Henry Cook, Steven Booten and I gave the following presentation at the THETA conference in Brisbane in April 2023. Below you will find Summary – a few paragraphs summarising the presentation. Slides – copies of the slides used. Software – some of the software produced/used as part of the work. References – used in the summary and the slides. Abstract […]
Gatherers, Weavers and Augmenters: Three principles for dynamic and sustainable delivery of quality learning and teaching
Exploring knowledge reuse in design for digital learning: tweaks, H5P, constructive templates and CASA
The following has been accepted for presentation at ASCILITE’2019. It’s based on work described in earlier blog posts. Click on the images below to see full size. Abstract Higher education is being challenged to improve the quality of learning and teaching while at the same time dealing with challenges such as reduced funding and increasing complexity. Design for learning has […]
Leadership as defining what's successful
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 […]
Oh Academia
It’s been one of those weeks in academia. Earlier in the week the “I quit academia” meme went through my Twitter stream. Perhaps the closest this meme came to me was @marksmithers “On leaving academia” post. That was about the day when I had to pull the pin on a grant application. Great idea, something we could do and would […]
IRAC – Four questions for learning analytics interventions
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: […]
Schools and computers: Tales of a digital romance
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 […]
One example of industrial e-learning as "on the web" not "of the web"
The following arises from some recent experiences with the idea of “minimum course sites” and this observation from @cogdog in this blog post I have no idea if this is off base, but frankly it is a major (to me) difference of doing things ON the web (e.g. putting stuff inside LMSes) and doing things OF the web. It’s also […]
Lessons for the meta-level of networked learning?
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 […]
Schemata and the source of dissonance?
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 […]
Some stories from teaching awards
This particular post tells some personal stories about teaching awards within Australian higher education. It’s inspired by a tweet or two from @jonpowles Some personal success For my sins, I was the “recipient of the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Quality Teaching for the Year 2000”. The citation includes in recoginition of demonstrated outstanding practices in teaching and learning at…., and in […]
Situated shared practice, curriculum design and academic development
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 […]
The rider, elephant, and shaping the path
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 […]
Nobody likes a do-gooder – another reason for e-learning not mainstreaming?
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) The chasm Back in 1994, Geoghegan draw on Moore’s Crossing the Chasm to explain why instructional technology wasn’t […]
University e-learning systems: the need for new product and process models and some examples
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 […]
How people learn and implications for academic development
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 […]
The McNamara Fallacy and pass rates, academic analytics, and engagement
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 […]
