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A.I.: Anticipating Impact of Educational Governance

It was my pleasure last week to deliver a mini-workshop at the Independent Schools of New Zealand Annual Conference in Auckland. Intended to be more dialogue than monologue, I’m not sure if it landed quite where I had hoped. It is an exciting time to be thinking about educational governance and my key message was ‘don’t get caught up in the hype’.

Understanding media representations of “Artificial Intelligence”.

Mapping AI Types Mapping types of AI in 2023

We need to be wary of the hype around the term AI, Artificial Intelligence. I do not believe there is such a thing. Certainly not in the sense the popular press purport it to exist, or has deemed to have sprouted into existence with the advent of ChatGPT. What there is, is a clear exponential increase in the capabilities being demonstrated by computation algorithms. The computational capabilities do not represent intelligence in the sense of sapience or sentience. These capabilities are not informed by the senses derived from an organic nervous system. However, as we perceive these systems to mimic human behaviour, it is important to remember that they are machines.

This does not negate the criticisms of those researchers who argue that there is an existential risk to humanity if A.I. is allowed to continue to grow unchecked in its capabilities. The language in this debate presents a challenge too. We need to acknowledge that intelligence means something different to the neuroscientist and the philosopher, and between the psychologist and the social anthropologist. These semiotic discrepancies become unbreachable when we start to talk about consciousness.

In my view, there are no current Theory of Mind applications… yet. Sophia (Hanson Robotics) is designed to emulate human responses, but it does not display either sapience or sentience.

What we are seeing, in 2023, is the extension of both the ‘memory’, or scope of data inputs, into larger and larger multi-modal language models, which are programmed to see everything as language. The emergence of these polyglot super-savants is remarkable, and we are witnessing the unplanned and (in my view) cavalier mass deployment of these tools.

Three ethical spheres Ethical spheres for Governing Boards to reflect on in 2023

Ethical and Moral Implications

Educational governing bodies need to stay abreast of the societal impacts of Artificial Intelligence systems as they become more pervasive. This is more important than having a detailed understanding of the underlying technologies or the way each school’s management decides to establish policies. Boards are required to ensure such policies are in place, are realistic, can be monitored, and are reported on.

Policies should already exist around the use of technology in supporting learning and teaching, and these can, and should, be reviewed to ensure they stay current. There are also policy implications for admissions and recruitment, selection processes (both of staff and students) and where A.I. is being used, Boards need to ensure that wherever possible no systemic bias is evident. I believe Boards would benefit from devising their own scenarios and discussing them periodically.

 

Very Brief Overview of ‘Innovating Pedagogy 2022’

This very brief summary is in no way to be taken as a substitute for reading the full report, or indeed the Executive Summary, which is available here: Innovating Pedagogy 2022

Cover of Innovating Pedagogy 2022This is the 10th annual report exploring new forms in interactive and innovative practice of teaching, learning and assessment. These innovations already exist in pockets of practice but are not considered mainstream. This report, a collaboration between the Institute of Educational Technology in The Open University, UK, and the Open University of Catalonia, Spain, is the result of a filtering process and is compiled, based on a review of published studies and other sources.

Hybrid models
Maximising learning flexibility and opportunities. Beyond the strict curriculum delineations in Blended Learning models, Hybrid forms aim to empower the learner to optimise their own learner choices at to where, when and how to learn. Providing flexible choices requires teachers and institutions to adjust their systemic approaches.		 Influencer-led education
 Learning from education influencers on social media platforms. Acknowledging the growth of edu-influencers, who optimise their use of social media tools to share their knowledge, experience, and passion for a range of subjects from the highly specialised to the generic. Evaluating the veracity of the message is a challenge for the learner.
Dual learning scenarios
Connecting learning in classrooms and industry workplaces. A step on from work-integrated learning models, the expectation is that course designers fully meld both formal classroom and work spaces into a coherent experience.		 Pedagogies of the home
Understanding the home as a place for cultural learning. Not the same as home-schooling. Rather, it seeks to leverage the wider socio-cultural environment that the learner inhabits. Also recognises the burden on marginalised communities to fully participate.
Pedagogies of microcredentials
Accredited short courses to develop workplace skills. Existing approaches, snippets taken from existing programmes, fail to create an effective learning ecosystem for learners who require support to develop a patchwork portfolio meshing formal, non-formal and informal experiences together.		 Pedagogy of discomfort  
Emotions as powerful tools for learning and for promoting social justice. A process
of self-examination that requires students to critically engage with their ideological traditions and ways of thinking about issues such as racism, oppression and social injustice.
Pedagogy of autonomy
Building capacity for freedom and independent learning. Explores notion of incorporating informal, non-formal and formal learning patterns into the learner’s experience, creating self-regulated learners with an emphasis on their metacognitive development and allowing them to reflect their true selves..		 Wellbeing education
Promoting wellbeing across all aspects of teaching and learning. Wellbeing education helps students to develop mental health ‘literacy’ by teaching them how to manage their own mental health, recognise possible disorders, and learn how, where and when to seek help.
Watch parties
Watching videos together, whatever the time or place. Leveraging the increased connectivity prompted in response to covid-19, and the move of  media providers to provide educational tools, this is the notion of structured engagement around a shared viewing (or listening) experience.		 Walk-and-talk
Combining movement and conversation to enhance learning. Not just used in service of for those in need of emotional support, where the therapeutic benefits have been proven, but across a wide range of learning activities where reflection and thought would be best served by being away from the classroom and being outside and mobile.
10 Themes from the 2022 Innovating Pedagogy report

 

Kukulska-Hulme, A., et.al. (2022). Innovating Pedagogy 2022: Open University Innovation (No. 10). Open University.
 

Dr Simon Paul Atkinson PFHEA / 13 July 2022

Image is generated by OpenAI’s DALL-E2

Flexible Learning requires portfolio-centred course design.

ePortfolios, and indeed their analogue counterparts, allow learners to make selections of educational evidence, bring them together so that the learner self-manages their reflections, progress and learning journey. They can also be used as tools for storing and sharing assessment, academic records and certifications.

I recently had a discussion with a colleague who advocated LinkedIn as a portfolio platform for vocational tertiary learners. That assumes that learners are ready to share the results of their endeavours, to present themselves to the world. A networking portfolio. That is one facet of a good portfolio tool. The process of selecting artefacts to share, writing articles and posts for LinkedIn is certainly advantageous for established and confident learners, but it is not suitable for the vast majority. LinkedIn is a professional social networking platform first and foremost, and an effective one, but it is not an ePortfolio for learners.

An effective ePortfolio tool is essential for contemporary learners in an environment in which digital forms of learning are ubiquitous. The ability to bring together, to aggregate, all forms of informal, non-formal and formal learning is something any serious educational provider needs to consider now.

An ePortfolio tool could provide the backbone of all the diverse provision across work-based, distance and flexible forms of learning. It diminishes the importance of where specific learning experiences are sought, which platforms students are required to logon to access their learning content, and instead provides a single reference point. ePortfolio tools that can be linked to any number of different virtual learning platforms and commercial storage options (Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, etc), that enables artefacts to be selectively shared or kept private already exist.

The Mahara ePortfolio ( https://mahara.org ) environment is one of those New Zealand government funded initiatives that, despite a lack of ongoing investment, has continued to exist simply because it is fundamentally sound. I am merely a user of Mahara and have no commercial or other vested interest in the platform. But I am beginning to anticipate how useful, and central, it could be to the mission of all educational providers if serious attention and investment was made into the Mahara platform. Learners would be able to logon to their ePortfolio, in effect as their personal portal, and be able to search across all provision, from micro-credentials to full degrees, across all modes of delivery. Learners would be able to add options to their ‘wishlist’ and could submit it for career advice. Learners would be able to move across different modes and locations as life intervenes. With some further integrations and a bit more UX development, learners would be able to upload images and video from the construction site, kitchen or orchard. Learners would be able to talk to other learners outside of their cohorts or courses, across providers and their platforms. With some additional investment Mahara can be used across all forms of ePortfolio use in vocational learning.

Portfolios can provide a personal profile, serve as a capstone portfolio for a qualification, a reflective space and a store for artefacts. It could also be used as a portal for other assessment and learning resources.

Flexible learning requires a portfolio-centred approach to learning.

Photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash

Taxonomies of Educational Outcomes

Delighted to share an interactive walk-through of the recently updated poster (available here). Click in the top right-hand corner to make the interactive fullscreen. There is also a video walk-through of the same poster below. Note the title of the poster has changed from using ‘objectives’ to ‘outcomes’.

Guidance to Educators: Developing professional relationships

Transcript:

Welcome all, please feel free to share this video with colleagues if you think they would find it of interest. 

Let’s talk today about building professional relationships. Teaching can be quite a lonely experience. Depends a little bit on the organization that you teach in. You might be teaching in a very isolated part of the world, or you might be teaching a very specialist discipline. You might be the only person teaching that particular subject in your school, even in your area. 

And having good connections with other practitioners that understand you, understand your context, definitely do serve to lower the level of anxiety that you might feel. There’s evidence to suggest that well- connected educators do suffer less anxiety.

So reaching out now is much easier. There are any number of digital platforms that you can engage with and connect with other people. And in doing so you benefit not just that level of human connectivity, but you’re also using them as a source of new ideas, new sources, new perspectives. 

It’s very important if you do get involved in any of these platforms that you do become a contributor, as well as a consumer. That’s not just because that’s fair. It’s just, it’s also that echoing your voice is really important, using your voice to mirror the practice of others is part of the process of building those relationships.

Even if it’s just to go back to someone who’s posted something, you found a value to just say “I’ve used what you suggested. It worked very well for me” or it didn’t and I made this adjustment, and I did it this way. Having that level of feedback is really important. 

So, I’m on a number of different platforms. I’m on LinkedIn. I’m on Twitter. I’m on Instagram. I’m on Tik Tok. I’m on YouTube and I’ve got my own website, but I think the two that everyone needs to start with are Twitter and LinkedIn. Build a profile on LinkedIn, doesn’t have to be expansive, but at least something that gives people a sense of who you are as a person.

And then Twitter is a great way of just picking up ideas, sources, perspectives, re-tweeting things that you think are of interest, identifying things more widely, and posting them and share that community experience. You’d be surprised how quickly it does build and giving you a solid network to lean on will undoubtedly reduce your anxiety. 

So you might want to try some of those platforms for yourself. See how it goes. 

Let me know. Be well.

Guidance for Educators: Making time for learning

Transcript:

Welcome all. Please feel free to share this with your colleagues, if you think they’ll find it of interest.

Let’s talk about how you make time in your learning. We all have a very busy curriculum. We have a lot of ‘content’ to get through a lot of concepts and learning, to convey to students during any one session. I think it’s really important that we make time for learning. I think teaching is better equated to a version of television rather than of radio. There’s a concept in radio of ‘dead air. Every, every silence has to be filled. That’s not true in television. If you’ve got something visual to look at, you don’t need to provide words to go with it.

So unless you’re developing podcasts for teaching, I think there’ll always be a visual element in any teaching encounter that you’re designing. There’s no need to worry about the dead air.

And in fact, a well-planned teaching session will always have space built into it, time built into it, to allow for some quiet reflection. And I think you do need to build that into your session at pertinent points, during any session that you’re delivering. So you can build in reflective questions.

For example, something I used to do literally to put up a slide that would have a question on it and just say. We are going to pause for a minute. I’m going to encourage you to think about that. Make some notes. Sometimes students might start talking to each other. That’s not necessarily a big problem. It’s only for a minute. It gives you a chance to gather your thoughts, have a glass of water, but it also paces the session quite effectively.

So please have a go try something similar. Let me know how it goes. Be well.

Guidance for Educators: Mix it up!

 

Transcript:

Welcome all. Please feel free to share this video with colleagues, if you think they would find it of interest.

I want to talk today about engaging students about the need to mix it up a little bit in terms of the way that we deliver our learning, the way that we engage our students. It is important to be consistent from a quality perspective but to avoid repetition. And it’s very easy to make an excuse and say, well, “this is the room that I’ve been allocated, to teach in”, or “this is the confines of the webinar space that I’m being expected to operate in”. And that becomes a defense mechanism on the part of educators. So this is the way this is the way it’s always been done. “This is the way the lectures work. This is the way it’s done.”

And I think we need to avoid that.

It’s important that we focus on the notion of engagement of the learning we need to think about, what’s going to provoke the learner, provoke the student, to engage with the concepts and the knowledge that’s being shared or imparted.

And that doesn’t necessarily making every session a very different form of active learning, but it does mean you have to focus in on the concepts and think about how best to illustrate those concepts. Visually, ideally. So the best way to do that is to review the concepts within an individual session and put it in the context of a broader course, and then identify whether or not you think this particular concept is best experienced through some lecture form,

or through some seminar form or through some active learning form you might throw in a moot or a discussion you might throw in a question, answer session. You might throw in a way of giving students to do peer learn from each other, even within a lecture theater, anything is possible. It’s really important that you break out of the mold of doing repetitive forms of delivery. It’s really important that we mix it up to maintain the engagement of our students. So look at the whole series of sessions, identify individual concepts, take a course wide view, and then map out what best form of engagement you think is going to work that ensures some variation in the learning experience.

And that’s much more likely to engage, maintain, engagement of your learners. 

Guidance for Educators: Speak freely

Transcript

Welcome all. Please feel free to share this with your colleagues. If you think they’ll find this. Interesting. So let’s talk today about how you deliver your notes. I’m going to assume that if you’re delivering any kind of lecture, you will have notes and it’s absolutely critical that you don’t stand and read.

It’s also important that you don’t substitute your notes with PowerPoint slides that have bullet-pointed versions of your notes, and you end up just reading out the bullet points. There’s good practice and bad practice in that. There’ll be other resources available around that shortly. So, I think it’s really important that you think about how you convey the message of the learning using your notes.

It’s ‘notes’, not a script. Don’t illustrate with bullet points, use as much eye contact as possible and make sure that you are illustrating key points. If you are going to use PowerPoint as a visual tool, it is a visual tool, not a text-based tool. It’s absolutely critical that you recognize that the most powerful tool you have when you’re teaching is your own voice.

And there are things you can do to train your voice. There are ways that you can encourage your voice to carry more meaning, more conviction, and there’ll be resources about that coming out shortly. So I tend to rehearse at least part of any presentation. I don’t always rehearse the entire one hour lecture or 40-minute lecture or 35-minute lecture, but I will always try and rehearse at least part of it to make sure that the tone is right, that the notes are structured in such a way that they will support what it is I want to teach.

So I would suggest that you try something similar. Let me know how it goes. Be well.

Guidance for Educators: Session Planning

Transcript:

Welcome all. Please feel free to share this with colleagues. If you think it would be of interest to them. So, today I want to talk a little bit about why it’s important to plan your sessions. This is particularly pertinent if you’re delivering a stand-up lecture, that’s expected to keep students engaged for 40 minutes, 45 minutes, but even in a normal session, a normal seminar session, it’s still really important that you plan. Down your session. It’s really important that you don’t plan around the content. And rather you plan around the learning experiences. We can almost take them as synonyms. We would almost say content and experiences are the same, but it’s really important that you think about how the student is hearing that content, how they’re engaging with that content rather than just delivering them raw content.

I think it’s also really important as you plan out those linkages, those connections between the experiences in your lecture, that you don’t use a hundred percent of the time, certainly lecturers when they start their careers, if they’re not particularly confident, they will walk into a lecture theater, start delivering, keep talking and leave at the end, in order to possibly avoid confrontation, avoid questions.

And once you’ve found your feet, you will be able to use the time really effectively. And I think it’s important that you plan possibly for up to 80% of the session to be around the learning experiences, the guided experiences that you were expecting to share with students, and leave 20%. at the end. Sometimes people say, what do I do if people don’t have questions, if students don’t ask anything, how do I use that time?

There, there are a number of ways that you can use that, but it is important to have a, almost an Encore in the way that a musician is expecting to come back onto the stage and perform again. we don’t usually get, rounds of standing ovations for our teaching, but very often having an Encore is really important.

It’s almost the most important thing because it’s the last thing that the student is going to experience. So it can’t be something that is core. Can’t be core content or core content experience because you might not get your opportunity. The session might go long and it’s dangerous to leave the best to the end, but it has to be something that’s reinforcing something that’s empowering and it’s worth actually concentrating really on what that Encore is going to look like.

And then build the session back. If the session does go a little bit long, that Encore needs to be able to be prepared either as a short video interaction to go up on the website on your, virtual learning environment, or possibly. Yeah, featuring featured in a handout, but it’s really important that you plan out the experiences for 80% of the session, and link them together, conceptually through good planning.

There are some templates that you can use for planning sessions, a search on the web would find any number of them. I’ve also got one on my website as well. If you do want to access that.

Just give it a go. See how it goes. Let me know. Be well.

Teaching Enhancement Toolkit: Simple 5 Step Lesson Plan

Why we need to change how we design courses.

There are many courses out there that do a great job of teaching manual, dexterity and physical capabilities. From bricklaying, hairdressing, to gas-fitting, there are course that are focussed around manual processes. However, there are huge numbers of graduates from tertiary programmes that cannot perform duties required of employers on day-one simply because they have not learnt how to do something. Their learning may have been told ‘why’, and even ‘what’ is expected, but it has not enabled them to perfect the skills associated with the ‘how’.

It remains remarkable to me that so many course and programme specification documents, replete with (sometimes well-formed) learning outcomes, have NO psychomotor outcomes. There are few courses that could not be improved by including an assessed outcome associated with using a tool or technology.

To prove the point I asked colleagues informally before Christmas whether they could think of a course where there was NO tool or technology use in play. Without further prompting, most agreed that Excel skills, SPSS, CAD tools, even library databases all required a degree of incremental competence but that these had not been in any way ‘taught’, let alone assessed, within their courses. One provocateur suggested that their course required only the ability to write and reflect. It took little effort to unpick this given that writing in this context requires a word-processing package, formatting, style sheets, spell-checking and in-text-citations, all of which are assumed graduates skills. This colleague stood their ground, suggesting that they were not employed to teach those skills; that was someone else’s responsibility.

This may be at the root of the challenge. Thirty years ago (when many of our current educational leadership graduated) your three to seven years spent at University was a valuable time spent in proximity to the sources of privileged knowledge, the esteemed Professor or the library. You had a whole life after graduation to develop the rounded skills associated with being whatever your chosen lifetime employment might be. That is simply no longer the case. The ‘academy’ no longer contains the privilege knowledge. We have democratised the information sources. Even those who embark on a lifelong vocation will find the landscape around them continuously changing.

Access to the LinkedIn Learning resources, and the cornucopia of free web resources, has allowed some institutions to negate whatever obligations for manual, dexterity and physical skills development they might feel towards their students. Some course weave these external resources into the learner’s experience, others totally abdicate responsibility and deem it part of the independent learning required of learners.

One reason for this lack of attention paid to the acquisition of psychomotor skills is because it is thought harder to assess someone’s psychomotor skill set that it is to test their knowledge, and by extension their intellectual or cognitive skills. If I can’t meaningfully assess it, I’ll just avoid teaching it. It is also a function of the ‘curse of knowledge’, given that faculty have acquired their psychomotor skills in a particular technology or tool over an extended period of time and they have failed to either document that learning or indeed to reflect on it.

There are some well designed courses out there. I hope you designed or teach on one. But there is still a significant deficit in the in-course provision of support for the acquisition of psychomotor skills associated with tools and technologies in a range of disciplines. We need to design courses across ALL disciplines that are rooted in the skills that graduates require to handle the uncertain information, technology, and socio-cultural environments they face. This means designing courses first around psychomotor skills, interpersonal and affective skills, then meta-cognitive and cognitive skills. Then, and only then, should we worry about the factual knowledge element. We need programme and course designers to be designing with different priorities if we want to make learning appropriate for the contemporary learner.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

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