A new YouTube channel has been produced in order to bring together a disperate range of video exemplars, explanatory videos and training & development material from the different DiAL-e projects in one place. We hope to develop this channel in the near future with your help, to make it a useful place to critique the framework and its applications, as well as a site to upload examples of good practice in using video resources.
We invite you all to join the site as a subscriber (we promise NOT to bombard you with emails) so that you can comment on the videos, provide insights for colleagues on what has worked best for you, and develop a community that is focused on using video resources in our teaching, particularly in higher education, as a focus for learner engagement rather than as ‘content’.
The next version of the SOLE model, with embedded Intended Learning Outcomes and further pedagogical guidance, along with a populated example, will be ready for the 2011 conference season!
Version 2.0 will be released on Saturday 16 April just before the 8th ALDinHE Conference: Queen’s University Belfast “Engaging Students – Engaging Learning” 18-20 April 2011
I will be presenting a workshop on the DiAL-e Framework and posters for both the SOLE model and DiAL-e.
The SOLE Model poster will also be featured at the UK Higher Education Academy (HEA) Annual Conference, “Changing Practice, Changing Times” at the East Midlands Conference Centre, Nottingham, 5-6 July 2011
Perhaps most exciting is the invitation to present the SOLE model at the 27th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on August 3-5 2011. Again I have been issued a workshop invitation, along with Kevin Burden, to present the DiAL-e Framework and alongside that work there will be an ‘Interactive Video Presentation‘ of the SOLE Model.
Part of my role at the LSE that I really enjoy is working with staff to find novel solutions to age-old problems. So a few weeks ago I was invited to discuss with colleagues in a research and teaching ‘cluster’ within a department that perennial question: “what’s the point of an away day?”
The head of department appeared to want the staff to spend the day writing serious funding proposals and yet a survey of the staff suggested they wanted to “have fun, and get to know each other.” The away day became a half day and the focus remained a little vague. The fixed points were lunch at noon, a gastro-pub at 5pm, and those apparent polar opposites, ‘research applications’ and ‘fun’.
The result was an off-campus half day at St Martin in the Fields, in the newly refurbished St Martin’s Hall. I had organised a ‘research-poster workshop’, in which tables of 4 or 5 colleagues, of different grades, backgrounds and discipline focus (socially engineered by the departmental manager), worked from a ‘mock’ European Journal funding call. The funding call, which modelled the ‘real thing’, invited applications for 12-24 month projects to build research networks with at least three country partners and a particular discipline focus. There was a specification about dissemination, use of technology and so on. The session ran along lines similar to the ‘World-Cafe‘ concept. So each table had to come up with a draft idea, blu-tac their A2 poster to the wall and then circulate around the other four groups’ posters providing feedback in the form of post-its (colour coded for each group).
The second session then allowed groups to revise their posters, go around and ask for clarification on any feedback received and produce a ‘final’ version of their research network proposal. All the while, the groups had a copy of the ‘marking criteria that would be used at the end, by them, to judge each-others efforts.
Final posters were put up and the groups circulated ‘marking’ the submissions. Each group had to come up with an agreed mark for each of the posters under some time pressure. As the ‘very light touch’ facilitator I went around between each round and photographed the posters, and I threw in a ‘red-herring’ with an envelope for each group suggesting a rumour that “The DG apparently likes…..”.
The effect was to have groups explore:
the difficulty of working with criteria which can appear ambiguous and needs careful unpacking;
the advantages of collegial review at both the developmental and final stages of proposals;
the need to think often ‘outside the box’ to come up with something original;
the danger of getting so carried away on a good idea it evades the call;
the danger of listening to rumour;
and that it is possible to have fun and still talk about research funding applications!
The feedback was gratifyingly positive and I’d suggest it’s an excellent model for a half-day workshop that recognises the need for junior staff to benefit from the experience of more seasoned researchers whilst bringing creativity and innovation to the process. It was also fun! Any workshop where people willingly stand up and start moving is good to see!
We are really delighted to have this news and keen to explore with a US audience some of the resources outside the original JISC digitization projects which initiated our framework approach. This project started in 2006 as a very small ‘assisted take-up’ activity for JISC but has maintained a consistent level of interest, development and support.
We are also keen to develop with our US colleagues, at this specific gathering with the focus on distance education, the ‘spaces’ dimension of the framework and look at how access to digital artefacts via laptops, tablets and handheld devices affects the pedagogical affordances presumed of them. We’ll be tweeting at #dialeUS as we plan and prepare for the conference. We hope some of you will join us.
Teaching quality interventions are always a challenge for an Academic Developer, walking a thin line between sanction and support, between reassurance and patronizing. Yesterday I ran a small workshop with new classroom tutors teaching Statistics. The challenges of teaching a dozen international students new statistical concepts at 5pm on a wet windy Friday evening in London needs little unpacking.
I sought to provide some tools for staff to think about their role, to reflect on how they might meet discipline goals. We focussed not on ‘tips and tricks’ but on the fundamentals of space and voice, and how to develop engagement with both.
We explored some classroom layouts, including the one we were in, and identified the social conventions of space that determine the learning and teaching styles that are adopted. It’s a nice activity which prompts participants to identify three different disciplines being taught in three layouts illustrated when in fact all three real examples are from the same course on the same day. It prompts the question ‘am I using this learning space effectively or does it constrain, and indeed determine, how I teach?’
The tools available in the space, projector, whiteboard, PowerPoint, Prezi, etc were then discussed in relationship to this space. One of the questions I like to ask is how would you teach if the familiar tools fail you (in this case, the decorators say have removed the whiteboards). On this occasion I was walking the talk because my PowerPoint presentation had no means of being projected on rhe day and I had rearranged the seating to be able to run the session differently. Useful demonstration however unwelcome! It was a nice exploration of the nature of the whiteboard as a ‘canvas’. I suggested students might be encouraged to photograph the whiteboard (the mobile phonecam being almost ubiquitous) to support the idea that this was a group creative process which rewarded engagement not simple the instruction from the board.
We then explored , with some amusing examples, the nature of the English language as a stressed language and the relationship, interplay, between intonation and connotation. This is always fun, not least because I get to remind myself why I never went into acting!
This combination of being more spatially aware, of using the tools with engagement as the intent not information delivery, and of simple appreciating the power of the human voice, will hopefully develop confidence and a sense of each tutors’ unique abilities to communicate.
It was a fun session to run and one I hope I get to run again soon and I would love to run it overseas too.
It’s always a strange thing to find oneself positioned as an ‘expert’. Today I found myself addressing 20 wide-eyed third-year statistics students on the art of the presentation. I was, it seems, the expert on presentations, and provided advice and guidance based almost entirely on what not to do, based on the cumulative experiences over educational technology conferences and educational media conferences over the last 10 years. Curiously, and worryingly, effective.
The SOLE model is intended to be developmental, diagnostic, evaluative and descriptive. It is borne out of a desire to make the learning design process transparent to students, to encourage staff to share ‘patterns’ of learning with each other and to provide a basis for self-evaluation and development of specific learning designs. The model is not concerned with the design of specific learning activities but rather the appropriate balance between the different modes of student engagement anticipated.
The model does not prevent an academic scheduling four hours contact time a week and delivering a didactic lecture, but it would illuminate clearly that that was the approach being undertaken. Likewise, the model in and of itself does not prevent staff from reproducing an identical pattern of learning every week through a paper or course, but again, the models’ associated toolkit would make that process clear.
The SOLE model is not prescriptive and it is possible for teams to change and modify any aspect of the toolkit to suit their needs. The intention however is to provide staff with a model of effective practice such that one might be concerned about the quality of the student learning experience if the model illustrated a consistently ‘unbalanced’ approach.
Phasing
One would anticipate that the visualisation generated by the toolkit would reflect a pattern of learning that differ from paper to paper, and from week to week. One could anticipate for example that in the first week of an undergraduate paper there would be significantly more ‘teacher-centeredness’ than in the twelfth week of a postgraduate paper. The visualisation will differ; the patterns can be expected to reflect different levels of engagement.
Centrality of Biggs Constructive Alignment
It is no coincidence that the model places the intended learning outcomes (ILO) at the centre. In each constructively aligned paper the pattern will be different because the learning outcomes, the assessment designed to illicit evidence of attainment and the patterns of teaching required to support that process will each be different. The SOLE model is precisely that, a model not a template. The model can, and should be adapted by staff to suit their particular approach to learning. It should reflect the nature both of their discipline, students existing context and the specific teaching environment.
The SOLE model was presented to colleagues in Zagreb (via Webinar) on December 8th as one possible way to explore staff preparedness for each cohort of learners they must design for.
I am delighted to be continuing my relationship with colleagues in Croatia at Centar za e-učenje and SRCE. I was asked to present Webinar on staff ‘integration’ of e-learning in their contemporary practice. The presentation for the Croatian National e-Learning Event on Wednesday 8th December comes at a rather opportune time as I have been writing about the myth of the ‘net-generation’ and the extent to which we are preparing academic staff adequately to work within contemporary expectations.
I’ve written a draft presentation entitled: Developing existing and new academic staff to integrate e-learning into their practice, that explores the need for each cohort of academic staff to revision, revitalise and reposition their teaching to suit the appropriate context in which they teach. It therefore becomes less an issue of whether there exists such a thing as a ‘net-generation‘ (I think not) but rather whether they have the reflective skills to enable them to position their practice appropriately and whether there exists learning design models that can support that practice. I cite the SOLE model as one possible approach but others certainly exist.
It was a great pleasure to work with colleagues at SRCE in Zagreb on Wednesday 8th for the 2nd National e-Learning Day. It’s always interesting to watch yourself but I do feel confident at least about the argument. There is a need to ensure that teaching staff see the process of professional development as one that prepares them to support the learning of each successive cohort of learners in an appropriate way, not as needing to find a technology solution to meet the ‘current’ perceive need.
It was a great pleasure to work with colleagues at SRCE in Zagreb on Wednesday 8th for the 2nd National e-Learning Day. It’s always interesting to watch yourself but I do feel confident at least about the argument. There is a need to ensure that teaching staff see the process of professional development as one that prepares them to support the learning of each successive cohort of learners in an appropriate way, not as needing to find a technological solution to meet the ‘current’ perceive need.
I am delighted to continue my relationship with colleagues in Croatia at CARNet and at Centar za e-učenje and SRCE. I have been asked to present Webinar on staff ‘integration’ of e-learning in their contemporary practice. The presentation for the Croatian National e-Learning Event on Wednesday 8th December comes at a rather opportune time as I have been writing about the myth of the ‘net-generation’ and the extent to which we are preparing academic staff adequately to work within contemporary expectations.
2005 Workshop at CARNet, Zagreb
I’ve written a draft presentation entitled: Developing existing and new academic staff to integrate e-learning into their practice that explores the need for each cohort of academic staff to revise, revitalise and reposition their teaching to suit the appropriate context in which they teach. It, therefore, becomes less an issue of whether there exists such a thing as a ‘net-generation‘ (I think not) but rather whether they have the reflective skills to enable them to position their practice appropriately and whether there exists learning design models that can support that practice. I cite the SOLE model as one possible approach but others certainly exist.
Looks like this book chapter with Kevin Burden on the conceptual modelling of emerging technologies is finally going to see the light of day. I note the publisher’s site now has chapter details, download prices and chapter ISBNs. So after a long wait, it’s going to happen:
Adaptation, Resistance and Access to Instructional Technologies: Assessing Future Trends In Education
It’s been an interesting process for this one. We had a journal article rejected and I was beginning to wonder if this was just too ‘left field’ and whether anyone would engage with it as an idea. I’m still convinced that the 3V concept has an interpretive and evaluative value but it needs a professional conversation and that means at least getting it ‘out there’ in a form that can be referenced in the hope dialogue follows. Here’s hoping.
I am currently in a symposium session at the Media and Learning conference in Brussels, sharing our ideas about how we might engage students and staff in Higher Education with media rich resources. We have explored the issue in some depth with a particular focus on identifying what students want from their University courses, and whether they really know what they want (want .v. needs). The panel have skirted around what we mean by the term ‘engagement’ but perhaps not as directly as we are trying to achieve with the DiAL-e framework. Its purpose is to focus on what students are engaged in doing during a learning session, rather than what the teacher/lecturer wants to deliver or even achieve.
There is a strong tendency, particularly amongst some of the non-UK speakers, to orientate themselves towards a predominantly transmission model of teaching in Higher Education whilst the DiAL-e framework is predicated far more around a learner perspective.
I attended a seminar run through the London Learning Lab yesterday focused on the future of education and the implications for ethical research. You can read more about it here. By chance I came across this presentation by Helen Beetham which she gave at Greenwich University recently. It covers a vast range of issues related to digital technologies in Higher Education but a lot of what she is saying is pertinent to what we are interested in achieving with the DiAL-e framework. Have a watch and listen if you get a chance!
The DiAL-e framework has already proven to be a flexible set of designs which can be used in a range of different contexts and one of these is the EduTubePlus European project which I am currently working on. Along with my colleague, Theo Kuechel, we are demonstrating how the DiAL-e framework can be used to engage students at the forthcoming media and learning conference in Brussels. Watch this space for an update on the outcomes of this presentation next week!
Kevin Burden and I met today in Leicester to review our progress on the DiAL-e Framework project. The project, funded by JISC in 2007-08 has generated significant interest, two book chapters, an article in review, several project reports, a JISC hosted website, over 120 workshop participants and more besides. We decided today to revitalise this work and move our online presence from an existing Wiki to WordPress to better share this ongoing work and make it sustainable. Over the coming days and weeks this site will grow, and we hope it will be of genuine use to those looking to make better use of digital artefacts from our amazingly rich public collections in their teaching.
Yesterday I posted some early thoughts on how visual rhetoric might be important to us in thinking about how we communicate in the teaching process, not just what we have to say but HOW we say it.
I said I’d have a crack at a PREZI presentation to illustrate my point – and here it is 🙂
I have begun writing a paper on visual rhetoric. I sat on the 7:31 commuter train to St.Pancras and watched commuters, hunched over their laptops, working in PowerPoint. Their screens filled with words, varieties of fonts, and formatting tricks in abundance. These comprehensive essays in landscape, perhaps to be printed and distributed but more likely projected illegibly for a bewildered business audience later that day reminded me again of the fundamental misuse of a very powerful and effective technology. The same day I showed my wife a Prezi presentation that I was preparing for a workshop the following day. Her comment was that it made her feel seasick as I moved fluidly, but somewhat distractedly, from one block of text to another. I suggested the term ‘see-sick’.
So I began to consider the power of these visual tools in our classrooms and the very superficial understanding that I, and I suspect the majority of my colleagues have, of their use. I turned to Aristotle.
Aristotle identified three branches of rhetoric: judicial, epideictic and deliberative. Judicial rhetoric is concerned with justice and injustice, the defence or advocacy of charge or accusation. Epideictic rhetoric refers to speech or writing in praise or blame. Perhaps the most familiar notion of rhetoric is that of deliberative, in which speech or writing attempts to persuade others to take or not to take some defined action.
Much of our teaching is the incitement to learners to do something, to take an action. Teaching may in many circumstances be considered deliberative rhetoric, an invitation on the part of the student (as reader, listener or participant) to pause and consider in response to a carefully timed performance and managed argument, the pace and rhythm control, the deliberate self interruption, punctuated silence, exclamations, questions, punctuating gestures. The teacher’s role is not simply to highlight an argument but to ensure that if a vote were cast the learner might make an appropriate judgment.
Teaching in face-to-face contexts supported by presentational technologies, the ubiquitous PowerPoint or some more contemporary form of visual media, requires a new mastery of rhetoric – that of visual rhetoric. This branch of rhetorical studies that concerns itself with the persuasive use of images, in isolation or in harmony with words, is a powerful tool in the classroom.
We live in an intensely visual world, surrounded by images in advertising, music, news information and educational media. Arrangements of words, in tag clouds, Word Clouds, or PowerPoint arrangements are visual objects. Text projected on the wall is either a visual representation, discursive, provocative, motivating or informative, or it is ‘just words’. Not every projected arrangement of light and dark on the classroom wall is easily inferred as a visual object, as visual rhetoric, “(W)hat turns a visual object into a communicative artefact–a symbol that communicates and can be studied as rhetoric–is the presence of three characteristics. In other words, three markers must be evident for a visual image to qualify as visual rhetoric. The image must be symbolic, involve human intervention, and be presented to an audience for the purpose of communicating with that audience.” (Smith, 2005, p. 144)
Kostelnick and Roberts in “Designing Visual Language: Strategies for Professional Communicators”, detail six canonical criteria through which to interpret the rhetorical impact, primarily of written text. These six are: arrangement, emphasis, clarity, conciseness, tone and ethos.
Arrangement – is the organisation of visual elements to demonstrate structure (and relationships)
Emphasis – differentiates elements giving some prominence through changes in size, shape and colour.
Clarity – avoiding unnecessary elements to assist the reader in ‘decoding’ quickly and completely the ‘message’
Conciseness –appropriately succinct designs that serve a specific audience need
Tone – the writer/presenter/designer’s tone provides evidence of their attitude to the subject
Ethos – developing the trust of the audience
These six visual criteria provide a helpful starting point in beginning to see images as objects for visual rhetoric and appropriate interpretation. (Kostelnick & Roberts, 2010)
Since Zaltman suggests that thoughts occur as images, which are essentially visual, there is a direct inverse relationship between the power of the visual to provoke an emotional non-verbal reaction, a thought. Research by Joy and colleagues using the Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique suggest a range of interesting relationships between viewers sense of space and depth, related directly to the positioning of objects, to the juxtaposition (overlapping, transparency, distortion) of images in support of a narrative. They conclude, “(U)ltimately, images and words are separate building blocks in the telling of stories but the two amplify each other. Researchers need to enrich and supplement the abstractions that accompany visuals with the details and particulars that accompany the verbal.” (Joy, Sherry Jr., Venkatesh, & Deschenes, 2009, p. 566)
Back in 2001, I did (what I still think was ) some interesting work with Nicola Durbridge at the Open University’s Institute of Educational Technology looking at how to overcome some of the restrictions of text-based discussion boards, the ‘drudgery’ of CMC (Computer Mediated Conferencing). I explored a simple ‘visual metaphor’ of a classroom so that individuals posting items to a forum did so ‘spatially’ as icons rather than simply adding the posting to the list. (Atkinson, 2001). I would be keen to extend now in looking at Prezi and its use of visual rhetoric.
Atkinson, S. (2001). Re-Tooling Online. In Book of Abstracts (pp. 154-156). Presented at the Online Educa Berlin 2001, Berlin: ICEF Berlin GMBH.
Joy, A., Sherry Jr., J., Venkatesh, A., & Deschenes, J. (2009). Perceiving images and telling tales: A visual and verbal analysis of the meaning of the internet. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 19(3), 556-566. doi:10.1016/j.jcps.2009.05.013
Kostelnick, C., & Roberts, D. D. (2010). Designing Visual Language: Strategies for Professional Communicators. Longman Publishing Group.
Smith, K. L. (2005). Handbook of visual communication: theory, methods, and media. Routledge.
The MCG website now has profiles of the projects moving forward from the LIVE!Museum Project. My favourite (I’m biased because I am on the development team) is I, Object.
Whilst all the projects are concerned with enhancing the on-site museum experience I, Object examines how the ‘web’ (in its broadest sense) can enhance the character of the object. Because the encounter with an object in a gallery should be a special experience, informational layers must add to, rather than detract, from that experience. This project seeks to reassert the “relevance of the object, its enduring significance and its contemporary relationships to in-gallery and other experiences”.
The research question, and one now being developed into a funding proposal, is ‘How can Museums and Heritage Institutions bring in external live content in order to enhance visitors’ experience of in-gallery objects?’
“What is imagined is an object-centred network that generates live content drawn from within, and beyond, the site itself in such a way as to enhance the visitor’s experience of in-gallery objects”.
A proposal for workshops associated with developing the conceptual framework for this project are being discussed, so hopefully we can benefit from a wider community input into the idea in the next two or three months.
