We need to recognise the labour involved in these emerging practices; existing teams are great at making things happen, making it feel possible, and making it as simple as they can for those of us who are experiencing it as users. But if the practices are to be embedded and widespread, that extra labour needs to be recognized and accounted for. People often can’t just turn up and flip a switch. And those who are told it’s just that easy are being sold something. In some institutions I am seeing a lot of recruitment in learning design and technology enhanced learning roles, in some I am seeing restructures with no overall increase in numbers, and of course some are either not changing or even reducing their numbers.
Category: Technology Enhanced Learning
This is just me thinking out loud… My wife went for a run at the weekend. She does that. I do not run, for the […]
Do we consider all learners when embedding digital into teaching, learning and assessment? If they don’t have the newest device, good connectivity, unlimited data, can they still participate, engage and learn, what if they have a disability? When practitioners start to use innovative practices and technologies is everyone included? It’s not often that I talk […]
As Technology Enhanced Learning continues to develop, it is clear that some form of digital learning environment will remain core to institutional practices; the levels of integration, features and porosity will continue to change, driven, and potentially driving the behavioural shifts we see in staff and students. Digifest18 was where Jisc launched “Next generation [digital] […]
An academic recently approached me and said: “I have been doing things this way for a long time – I want to do some digital stuff, I am on Twitter, I use Facebook I have good skills in Office and Google, but how do get started with changing my teaching?” It got me thinking. We […]
Digital is people – it’s not the first time this has been said on this blog, and I am sure it won’t be the last. One of the unique things about people, according to Chomsky, is our ability to communicate through language. Institutions are made up of people and there is a now a huge […]
Last week I wrote a short story “Next Gen DLEs and Coach C on 15:11 from Cheltenham”. It recounted my struggles with the Crosscountry Trains on-board booking system, and documented a series of failures and usability errors, both online and face-to-face. When I tweeted it, and cc’d @crosscountryUK for comment – they did kindly get […]
Bear with me. This story starts with a journey. 25th April 2017, 14:30: Bristol. It was a Tuesday. I was heading home from a meeting. There is a Train Service provider in the UK called CrossCountry Trains. They have a fleet of trains with LCD seat reservations. The seat reservation system downloads all the reservations […]
Recently we held a really fun day of internal talks around a variety of issues. I chose to build on the metaphor that Amber Thomas first suggested around “cats and dead birds”. I have used this before in workshops, but I wanted to build on it, and with limited time available (max 10 minutes) this […]
#Codesign16 Launched on 31st October, so far the hashtag has appeared over 4000 times and discussion across all the challenges has been lively. The area I am leading is Next Generation Digital Learning Environments, receiving over 600 tweets and a dozen blog posts from across the sector. We asked a range of questions, including: What […]