Recent Bookmarks and Annotations
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Unlearning How to Teach on 2009-11-23
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Creativity
or Conformity? Building Cultures of Creativity in Higher Education
A conference
organised by the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff in collaboration
with the Higher Education Academy
Cardiff
January 8-10 2007
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Unlearning
How to Teach
Erica McWilliam
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arguing the need for a more interventionist role for academic teachers
and a greater emphasis on an experimental culture of learning, rather
than a culture in which curriculum and pedagogy is fully ‘locked in’
in advance of engagement. The challenge for academic teachers is to
promote and support a culture of teaching and learning that parallels
a post-millennial social world in which supply and demand is neither
linear nor stable, and in which labour is shaped by complex patterns
of anticipations, opportunities, time and space.
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To develop the sorts of learning dispositions
that are appropriate in such contexts, academic educators will need
to spend less time explaining through instruction and more time in experimental
and error-welcoming modes of engagement. If higher education is to play
a key role in capacity building for graduates’ professional
workforce futures, then a pedagogy of induction into disciplinary knowledge
needs radical reworking into a pedagogy in which teachers and students
work as co-creators and co-assemblers (and dissemblers) of trans-disciplinary
knowledge applications for digital work futures.
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‘unlearning’
will be as important to social success in the 21st millennium
as learning has been in the 20th millennium, then the habit
of ‘lifelong learning’ will need radical re-thinking in terms of
the nature and purposes of pedagogical work. Put simply, we will need
to see a further shift from sage-on-the-stage and guide-on-the-side
to meddler-in-the-middle (McWilliam, 2005).
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The challenge for academic teachers is to
promote and support a culture of teaching and learning that parallels
a post-millennial social world in which supply and demand is neither
linear nor stable, in which labour is shaped by complex patterns of
anticipations, opportunities, time and space, and in which new combinations
of ‘creative’ skills and abilities are increasingly in demand. It
also takes up the challenge posed by Pat Kane (2005), that of getting
universities and other learning organisations to become more serious
about play.
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University graduates, as potential future ‘creatives’ (Cunningham,
2005, 2006; Florida, 2002; Florida & Goodnight, 2005: Pink 2005),
will be performing work that is much less focused on routine information-seeking,
executing transactions and routine problem-solving and much more focused
on forging relationships, tackling novel challenges and synthesising
‘big picture’ scenarios. The challenge of the “Conceptual Age”,
as Daniel Pink (2005) describes it, is not just the ability to work
in high technology environments, but to utilise “high concept/high
touch” abilities to make and re-make our personal and professional
environments in ways that serve both functional and aesthetic needs
simultaneously.
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the de-routinisation of present and future creative work has profound
implications for what university teachers do and how they do it. Yet
there is little evidence that the nature and purposes of teaching and
learning have changed in any substantive way in recent times. Mainstream
pedagogical practice within the academy very much parallels a work culture
focused on accessing information and using it to solve relatively predictable
problems or complete routinised transactions of one kind or another.
Lectures allow students to ‘access’ the wisdom of ‘the best’;
tutorials allow students support as they seek to ‘master’ the knowledge
of the ‘master’; assessment tasks focus on how well the young apprentice
has been able to perform ‘knowing’ the discipline.
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“an English speaking thirteen
year old in Zaire with internet connection can find out the current
temperature in Brussels, or closing price of IBM stock or name of Winston
Churchill’s second finance minister as quickly as the head librarian
in Cambridge university” (pp.100-101).
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young
people increasingly experience formal learning and work in parallel
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engage with the challenges of the
less predictable, less routinised work made possible in the “Conceptual
Age”, higher educational policy has certainly been saturated with
calls for more innovation and/or creativity within the sector.
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The collapse of calls to innovation
is evident in the framing of what is sanctioned as evidence of literacy,
numeracy, citizenship and employability skills. The evidence is overwhelmingly
drawn from standardised test results (see Corson, 2002). In broad terms,
the funders of education, both government and non-government, have come
to fix almost exclusively on performance data that can be standardised
in order to allow for intra-national and international comparisons.
In a performative culture that makes it possible, in theory, to quantify
the value of higher education on a national and even global scale, winners
can be highly visible and valued, however that calculation is arrived
at.
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The capacity to learn and reproduce
appropriate social behaviours, he argues, is no longer the key to success.
Instead of opening up possibilities, such learning may actually be unhelpful
because it assumes a fixed or predictable social world. Bauman elaborates:
Just as long-term commitments
threaten to mortgage the future, habits too tightly embraced burden
the present; learning may in the long run disempower as it empowers
in the short…. ‘Your skills and know-how are as good as their last
application’. (p.22)
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To develop the sorts
of learning dispositions that are appropriate in such contexts, academic
educators will need to spend less time explaining through instruction
and more time in experimental and error-welcoming modes of engagement.
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This is supported by findings from neuro-science about the way in which
the brain is ‘changed’ (see Zull, 2004) through hands on, minds
on experimentation and how it is not changed by instruction-led pedagogy.
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a pedagogy of induction into disciplinary
knowledge needs radical reworking into a pedagogy in which teachers
and students work as co-creators and co-assemblers (and dissemblers)
of trans-disciplinary knowledge applications for digital work futures.
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Put simply,
we will need to see a further shift from sage-on-the-stage and
guide-on-the-side to meddler-in-the-middle (McWilliam, 2005).
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“What
holds people back from taking risks”, he asserts, “is often as not
…their knowledge, not their ignorance” (p.4). Useful ignorance,
then, becomes a space of pedagogical possibility rather than a base
that needs to be covered. ‘Not knowing’ needs to be put to work
without shame or bluster. This sort of thinking is echoed in Guy Claxon’s
(2004) call for a pedagogy for “knowing what to do when you don’t
know what to do” (p.?) .
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shifts thinking from consumers to co-creators of value,
and from value chain to network.
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As co-creators, both would add value to the capacity
building work being done through the invitation to ‘meddle’ and
to make errors. The teacher is in there experimenting and learning from
the instructive complications of her errors
alongside her students, rather than moving from desk to desk or
chat room to chat room, watching over her flock.
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if
we consider the student’s learning network as a type of value network,
then, we must also accept that such a network allows quick disconnection
from nodes where value is not added, and quick connections with new
nodes that promise added value - networks allow individuals to ‘go
round’ or elude a point of exchange where supply chains do not. In
blunt terms, this means that the teacher who does not add value to a
learning network can - and will - be by-passed.
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The rhizomatic capacity
of networks to flow around a point in a chain means that teachers may
be located in a linear supply chain of pedagogical services but excluded
from their students’ learning networks. That would be an effect of
being perceived by students to be doing things that do not add value.
And digital technologies can and are being used both to identify value-blocks
and options for getting around them. Once again, this is not a just
matter of how much take-up of technology is evident in the pedagogical
work (Sassen, 2004), but whether or not pedagogical processes bring
student and teacher together in their shared ignorance and mutual desire
to make something new of their world.
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If the rethinking of pedagogy as
co-creation of value re-positions teacher and student (or one student
with other students) as project partners, as co-directors and co-editors
of their social world, who then is the rightful assessor of the value
of that cultural assemblage? What does it mean to make judgements to
credential individuals on the basis of the quality of the co-creation?
What new dilemmas does this set up around ‘objectivity’ and assessment?
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“[t]he opposite of play isn’t work.
It’s depression’ (Sutton-Smith, cited in Pink, 2005: 179)
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Gained something in the translation « BuzzMachine on 2009-11-20
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@rpaskin
tweeted this: “In a link economy, there are values from creating content and linking to content. There’s no value in just reproducing content (Jeff Jarvis).”
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There is no value left over for the copiers. Indeed, online, if one copies, one is considered a thief because it’s only the thieves who copy.
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Education Innovation: Essential Education: "Myths and Opportunities: Technology in the Classroom" by Alan November on 2009-11-19
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Virtual School Symposium 2009 Overlay - live on 2009-11-16
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copyrightfriendly - home on 2009-11-16
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StateU.com on 2009-11-16
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100 Excellent Open Access Journals for Educators | Online College Tips - Online Colleges on 2009-11-16
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100 Excellent Open Access Journals for Educators
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The following open access journals provide top-notch scholarly information available at no cost. Most of these journals are published just once or a few times a year, so subscribe to several so you can keep up-to-date on the latest research coming out of the field of education.
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- Journal of Curriculum and Instruction. The articles here focus on research and practice relevant to pre K-12 education.
- The School Community Journal. The mission of this journal is to unite the entire community of teachers, parents, and students to work in the interest of successful education.
- Insight. This annual journal focuses on research-based articles, case studies, and innovation in teaching, learning, and assessment.
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Networks. Kindergarten through postgraduate teachers share research on classroom practices in an effort to improve effectiveness.
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- Education Next. This evidence-based journal highlights current research in education policy and school reform.
- Education Policy Analysis Archives. Available in both English and Spanish, the articles here focus on current policy in American education.
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Academic Leadership. Learn about cultivating leadership in both public school and higher education settings.
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- The ALAN Review. This journal provides information relevant to teaching literature to teens.
- Kairos. This journal explores the language arts and rhetoric through the use of new media.
- Computers and Composition Online. Learn about technology as a tool to teaching and learning literacy in this journal.
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Language Learning & Technology. This journal is specifically for teachers of second and foreign language and how teaching and learning can be enhanced through the use of technology.
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Journal of Museum Studies. Students and faculty involved in museum studies will benefit from the articles in this publication.
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Journal of Educational Technology & Society. These articles serve to unite those who design technology systems for education and those educators who implement and manage these systems to work together for the greater good of education.
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Meridian. This journal provides information on technology in middle school education.
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- International Journal of Educational Technology. A joint venture between the US and Australia, this journal provides scholarly articles on technology in education twice a year.
- THEN: Journal. This journal offers a humanities-based approach to learning about research on the use of technology in education.
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google-docs-upload - Project Hosting on Google Code on 2009-11-14
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A tool for batch upload documents to a Google Docs account with recursive traversing of directories. The tool supports PDF upload.
Total list of supported formats: csv, doc, docx, html, htm, ods, odt, pdf, ppt, pps, rtf, sxw, tsv, tab, txt, xls, xlsx.
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Google Docs Batch Upload Eases Online Document Transfers - Google Docs - Lifehacker on 2009-11-14
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Windows/Mac/Linux (Java): Got a bunch of files to send to Google Docs, and don't have time for the webapp's one-by-one uploads? Google Docs Batch Upload does just what you might think, loading any folder of files into Google Docs' servers
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java -jar google-docs-upload-1.2.jar /home/kevin/uploads --recursive
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You'll be asked for your Google Docs login credentials, and then Google Docs Batch Upload gets to work. The latest version includes the ability to replicate a folder structure of sub-folders placed in your chosen upload folder, which might relieve the minds of those with a hyper-organized set of docs.
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Google Docs Batch Upload is a free download and works wherever Java does. Looking for a two-way Google Docs sync solution? Try the similarly command-line-powered
GDataCopier
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Free Backup software, automate backup, synchronization, and archiving tasks, JaBack on 2009-11-13
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