A number of thoughts ran through my mind at this point:

• Ooh, interesting question…
• Hmm, that depends…
• That sounds like a blog post in the making…
• What! Only two?!

But I like the idea of narrowing it down to just the two most important; a bit like some weird and geeky version of Desert Island Discs. Plus, to keep my analytical side happy, there’s plenty of scope for categorising loads of specific ideas under two broad techniques.

So, on with the game. After some thought, I think that my two favourite techniques are:

1. Talking to people; and
2. Leading by example.

Let’s take them one at a time.

Talking to people

Well, when I say talking to people, I don’t really mean talking all the time so much as listening. I may not know everything there is to know about technology, but I know more than a little about how it can support teaching; I know plenty about how it’s useful for teaching for me.

But I’m not you. I’m not him over there. And I’m certainly not a busy academic with half a dozen research grants on the go trying to teach my students as best I can alongside the myriad other commitments of life in HE.

And when I say listening, it’s not just about listening. It’s about caring. If I knew the right techniques, I could probably convince you that I was listening, but if I didn’t actually care what you were saying, you’d probably guess pretty quickly.

I don’t know much about neurolinguistic programming or anything like that, but what I do know is that when I take a genuine interest in what someone’s saying then I really get a lot out of it. That’s not something you can fake, but I’ve found that you can actively take an interest in pretty much anything or anyone if you make a bit of effort.

Why is this important? The only way I can help you (or him over there) to make the best of technology is to get a clear picture of what your needs are. I need to understand you. It’s no use me patronising you with information you already know; neither is it helpful to force-feed you information that you just have no use for.

Only if I understand your unique situation can I provide the advice that will help you improve your teaching, or leave well alone if that’s the best option.

Teaching by example

This is something I try to do all the time, in everything I do. I won’t claim that I succeed all of the time, but I’m getting better at it the more I do.

A little while back I read Postman & Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity (and I recommend you do to if you’re interested in improving the quality of education). One of the big messages I took away from it was that we learn what we do.

In other words, how we teach (and thus how students learn) is just as important, if not more so, than what we teach.

So, if I want to help you understand how technology can improve your teaching and make life easier for both you and your students (“Why should we make life easy on our students?” I hear them cry) it won’t help if I stand up in front you and your colleagues and give a 45 minute death-by-Powerpoint presentation on how to use Facebook.

Instead (and having listened to you I’ll have an idea of what fits the way you work) I’ll use a whole range of techniques. By giving you a 2-minute online video of tips on how to facilitate online discussions, I can show you how effective YouTube is for teaching. By encouraging you to take part in an online discussion about teaching with video, I can help you see what does and doesn’t help people learn from forums. I might even give you a 45-minute presentation on the theoretical pedagogies of Facebook, if that’s what works for you.

This technique does at least two useful things. First, it gives you an opportunity to get first-hand experience of what tools are out there and what they’re like to use. Secondly, it demonstrates that when it comes to e-learning I have a good enough idea of what’s going on to give you advice that you can trust.

In the end…

…it mostly comes down to trust. If you trust that I both care about you (and your students) and know what I’m talking about, how much more likely are you to consider listening to me?

Possibly related posts:

1. Introduction to SLC 2.0: Part I

I put together the slides for the initial presentation using SlideRocket, and you can flip through them here:

Becka Currant kicked off the discussion by pointing out that “too many assumptions are made about digital fluency.” This is something that I’ve since come to agree with: it’s all too easy to assume that because young people appear comfortable with technology, they are completely turned on to the consequences of its use. Becka also pointed me in the direction of this typology from JISC’s Enhancing Learner Progression project which does a great job of explaining the separation between students’ level of technological experience and its contribution to education.

Doug Belshaw pointed out Ben Grey’s post from Tech & Learning and his crowdsourced followup, along with Doug’s own response. All three are worth a read, so go ahead and check them out.

Tomaz Lasic made an insightful comment that many the skills we were looking to achieve with technology (or education in general) are far from new:

“2nd century BC” skills that even some of the old Greek wise heads were talking about – democracy, participation, freedom of expression & thought, active citizenship … you know those pesky old things that never seemed to go out of fashion with thoughtful people.

Tomaz followed up with a thought-provoking post on his own blog, which underscored the point that I was trying to make originally: that it’s vital to consider what we want to achieve with technology, not just how cool it is.

Catherine Werst suggested that one of the best reasons for using technology to teach is that it pushes us out of our comfort zones, forcing us to question our assumptions about what it means to teach:

Technology presents opportunities and challenges that stretch us to become better teachers.

Jenny Evans drew on her work with Wolverhampton City Council interviewing kids for an e-learning promotional video (the site seems to have some odd certificate problems, but you can view the video there). She summarised her experience thus:

We got loads of interviews with kids about what they got from from technology – a really strong theme of improving life chances emerged.

Finally, Paul Jinks suggested that teachers tend to use technology when it makes their lives easier and students use it when it’s necessary for their assessments: a paraphrasing of his earlier blog post. Although I agree with this in part, I think this overgeneralises a complex situation. I also live in hope that some, if not all, teachers can be persuaded that improving their own teaching practice and using technology is one (though not the only) way to do this.

In summary, this post turned up some really useful opinions on why we use technology in teaching. Indeed, it’s worked so well that I’m going to try to keep up the theme of “Ask the Readers”, as it fits in well with my desire to learn from this blog and help others to do the same. I hope you’ve found the responses as interesting as I did, and encourage you to continually ask the question “Why use technology?”

This is the first time I’ve summarised a discussion from a previous post. Did it work? Did I add enough value to justify the new post? What could I have done better? Please let me know in the comments below.

No related posts.

I thoroughly recommend you read their opinions before reading on. Go on, I’ll wait…

Right then. My take on the whole thing is heavily coloured by my use of Unix-based computers over the last 10 years or so. To cut a long story short, it’s long been common on these systems to have lots of small separate tools which each do one job very well; you can then do more complex tasks by combining them in various ways through well-defined interfaces.

Compare this with, for example, Windows. Each piece of software is fighting with all the others to include every feature the user could possibly want, which results in big, heavy programs which take ages to load and are often full of bugs. I accept that I’m overgeneralising here, but I hope you understand what I’m aiming at.

So, one of the big problems that I see with the current generation of VLEs is that they try to do everything all in one package. The result is a textbook illustration of the phrase “Jack of all trades, master of none”.

WordPress, Blogger and others do blogging better. MediaWiki, WetPaint et al are better for wikis. Facebook and friends connect people much more easily.

I agree with James, Matt and Lindsay (and, I suspect, Steve as well, despite the stance in his post) that there’s still a place for the centrally-run VLE. But it should be more flexible. The word that keeps coming to my mind is ‘agile’. We should be following good software engineering principles and providing tools that are best-of-breed and put the effort instead into making them play nicely together. And we should give learners and teachers the option of using something else if they prefer.

This is where the idea of the personal web/personal learning environment comes into play. By providing a diverse toolset instead of insisting on one monolithic solution our learners and teachers can choose what works best for them. The VLE can evolve into a framework to help coax these tools to play together nicely, and to join them into a coherent whole for those who lack either the time or the inclination to choose their own.

Open standards will help with this. Open source will be a big help too, particularly if a community of developers with educational experience start to contribute. But above all, we need to start trying it out. We’ve got the tools already, all we need to do is persuade our institutions to use them.

What’s your take on all of this? Do you think the VLE should lay down quietly to die? Or should we bravely resurrect it and bring it back to its former glory? Leave your opinion in the comments below, or by linking here from your own blog.

Possibly related posts:

1. Portfolio assessment in the age of the computer
2. Storytelling

What is “social media”?

Social media, Web 2.0 (and by extension, Learning 2.0) or whatever you want to call it can be pretty slippery to actually define. Here are a few starting points:

• What is Web 2.0? — Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media
• Wikipedia articles:
  • Web 2.0
  • Social media
• Some cool introductory videos from the Common Craft show

Examples

Here are some of the most common types of social media tools currently available on the web, with examples. This is by no means a complete list, but Google should help you if you want more.

Wikis

A wiki is a collection of web pages that can be edited in-place in the web browser by any user, with little or no knowledge of how to write conventional web pages using HTML. Most wikis allow you to restrict what it means to be a “user”, provide some standard navigational features and record the full edit history of each page. They’re great for collaboratively building a knowledge base on a particular subject, or for organising projects as a group.

• The first ever wiki
• Wikipedia — the best-known example
• Places to set up your own wiki:
  • PBwiki
  • WetPaint
  • Wikia

Blogs

A blog (from web-log) is a website based around a series of articles, which are indexed and presented in chronological order. The articles may be as long or short as the author likes, and on any subject. Most blogging platforms provide management tools and an editor which, again, requires no knowledge of HTML. Here are some places to start your own blog:

• WordPress
• Blogger
• Typepad
• Blogspot

Social networking

Social networking connects people together, allowing them to share content with friends and friends-of-friends.

• Facebook — begun for university students, but now available to all
• MySpace — now popular primarily with musicians and bands
• LinkedIn — aimed at professional networking
• Twitter — centred around broadcasting of 140-character status updates, referred to as microblogging; simple and flexible

Social bookmarking

Social bookmarking allows you to tag any page you find on the web, save a bookmark for later and share it with your connections.

• Delicious
• Magnolia
• citeulike

Media sharing

Media sharing sites allow you to upload and share photos, videos and types of multimedia content.

• Photo sharing:
  • Flickr
  • Photobucket
• Video sharing:
  • YouTube
  • Vimeo
• Presentation sharing:
  • SlideShare

Specific educational sites

While all of the above have educational uses and many of them provide specific services for educational users, there are a couple of websites which cater specifically to the educational community.

• Moodle — A learning management system (LMS) built on Web 2.0 principles
• Edmodo — A microblogging service (like Twitter) for education

The seminar

The goal of the seminar was to introduce some of my fellow trainee teachers to the potential of social media for learning and teaching, and perhaps infect them with some of my enthusiasm, and also to inform them about the bluecloud project. I began by showing the wonderful video from the Common Craft Show on social media, using ice cream as a metaphor. I then gave a few examples of well-known social media tools and listed the common features, before asking those present to split into groups to come up with ideas for how they could use these new tools in their own learning, teaching or research. We then discussed these together as a whole group, and I demonstrated one way of using blogging by directing them here for further resources.

[slideshare id=1122467&doc=socialmediainteachingandlearning-090309130637-phpapp01]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpIOClX1jPE]

Possibly related posts:

1. Teaching with social media: engaging the audience
2. Social networking at the University of Sheffield: uSpace
3. Ask the readers: Why use technology in teaching?