The midden » teaching

Top 10 worst teaching mistakes

Will Stewart — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 11:45:54 +0000

One of the characteristics of HE teaching is that lecturers tend to teach in the way they were taught when they were undergraduates. So if they were taught by inspirational teachers who saw the value of teaching, they are more likely to focus on inspiring their own students. If they were taught by lecturers who were teaching under duress and saw it as a distraction from their research, they are more likely to inflict the same on their own students. Moving this latter group into the former is a major challenge for those involved in teaching the teachers.

Richard Felder’s web site is aimed at providing help to HE lecturers who find themselves in a teaching role, but without any training. Although aimed specifically at Science and Engineering lecturers, many of the resources are applicable to a wider audience.

In his “Random Thoughts,” column on educational methods and issues for the quarterly journal Chemical Engineering Education he writes on a whole range of issues facing today’s HE lectures and provides valuable guidance on how to deal with them.

His two papers on the Top 10 worst teaching mistakes is a good starting point. This is a useful list as it not only identifies bad practice in HE teaching but also puts forward some helpful suggestions for avoiding these.

Handbook of Emerging Technologies for Learning

Will Stewart — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 15:15:14 +0000

Billed as “a resource for educators planning to incorporate technologies in their teaching and learning activities”, this handbook written by George Siemens and Peter Tittenberger at the University of Manitoba, is a lot more than this. It starts from the premise that Higher Education, whether individual institutions know it or not, is in the midst of fundamental and large-scale change that will see the transformation of teaching and learning on a scale that we haven’t experienced since the Industrial Revolution.

At the heart of this change is the fragmentation of information. No longer does information only exist in a pre-packaged format, such as books, CDs, newspapers or even as a course. Information is now available in a whole range of formats, and this information can be “personalised” by editing, adding, re-designing so the user ends up with information in a format that makes sense to him.This creation of “personal frameworks of coherence” by users is one of the most important drivers for transformative change within the HE sector. No longer is the creation, delivery, validation and dissemination of information under the control of the lecturer, expert or university. The growth of user-generated content, Google, Wikipedia, Open Educational Resources, Web 2.0 technologies, social software and mobile technologies means that the individual is now in control.

Information Fragmentation and Coherence

The Handbook gives a good overview of the pressures bringing about change and how these impact on the learning process. The discussion on the role of technology in teaching and learning goes a long way to summarising where we are at at the moment and provides some useful guidelines on its effective use. The use of technology by lecturers and departments can help bridge the gap between the traditional and the, as yet undefined, role of education in the future.

The final paragraph really brings home what we in HE are all trying to grapple with:

“Through a process of active experimentation, the academy’s role in society will emerge as a prominent sensemaking and knowledge expansion institution, reflecting of the needs of learners and society while maintaining its role as a transformative agent in pursuit of humanity’s highest ideals.”

4 ways to improve Powerpoint presentations

Will Stewart — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 09:08:43 +0000

This is a useful article by Olivia Mitchell, posted on the Slideshare blog, describing 4 multimedia learning principles that can be applied to improve the learning value of presentations. She distinguishes between graphic design and instructional design and explains why the latter is the most important if you want to help your audience to learn.

Horizon Report 2009

Will Stewart — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 16:22:50 +0000

The latest Horizon Report, that looks at the likely impact of emerging technologies on teaching, learning and research, features six examples of tools, applications and devices that will change the way we operate. Two of these technologies, i.e. mobile devices and cloud computing, are already with us and used extensively. With the advent of the 3-G iphone and Google’s Android phone the potential for new and innovative forms of learning, assessment and collaboration is huge. Anyone who uses Google Docs, Flickr, YouTube and Mobile Me is already linked into a “cloud”. Educational institutions, certainly in HE, probably don’t yet realise the extent to which their students and, indeed, their workforce are making using of cloud computing.

The other four technologies covered in this report are:

geolocation technology
the personal web
semantic aware applications
smart objects (see recent post on QR codes)

The report describes the relevance of each of these technologies to teaching and learning, as well as providing some useful links to examples of educational applications.

Promoting transformative innovation in schools – a model for HE?

Will Stewart — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 11:35:57 +0000

While this handbook from futurelab is aimed at promoting discussion around the nature and purpose of innovation in schools, much of the evidence, ideas and recommendations it presents are equally valid for HE.

Transformative innovation is radical and challenging. It is the kind of innovation that challenges our assumptions about how we do things and causes us to question our accepted notions about education. Although radical and challenging, transformative innovation is informed by knowledge and awareness of the issues facing education, and aims to bring about improvements to the education system.

One of the main drivers for transformative innovation is the need for our education system to respond to the social and technological changes that are happening around us. Creating a culture of transformative innovation within the institution is essential, where the innovations are aligned with cultural values and beliefs of the organisation, and are not seen as being externally imposed.

This model differs from the commonly used “best practice” model which generally promotes a set of ideas originating from outside the organisation itself, rather than ideas that are central to the core goals and values of the organisation and the people within it. The culture of innovation that leads to transformation is built on a cyclical, iterative and reflective process involving:

Insight - identifying a problem, exploring solutions and finding tools to deliver

Invention - thinking out the box, thinking creatively, challenging existing practices

Application – developing strategies and organisational structures to implement new approaches and practices.

Reflection and communication – regularly reviewing and refining strategies to ensure that they are effective. Ensuring that communication networks are in place to ensure that innovation is embedded throughout the system and can be sustained.

Much of what is written in this paper is applicable to HE and could provide a useful model for managing transformative innovation within our institutions.

Half an Hour: The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On

Will Stewart — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 10:56:01 +0000

- Half an Hour: The Future of Online Learning: Ten Years On
This posting by Stephen Downes provides a useful summary of where we are at now and how we got here. He re-visits a previous article written in 1998, noting that many of his earlier predictions have been remarkably accurate. The main areas he discusses include:
new technologies in education – the teaching process remains relatively unchanged despite more than 10 years of the Internet
online conferencing – becoming increasing important as a way of understanding communication in an online environment
personalised learning – the importance of informal learning in the online environment is being increasingly acknowledged, where students are not restricted by the constraints of the traditional classroom model
time and place independence – as small, lightweight wireless devices become the norm, online learning and mobile learning become the same
learning communities – the internet has developed into an enabler of communities within which individuals can learn

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

AccessApps – a collection of open source and freeware assistive technology applications

Will Stewart — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 07:44:44 +0000

AccessApps is a collection of over 50 open source and freeware assistive technology applications for Windows PCs, that can be used directly from a USB memory stick without the need to install anything onto your computer.
The applications have been collated by the two Scottish JISC Regional Support Centres (Scotland North & East and Scotland South & West) in partnership with JISC TechDis.

They consist of 12 categories of applications with options to download all (the Works), a pre-defined selection (Lite) or your own chosen selection (Pick n Mix). The applications include the Open Office tools, a range of multimedia tools (Audacity, GIMP, Artweaver) as well as some presentation tools and utilities. There are also an impressive collection of assistive applications, such text to speech readers, accessible browsers and keyboard alternatives.
The AccessApps team have also put together a number of excellent tutorials and video screencasts to help get started with some of the main applications.

All-in-all, a useful selection of applications for all learners, including those with additional support needs.

There are no natives – we’re all in the same boat

Will Stewart — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 10:43:23 +0000

Mike Wesch’s latest Youtube video, A Portal to Media Literacy, is essential viewing for all educators. He describes so clearly why we have to change and challenge the present system of educating our young people. He is clearly a passionate teacher and someone who understands the world in which his students move.

His dismantling of the idea that “to learn is to acquire information”, the basis of our exam-driven school and college system and our institution-centred university system, is a joy to listen to.

He argues that our students might know how to use Youtube, Facebook, Blogger, Digg and MySpace for their own entertainment but they don’t know how to use them to learn or to create something interesting or new. So, in this sense they are no more “natives” than we are. We can’t assume that our students are media literate – even though they use Wikipedia all the time, many don’t realise it’s a wiki and can be edited.

The challenge for Higher Education, and indeed our 5-18 system, is to create “platforms of participation that allow students to realize and leverage the emerging media environment”. Moving our school, colleges and universities out of their “content delivery” model to one where students are participating, collaborating, sharing, creating and evaluating is how we develop an education system that is relevant to the next generation of learners. As I have said before, we have undersold and largely failed the Google generation – those who are in the system at the moment. But it is not too late to do something about the ones who are coming along after them. Put aside some time and watch the entire 66 minutes of this video – in 67 minutes you’ll be inspired to do something!

OU joins iTunes U

Will Stewart — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:00:38 +0000

The OU has become the second UK university (after UCL) to make its content accessible through iTunes U. It joins other world class universities such as Yale, Stanford and MIT in making course materials available for free download. It plans to have 500 video and audio materials from 50 courses on iTunes U by the end of July. In the longer term, some of its research activities will also be published on the site.

Making it happen: teaching the technology generation

Will Stewart — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:11:44 +0000

This is a video of my presentation to the JISC Regional Support Centre for Yorkshire & Humber on June 10th at Bradford University. The sub-title of the presentation was Beyond “no significant difference”, on the basis that, in education, we use technology to do things the same way as we have always done rather than use it to do things differently. The theme of the presentation was that we, the teachers, rather than our students, are the technology generation. Because the use of digital technology has been completely normalised and fully integrated by our students, they don’t see it as technology. They are the “no technology generation”, and it is us who need to be taught how to use it in ways that engage our students and make their education relevant.

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