Category Archives: events

elearning, events, teaching

Learning from the “E-learning and Digital Cultures” course

E-learning and Digital Cultures was a 12-week course taught by me and Siân Bayne as part of the MSc in E-learning programme. It was innovative for the programme because of the nature of its engagement with digital cultures: it was open-access and disaggregated (you can see for yourself by browsing the web site), and made use of blogs, lifestreaming, twitter and a range of social and user-generated tools from across the web.

We’ll be presenting a paper at the Academic Identities for the 21st Century conference at Strathclyde University in June called “Posthuman academic identities in digital environments”, drawing on Siân’s recent work on uncanny digital pedagogies to talk about some of what we’ve learned from this course: how to work productively with volatility, disorientation, and strangeness.

events, phd

Forthcoming talks at SRHE conference & University of Glasgow

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I’ll be giving at talk at the Society for Research into Higher Education conference on Wednesday 9 December called Reflective practices as masks: a new way to think about reflection in higher education

Summary: This paper discusses ongoing research into how students and teachers negotiate issues of identity, authenticity, ownership, privacy and performativity in high-stakes online reflection in higher education. I define high-stakes reflection as reflection which is summatively assessed or has a gatekeeping function into a profession, and use a metaphor of the mask to draw out different aspects of high-stakes reflection online: performance, disguise, protection, transformation, discipline and trace. Conceiving of online reflective practices in these mutiple and overlapping ways has implications for how educators understand and support reflection, and the expectations we place on our students in terms of what high-stakes reflective writing can and should accomplish. These practices should support development of academic or professional identity and voice through explicit engagement with matters of authenticity, power, narrative, subjectivity and agency – not through a discourse which frames the recording and improvement of the “true self” as the ultimate goal of reflective practice.

I’ll be giving a longer talk on similar themes at the University of Glasgow’s Learning and Teaching Centre’s seminar series, on Wednesday 13 January 2010. I will have time at this second event to share more of the data that’s emerging from my PhD research.

I’ve been thinking about the masks for a while, and I’m now starting to draw some conclusions about what I think that thinking about reflective practices in this way might imply for teaching and learning. Both of these talks will represent the cutting edge of my ongoing doctoral research looking at online reflective practices in Higher Education!

events, phd

Literacy in the Digital University seminar, 16 October 09

I’m looking forward to giving a short talk at the first seminar in the ESRC funded Literacy in the Digital University series – http://literacyinthedigitaluniversity.blogspot.com/2009/09/seminar-1-programme.html . The title of my talk is “Personal, professional and academic voices in online reflection: new literacies for new media practices”. I’ll post up slides or something as soon as they’re available!

events, phd

paper for AoIR conference – traces of self

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Here is my PhD-related paper for the AoIR conference in Copenhagen in October.

Abstract:

This paper explores some conceptual issues emerging from my research into the question of how students and teachers negotiate issues of identity, authenticity, ownership, privacy and performativity in high-stakes online reflection in higher education.

The traces produced by online reflection are traces of a cultural moment and a political imperative, as much as traces of individuals. This paper critically examines how a humanist discourse of a ‘true self’, which can be understood or revealed through reflection, masks the increasingly invasive character of educational practices which demand confession and self-surveillance as evidence of progress and learning, and asks: in what ways might working online complicate, corroborate or undermine notions of the ‘true self’ in these contexts?

Download Traces of self: online reflective practices and performances in higher education as a PDF file.

events

ALT-Conference, Edinburgh

The ALT-C (Association for Learning Technology Conference) starts for me tomorrow. I’m really looking forward to it – I wasn’t very well in Manchester last year, so couldn’t do as much networking as I would have wanted to.

Already this year I’ve had a chance to meet some people whose work and writing I admire – at the Curverider conference at the University of Edinburgh today.

My ALT-C presentation is tomorrow afternoon. It’s called “Next Generation Learners: do they speak the language? Non-traditional students and their engagement with e-portfolios”, and it was written with my colleagues Hamish Macleod and John Davis, with some very valuable advice from Steve Farrier at the University of Northumbria. I’ll be arguing a few things: that non-traditional, part-time, mature students constitute an important next generation of learners in Higher Education; that the notion of ‘digital immigrants’ often applied to these learners can obscure both a range of attitudes to technology and legitimate dissent and criticism of our ICT implementations; and that embracing the level of flexibilty that the diversity of this group of students requires may force us into taking more radical positions than our institutions can easily accommodate.

I hope I’ll be able to make my case adequately in the short time available, but in any case a longer paper is due to be written, so I’m going to try to be reasonably relaxed and just enjoy the experience.