Discursive Production

With a new course starting in a couple of days, it’s shaping up to be a busy and fun summer work-wise. I love teaching and can’t wait to get back into it. And I love teaching about technology!

*squee*

As Vancouver bursts fully forth into a lovely spring, I glance periodically out the window towards all that is in bloom. And then I get back to work. Because the end of April is the run-up to a new term.

Of course, the good new is that we can have class outside every day…if you have a laptop, good battery, and can pick up a decent wi-fi signal. Gotta love online learning! What’s that? Can’t see the screen in the sunshine? Get a ‘brolly!

And don’t forget the sunscreen.

In most instances my job right now is to help other course authors and instructors get ready for next week. But largely I’m focussed on the course I’m co-writing and teaching. It’s in very good shape, but there’s always a fair bit of alignment work to be done.

In a nutshell, constructive alignment (popularized by John Biggs), means make sure it all fits. Or, make sure it’s not contradictory. In curricular terms, “it” refers to learning objectives, course materials, instructional activites, and assessment strategies. In political economic terminology this would be called transparency.

It’s a simple premise: explain why you’re teaching this, what materials you’re using, how you will facilitate learning, and how you will assess learning. However I think many university-level instructors ask their students questions on assignments/quizzes/exams because they’re really good questions, even though sometimes they can’t be linked to what the course is ostensibly about.

Constructive alignment sceptics think this dumbs down education; in my experience, it’s the opposite. Constructive alignment leaves little (well, none, hopefully) ambiguity. That makes the bar both exceedingly clear and inexcusable to miss.

The tradition course authorship model (give me a course title and I’ll teach “it”) is also a lot of work. But taking the added steps to inventory and align your course before you teach it (rather than tweaking it along the way) makes for a lot more work up front.

But it also makes for much less time with students. Because the first time you say “when I said you needed to write ‘a 500 word or less proposal that includes project title, rationale, literature review, and working hypothesis’ that meant your assignment needed to be a proposal up to 500 words long, with a title, rationale, lit review and working hypothesis.”

Oh. That’s what you meant.

Yes.

It’s official: I’ll be teaching ETEC 565: Learning Technologies: Selection, Design and Application in UBC’s Master of Educational Technology (MET) programme, starting May. I’m very much looking forward to teaching again.

Here’s the blurb:

ETEC565 is an online seminar that provides several theoretical frameworks to assist educators in evaluating, selecting and using various learning technologies. Students will gain hands-on experience using a range of learning technologies and platforms: web-publication, course management systems, communication tools, community and collaboration tools, multimedia, and social software tools. Students will complete a number of small assignments using different learning technologies as well as a larger project in which they bring several of these technologies together to design materials and activities to support student learning.

I’ve taught a similar course previously, which was delivered face-to-face (F2F): this one is all online. Should be fun; should be challenging.

I’ve also registered for a couple of courses this summer. As a staff person at UBC I’m entitled to a tuition waiver. I’m taking a university-level French class (I’ve not taken university-level French before), and a Canadian history one. Funny that my doctoral supervisor is a pre-eminent Canadian historian and this will be my first university-level history class as well. However the latter course is print-based distance-based and I have 12 months to finish it. Though my goal is before Christmas and Olympic fever come later this year.

But I won’t disclose my teacherness to either instructor: it can be unfun teaching teachers. 😉

The ‘net dynamism is one of the reasons it’s so great: information can be disseminated quickly, efficiently, and consumably. Updating online resources makes for (near) instant updating to consumers, particularly when technologies like RSS are used. It’s all good, right?

When creating online learning spaces–within an LMS like Vista or Moodle, or via a regular web-site–it’s tempting to try leveraging web resources. And often it works really well. But sometimes it doesn’t.

Let’s say you’re writing an online course–or a face-to-face course, but you want to use some artifact online as the centre of an activity.  Here are some questions to consider:

• What does this bring to the learning experience beyond other materials?
• What sorts of technologies–including plug-ins and helper applications–are required for this to work?
• Is this a broadband-dependent resource: can folks using dial-up or a 3G tethered connection still access it?
• How confident am I that this site will be up when needed–is it a site maintained by an institution (odds are good) or individual (odds are less)?
• What does the URL look like: if it’s got all sorts of wacky strings in the text, it’s probably been generated by a CMS…and if the site’s redesigned, will your link die? Can I easily find the page again, either by searching the Web or navigating through levels of the site?
• What sort of back-up plan can I make, just in case? Can I use the Internet Archives, or create a web archive myself?

It’s no fun to spend hours patching holes in a course site–but it happens often. We can’t control this dynamic, vibrant, evolving beast. But we can anticipate common hiccups and identify work-arounds before we need them.

Well it’s never boring, at least!

There seems little doubt that Web 2.0 technologies like blogging often perform a pedagogical function. In fact, there are lots of spaces and places where blogs are created explicitly for teaching and learning. We use them in a number of courses here at UBC, but all levels of lifelong learning–community, primary, secondar, tertiary, adult and continuing–are using blogs somewhere to learn.

Their uptake, however, hasn’t been universal–or even consistent. Often (too often?) instructors in teacher traning programmes take the idea of a reflective practice journal and transpose it online as a blog. As someone who has taught in such programmes I think the trade-offs involved aren’t worth it: reflective journals only work well if the teacher has the ability to be forthright about her experiences. A paper journal can be put away; a blog, not so much. And yes, even sites like Livejournal, that give bloggers the ability to filter content to some or all prying eyes, are fallible. If you can create an account for it online, someone can hack it. Particularly for early service teachers I recommend sticking to paper.

Blogagogy (blogs as pedagogy) carries all sorts of opportunity costs. At the very minimum, a computer with Internet access are required–and the skills to use them. For many novice computer learners, the jump from consuming content to creating can be both confusing and daunting. Thus, for educators the onus is on us to help learners navigate through these challenges, lest they become barriers to participation. And learning.

Many years ago I was tasked with developing a computer training course for “mental health consumers”: persons who had been persistent users of mental health facilities ranging from counsellors and psychiatrists, to those who had been institutionalized in hospitals for extended periods. They referred to themselves as consumers because a number were not mentally ill: they had learning disabilities and were misdiagnosed–or tossed into care because it was expedient.

I had facilitated meetings for this group for a number of years before embarking on this project. I knew the members well and I knew computer training well and expected this to be challenging but manageable. But on the first day I started teaching, one of the learners was unable to double-click the mouse: their medication impeded their fine motor skills. I could change the system preferences to require only a single click, but my materials were all printed with double-click instructions.

We got through it; in fact, it went very well. We taught these folks how to use the Internet and MS Word as self-advocacy tools. They learned how to verify policies regarding social entitlements so they could assert their rights. They became skilled at writing letters so their requests would require government bureaucracies to respond officially, beyond a verbal “no.” You can read more about this work here:

Egan, John P. “Pedagogy of the Depressed: Mental Health Consumers, Computers and Empowerment”. Convergence. 35(1) (2002): 82 – 89.

In 2006 I “had to” go to Belfast to give a paper at a conference. Since I was already there and my airfare paid by my grant, I decided to check out Europe’s explosion of cheap-and-somewhat-cheerful budget airlines. After applying various rubrics I ended up with two destinations as side trips: Tallinn Estonia and Slovenia. In Tallinn I hoped to get a glimpse of what a post-Soviet society looked like; in Slovenia I wanted to visit my online friend Tomaz and I wanted to see what the only former Yugoslavian country to transition into the EU looked like.

Having only seen Tallinn, I feel unprepared to analyze Estonia per sé. Tallinn has almost as many Russians as Estonians, and I was largely in the old city–which is marvellous, but hardly representative of anything but itself. I’d love to spend more time there, seeing the rest of the country.

Slovenia I got a good look at: Tomaz and his partner Igor pretty much gave me the full meal one day tour deal. After an evening in Lujblijana proper (which means’ Lovely town’) we went high into the Julian Alps, through the lake district, across briefly into Italy, and down to the Italian speaking Adriatic coast. Aside from being a wonderful, beautiful, quietly self-confident place, what struck me the most were the highways.

No, really: the highways. In fact, the infrastructure overall. In particular, the contrast between Italy and Slovenia was striking. Slovenia seems to have decided that infrastructure is critical to maintaining a robus economy. It’s working too: the GDP per capita is already higher than Greece and Portugal, both of which have been in the EU for many years.

But highways were just the obvious part. Schooling is quite good apparently, from K through university. I encountered very few Slovenians who didn’t have a basic grasp of English. There are also apparently ongoing investments in telecom and hydro. And even the recent gas crisis–which didn’t affect Slovenia nearly as much as its neighbours–has sparked a public discourse on how to move towards greener, more renewable energy sources ASAP. Not if; when and how.

Today we get the dog and pony show that is the Throne speech. I’ll skip it, thanks. But tomorrow we get the details on the budget. While there is so much we can spend to stimulate the economy, to my mind infrastructure tops the list. This would include:

• highways, rails, airports, port
• Housing
• telecommunications networks
• Renewable energy industries

It would not include bailing out an auto industry or forestry industry, so long as those industries cling to unsustainable (economically and environmentally) business models. The writing has been on the wall for both industries for over a decade.Radically change how they do business if they want a hand up.

No more stoopid, gas guzzling personal vehicles; subsidies to develop hybrid and electric vehicles faster; a re-tooling of the way their factories operate. And a bigger bucket to help the workers find new jobs in other industries for the most part.

And no more shipping raw logs out of Canada: that change alone will both save and create jobs.