Janine’s blog

Following on from visitor this week. London Grid for Learning - echoes a lot of the learning communities within learning communities concepts. Interesting to see their newly designed homepage compared to the previous version. The new one is very simple - resources, staffrooms and communities, with an overarching personal menu bar across the top.

http://www.lgfl.net/lgfl/

I came across this article by Michael Coghlan from a couple of years ago - it appealed to me as an interesting short read that highlights some very pertinent points about facilitation and using LMS environments for constructivist learning.

http://users.chariot.net.au/~michaelc/nz/ICCE_paper.htm

I attended an Education.au update seminar this week in Melbourne. The theme was “The Changing Landscape of Communication”. I was particularly taken with Illana Snyder’s presentation about smart strategies for reading the research, recognizing the rhetoric and then extracting what is important for teaching and learning, what changes are warranted?

Illana drew on themes from a William Gibson  book called “Pattern Recognition”, apparently now in production as a Peter Weir film.

She went on to articulate  a number of patterns and to suggest better research questions than the ones that assume cause and effect.

“What patterns are there in the research? If you can recognize the patterns you can avoid being seduced by them. Think not so much of new worlds but old worlds with new meanings.

1. The technology revolution – appears to be a mandatory reference. The danger of repetition is that predictability can remove meaning

2. The techno-enthusiasts/ techno-demoniser false dichotomy. Such division is uncritical. The transformation of education (by technology) is not automatic but the landscape has definitely changed

3. Technological determinism – a perception of technology as autonomous agent of change is not new. Such claims tend to assume cause/effect relationships ignoring contexts, human agency and control

4. Policy agendas – no longer rely on improving or enhancing but refer to educational and economic transformation. Because of the economic link, issues of equity of access of even more important.

5. Commercial imperatives – inevitable USA dominance – rhetoric of empowerment (through technology) leading to enhanced learning leading to improved futures leading to economic productivity – need to recognize the patterns of incursion of commercial interests into the educational sphere

6. Different accounts of e-learning: have we gone too far towards the social end and too far away from the psycho-liguistic eg overuse of “new”  whereas in reality, old and new interact in complex ways. E-learning suggests a new mode whereas multimodal and hybrids are closer to the reality of what really makes a difference. ICTs ARE being used to a greater or lesser extent. How to use them well in schools? Finding creative ways to do more with less.

7. Shape of questions researchers ask (and are currently attracting research funds)
- Does the use of computers improve ………eg The impact of ICT on literacy education (assumes cause/effect). Such questions lead inevitably to randomized trials before further investment

More effective questions might be:
How can educators best use new media to achieve teaching and learning objectives that are socially and culturally empowering?

If the use of new media is changing the communication landscape, how can educators design learning spaces that accommodate and maximize what the technologies might offer?

8. Interrogating the narratives about the use of ICT in education - Simplistic chronological cause/effect or creationist style claims are problematic. Claims need to be critically examined in the local context.

We need to tell stories of ICT that are more nuanced and not just good and bad – taking account of the perspectives of educators, response of learners, learning journeys. We need to use ICT for our own purposes rather than be used by it. There is no single coherent narrative but some are better informed than others.”

All of the speakers’ presentations will be made available via the web in due course.

I found out about Edublogs just this week whilst attending an online launch of the 7th Edition of The Knowledge Tree. I checked it out, liked what I saw and have decided to blog from here now but intend to cross reference to my previous blog as needed.