of questions, in this talk.

  1. What is the relationship between UK higher education, internationalisation agendas and student voices in a world that faces significant disruption?
  2. Is business-as-usual a viable option?

Business-as-usual

In slide 4 I highlight UUK’s response to the UK Coalition Government’s spending review proposals. It develops an argument about UK HE that demonstrates how the sector is important and an engine for economic growth. It begins to sketch a view that UK HE’s size and complexity, its networked potential to support growth, its ability to act as a motive-force, gears it to be re-focused and shackled in the name of market fundamentalism. Here, HE is about resources and the valorisation of (human) capital-in-motion, rather than the relationships between people. This is a hegemonic view of business-as-usual, further exemplified in HEFCE’s mission and the HEA’s Strategic Plan [slides 5-6]. In these documents, Internationalisation is explicitly and uncritically placed in relation to economic growth.

In slides 7-9 I highlight recent reports that demonstrate the place of UK HE in a model of neoliberal political economy, focused upon human capital in the global knowledge economy and the accumulation of capital by the UK through exports, alongside the increasing global mobility/flow/circulation of students as part of this process of coercive competition. A snapshot of current practice highlights a flow from developing nations [BRICS and south-east Asia] towards the West. Slides 10-13 highlight the current role of these nations in providing “human” capital in the form of students, counterpoised against their emerging success in Western-oriented school testing and the emergence of China as a space for the inward flow of mobile students. Importantly this is as opposed to the relative reduction of students into the USA. Is there a clash coming, or a shift in the locus of power between the USA and China in HE, as a function of the movement and re-production of transnational capital? This view is framed by slide 14, which also points out that whilst there may be differences based on the type of (non-) accredited, international activity, it is important that student migration grows faster than overall migration. At issue here is the cultivation of those likely to produce proprietary knowledge, as opposed to knowledge workers. A tied question is who will own such proprietary knowledge (workers)?

In slides 15-16 I wish to raise some central questions around business-as-usual;

  1. Is it possible to develop an internationalisation of HE that enables alien experiences enrich the curriculum and global “knowing”? (Deliberately opposed to “the knowledge economy”.) This is important in finding shared solutions to global problems.
  2. Is engagement with overseas students’ by UK HE a form of capitalist primitive accumulation, of both fiscal and human capital? Or is it tied to the transnational movement of global capital linked to corporate development?
  3. Where students entering UK HE are privileged and gain further ‘positional advantage’ in a crowded and increasingly ‘credentialised’ graduate labour market, is UK HE contributing to elitist, hegemonic positions in countries of origin? Moreover, are these positions an extension and a valorisation of neoliberal socio-cultural forms?

HE as homogenised

In slide 17 I begin to argue for a homogenised higher education, irrespective of cultural specificity/difference, with a focus on employment rather than knowing or a transformation of thinking. This view is focused institutionally in slides 18-19 by demonstrating that the international student experience is shaped [with a few exceptions based on state/financial security, like border controls] like the “normal” student experience. Such normalisation is helpful in extending a hegemonic position through the incorporation and assimilation of the “other”.

It is interesting to note that once the curriculum is brought into play, we begin to see examples of how internationalisation might enable experiential, or practical, production to occur, in the name of a transformation of mind [slides 20-21]. However, this transformative moment is almost lost in the face of the homogenised, institutional representations of internationalisation/student living that are revealed by university web-sites, whether they are grouped by 1994, Million+, Russell Group or University Alliance [slides 22-25]. This is in spite of the focus in some of these spaces for materials which underpin the development of staff, or the appearance of some student voices.

A view of HE as a convergent place for production/consumption is also revealed in the face of the stereotyped view of Asians as rote-learners, as opposed to more sophisticated, contextually-driven learners. Although, of course, we also see the same claims made about some home-based students who come to HE following their A-levels. This view that there is good [Western] educational practice that might be transferred is also reinforced by those private consultancies who are trying to engage with the rush to outsource practices, spaces and “excellence” [slide 26]. In spite of this structural, institutional position, at the level of the curriculum we see the possibility for a transformation of mind through shared, generic human experiences/stories that spill through. These need to be positioned culturally but they open up spaces for the transfer of things and thoughts [slides 27-29].

And so in slide 30 I wish to ask whether the internationalisation of HE has the possibility to be about something more radical – that it might be more humane? That it’s not just the (knowledge) economy (and efficiency) that is to be served, but that, irrespective of cultural differences, we might be able to produce something else. There is something here on power and the production of the curriculum and the world at a range of scales. Moreover, maybe commonalities are more important in a world that faces significant disruption.

However, we need to reveal how that view relates to our work with students. Work on the student voice is often seen as inclusive and democratic, and to validate specific views. It humanises our view of them because up to a point they are included in our work [slides 31-32]. At issue is whether our conversations with students offers the possibility of a radical moment in which we might crack open higher education for a productive purpose beyond neoliberal intent.

Slides 33-44 demonstrate how much work needs to be done here in engaging students with each other in the face of overtly economically-driven imperatives. These quotes from students highlight the alienating impact of money and debt on social relations, and how the cultural separation of individuals and groups is enhanced through our current focus on HE as economic engine, fuelled by debt and privatisation. This separation and alienation encourages marginalisation and views of the other. It enables the aggressive marketing of a specific way of life that is driven by capitalist work.

Disruption

The next section focuses upon HE’s place in a world that faces significant disruption. These disruptions are prefigured around four themes.

  1. Control and management of flows of ‘economic migrants’/asylum-seekers: here is a view of international students as threat, as the other, unless they are holders of proprietary knowledge who become like us. This enables the dominant neoliberal position to elide the threat of domination by alien cultures with attacks on the wastefulness of the public sector and its assets, and to aggressively argue for privatisation [slides 46-50].
  2. Globalising privilege: as mobile students represent, to some extent, a ‘privileged’ selection of humans, there is a risk that ‘student switchers’ enable developed countries to accumulate human capital, and extend its hegemonic position through the ownership of proprietary knowledge workers [commonly referred to as a brain/skills drain] [slide 51].
  3. HE and post-colonialism/neoliberalism: whilst there is a flow of networks and connections between nodes in the West, and to an extent between the East and the West, there is emerging power within those on the boundaries that is challenging and radically threatening to established norms. The economic rise of the BRICS offers a central geographical space into which this clash may be escalated [slides 52-54].
  4. Against nature: climate change, peak oil, energy costs, the loss of biodiversity each threaten business-as-usual within capitalist social relations. Internationalisation threatens to take more people from countries with low ecological footprints and export them to those with high footprints, or to transfer activities in the opposite direction. And it is simply not good enough to claim that technological efficiencies will save the day, because a rise in global population and affluence will ensure that this is not possible. Deeper solutions are needed [slides 54-60].

As a result we might need to work in a more focused way at a range of scales, including within HE. We might need to revisit radically our curriculum and activities. We might need to think about limits. We might need to fight views of business-as-usual predicated upon students-in-debt as consumers-of-education. We might need to stand against technological and economic determinism and provide radical alternatives. And when we are told that capital in all its forms [financial, human, social, cultural] will save us because we will be more intelligent/flexible/adaptable, we need to ruthlessly critique the alienation, the imposition of hegemony, and the immiseration of life and labour enforced by capital in its self-valorisation and in its re-production of those social relations that imprison [slide 61].

The Shock Doctrine and HE: the place of internationalisation

Within UK HE, the Browne Report and the Coalition Government’s subsequent response has turned the global economic crisis into a means to quicken the privatisation of the state, and to attempt the strangulation of possibilities to energise transformative, co-operative relations. This places HE in the vanguard of the Shock Doctrine, designed “to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy”. It rests upon, for example…

  1. The relentless law of competition and coercion [the rush to internationalise].
  2. The impact of crisis to justify a tightening and a quickening of the dominant ideology [student-as-consumer; HE-as-commodity].
  3. The transfer of state/public assets to the private sector under the belief that it will produce a more efficient [smaller, less regulatory] government and improve economic outputs.
  4. Lock-down of state subsidies for “inefficient” work [Band C and D funded subjects].
  5. The privatisation of state enterprises in the name of consumer choice, economic efficiency or sustainability [encouraging the privatisation of HE].
  6. A refusal to run deficits [pejorative cuts to state services].
  7. Extending the financialisation of capital and the growth of consumer debt [increased fees].
  8. Controlled, economically-driven, anti-humanist ideology.

And so, internationalisation might be read as an attempt to enforce the shock doctrine as part of a response to economic crisis. It might be read as an attempt to increase the market for western neoliberal values, delivered in-part through higher education. At issue then is how shared, international values/stories might enable oppositional, alternative, meaningful social transformation to be realised.

In this, we might ask [slides 63-66]:

  • Is HE resilient in the face of disruption? Or is it disoriented in the face of shock?
  • Do our approaches to internationalisation and the place of students in HE limit re-invention?
  • How does the intimacy of commonality help us? Which co-operative projects might offer possibilities?
  • So what might this mean for student voices in HE? Can the voices of international students help HE become more resilient?

Students-as-producers of resilient HE?

Resilience is about communities and societies working to adapt to disruption. It is not about business-as-usual. It is not about mitigation. It is about engagement, education, empowerment and encouragement. It is about co-operation and not competition. And so the University might become a space for international engagement with the production of a radical, active, non-hegemonic set of experiences. The totality of our contextual experience might be analysed from a range of perspectives, in order to develop new identities and social relations [slides 67-69].

And so students and academics might, irrespective of culture, work as co-producers of a mass intellect in commons. Collaborative social relations might enable us to re-envisage the University as a revolutionary space, where knowledge is constructed not for consumption and privatization and commodification for the economy, but instead for global knowing and reimagining, and solutions to global disruptions that are not financialised. Within this approach, civil, experiential action is critical, as is critique. The emergence of activities underpinned by co-governance and co-production, focused upon praxis, are central to this approach, and in answering the question: “In the face of disruption what is HE for?” [slides 70-73].

By engaging with education as social re-production, and taking on-board the homogenous, shared elements of out life-world, we might ask:

  1. Are there other ways of producing knowing? What authority does HE/do universities have? How relevant are fixed institutions/programmes in a disrupted world?
  2. How do internationalised student voices help to adapt to disruption? In a knowing world, rather than a knowledge economy, what does curriculum innovation mean?
  3. Does a pedagogy of production need to start with the principle that we need to consume less of everything? What does this mean for ownership of the institution at scale [local, regional, global]?

A focus on business-as-usual is no help in a world that faces significant disruption. We need to begin with our students and ask them “How can internationalised student voices help in the struggle to re-invent the world?” For it is through their revelation of the world that alternatives may be produced.


Student-as-producer: reflections on social protest, social media and the socio-history of re-production


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 16 November 2010

I was taken with Mike Neary’s description of the 10th November national demonstration by students, staff and supporters of HE as a public good. It was important that Mike called his piece “History (Change) in the Making”, in order to highlight the possibilities for fusing the production of our futures through an engagement with the past. In the quest for progress, too often we dismiss any attempt at critique of our present moment as historically-situated, especially in terms of our use of technology. Too often we make claims for technology in education as progressive because we believe it enhances engagement or participation or the value of a student as a knowledge worker, and this tends to be collapsed into a discourse around employability. However, a more critical, democratic reappraisal of our shared positions in the academy, underpinned by socio-historical narratives, rather than socio-technical ones, is being focused by Neary through the student-as-producer project. This project is working in the institution, against neoliberal views of the curriculum-as-consumption, to move beyond prescribed social relations. Neary notes that:

“Student as Producer is not only about encouraging students to produce products, whether in the form of artistic objects and/or research outputs. Student as Producer extends the concept of production to include ways in which students, as social individuals, affect and change society, so at [sic.] to be able to recognise themselves in the social world of their own design.”

In relating the project to the protest, he powerfully highlights that the students in London were not those who will feel the cold-wind of fees, and yet they were standing-up for higher education as a public good. He also stated that they could see that “the lack of money is a constant grinding relentless reality”, which diminishes us all. This diminishing of education and our social relations in the face of externally-imposed, economic necessity reminds us “how the power of money has so overwhelmed human sociability that it now seems like a natural phenomena, rather than the outcome of an oppressive social process. And, as such, it appears impossible to resist.” Critically, as the Rector of Edinburgh University, Iain MacWhirter, noted, this means that in the name of supporting coercive capitalism and the financialisation of our economy and life-world, prospective undergraduate students must mortgage their futures before they can consider a traditional mortgage.

One of the critical outcomes from the protest was around the importance of re-politicising the question of what higher education is for, not just amongst academics and established intellectuals, but also amongst others who benefit from the forms of HE. I do not know whether the students engaged on the NUS/UCU demo regard themselves as intellectuals, activists, citizens, agents or whatever. However, the ability of 50,000 people physically to see 49,999 other people, alongside brass bands, drummers and carnival grotesques, is an important moment in radicalising and re-imagining what our concrete, living experiences of higher education might be. This re-politicising offers the promise of a re-imagining and a re-production of the forms of higher education.

In this way the reality of this national event was its appearance as a crack in the dominant form of resourcing, sharing and delivering HE. As a crack in the dominant moment of higher education it forces other students, academic and professional services staff, society, workers, the state, to grapple with alternatives, or at least to defend their orthodoxies. This is important because, as Holloway argues, this is a disruption in the dominant logic of our social determination. He quotes: “We shall not accept an alien, external determination of our activity, we shall determine ourselves what we do”. For Holloway, moving away from imposition and alienation, towards automomies of doing is a critical, radical moment. I wonder the extent to which Wednesday was important because of the spaces it prescribed for autonomous activity.

The value of actual, living experiences, where fellowship can be described and re-formed through direct action in the world, shines through this crack. Whilst I tweeted my descriptions of activity from the demonstration [as activists have done in a range of spaces before], and whilst Twitter enabled newsrooms to manage live representations of activity, social media only ever remained a second-order instrument, as a reporting tool, or a mechanism to disseminate information, or to re-publish live information. After the fact it gave a way for me to re-interpret lived events and to correlate that with those of others. My ability to use social media to reflect on my position in relation to a range of others is critical. [Note that there is a wealth of vimeo footage, #demo2010 tweets and blog postings about the protest.] However, social media only described a representation of our power to recast the world; it described a possibility, or a space where radical moments might be opened-up; it was never, of itself, that re-presentation without taking the form of concrete action-in-the-world.

One of the great spin-offs of the use of social media by the protest movement is the ability of autonomous groups to see their peers exercising their power-to re-create the world. Technologies are a means through which the idea of the university is being critiqued, or through which the possibilities of collective and co-operative re-productions of higher education are being discussed ahead of concrete action-in-the-world. In this way autonomous movements in Popular Education, student protests in Italy, automonist student collectives in the UK, an Education Camp in Parliament Square, and planned and actual student occupations based on teach-ins and the historical, educational experiences of radical communities, are engaging with social media as a means of re-producing their living experiences of higher education. It is this latter point that is central. Technology in and for education is at once an external portrayal of a living reality, and a means of re-inforcing the ways in which established cultures are being challenged. This is why its use by students-as-producers is so energising, where it is keyed into: their social relations and their relationships with the environment; their production and governance processes; their conceptions of the world; and the conduct of their daily life that underpins their social reproduction.

The view of students-as-producers connects to Collini’s case for the Humanities, which moves us beyond the economy and its reductive/hostile positioning of the academy, towards the need for a public discourse on the nature of the university as a public good. Collini urges us to move away from a discourse framed by the power assumed by the state in the name of the taxpayer, to reconsider our educational and socially-mediated values. In the struggle for higher education, in moving away from formulae of impact, excellence and assurance, Collini urges us to engage with issues of trust and “contestable judgements”. This is exactly what the use of social media by students-as-producers is hinting at, in particular addressing the contested meaning of constructed positions, especially the socio-historical positions taken by coercive capitalism.

This issue of engagement with socio-historical positions is underlined by Zizek who argues that we need to reappraise ourselves of what “interesting times” actually means, in terms of the consequences of socio-cultural, economic and environmental dislocations. He argues that it is not newness that is interesting, but how the new and the old are mixed. Otherwise our present fiction, in which the future as defined by the dominant form of capital, will continue to function as our dominant, living culture. Zizek argues that our socio-historical culture, and our understanding of the past is critical here in developing “a culture of tolerance, this is a culture of its own, not just being open to the other, but open towards the other in the sense of participating in the same struggle.” One of the pivotal points that he raises is that in order “to change a view you must reveal the extent of your oppression.” Social media is one such way in which students and academics are revealing this in their living experiences.

This mixing of a socio-historical critique of our social relations, our ability to produce our world, and technology is needed to engage with any work on futures. In this, no meaningful engagement with technology in education matters beyond the question of what is higher education for? Keri Facer has argued that we need to ask some serious questions and whether our hegemonic educational systems, oriented towards accreditation in the current economy are viable. She has asked what sorts of worlds do we want to live in, what skills and relationships do we wish to encourage, how do we integrate education into our communities?

These are big questions, and they sit uneasily alongside our view of UK HE and economic growth through, for instance, internationalisation agendas. Can we really look to extend market share in a world where countries like India, South Africa and China are expanding their domestic, higher education provision to support their own economic growth? However, more importantly, how does higher education react to, and plan within, critical international issues of political economy, like banking bailouts and structural trade deficits. What value futures’ planning for higher education in these scenarios, beyond blind faith in business-as-usual?

Facer argues that we are not having right conversations about HE, that Browne is a symptom of a failure to have debate over what HE is for and how it should be funded. She states that we need “a serious public debate about education” and speaks for a critique of socio-technical change rooted in an analysis of the radical possibilities of the curriculum. In this she sees universities as democratic public spaces, which need to be reinvigorated. Where we have the university as servant of the knowledge economy and no more, where our lives are based on technical skills alone, we will see radical socio-economic polarisation and economic inequality. We need to imagine alternatives tied more closely to needs/aspirations of our communities.

The realpolitik of this is that new funding models framed in the name of sustainability, as outcomes of the shock doctrine, increase our alienation from imposed social determinations visited through manifestations of business-as-usual. I would argue that the key to grappling with Facer’s question of what HE is for, is a meaningful socio-historical critique of the forms of higher education. Within that the use of technology is an area of activity interconnected with concrete activities and decisions that can be described, compared, offered and critiqued. The current use of social media by students in producing new, radical moments for the university is a valuable starting point for fighting for the idea of higher education. In planning alternatives to prescribed futures, we must recover our socio-historical positions. Students-as-producers have demonstrated how critical engagement with technology in education may offer hope in this praxis.


Towards a radical manifesto? The Impact of Web 2.0 on HE


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 15 May 2009

I have finally re-read the Report of an independent Committee of Inquiry into the impact on higher education of students’ widespread use of Web 2.0 technologies. From the report I am particularly taken by the following statements/outcomes, which have ramifications for our policy, practice[s] and culture[s]. I am especially interested in the connections between these areas as they impact our ability to re-define a radical pedagogy for empowering our learners, wherever they are on a continuum of engagement with technology. The key is making the world a better place.

1.    The impact of pre-HE pedagogies and technologies

This may be the single most important area that will impact HE practitioners. The report notes two key factors:

“Present-day students are heavily influenced by school methods of delivery so that shifts in educational practice there can be expected to impact on expectations of approaches in higher education”

“The digital divide, the division between the digital ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’, has not been entirely overcome and persists in several dimensions: in access to, and engagement with, technology; the capability of the technology; and in individual competence.”

Issues of marginalisation, disempowerment and disengagement by accident, status or design are still very real. They connect into Helen Milner’s recent work on social inclusion and digital technologies and her Next step for the digital inclusion manifesto. They are also impacted by the development and extension of the precepts within the Early Years Foundation Stage Strategy, which is in itself a manifesto for: inclusion; child-centred practice; productive, learner-defined and owned personal learning environments; a new politics of praxis within and beyond the classroom. The time is ripe for a reappraisal of the value[s] of Bandura, Dewey, Illich, Rorty, integrated with the work of Ronald Barnett.

As digital identities are developed and better understood, as libraries, community centres, social enterprises and schools extend coverage, and as access via mobiles broadens and depends, HE has a duty to ensure that its practitioners are not playing catch-up. This is especially important in the pedagogic cultures that drive programme teams, both in their definition and scoping of curricula, in their involvement of students-as-mentors, and as a result in the power relationships that exist in the learning space that a learner defines. Enabling learners to manage their place in a set of cultures and ask questions at key moments of transition – to their enrolment or registration, in their modes of assessment, in migrating between levels 1 and 2 or between levels 2 and 3 – are critical for good-enough educators who have to support the student in her/his integration of the disparate facets of HE study for her/his own development.

2.    The impact on staff

The report notes that:

“Staff capability with ICT is a further dimension of the digital divide… Tutors are central to development of approaches to learning and teaching in higher education. They have much to keep up with, their subject for example, and developments in their craft – learning and teaching or pedagogy. To practise effectively, they have also to stay attuned to the disposition of their students. This is being changed demonstrably by the nature of the experience of growing up in a digital world.”

Programme teams are crucial in setting a context and ethos within which students can become themselves and succeed. The academic as lone ranger in embedding technologies helps no-one, least of all the student. The student’s integration of the HE and subject environment into their self-concept as a learner who can achieve, demands that programme teams frame their learning activities and subject context around a cohesive digital environment. Too often this is missing at HE.

3.    Developing information literacy

The committee highlight that:

“providing for the development of web-awareness so that students operate as informed users of web-based services, able to avoid unintended consequences. For staff, the requirement is to maintain the currency of skills in the face of the development of web-based information sources”.

The higher-level speaking and writing skills that Bloom developed in his cognitive taxonomy are as relevant today as they were 50 years ago. Flexible pedagogic development, the impact of diagnostic assessment, peer-mentoring and enquiry-based learning are critical here. Equally important is engaging learners in the context and actuality of publishing data and argument for the wider world to utilise and judge. Issues like those raised by JISC Legal are critical in framing such a set of developments, but the reality of information literacy cannot be divorced from the reality of integrating and developing a digital identity. Critically this has to be linked to decision-making and action in the world. Problem-based learning may be a key.

4.    Change in HE

“The world [students] encounter in higher education has been constructed on a wholly different set of norms. Characterised broadly, it is hierarchical, substantially introvert, guarded, careful, precise and measured. The two worlds are currently co-existing, with present-day students effectively occupying a position on the cusp of change. They aren’t demanding different approaches; rather they are making such adaptations as are necessary for the time it takes to gain their qualifications. Effectively, they are managing a disjuncture, and the situation is feeding the natural inertia of any established system. It is, however, unlikely to be sustainable in the long term. The next generation is unlikely to be so accommodating and some rapprochement will be necessary if higher education is to continue to provide a learning experience that is recognised as stimulating, challenging and relevant.”

The last sentence bears rethinking. It should drive all we do in the coming months. At DMU it will certainly shape our re-definition of our e-learning [technology-enhanced learning] strategy and develop a plan its implementation, with our students, and our e-Learning Co-ordinators and Champions. It is critical that we evaluate our professional development approaches and the technologies we support.


Our post-digital priorities: overcoming the neglect of the tutor


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 1 July 2009

A number of national research reports and position statements have been published recently, which impact technology-enhanced practice across the sector. These include:

  1. JISC, Thriving in the 21st century: Learning Literacies for the Digital Age, http://bit.ly/u1Wrb
  2. DEMOS, The Edgeless University http://bit.ly/10pd2r
  3. Department for Business, Innovation and Skills [DBIS], Universities set to go online for millions, http://bit.ly/2lr0S
  4. Report of an independent Committee of Inquiry into the impact on higher education of students’ widespread use of Web 2.0 technologies [CoI], http://bit.ly/J1JMf .
  5. Revised HEFCE strategy: Enhancing learning and teaching through the use of technology, http://bit.ly/JikvC
  6. DCFS and DBIS, Digital Britain: Final Report, http://bit.ly/wdRgb

From the Revised HEFCE strategy, DMU is engaging with how technology-enhanced learning [TEL] can reinforce and extend its distinctive brand, in particular focused on the impact of the learner of the future, personalised learning and business flexibility, on both the business case and service provision. The development of a blueprint for TEL, and the concomitant investment and professional development implications, is central.

In engaging with these issues it is critical that HE is able to make decisions based upon the impact of developments in other areas of statutory and non-statutory education. The reports noted above highlight that HE doesn’t exist in a social or educational vacuum. Whilst current work on evaluating learner experiences helps shape and enhance current practices, future-proofing and planning demands engagement by the sector with progressive pedagogies being embedded in primary education. In particular the Rose Review of the Primary Curriculum and the Early Years’ Foundation Strategy enable HE practitioners to develop a manifesto for the future.

  1. Sir Jim Rose, Independent Review of the Primary Curriculum, http://bit.ly/2eBjX
  2. Becta’s contribution to the Rose Review, http://bit.ly/FOHEp
  3. DfES, Early Years’ Foundation Strategy, http://bit.ly/a0tkK

Pedagogically, Rose and the EYFS frame enabling environments within which structured play, risk-taking and decision-making can take place. There is a developmental focus on the learner taking personalised ownership of the learning pathways s/he wants to follow, framed by a mentoring approach by more experienced others. The addition of ICT as a core competency or “literacy” alongside numeracy and traditional literacy, elevates technological autonomy and agency [what tool to use, when, how and why]. The emphasis on the professional development of teaching teams also shapes or scopes a move towards technological transparency, or engagement in what might be termed a post-digital world.

The ramifications for HE of both a societal and educational move towards high-skilled digital and post-digital practitioners demand attention. In particular, there is a very real danger that we fetishise the learner voice at the expense of the needs of our teaching teams, and that an educational divide between staff and student capabilities, flexibility, autonomy and post-digital agency becomes unmanageable for institutions. In terms of fetishising the student voice, I mean, broadly the extravagant trust, fixation or reverence that is at times shown to it as a concept, without demonstrating the concomitant impact on other stakeholders. The wordle cloud for all the releavnt HE-related text from sources 1 – 6 above is shown at: post-digital HE. The focus on the learner and technology is stark. As is the potentially disastrous, limited focus on staff and staff teams. Whilst the reports all focus on the need for professional development, there is little concrete that is actually presented. At DMU this is now a core focal point, with a key frame-of-reference made by the Committee of Inquiry.

The world [students] encounter in higher education has been constructed on a wholly different set of norms. Characterised broadly, it is hierarchical, substantially introvert, guarded, careful, precise and measured. The two worlds are currently co-existing, with present-day students effectively occupying a position on the cusp of change. They aren’t demanding different approaches; rather they are making such adaptations as are necessary for the time it takes to gain their qualifications. Effectively, they are managing a disjuncture, and the situation is feeding the natural inertia of any established system. It is, however, unlikely to be sustainable in the long term. The next generation is unlikely to be so accommodating and some rapprochement will be necessary if higher education is to continue to provide a learning experience that is recognised as stimulating, challenging and relevant.

The themes arising from an analysis of the reports [1 – 6] are noted below, with key developmental areas. These will form the spine of our approach to technology-enhanced learning for a post-digital world at DMU.

  1. Enhancing our learners’ [post-]digital literacy through our services and curricula [focus on services, curriculum, pedagogic roles, literacies]
  2. Enabling learning environments that frame personalisation of experiences [focus on services]
  3. Developing services that enable students to manage transitions, progression and attendance [focus on autonomy, pedagogic roles, services and progression]
  4. Reappraisal and extension of professional development [focus on pedagogic pedagogic roles, reward and recognition, literacies]
  5. Developing flexible approaches to the curriculum [focus on informal learning, affiliations, business, personalisation, DL]
  6. Extending a distinctive institutional culture and brand [focus on the business case, services, affiliations and open access]

Social media mores and cultures, and the role of higher education


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 27 August 2009

Two “events” have crossed my radar in the last week that have made me think about educators’ responsibilities for enabling a good-enough socialisation of students as they enter higher education. This is critical given the importance of HE for developing independent, associational and deliberative decision-making and actions by students, and also given the proximity of the start-of-term.

1. @Aggerscricket vs Will Buckley

This summer’s coverage of The Ashes [bear with me – I’ll get to the point] saw a growth in the use of Twitter, either by punters tweeting using the #ashes hashtag or by following commentators like Jonathan Agnew [@Aggerscricket] or David Lloyd [@bumblecricket] or cricketers like Graeme Swann [@swannyg66]. This enabled cricket lovers to keep in-touch with both information, in terms of what was going on at each test match, and expert opinion, alongside framing communication around specific issues.

One outcome was an emerging conversation between songstress Lily Allen and Agnew that ended with a discussion on Test Match Special on Radio 4/5Live Sports Extra during lunch on the Saturday of the final, Oval Test match. At least it would have ended there, had Will Buckley not written a piece in The Observer that stated that Agnew’s relationship with Allen had appeared “pervy”. Agnew subsequently used Twitter to “out” Buckley and to get the apology he wanted, levered through the power of the crowd, which commented on Buckley’s piece [usefully using the fact that “Comment is Free” in The Guardian and The Observer] and used email to pressure The Observer Sports Editor. Agnew declared: “What an eye-opener this has been for all… to the power of new media. It is here and will change the way news is responded to, in particular. This showed what twitter can do.”

The message: firstly, don’t print spiteful things, think about whether what you have to say is kind, true and necessary; secondly, social media is a powerful tool for engaging users – why and how it is used is morphing, and this has implications for socialisation, deliberation and our cultures.

2. Inappropriate use of Facebook and Twitter

A *news* item came across my desk that focused my thinking about privacy issues in social media. It concerned a new sexual relationship between two *friends* on Facebook. Details ended up on each other’s Facebook walls, which was then screen-captured by a mutual *friend* and went viral via Twitter. One of the couple felt ashamed that these statements were public within a localised friendship group, let alone the mortification that would follow when it went worldwide. This person did not understand how the wall worked or how privacy settings in Facebook work.

The item arrived on my Twitter feed, with one of those who re-tweeted it stating to me that “I thought it was funny; and I saw that it had just gone up on Digg ”, the implication being that others were forwarding it anyway so he might as well do so. What a mean, thoughtless and salacious response this was. My discomfort in this approach was matched by a fellow Twitterer who noted “everyone else was doing it? Seriously? You think that’s an excuse? Cliff. Jump. Would. You?”

The message: firstly, do you really have to print or forward spiteful things? Think about whether what you have to say is kind, true and necessary; secondly, how individuals engage with rules and settings, and cultural norms within social media matter. Whether we like it or not some users need and deserve our help and common humanity.

These two issues have implications for our approach to socialisation in HE. New students, many of them unsure of their place in the world, are coming into a very different, independent-yet-networked learning space, from those which they are used to. Part of the role of HE should be to engage these users in a discussion around the ways in which social media can be used and about how they can ensure their own safety. In part, this connects into the broader debate about the death of the VLE and the rise of the PLE. My own take on this is that whilst a radical manifesto that supports personalisation is needed for developing pedagogies for HE that are fit-for-purpose, we need to help our learners make good-enough decisions about tools, rules, signal-processing and approaches. This may involve structuring and closing down some learning in contexts within which they can free-range, but it also involves negotiating with them shared rules of engagement.

Defined environments for learning, built around or including a VLE or PLE, are unique to each learner based on their learning aims. These environments are fused from personal associations that are both formal and informal, and that use social media to process rule-based signals into action. Illich rightly argued that education was owned by an individual when s/he became a self-aware actor, and he also argued that the questions individuals are empowered to ask coupled to the socio-technical tools available to them, supports her/his personal emancipation. Social media, in whatever form, afford tools for encouraging individuals to associate with each other in contexts that support doing, questioning and re-conceptualising. However, this is risky because we have to make decisions about how we and our data are used and represented on-line.

HE ought to be a space in which norms, rules and cultures can be discussed safely, in order that co-operation and emancipation are enabled. This is important because HE has a duty to help make the world a better place.


Forget the technology and focus on the human


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 2 September 2009

I recently commented on the work of the 52 Group on post-digital futures. They argued that “We are moving towards a postdigital age where the tools driven by the microprocessor are common to the extent to which they will no longer be noticed”. This aligns with the view of Russell Davies that: “There are a lot of people around now who have thoroughly integrated ‘digitalness’ into their lives. To the extent that it makes as much sense to define them as digital as it does to define them as air-breathing. ie it’s true but not useful or interesting.” As educators, learning technologists, managers, our hang-ups about tools and technologies, trends and horizons, risk deflecting us from meaningful conversations about learning and teaching, and personal/social empowerment.

In fact, conversations about people, communities, associations and outcomes ought to be central to our discussions around the role of higher education. Technology should only ever be secondary. It is unfortunate that, according to the 52 Group, “the speed of the change [to a digital, Web 2.0 world] has left us with the mistaken belief that social change was somehow ‘created’ by the digital rather than simply played out on a the canvas of the digital.” This is important because digital and analogue tools offer possibilities to focus conversations around issues like: agency; emancipation; involvement; enterprise; and democracy. The key is integration into user-defined environments with a focus on the human.

We need to open up a space for deliberation around a vision for HE, in terms of what our institutions stand for and what our curricula look like. From there we can begin conversations about the processes, procedures, technologies, organisation and information that we need to support that vision. Educational technologists and practitioners need to shift the discussion away from tools towards the types of learning/pedagogic spaces that are good-enough to help staff and students make appropriate decisions and take action.

An element of this deliberation is the extent to which students and their/our perceptions of technologies should be driving the agenda. It can be argued that students and technologies are too fleeting and transient in their lifecycle/existence within HE to drive decision-making about sustainability agendas or effective pedagogic practice. They are important indicators of possibility within a system [HEI], but they offer much short-term variation and uncertainty within that system [HEI]. Decisions should be made about technologies, services etc., in order to manage uncertainty as it trends, but not to second-guess its management based on immediate whim.

Balance in the system demands that we align meaningful data from both students and technological horizon-scanning, with the strategic role of HEIs, and their visions, cultures, subjects and staff. The latter are more grounded and secure in anchoring institutional planning for sustainability and capability-building than either the latest technology trend or the technological expectations of current students. HEIs need conversations with students about practices, in order to empower those students to negotiate decisions about technologies as one strand of a conversation with staff about their curriculum. We risk skewing the debate over the purpose and future of HE if we base strategy and implementation either on the primary authority of the student as service user/client [validated by the NSS], or on reductionist/populist technological solutions, neither of which can anchor deliberation.

One risk is that a prevalent or dominant view of technology, in terms of what is and isn’t *enabled*, is validated above wider academic ownership and innovation. We also risk focusing on the shiny and the new, or what’s just over the horizon, rather than thinking about how trends can be embedded within an enabling environment, in order to offer flexibility going forward. Rather than a contested PLE-VLE debate, which fetishises tools and services, we desperately need to re-focus our thinking on developing both curricula and a vision for HE with staff and students, that are fit-for-purpose beyond 2010. As a result we may ditch the digital to debate the implications of a post-digital view.


Technology-enhanced learning: the emergence of ideology?


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 9 September 2009

ALT-C 2009 is billed as “in dreams begins responsibility”. The first day got me thinking about responsibility linked to rights and roles within a shared value system. This was amplified by the main messages that I took from Michael Wesch‘s keynote. Wesch highlighted the work of Charles Taylor on The Ethics of Authenticity and the emergence:

  1. of self-centred modes of self-fulfillment; and
  2. of the apparent negation of all horizons of significance.

Wesch went on to note that these two outcomes of late modernity led to disengagement and fragmentation amongst the citizenry, with individuals flocking together over specific issues rather than aggregating in persistent blocks.

This view of flocking for a purpose maps onto public policy research into associational democracy, where deliberation over issues occurs within and across associations of apparently fragmented people or groups,  and where affiliation may become a powerful connector. The work of Bauman on liquid modernity and Barnett on the need to rethink the relationship between the institution and the individual informs this complexity of this debate, as fragmentation and disengagement loom.

This view of 21st century HE is messy and complex. It aligns with both the DEMOS report on The Edgeless University, which suggests that Universities have to rethink their roles, values, and purposes, including their affiliations, and the recent SOMUL working papers, which develop the concept of parallel universities existing within the same physical and virtual space. To reiterate, the headlines here are: that managing and living within 21st century HE is messy and complex; that our working roles are messy and complex; and, that our responsibilities are messy and complex.

Wesch went on to talk about his teaching and learning strategy trying to overcome a “participation gap” between his students and his curriculum, and therefore him. The value I take from this is the power of relationships that enable learners to define themselves. New media are important because they offer the opportunity to build new relationships and ways of working, and thereby, in Barnett’s terms, to become themselves as an agent in the world. This is crucial because it aligns with the work of Winnicott on the value to the individual of an enabling environment where s/he can be held whilst making sense of the world. This act of holding is based on trust and engagement within a secure space, that is engaging and not fragmented. Both the environment and the relationships have to be good-enough to enable the individual to make sense of themselves and what they feel and want to achieve.

This is important beyond ALTC 2009 because the responsibility is for individuals at all levels within an institution, or a society, or an association, to be good-enough in their relationships to enable others to decide and act, within a set, or sets, of shared values. This accepts a range of desires, hopes, confidences, expertise etc across an institution, with that institution able to hold the individual whilst s/he makes sense of her/his place in it.

The institution’s ability to hold its associates, affiliates, staff, students etc. is tricky. However, this demands that it configures its services, technologies, information, policies around a vision of what it stands for and what it intends to do in the world. All other conversations are secondary to this, even if every university is trying to do and stand for the same thing. We still need a set of ideas that we are responsible for and can take action around. In short we need an ideology for HE, in an age when we allegedly run the risks of disengagement and fragmentation that atomise our needs and experiences.

The impacts debates for learning technologists, or e-learning co-ordinators, or heads of technology-enhanced learning because these people have the responsibility to enfranchise those they support in-line with a meaningful vision. All else, from discussions of progressive pedagogies to the technologies that support them, from how to frame enabling contexts for learning to the information we need to make decisions and the policies that are in place to govern those decisions, is secondary. In fact the clear danger is that with no ideology we become reductionist in our view of technologies, and that we predetermine the tools we will prioritise and sell based on personal whim or fragmented context. The allied danger is that we are determinist about why this tool works and that one does not. This carries over into the discussion over VLE-PLE where concepts like marginalisation, participation, democracy emerge but are not deliberated. We then risk the twin dangers:

  1. that we declare the PLE to be democratic and inclusive without assessing whether it disempowers some people, and the VLE to be controlling without appraising how it enables. One risk is technological dogma; and
  2. that we negate the very flexibility to which we claim to aspire because we close down certain avenues.

In fact, it may be that technologies are both transient and transitional in their use within and beyond curricula, for individuals and groups, as they gain and lose utility. A tool or toolset is useful where it enables me to achieve something in a specific time and increase my self-awareness and move on. However, the lack of proper deliberation over values, ideas and ideologies damages our debates over responsibility.

Technologies then amplify other more critical issues around:

  1. ideology and what we stand for;and
  2. power and control.

Technology changes nothing without a reappraisal of the “why” of HE. The responsibility of learning technologists or educational developers or heads of technology-enhanced learning is to work with senior managers on their vision for their institution, and to align technologies to that vision. Otherwise all we do is chase the next new tool or toy or trend, whilst perpetuating the mythology that innovation is stifled by large institutions and their administrators and that we are somehow better placed if we are counter-cultural.

A central element of this is to engage with Wesch’s view of the flock, and the development of a new localism that aligns tools and approaches to the needs of local communities or associations of practice. These local groups might be module teams or programme cohorts, or networks of e-learning champions, or departmental staff or faculties. An institutional ideology that enables localism augments the view of parallel universities, and of the local needs that so often pervade devolved institutions. In turn this demands flexibility in the deployment of technologies and our engagement with staff or communities of practice. Managing this flexibility demands that those responsible for technology-enhanced learning ask why, rather than how, and begin a deliberation around the ideologies they are confronting or supporting or enabling.


I wanted to study under him: can this be post-technical?


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 11 September 2009

I had a great conversation with a friend this morning about the JISC Greening ICT programme. I was asking him how he got interested in this whole area of work – he works in our important Institute of Energy and Sustainable Development. In explaining his journey he noted that one tutor had inspired him through his dedication to deliberation, and his commitment and action. My friend made the wonderful statement that he “wanted to study for longer under him”.

The notion of studying *under* someone rocked my thinking because it highlights an environment that can be “covering” or “shielding” or “holding”, and that is safe and secure enough to enable a learner to become her/himself. This covering or holding will take different forms at different times. I argue elsewhere that:

Wesch went on to talk about his teaching and learning strategy trying to overcome a “participation gap” between his students and his curriculum, and therefore him. The value I take from this is the power of relationships that enable learners to define themselves. New media are important because they offer the opportunity to build new relationships and ways of working, and thereby, in Barnett’s terms, to become themselves as an agent in the world. This is crucial because it aligns with the work of Winnicott on the value to the individual of an enabling environment where s/he can be held whilst making sense of the world. This act of holding is based on trust and engagement within a secure space, that is engaging and not fragmented. Both the environment and the relationships have to be good-enough to enable the individual to make sense of themselves and what they feel and want to achieve.

I think this is important in light of some thinking around the term post-technical, and how and where we hold learners whilst they develop the emotional, technical and cognitive skills they need to become themselves. Ian Truelove delightfully argues that we need to define an approach that sets the right “tone for learning”, and this is amplified by Ed Summers in his inkdroid blog:

“We make a mistake, I believe, when we fixate on particular forms and technologies, taking them, in and of themselves, to be the carriers of what we want either to embrace or resist.”

This then connects into our current debate over the VLE-PLE. What types of environments do we need to provide in order to hold our learners. Can this be linked to spaces that are free-ranging? I tried to outline some thinking about this linked to participation in learning, but it is time revisit this, in light of the simple statement that “[I] wanted to study for longer under him”.


Presenting and representing the past: a model for History learning and teaching


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 8 October 2009

The level 1 History module, “Presenting and re-presenting the past” is viewed as a shared project between staff and students. The intention is that students and staff will engage as colleagues in engaging with its content, concepts and meanings, in order to understand more critically how History as a subject develops, and why and how it matters to different societies. The module is divided into 4 blocs, each dealing with a particular topic/issue.

  1. What is history and what do historians do.
  2. The relationship between the practice of academic history on the one hand, and public or popular history on the other.
  3. Issues relating to sources, research and the ways that historians handle and use “evidence” in their arguments.
  4. The recent attacks on history and historical knowledge, and how historians have attempted to defend their discipline.

Underpinning the module is a core theme, namely that: history and historical writing are contested.

The teaching team hold to the belief espoused by Gramsci that we all have the ability to flourish as intellectuals in everyday life, and that we all have the potential to become ourselves-as-academics. As a result, the team strive to provide an environment to support its aspiration that all students succeed. The team believes that all learners are studying at De Montfort University because they want to develop as individuals and want to enhance their critical thinking. Our ethos is to challenge students to make good, personal decisions about what to read, what to write, and what decisions and actions to take.

The place of the learner within this context is represented by this adapted version of the Ravensbourne Learner Integration model, with feedback from a variety of communities of practice being key.

Learner Integration Model in Fused Learning Environments

Learner Integration Model in Fused Learning Environments

See Hall, R. Towards a fusion of read/write web approaches. EJEL, 7 (1).

The technologies that support these aspirations are designed to extend the face-to-face contact that is available. We expect that students will attend or engage with all formal, timetabled activities, namely lectures, seminars and tutorials that are driven by socio-constructivism, activity and participation. However, we are clear that social and individual, independent learning activities are crucial in developing learning citizenship.

Blackboard provides a shared on-line space to access learning materials/tasks and discussions for each area of work on the module. Generally content will be presented in MS Office format so that it can be repurposed easily by learners. For some blocks of learning or key concepts we will also post podcasts or short videos. Instructions will be given on Blackboard about how to download or access these files. Blackboard also provides security that assessments can be backed-up and submitted in a secure space. Students are expected to submit all assessments: book and web reviews; and both essays; into our Plagiarism Detection System, Turnitin. This is accessed through a link in Blackboard.

Ning allows the students to build their own profiles and create their own identities in a safe space that is closed to the wider web, but is more engaging than Blackboard. The intention is that this will encourage shared discussion of concepts, readings, ideas and assessment. The forum tool is used to engage learners in weekly tasks like discussions of objectivity and morality in History. There is also a Twitter feed that picks up the #hist1002 hashtag, so that staff or students with Twitter accounts can post ideas or feedback. Finally Huddle workspaces are provided for the group presentations that are planned and delivered during the first semester.

Ning can be accessed from the module home page on Blackboard, and it enables all students and staff to post and read messages, or start conversations. In the first instance, specific tasks will relate to particular seminar discussions and will involve the Forum tool only. Over time the students will be introduced to Huddle and Twitter, as possibilities only, in-line with the technological model presented below. There is a tension between presenting a coherent structure and a set of tools that overwhelm. So the early use of Blackboard and Ning forums/profiles is to support the production of the first assessment, a 700 word book review.

External web resources are housed on diigo accessed via Blackboard. However, in order to reduce student (di)stress this is managed by the tutors in the first instance. As students prepare for their second assessment, a 700 word web review, they will be invited to use diigo, to create a shared set of resources for the community and to understand tagging, annotating and managing resources for a specific purpose. Diigo is also linked to from Blackboard, so that there is a common framework available.

Students have to submit two essays in the Spring, on the public perception of History and on History and controversy. They can work this up via Googledocs or MS Word. The final piece of assessment is a learning log on Blackboard, which is a means to reflect on progress as a learner and as an historian at critical times in the session (e.g. assessments). Maintaining the log is done via Blackboard (secure and individualised/private), and is continuous in nature. The quality of contributions is formally assessed. The intention is to gradually extend the learning environment in a controlled way, to enable students to manage their transition into HE and to identify and model historical practices in a set of safe spaces.

HIST1002 technological model

HIST1002 technological model