Tag Archives: peter bryant

Inauguration – Weeknote #99 – 22nd January 2021

99 Flake
Image by Steve Buissinne from Pixabay

I have been working on proposals this week, which is always a challenging activity for me, as I need to be concise and succinct, whilst my default when it comes to writing is to be extended and I make extensive use of redundant terms.

In researching some news and links for a presentation on digital poverty I discovered this blog post by Daniel Stanford from March on low bandwidth teaching, which resonated with some of my thinking.  I had the day before published a blog post on my experiences in using consumer technology for teaching and learning, which looked at low bandwidth and synchronous teaching.

In the post I reflected that the key issue is rethinking the curriculum and the pedagogy. We have designed courses for in-person face to face teaching. Most of the time this has been converted (or translated) into a remote delivery format. It has not been converted to reflect the opportunities that online pedagogy can bring to the table. Even if it has then often the mobile pedagogy isn’t even thought about. Teaching and learning remotely is one thing, online teaching and learning is another, and mobile teaching and learning is different again. The solution appears to be a combination of redesigning the curriculum, to be a combination of low bandwidth, asynchronous type activities, alongside traditional live streaming, with option to deliver content to learners to access on their devices at a time and place to suit them.

Understanding where your learners are and how they will access teaching and on what device and connection is critical when it comes to successful curriculum design.

Daniel illustrated this idea of Bandwidth versus Immediacy through the following graphic.

Wonkhe on a similar note published this article on the same kind of subject.

Asynchronous learning gives students the chance to treat modules like box sets, bingeing or skipping as they see fit. Tom Lowe wonders what this might mean for learning.

I read this by Peter Bryant, which was published last week, on the snapback. He reflects on the changes that the pandemic has brought into higher education, but wonder what would happen when we can go back to in-person face to face teaching?

Whilst all these changes were borne out of the pandemic, would I want to go back to large didactic lectures, social isolation, mass exams and tutorials driven by repetition and memorisation? Firstly, that was never the exclusive way we taught, so many colleagues were doing amazing, innovative social pedagogies before and during the pandemic. But across the sector I reckon face to face lecture/tutorial/exam was a pretty dominant pathway for learning pre-pandemic. So, what happens when we can do those things again, face to face? What happens when we don’t have to worry about Zoom bombing, invasive proctoring solutions and the impersonality of online learning? Will we learn from this mess and value the ‘human interaction’ that a two-hour lecture using PowerPoint or a three-hour handwritten exam affords us?

Jisc offices in Bristol, December 2019
Jisc offices in Bristol, December 2019

With new safety protocols prompting design changes, traditional office spaces may be a thing of the past and this was explored in this article in The Guardian.

The pandemic has shown us that work can go on without a workplace. If it can be done online, it can be done from virtually anywhere with an internet connection. At the same time, however, the move to remote work has revealed the value of the workplace, as many employees hanker to return to the office. In light of these two opposing trends, what might the office of the future actually look like?

Jisc offices in Bristol, December 2019
Jisc offices in Bristol, December 2019

I had my mid-year review this week, and as with other reviews, these weeknotes have been useful in referencing some of my work. Seemed to go okay, which is nice. We reviewed my objectives, deleted a couple and added some more.

I had to write some notes for the Data Matters Conference, these I edited and published as an article on my blog.

Wednesday saw the inauguration of a new US President and hopefully a more positive future.

Private Eye Cover

In 2018, the government launched a review of post-18 education and funding, with the aim of ensuring that post-18 education gives everyone a genuine choice between high quality technical and academic routes, that students and taxpayers are getting value for money, and that employers can access the skilled workforce they need. This week the Government published a paper, that sets out an interim conclusion of the review, which responds to some of the key recommendations of the report of the independent panel led by Dr Philip Augar.

Coventry in January 2018

On Thursday I spent most of the day judging the University of Coventry Post-Graduate Researcher of the Year award. This did mean spending most of the day on Zoom. Quite exhausting, but quite a rewarding process. There were eight finalists, and each had to prepare a written statement, deliver a presentation and be interviewed. Challenging for this at the best of times, but more so with everything happening on Zoom. Hats off to Jennifer and Heather for some excellent organisation of the event, which made my contributions much easier to do.

discarded mask
Image by Roksana Helscher from Pixabay

It’s sobering to think that this week saw the highest daily death rate recorded from Covid. In the last seven days, 8565 people have died within 28 days of positive Covid test. On Wednesday we saw 1820 deaths. Putting that into perspective, that is more than 50% of the total deaths in The Troubles in Northern Ireland over thirty years! It is more deaths than the number of people who died on the Titanic in 1912. These are troubling times and it looks like it will be some time before we can think that the pandemic is over.

My top tweet this week was this one.

I am a unicorn!

It’s not your name that matters, it’s what do that counts.

Lego Unicorn
Lego Unicorn – Image by Joakim Roubert from Pixabay

One of the facets of membership of ALT is the busy, informative and interesting mailing list that you can participate in. As well as collaboration, asking for advice and information, there are also on the odd occasion entertaining discussions on topics related to learning technology.

Recently, Peter Bryant from USYD,  posted the following:

We are building a new team of educational and technology expertise at USYD. USYD are looking to build the kind of expertise that goes above and beyond system administration, learning object making and technology support (noble pursuits all mind). We are looking for a team of learning technologist type people who can work with designers to identify and deliver solutions for wicked and grand pedagogical challenges, work with academics on training and development, see and support innovation and pushing the technological envelope and to work collectively to evaluate the impact and success/failure of these interventions. 

So, my question for the list, what kind of job titles would you call such a unicorn?

There then followed a deluge of responses about what these unicorns should be called. As you might expect the predominate response from a list of members of Association for Learning Technology who in the main are learning technologists was that these unicorns should be called learning technologists.

Reading the discussion, I was reminded of something I wrote in 2017 about the name of my eleaningstuff blog.

It’s not what you say you do, it’s the way that you do it!

I was thinking the other day that I don’t have enough readers of the blog and insufficient engagement So the solution has to be that the name of the blog isn’t right. First idea would be change the name from “elearning stuff” to “blended learning stuff”. Then again maybe I could choose “e-pedagogy stuff” or what a about “threaded learning stuff”. How about “hybrid pedagogy stuff”?

Do you think that changing the name will significantly increase readership and engagement on the blog?

Of course the response to this question is a resounding no!

As I discussed in that blog post, I think that the job titles are a similar challenge to the name we call e-learning or blended learning or TEL, or digital learning or whatever the flavour of the month is.

The job title is (mostly) irrelevant (except maybe to identify to those looking for a role what the role may be about). Often we look at job titles as the people behind those job titles are finding it challenging to engage with academics to help them to make the best and most effective use of technology to enhance learning and teaching. We think that by changing the job title we will be more effective in engaging with academics. Of course how many times do you engage with someone by pushing your job title at them?

The real challenge has been working with academics and their mindset (and culture) and job titles will always be wrong in some people’s view, regardless of what that job title is, was or will be. This was identified and echoed by people on the list.

Academics in the main don’t see the value in these roles, so there’s a culture issue here too.

…one day we were told our TEL team was moving to be part of Teaching & Learning Enhancement (TLE). This move changed the mindset of how most academics viewed the TEL team…

It should be helpful for the staff you interact with, so the language should reflect the language of the institution.

If you are having challenges in engaging staff in the use of digital and learning technologies and thinking that changing the “name” for the people who do this, we use is the solution, i would suggest you may actually want to spend the time and effort thinking about your approaches and the methodology you are using.

Of course the real reason people choose to change the language, is that it is much easier to do that, then actually deal with people!

Addendum

Having written a draft of this blog post, I shared it with Peter and he divulged that the reason for asking the question was about attracting the right kind of recruit. Which is a reason, as I mentioned above, The job title is (mostly) irrelevant (except maybe to identify to those looking for a role what the role may be about).