Understanding the experiences of learners in a digital age: ELESIG start-up

I think I struggle with the whole learners' experiences thing, and I think that's because I feel like a grandma who has just been handed a basketful of free range, extra large, shelled, hard-boiled eggs by her smiling, fresh-faced grandson who has just discovered the best way to eat them... I'm not saying that we don't need to identify where our learners come from, their motivations and aspirations, the types of tools that they use and why, and how technologies impact upon their learning and achievement, and more importantly, their sense of who they are and how they can act in the world. However, I wonder whether that which is being presented as shiny and new hasn't already got a long track record. Perhaps sector-wide maturity in e-learning, and pedagogic evaluation, has reached the point where we can discuss the normalisation of this process.

So what were the lessons learned from last week's ELESIG event?

1. Upskilling staff to be both reactive and proactive in their use of technologies is central to connecting students' uses of technologies to the development of their critical literacies.
2. Higher education needs to stop chasing "cool". There are core academic values that we want to develop, and it may be that some institutions build a digital reputation that connects into those core academic values and provides a framework within which students can define themselves and succeed. However, institutions are unlikely to stay ahead of the technological game, given that students are so fleet of foot and universities are so unwieldy.
3. Helen Beetham made the point that evidence from learners defined some clear challenges for institutional values and cultures. She posited that a crunch point may be coming, where academic issues, for instance, around the centrality of subject knowledge or plagiarism clashed with 21st century learning that is predicated upon building social capital, by way of mashing, reusing and re-presenting the work of others.
4. There is a growing theme around the creation of on demand, personal learning environments, in which the individual learners experiences (rather than institutional e-Learning drivers) enable the aggregation of relevant tools. Connected to this, Oxford Brookes University, highlighted that they are embedding the notion of the digitally literate learner in their new institutional e-Learning Strategy and also within validations. Through our e-Learning Champions and programme development checklists at validation and periodic review, we engage with these issues. However, I wonder whether DMU needs to have a more overtly didactic, Brookesian approach that forces the issue of engaging with digitally literate learners, rather than expecting that staff will engage with the issue.
5. As ever, there was only tentative engagement with the learner's role in society and the institutional contribution to that. The central theme seemed to be what the learner values in higher education, and whether we can help learners achieve some resilience in managing their learning. However, Mel from South Bank argued against the "destructive effect of transmission learning" and highlighted that we still see so much of that through the use of our institutional VLEs. It was also interesting to pick up the throwaway remark from one of the presenters about adding value to "the technologies that are provided for them (students)". For me, there are several untapped areas.

• I am with those who argue that higher education is a democratic project, and that (it into the work of Ronald Barnett) it can be made socially empowering through a learner's coming to understand their subject area, themselves and their world, and coming to act in it. This social empowerment, and the cultural and social capital which follows, needs more understanding.
• I am less interested in community, and more in participation and association. How do individuals associate or disassociate, become enfranchised or disenfranchised, participate or step away, and why? What therefore is the impact of PLEs on learner engagement, motivation and achievement, both in higher education and society?
• In terms of transition, progression and retention, how do technologies and the ways in which academics engaged with them, connect into student's emotional development? What is the impact upon digital natives, digital immigrants, employer engagement, mature students, etc?
  

100th post: what do our students think of Web 2.0 in the curriculum?

Ha! I've bagged the hundredth post on this blog! What is more, it is about our students' views of Web 2.0 in the curriculum, based upon a series of 116 interviews and focus groups conducted between 2005 and 2007.

So this follows on from Suki's posting about maintaining the differences between informal and formal learning spaces. The key themes that arose from our interviews were:

• The importance for students of controlling the technologies that they use to learn, and of engaging in learning conversations with tutors about the types of spaces and environments that are created;
• The critical nature of access to, and participation within, specific spaces and technologies;
• the value that students placed upon external, non-institutional learning communities/associations (for instance, the friendship networks that exist on MySpace or Facebook); and
• Concerns about the ways in which critical literacy can be enhanced, and captured through assessment for learning, in non-institutional spaces.

The Deputy-President of our Student's Union highlighted the need to extend and enhance traditional learning environments through web-based technologies, whilst being mindful of the need to separate social and academic spaces. This issue was brought out more forcefully during the discussion that followed. One Head of Department forcefully argued that where Web 2.0 technologies are central to informal learning, then they are owned by students and should not be "captured" by academics.

The discussion also highlighted issues around copyright, plagiarism and intellectual property, as well as staff confidence in engaging with newer, web-based technologies. However, the single most important point that was raised by staff, focused upon how to build learning tasks that framed the development of critical, academic literacies.

We have five further practitioner-led sessions coming up, focused upon: blogging and the end of the essay; social bookmarking; social networking; podcasting; and wikis. We hope that the examples of practice demonstrated by these practitioners will enable other staff to reconsider their learning tasks, focused around their learners' aspirations for and approaches to, developing critical literacy.