Henry Cook, Steven Booten and I gave the following presentation at the THETA conference in Brisbane in April 2023....more...
The following has been accepted for presentation at ASCILITE'2019. It’s based on work described in earlier blog posts....more...
After spending a few days visiting friends and family in Central Queensland - not to mention enjoying the beach - a long 7+ hour drive home provided an opportunity for some thinking. I've long had significant qualms about the notion of leadership, especially as it is increasingly being understood and defined by the current corporatisation of universities and schools. The rhetoric is increasingly strong amongst schools with the current fashion for assuming that Principals can be the saviour of schools that have broken free from the evils of bureaucracy. I even work within an institution where a leadership research group is quite active amongst the education faculty....more...
The following is an early description of work arising out of The Indicators Project an ongoing attempt to think about learning analytics. With IRAC (Information, Representation, Affordances and Change) Colin Beer, Damien Clark and I are trying to develop a set of questions that can guide the use of learning analytics to improve learning and teaching. The following briefly describes:...more...
It's the last week of semester, EDC3100 ICTs and Pedagogy is drawing to a close and I'm putting together the last bit of activities/resources for the students in the course. Most are focused on the last assignment and in particular a final essay that asks them to evaluate their use of ICTs while on their three week Professional Experience where they were in schools and other locations teaching. Perhaps the most challenging activity I'd like them to engage in is questioning their assumptions around learning, teaching and the application of ICTs. A particularly challenging activity given that much of what passes for the use of ICTs - including much of my own work - in formal education hasn't been very effective at questioning assumptions....more...
The following arises from some recent experiences with the idea of "minimum course sites" and this observation from @cogdog in this blog post...more...
This semester I'm teaching EDU8117, Networked and Global Learning, one of the Masters level courses here at USQ. It's been an interesting experience because I'm essentially supporting the design - a very detailed "constructive alignment" design - prepared by someone else. The following is a belated start of my plan to engage in the course at some level like a student. The requirement was to use one of a few provided quotes attempting to define either networked learning or global learning and link it to personal experience. A first step in developing a research article in the topic....more...
The following is intended to be an illustration of one of the potential origins of the gap between learning technologists and educators. It picks up on the idea of schemata from this week's study in one course and connects to my point about the dissonance between how educational technology is implemented in universities and what we know about how people learn....more...
This particular post tells some personal stories about teaching awards within Australian higher education. It's inspired by a tweet or two from @jonpowles...more...
Am currently reading Faegri et al (2010) as part of developing the justificatory knowledge for the final ISDT for e-learning that is meant to be the contribution of the thesis. The principle from the ISDT that this paper connects with is the idea of a "Multi-skilled, integrated development and support team" (the name is a work in progress). The following is simply a placeholder for a quote from the paper and a brief connection with the ISDT and what I think it means for curriculum design and academic development....more...
Listened to this interview of Chip Heath, a Stanford Professor in Organizational Behaviour about his co-authored book Switch: How to change things when change is hard. My particular interest in this arises from figuring out how to improve learning and teaching in universities. From the interview and the podcast this seems to be another one in a line of "popular science" books aimed at making clear what science/research knows about the topic....more...
Came across the article, "Nobody likes a do-gooder: Study confirms selfless behaviour is alienating" from the Daily Mail via Morgaine's amplify. I'm wondering if there's a connection between this and the chasm in the adoption of instructional technology identified by Geoghegan (1994)...more...
I'm in the midst of the horrible task of trying to abstract what I think I know about implementing e-learning information systems within universities into the formal "language" required of an information systems design theory and a PhD thesis. This post is a welcome break from that, but is still connected in that it builds on what is perhaps fundamentally different between what most universities are currently doing, and what I think is a more effective approach. In particular, it highlights some more recent developments which are arguably a step towards what I'm thinking....more...
While I'm traveling this week I am reading How people learn. This is a fairly well known book that arose out of a US National Academy of Science project to look at recent insights from research about how people learn and then generate insights for teaching. I'll be reading it through the lens of my thesis and some broader thinking about "academic development" (one of the terms applied to trying to help improve the teaching and learning of university)....more...
In some reading for the thesis today I came across the concept of McNamara's fallacy. I hadn't heard this before. This is somewhat surprising as it points out another common problem with some of the more simplistic approaches to improving learning and teaching that are going around at the moment. It's also likely to be a problem with any simplistic implementation of academic analytics....more...
Over on the Remote Learner blog, Jason Cole has posted some information about a keynote by Dr Richard Clark at one of the US MoodleMoots. I want to focus on one key quote from that talk and its implications for Australian higher education and current trends to "improve" learning and teaching and adopt open source LMS (like Moodle)....more...
Dave Cormier has presented 8 hypotheses summarising what he's learned about open learning. I've been meaning to post about it for a day or so, there is some really good stuff here. Some really important insights that formal education institutions need to think about, especially those wishing to ride the online learning revolution into the greener fields of growing student markets....more...