Cascading Change Symposium 09

Live blog of the session:

Cascading change symposium – getting beyond centralised technologies #CaCha09

• There are various viewpoints in the educational technology space. We want to explore tensions.
• Gradiants: elearning works……elearning doesn’t work
• Context: Interventions, second order change in HE. Icamp project www.icamp.eu EU-funded project
• Wanted to create opportuniies to advanced dispositions – skills knowledge and orientations for succeful action in distributed working

Three areas:

• Collaborating with others,
• social networking and
• self directing intentional learning projects

Negotiating and making decisions on appropriate tools and services for mediating particualr activities is one means of expressing self-direction

Context

• 3 month masters online course in HE, distrbuted actos, communication and (inter)action technologically mediated with a landscape fo tools and services
• Shift of control to the studetns
• Learning contracts as suport instruments
• ActorsL studens, faciltators, institutional reps and researchers
• Challenges - interpretation and perception of shift of control and redistrbution of responsibilities

Why do these type of interventions often fail? Bereiter 2002 - Allocated timeframes dont fit, initial implementation may not show success, impact may be further down the line

Gráinne Conole
22:29 on 6 December 2009 (Edited 22:39 on 6 December 2009)

@aneesha interventions into systems of organised complexity can't be modelled into simple cause and effect #cacha09 #ascilite09

Gráinne Conole
22:42 on 6 December 2009

The challenge/context

• OECD trends – the learning society (rising attainment, increasing resources, inequalities)
• ICT and the next generation (faster, smaller, cheaper, mobile and widely available)
• Accountability – data driven, benchmarking, and drilling down. Reliable, comprephesive and valued evidence
• Beyond technical impact – understanding users and technologies in context

Source: OECD Trends shaping Education 2008 edition

Gráinne Conole
22:45 on 6 December 2009

The importance of big ideas and questions

• A pedagogy of ideas (Papert)
• Technology giveth and technology taketh away and not always in equal measure Niel Postman
• Also the work of John Seely Brown

Gráinne Conole
22:45 on 6 December 2009 (Edited 22:47 on 6 December 2009)

 Lessons learn from some of their projects

Lesson Digital learning communities project

• Social learning – support different connections between people, tools and knowledge
• Disaggregate the artifact – look around and within the device
• Need to develop more transformative understanding of user and technologies in context (presence and place)
• No one size fits all
• Network literacies
• Engage users
• Need to ensure we don’t crowd out different solutions

Gráinne Conole
22:52 on 6 December 2009

What's different? (with new technologies, are we replicating the hype of previous technologies)

• The abundance of information, quantity alters the fundamental experience
• Can we put the genie back in the bottle, the internet is here and here to stay

Gráinne Conole
23:15 on 6 December 2009