engagement, events

My time in the Scottish Parliament

This year I was delighted to have been appointed a Scottish Parliament Fellow by the Beltane Public Engagement Network. This meant I got to spend a day a week in the Scottish Parliament over a roughly six-month period.

I really can’t say enough good things about my experience as a Fellow, working closely with Donald Jarvie and Scotland’s Futures Forum. My understanding of public engagement, the policy sphere in Scotland, and the value of networking and collaborating beyond academia has been deepened, and it’s really had a big impact on how I think about my identity and priorities as an academic.

My Fellowship focused on online and distance learning in Scotland, and looked in particular at issues around Massive Online Open Courses. I briefed Parliament colleagues about MOOCs, co-ordinated resources and activities to get them to explore these courses by signing up for one in early 2014, and worked with the Forum and the Learning and Leadership team to embed MOOCs as part of the professional development infrastructure of the Parliament. The MOOC strand culminated in a workshop in April 2014, bringing together groups of non-academic experts in four topic areas, including wellbeing and community energy, along with MOOC experts from the University of Edinburgh, to discuss the potential for creating MOOCs for public engagement and knowledge exchange. These teams are now taking their ideas forward, with further input from me.

_DRP5238
MOOC scoping workshop, 7 May 2014, Scottish Parliament

 

Two other strands of activity emerged during the Fellowship. The first involved discussions with the Shetland Learning Partnership, when Scotland’s Futures Forum was asked to help plan scenarios for secondary, further, higher and adult education in Shetland.

One of the sights of Shetland - in the taxi, stopped at the runway's level crossing to wait for a plane to take off!
One of the sights of Shetland – in the taxi, stopped at the runway’s level crossing to wait for a plane to take off!

 

The second was a collaboration with the Forum to host a ‘Creative Futures for Scotland’ roundtable event exploring how the growing popularity of individual and collaborative creativity (for example, crafting, 3D printing and web coding) could impact on learning, innovation and wellbeing in Scotland.

making coding crafting
My question about Scotland’s creative futures.

 

All three areas of work are continuing beyond the end of the Fellowship. I greatly appreciate the support I’ve received from Beltane, Scotland’s Futures Forum and the University of Edinburgh.

events

Networked Learning & Emerging Technologies for Online Learning – an eventful week

Next week I’m fortunate to be involved with two digital education conferences, and wanted to post about them both, because they’re both very dear to me.

From Monday 7th, my colleagues and I are proud to be the local hosts of the Networked Learning conference in Edinburgh. This is, in my opinion, the best conference for hearing about new approaches to networked/digital/online education theory. This year the keynotes (from Neil Selwyn and Steve Fuller), symposia, and papers look outstanding. I’m missing my own symposium on Wednesday, on ‘the spaces of networked learning‘ which is upsetting, because it’s going to be amazing. But Phil Sheail, my paper co-author, is planning an excellent short talk based on our paper: Disrupting the illusion of sameness: the importance of making place visible in online learning.

The reason I’m missing it is because I’m heading to Dallas, USA, for my third year of Sloan-C’s Emerging Technologies for Online Learning. I have this conference to thank for introducing me to some wonderful collaborators, including Amy Collier, with whom I’m giving a plenary talk on Friday morning: Mess in Online Education – How it is, how it should be. I’m also getting the opportunity to think about my career (!), as I join a panel discussion about ‘the role of faculty and professors in educational technology’.

So – an eventful week, the end of which will find me with my dear sister, the other Dr Ross, exploring the sights of DC. I’m promised cherry blossoms.

If we’re overlapping next week in Edinburgh or Dallas, I look forward to seeing you!

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Newark_cherry_blossoms.jpg

papers

HEA report: the pedagogy of the MOOC

Last autumn, Sian and I were commissioned by the  Higher Education Academy in the UK to write a report about MOOC pedagogy. The report has been published today, and is available to download.

The report details the UK MOOC landscape, and shares findings from interviews with MOOC teachers.

The three key concluding messages the report emphasises are:

  1. MOOCs are multiple: we can no longer define them either as a single ‘transformative’ entity or clearly position them in terms of the previously dominant cMOOC/xMOOC binary.
  2. MOOC pedagogy is not embedded in MOOC platform, but is negotiated and emergent, a sociomaterial and discipline-informed issue.
  3. The teacher persists in the MOOC: though reworked and disaggregated, the teaching function and teacherly professionalism remain central.

 

papers

New paper: Making distance visible – assembling nearness in an online distance learning programme

This short paper was written in the context of the “New Geographies of Learning” project, and draws on data generated ininterviews with participants on the MSc in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh. It was written with Michael Sean Gallagher and Hamish Macleod.

The IRRODL journal is open access, so you can read the paper in full on the web site.

http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1545

engagement

Public engagement activities

I’m delighted to have been appointed as a Beltane Parliament Engagement Fellow in the autumn. I’ll be developing engagement events for Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) and other parliamentary colleagues, on the topic of “Distance and online learning for an innovative and inclusive Scotland”. The fellowship will be starting at the end of September, and will run til the end of March. I got to attend a working dinner at the Parliament back in June, and started to get a sense of the many interesting topics and issues that the fellowship will raise.

MOOCs were on the agenda, of course, but also the Scotland’s Futures Forum 2025 project, and broad questions about what quality online education really means, and what Scotland should be doing to achieve it. I’ll start a project blog closer to the time, but in the meantime, feel free to be in touch if you’d like to discuss anything further re this.

Another fun thing on the horizon: my colleagues Hamish and Sian and I are taking part in the Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas – part of the Edinburgh Fringe. Our event is on 22 August at 3:30pm, and our topic is “The Disembodied University”. We’d love to see you there!