pedagogy
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The COVID-19 online pivot
The outbreak of COVID-19 has seen many universities closing campuses and shifting learning online. It’s unprecedented and suddenly puts ed tech front and centre in a way it hasn’t been before. For those of us who have been doing online learning or distance ed for a while it can seem a bit irritating to have been seen as second class for so long and then suddenly deemed worthy of interest. So I tweeted over the weekend: It’s interesting seeing all the unis that disparaged distance ed as not proper suddenly being converted to the benefits of online education — Martin Weller (@mweller) March 7, 2020 It was kinda snarky, but…
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Connectivism and scale
via GIPHY In his recent post criticising the Creative Commons Certificate, which I won’t comment on, Stephen Downes repeats a claim he has made before about the scalability of the connectivist approach, stating: One of the major objectives of our original MOOCs was to enable MOOC participants to create interaction and facilitation for each other. This is because there is no system in the world where a 1:30 instructor:student ratio will scale to provide open and equitable access. In my view, this model worked very well. I’ll preface what I’m going to say with stating that I’m a big fan of connectivism for two reasons: it is an example of…
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Innovating Pedagogy 2019
As you may know, a group of academics in the Institute of Educational Technology at the OU, produce an annual report looking at innovations in teaching and learning. Led by Rebecca Ferguson and Mike Sharples, we collaborate with a different educational research unit each time, and this year it was the Centre for the Science of Learning & Technology (SLATE), University of Bergen, Norway. We skipped the 2018 one and nudged it into 2019, so here is the new report. It proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not had a profound influence on education in their current form. These are: Playful Learning Learning with Robots Decolonising…
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25 Years of EdTech: 2010 – Connectivism
[Continuing the 25 Years of Ed Tech series] The early enthusiasm for e-learning saw a number of pedagogies resurrected or adopted to meet the new potential of the digital, networked context. Constructivism, problem-based learning, and resource-based learning all saw renewed interest as educators sought to harness the possibility of abundant content and networked learners. Yet connectivism, as proposed by George Siemens and Stephen Downes in 2004–2005, could lay claim to being the first internet-native learning theory. Siemens defined connectivism as “the integration of principles explored by chaos, network, and complexity and self-organization theories. Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements—not entirely under the control…
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25 years of EdTech – 1997: Constructivism
In 1997 web based learning was getting a lot of traction, and with it people began to look around for new models of teaching. So for 1997 I’m not focusing on a technology, but rather an educational theory because there’s education in educational technology after all. Constructivism was by no means new, dating back to Piaget, Vygostky and Bruner. The principal concept of constructivism is that learners construct their own knowledge, based on their experience and relationship with concepts. It’s a (sometimes vague) learning theory rather than a specific pedagogy, so how it is implemented varies. It was often put into practice by active learning, or discovery based approaches. The…
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Innovating Pedagogy 2017
The Open University’s annual Innovating Pedagogy report is out, this time in collaboration with the Learning In a NetworKed Society (LINKS) Israeli Center of Research Excellence (I-CORE). It’s the sixth year we’ve done one (well done to Rebecca Ferguson and Mike Sharples on pushing this through). When we started the intention was to make it distinct from the NMC New Horizon reports by focusing on pedagogy. I think, to be honest, in those early ones there was probably a technology focus still, but as it’s progressed it has really moved away from this to more pedagogy, socially focused issues. I’d also add I’ve found it increasingly useful as a resource.…
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Innovating Pedagogy report
Here at IET in the OU, a bunch of us, led by Mike Sharples, were asked to produce an annual report on how changes in teaching and learning (related to technology) were changing the current landscape. The initial idea was to do this for senior OU management, but I'm pleased to say that everyone involved wanted to make it wider than that and create a publicly available report. Think of it as like a Horizon's report with more focus on pedagogy. We adopted the same methodology as the Horizon report also. It does have a bit of an OU bias, but I think it's a very good read (and I…
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A pedagogy of abundance – the paper
I've given a couple of talks (and blogged) around a pedagogy of abundance. In these I was exploring what abundance in terms of content might mean for education, and whether we had appropriate pedagogies, when most of our learning theories have been built on an assumption of content-scarcity. For my digital scholarship book I made this the chapter that looks at the teaching element of Boyer's scholarly functions. I have now redone that chapter and published it as an article in the Spanish Journal of Pedagogy Note – the journal isn't open access, but I'm trying to explore the green, or self-archiving route of OA, so I got agreement to…
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A Pedagogy of Abundance take 2
I gave a presentation for George Siemens CCK09 course last night, which explored an idea I had proposed in this blog a while back, on the pedagogy of abundance. I wanted to explore the idea, so talked for half an hour and then we had a good discussion. You can see the recording of the session in Elluminate here. Below is a slidecast of the presentation. My main argument was that in economics previous models were based on an assumption of scarcity. In a digital world we have abundance and many of these models do not apply. There are two types of response to this, the abundance response which assumes…
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A pedagogy of abundance
It has been said that previous economic models were based on scarcity. In a physical world one has to deal with the basic principle that once you give something away you no longer have it. Resources are finite. Making them, sharing them, moving them, storing them – it all eats up resource. But in a digital world these considerations disappear, or drop to near zero (there is still a cost in storing say, but nowhere near as much as a physical item if we compared a digital book with a real one for example). We thus need a new form of economics that accommodates this – an economy of abundance.…
