Where we hope our students will engage and thrive in the theoretical and practical communities created through our learning design, teaching and assessment, the same cannot be said of how we initiate and implement teaching and learning change from an institutional through to curricular level. Driven by the sometimes-disruptive predictions for the future of our Universities, pedagogical change is often seen as the panacea for all manner of strategic threats or the rocket fuel to take advantage of the opportunities the new environment affords. Almost every institution undertakes programs of pedagogical change in regular cycles, shifting philosophies and modes of assessment, identifying and implementing technological solutions and translating the complex frames of future prediction, industry expectation and market potential into readily deliverable forms of learning. We are often behest to whatever trend, assumed strategic necessity or technological payload everyone else believes they need to have. What is interesting though is how little the core fundamentals of our pedagogy have changed, whilst the periphery and the compliance have turned over dozens of times.
Real pedagogical change (the kind the addresses the core experiences, practices and realities of teaching and learning) needs people to lead it, challenge it and make it happen, as technology. goodwill and assumptions will only carry you so far. There is no magic fix or single system that will bundle up all the experiences, capabilities and outcomes for student learning and deliver them in a cloud shaped box. This kind of change needs to come from the very cultural heart of the institution, the critical centre shaped by our common experiences of being part of this highly fraught, polarised and often lonely place we call our University, with its frayed boundaries and contested and liminal spaces. Successful pedagogical change happens because the institution (from the top and the bottom) listens and engages with the people in the middle. It makes sure the right people are in the right rooms, participating in the conversation. It challenges the assumptions around why are we making this change and who are we making it for. It understands and recognises that change elicits fear, challenges confidence and fuels assumptions of obsolescence and redundancy. It happens because you are a part of it, you have a voice in it and you understand what it means to own and participate in collective strategic responsibility. And yes, I know it isn’t easy. Maybe you are not let into the room. Maybe, if you are there, you don’t know what to say. Perhaps you are the person who pipes up when no one can connect to EDUROAM and you help out. Perhaps, the louder voices and dominant perspectives simply cancel you out, filling your eyes and ears with white noise and anger.
No one has all the answers. No one can say they don’t have frameworks, memories, experiences or fears that don’t get in the way of making education better. Equally, no one can say that they have nothing to add to the story. But whether it is colleagues or friends, your professional associations (like SEDA or ALT or ASCILITE), your senior management teams or mentors, being a part of something, being in the community and drawing inspiration, ideation and support from them makes it easier, We encourage our students to learn collectively, to construct knowledge socially and challenge critical assumptions to help address wicked and pernicious challenges; maybe we need to start heeding our own message. So, we come to this manifesto for being a part of strategic pedagogical. It is drawn from my own personal experiences, my own successes and my own heroic failures. I have sat in the room with the VC and had to sell the kind of change I wanted to lead in 30 words or less. I have had to make the case for funding when my idea was only one of hundreds competing for the same diminished pot. I have had to argue for change when almost nobody at the institution wanted it, the majority resisted or ignored it but almost everyone knew that we desperately needed it. It is nerve wracking, frightening and exhilarating often within the same gulp of air. But it was being a part of a network, running Future Happens with colleagues and friends Donna Lanclos and Dave White, taking risks with pilots and stepping into the dark barefoot that made it work. I don’t have the answers, all I got is how I work everyday to make education better. I hope it helps you.
1. Have a plan
Come up with ideas. Think through how they might work or fail. Ideate outside and inside the box. Know how you will make it happen. What are the risks and pain points. How much money/resources/people/policy do you need. Don’t go in empty handed. Have a plan.
2. Reward and recognise excellence and achievement
We punish failure or set standards to ensure we are not bad (as opposed to getting better). Reward people intrinsically and tacitly. Listen to people and hear them talk about teaching. Share those lessons with others. People respond to being seen and recognised. Reward and recognise excellence and achievement.
3. Be in the conversation
It easy to throw stones from the outside, it’s harder to put those ideas and opinions into the conversation. Be in the room, influence those who are if you can’t. Don’t let pedagogical changer be done to you. You know stuff, you have done stuff, you have something to say. Make sure you say it. Be in the conversation.
4. Connection is the glue
None of this can be done alone. Finding, nurturing and leveraging connections is critical to being a part of change. This not about alliances and political expediency, although these play their part in any change. Connections join the dots of knowing, doing and making. Connection is the glue.
5. We don’t know what the students want – but we need to
There is so much telling and not enough listening in terms of student engagement. We assume so much through distorted and blurry filter of our own experiences as students. We need to find ways to hear the stories of students, understand them and incorporate them into any change we initiate. This is more than representation, surveys and feedback loops. We need to know what the students ‘want’.
6. Expose yourself to risk
This is not always safe. You are spending money, you are changing things that cut to the core of things like job insecurity, professional identity, graduate outcomes or rankings and metrics. Bit change means you have to take some risks. Trust your experience, trust the people around you. Safe is great, but safe can also be a form of resistance. Expose yourself to risk.
7. Look outside and inwards
You can learn from people around you. Workable solutions, innovations and transformations come from everywhere. Look inwards for experiences and look outwards for inspiration.
8. Be rigorous, evidence based and critically reflective
We work in an academic environment. We are curious, we are critical, and we think through why things. Whatever you suggest, argue or advocate for, make sure before, during and after you have built in evaluation, evidence and rigor. It is more than analytics, it is knowing why something happened and knowing how to make it happen again, scale it or share it with others.
9. Enhance, don’t replace
So much of what we do is predicated on replacing something. Technology is often simply reinforcing practice, just using the latest version or platform. The real challenge of pedagogical change is where we seek to enhance practices, technology or learning. How do we make it better? How do we argue that we have all the raw materials and tools we need and yhat it is time to learn how to use them better. Can we break break/bend/shake/remix what we do now and come up with something completely different?
10. The Future Happens
It does. It really does. We can’t go back to the way it was. That doesn’t mean all change is inevitable and it doesn’t mean we throw out every baby and their bathwater. Embracing the notion that things will change and that you want to be a part of it is the most important thing on this list.
Postscript: The dream of the nineties is alive
Avid readers will know that one of the most important parts of this blog for me is how fundamental music is to my thinking about higher education. It is an amazingly personal but shareable prism to view the world through. Running through the writing of this manifesto was some subliminal reflection on music from my past, specifically the indie/alternative scene of the 90s. From the start of the decade when I was in second year at University through to the end when I was entering my 7th year of teaching marketing and management, discovering new music was so important to my routine. Whether it was doing my radio show on 2RRR in Sydney, filtering tracks as either filler between the hours of talk in one show or telling the story of a specific scene in another, or making mix tapes for special sandgropers, being emotionally carried away or sweating until there wasn’t anything left to give was an everyday experience. I learnt to yell my insides out with every inch of breath (The Geraldine Fibbers – Dragon Lady) and I experienced broken hearts, minds and lost innocence (Scud Mountain Boys – Grudge Fuck). I danced around the room like a madman (Lush – Hypocrite) and I saw how dark it could really be (Tori Amos – Silent All These Years).
I have been listening to heaps of these songs over the last few weeks, rediscovering amazing and lost tracks, having bits of my brain activated that had stored lyrics, guitar riffs and memories of gigs gone by. But the one thing I kept coming back to was that these songs were soundtracks to a time when I felt a part of something. A community of fans who could fill a stadium or barely trouble the back of a Mini. The nineties for me were an era of learning how to learn through making, through sharing, through participating and through curating. I used music in my teaching, I shaped my identity through owning and collecting music (much to the chagrin of some around me 😉 and I took great joy in sharing music with people and having music shared with me. So, I just thought I would share some this music with you. Below is a link to two podcasts I made a few years back. I had the plan of doing one for each year of the 90s. I finished two before life got in the way. I have also made a Spotify playlist for you to browse through. Maybe you will feel like you have become a part of something different or be reminded of the things you were once a part of. Or maybe you will scream along to the Geraldine Fibbers like I am doing right now as I am 34000 feet in the air. I’ll rip myself to piece ‘til the end of time, then I’ll glue them back together in a stupid rhyme
Part 3 of this extended blog post will focus on how to ‘do’ post-digital learning experiences and make them work as part of an integrated approach to learning and curriculum design. And the glue that holds these approaches together is design thinking. Design thinking represents an interesting conceptual framework in which to think about teaching and learning. Meinel and Leifer (2010) describe four tenets or rules of a design thinking approach;
The human rule – all design activity is ultimately social in nature
The ambiguity rule – design thinkers must preserve ambiguity
The re-design rule – all design is re-design
The tangibility rule – making ideas tangible always facilitates communication
These frames help explore solutions for what design thinkers called ‘wicked problems’; difficult, intractable, nebulous or impossibly contrary questions that challenge the structures and fabrics of practice. In higher education, wicked problems are pervasive and disruptive for evolving and emerging practices. They arise from the relationship between learners and teachers, between the faculty and institution, between the centre and the Schools, between technology and things remaining the same as they have always been. But within the design thinking approach there are some perceptive and practical insights that can inform the idea of learning experiences as a critical factor in learning and teaching design.
Human – Teaching and learning is a human activity. It is social and is guided and shaped by the mores, tropes and vagaries of human communication. Identity, status, privilege, roles, language and intent are pushed into a sense of hyper-reality in the context of education.
Ambiguity is a parlour trick we often use to ensure the fourth wall remains unbreakable. And next week, you will find out the secret of passing the exam, this week I will tempt, next week I will taunt, maybe a bit of tease the following week. But ambiguity also can be a positive, taking the next step without knowing what is underfoot; leaping off a cliff hoping there will be someone there to catch you. Ambiguity is more than a cliff-hanger. It is a function of learning as an adult, because life is ambiguous.
Re-design – Almost all teaching is a process of redesign, whether its curation, remixing, re-purposing, summarising, aggregating, commenting.
Tangibility – making it and keeping it real. Case studies, application, life experience, problem solving, practicality, it’s all there in what most people call good teaching and learning.
Post-digital learning experiences are a design thinking process. How do we break the intractable nooses of institutional entropy, technological tensions and the incongruity of expectation? How do we design tangibility, ambiguity and humanity into teaching and learning so that outcomes are enhanced, durability of learning continues to extend, transferability of experience is enhanced and the effectiveness of education is exponentially increased? How do we do design thinking for learning? This post will explore how to design learning experiences relevant for the post-digital age. The PDLE idea comes from applying a design thinking approach to the wicked problem of teaching and learning in a modern institution, with modern learners and modern disciplines. It comes from the debate constructed so often in my blog about what happens if we do nothing. What happens if we ignore the changes in learners, learning and society and carry on advocating the holy virtue of pen, paper and note taking? What happens if we ask people to turn their devices off in order to learn or demonise them for wasting time on frivolous uses of technology? Because often, that is where we are and that is the entrenched position defended to the death by the pure of heart from the marauding techno-hordes. It comes from the way people design stuff other than learning. Art, media, careers, discoveries, business, innovation and their lives.
Found
Found is the first of the post-digital learning experiences because it is the one closest to my own practice. The notion of making sense from discovery is at the heart of learning. It has not all been written or discovered. There are huge swathes of undiscovered countries. At the core of found are two very powerful learning experiences; bricolage and discovery. Found represents a way of explaining the sheer capacity of knowledges. Found is a way of understanding something, explaining something, adding a sense of the undiscovered and the unknown;
Asking the question without knowing the answer
Story without an ending
Problems without solutions
As a learning experience found can have many guises. From the discovery of new and exciting ways of thinking and seeing, to the co-opting of knowledge from diverse disciplines in order to have insights into your own. From seeing an image and telling a story, through to the remix and re-purposing culture of digital media making, through to the finding of meaning, found can change the way learning happens. However, much of modern learning uses found in its paste tense form. Knowledge has already been found, and the job of the academy is to present you that knowledge. The job of the research academic is to find out more. The student is not the finder. The student is the repeater of found knowledge. The student is the next in the chain of Chinese whispers. In a modern bricolage culture, found is no longer a past tense. It is a sense of future discovery; it is a label for artefacts and raw material. Learning experiences that build on found enhance curiosity, complex linkages, independent thinking, collective intelligence, the progression of knowledge and an educational ambition that sets to to make that sure that there is more than that to be found. Knowledge as an experience is not static in a found learning design. It is a body of active pieces waiting to be reconstructed, reinterpreted, rediscovered and reused.
Making
There has been an incredibly large amount written about making (in a post-digital world). For a much better exposition of this idea, I point you to the work of David Gauntlett and his brilliant piece on making called ‘Making is Connecting’. Making is a core learning experience. It is rooted in conceptual frameworks like creativity, problem solving, tactility, abstract thinking and practicality. Maker spaces have traditionally been the realm of engineering and sciences but I have been advocating the creation of maker spaces for a wide variety of disciplines. I am working on what a maker space would like look for the social sciences. At the core of making for me is the concept of owning. The learner owns the experience, the space, the outcome and the solutions. Making challenges the theoretical safety net of HE to be realised in a practical environment. Equally, creativity is a fundamental. Technology has democratised creativity. Technology has made your ability to make with others, share with contemporaries and make your making available exponentially wider and easier. Everyone is creative in some way. Creating learning experiences that provide people with the opportunity to make something opens up avenues of learning that consumption and reception can never replicate. It might be as simple as a case or simulation right through to technology-led practices like media making, app development, product design or innovation. There is a growing movement to make making more explicit and tactile, maker spaces and labs, simple to use but complex apps that allow everything from music making, to knowledge presentation through to design work to be done on a tablet. Making is a design activity that is multi-sensual, trans-disciplinary and a tookkit for life-long learning.
Identity
I have written a lot about identity in a post-digital age. It is a complex thing, caught flash hard in the debates about safety, responsibility, expression and citizenship. Identity as a learning experience is inherently trans-disciplinary, providing a skill relevant across learning trajectories. Without re-hashing the debates about digital identity (that you can see splashed through my blog history), there are some key aspects relevant to learning design. Identity formation is a critical learning experience; what is your identity within a discipline? Where do you fit into traditions and discourses? Identity sharing is a learning experience at the heart of effective portfolio learning, professional development and connected experiences. Identity development is a 21st century skill, knowing how to use and develop, manage and nuance multiple identities for different aspects of your life. I have written a lot about the digital stranger (the person who reveals only small slices of themselves in an on-line environment, made easier by avatars, light touch registrations and the blurring of identity in social media) and how fleeting connections with people can shape thinking and development of beliefs and practice. One of my favourite writers, Stephen Brookfield (1984) really nailed this idea in an article called ‘Tales from the dark side: a phenomenography of adult critical reflection’ In this seminal piece, he talks about how identity impacts directly on how we reflect critically as practitioners, identifying senses like impostership (the idea that reflection is not for the ‘likes of me’, cultural suicide (that to be true and honest in reflection could be shaming of friends) and lost innocence (that reflection troubles to address ambiguities best left unaddressed) as darker sides of identity interacting with communication, reflection and the practices of teaching.
From the way media can be shared and critiqued, to peer assessment, through to exploring and interrogating the necessity of anonymous double blind marking, identity is a learning experience that crosses through much of the learning activity we engage in. And like the rest of these learning experiences, it is not the sole domain of our students. Identity is at the heart of teaching practice too. The cult of the expert, the theatricality of the fourth wall in a lecture, the capacity to always be right and the artifice that protects poor assessment and feedback from anything other than student satisfaction criticism are all informed by crisis’ and concepts of identity.
Play
‘Play is at the heart of human behaviour, encouraging healthy relationships, enhanced literacy and creativity (Saracho & Spodek, 1998) and a better developed approach to work and career (Hartung, 2002). Play is not risk free, with some arguing that the best learning should hurt (Mann, 1996). Margitay-Becht and Herrera (2010) note that ‘fun is learning’ and observed little resistance by staff to engaging in fun activities such as virtual worlds and gaming but much higher resistance from the students, who wanted their experiences rooted in reality and play for the times after learning.’
We all play. Life is full of play. And play is equal parts fun and risk. Some of the most fun we have ever have is when we play with risk. Jumping from planes, falling off slippery dips or singing our signature song at Karaoke, this time in front of a live audience (I will tell you mine, if you share yours. All song titles in the comments!). Play is great. Trouble is that learning can be so damned serious. Brows get furrowed. Stress balls are made from competing deadlines. It seems that we are happy when are students aren’t having fun but worrying and stressing. Part of life. And then there is us. Where has the fun gone in our jobs? Counting down the months, weeks, days, hours and minutes to holidays. The stress of tenure and the worry that if even the smallest thing goes wrong, we are back searching on jobs.ac.uk. Failure isn’t an option when it comes to pedagogy. NSS scores, student evaluations, the push to higher and higher student achievement have driven all the fun and experimentation out of teaching. So, how do we bring play back into learning? We have to encourage students to experiment, to fail, to fall flat on their faces or find themselves succeeding despite their best efforts, all in safe way. It is no longer acceptable to simply get a degree in the UK. You need a good degree (although hopefully this stupidity is now changing). We have to support a culture where play and experimentation are natural components of good teaching. Where we learn as much from failure as we do from success and we bring students along with us on the ride. That way they don’t feel like guinea pigs when they are paying £9000 fees.
Play means a chance to use games, digital storytelling, media making, Lego, role plays and other mechanisms that break reality and put people into slightly uncomfortable roles. I used to run a class where I used a thing called interactive case studies. These were all set around a restaurant where certain characters created a scenario for HR or management students. I asked for a few volunteers from the class to play these characters. I gave each ‘actor’ some basic character traits and asked them to improvise the characters based around them (simple traits like ‘always brought things back to them’ or ‘always lies’ or ‘will always support character Doris, even when she is wrong). Sometimes it worked, and other times I had to step in, moderate and lead. But every time I ran it, it was fun. People laughed and played. I gave people who weren’t feeling comfortable to chance to ‘tag’ another student into their role. This was a safe space. There were no grades, no pressure, some risk of public performance, but it was all about learning. It tapped into identity, roles, perceptions and attitudes, all crucial skills for people management. We learn through play. It doesn’t have to infantalise or regress people. Adults play. But experimentation and play, whether it be through humour, or simulation or gamification are effective post-digital learning experiences.
Discontinuity
Life is chaotic, messy, non-linear, traumatic, joyful, unexpected and unpredictable. Memory is much the same. Learning however, is in the main structured, scaffolded, episodic and linear. This tension could afford education with a unique opportunity to develop skills in navigating, leveraging and riding the chaos. Instead, it tries to control it and at worst ignore it, assuming normalcy and norms dominate. This norm driven perspective assumes for example, that the jobs that existed when a student started their degree look exactly like the world they will enter three years later.
Discontinuity as a learning experience takes the fear and uncertainty that arises from not knowing if there is something waiting for your next foot fall and learns from the calculations, assumptions and sometimes faith (in the truly atheist sense) that goes through your brain in the split second before you step. It lets the learner enter the story at the middle, or the end and work through the problem in reverse, identifying and challenging assumptions. It shows them the natural end of a discourse and asks them to reverse engineer how we got there. To identify what assumptions were inherent in the debate and what shaped arguments, discoveries or transformative moments. It drops them in the centre of a problem, like the middle of a maze and encourages then to find and deduct their way out. Chaos is equally as powerful a learning experience. The wash of not knowing what is happening, that slight out of control feeling that eventually coalesces (usually around assessment time) has been part of higher education for years. It can be dizzying, challenging and uncomfortable, like many of the things we experience in life and work. Replicating even a dash of that through discursive activities, breaking of routines, cracking the fourth wall or challenging power structures brings an element of safe free fall into learning. And it makes for authentic experiences that replicate the way we in part live our lives. All of which brings us to…
Authenticity
This is an interesting concept, not less for the debates around what is authentic. Authenticity as a learning experience is rooted in ensuring that what the learner does feels and in effect is real. Realness is a very fuzzy concept in an on-line world. From the variability of identity to the mask of reality that on-line interaction can afford participants, defining something as authentic is difficult. We may have defined authenticity in learning pre-digital age as things like field trips, simulations, model offices, work based learning or professional practice. But in a more complex learning world what can constitute as authentic? At a simple level, it is about making sure that the learning experience means something, that it is not simply a test of character, or the rite of passage afforded to those who get to experience higher education, as an ivory tower hall of rotating knives. At a more concrete level, it is about the skills required to develop ethical frameworks, approaches to working with and supporting people, developing and changing the world, and an academic/student relationship that is built on a dialogue or a conversation where each are shaped by the interaction, not a monologue delivered by someone who will never know your name. Authentic experiences are not easy to facilitate, in fact, I would argue that it is the hardest of the PDLE. It is inherently personal. Authentic experiences rely on trust, the developing of a relationship, the exchange of experiences and the realization that learning is a complex amalgam of the interpersonal and personal.
Community
‘…it’s through participation in communities that deep learning occurs. People don’t learn to become physicists by memorizing formulas; rather it’s the implicit practices that matter most. Indeed, knowing only the explicit, mouthing the formulas, is exactly what gives an outsider away. Insiders know more. By coming to inhabit the relevant community, they get to know not just the “standard” answers, but the real questions, sensibilities, and aesthetics, and why they matter.’ (Brown 2001)
Community is something that people crave for from a university experience. Being part of a learning community (as opposed to a community of learners) is empowering. But equally when that community can crowd-source knowledge and solve problems, when that community can leverage the power of the massive and through technology can span location, engage in social behaviours and create and share knowledge then it becomes truly transformative. Community learning experiences build on the social aspects of learning; collaboration, collective assessment and engagement, group work etc and social media changes that game entirely.
‘Social media has facilitated a complex, co-created and immediate form of learning response, where content and openness challenge the closed, structured nature of modern higher education . Social media has had significant impacts on the way learners connect with people and with the knowledge they require in order to learn across a variety of contexts. Social media support more than user interactivity, they support the development and application of user-generated content, collaborative learning, network formation, critical inquiry, relationship building, information literacy, dynamic searching and reflection.’
A social media community is far more than Facebook and Twitter. Social media explore innovative pedagogical practices like making, ideation, creation, critique, sociality, connected practice, crowd-sourcing, entrepreneurship, digital citizenship, media making, identity, politics and policy. And that is just the start. The communities that form on social media are equally fleeting as they are lasting, large as they are intimate, collaborative as they individual. They support lurkers, talkers, loud mouths, itinerants and learners. Social media are being used by your students now. They may be consuming yours, making their own, using their existing networks to find out stuff or leaving others because they have developed and moved on. Yes, they can have arseholes in them, but so can a bus. Yes, they have trolls, but so does a classroom. Community formation and development through social media is not a ‘trend’, it isn’t ‘new’ nor will it go away like fax-based learning (was that ever a thing?). Social media is for the foreseeable future how the internet is wired. It is how society is increasingly wired and it is how many people form and nurture their communities, inside and outside work. Sure, not everyone is an expert or a natural at social media. Not everyone likes talking on phones neither. Doesn’t mean we never used them for work.
There you have them. Seven post-digital learning experiences. None of them are ‘new’. They are all built on good teaching practices that we have done ourselves or experienced. They are rooted in deep traditions of experience, both socially and professionally. They are not exclusively digital, but they are amplified and enhanced in a digital environment. Technology makes them more possible and multiplies their potential. They will work in off-line, blended and on-line environments because in a post-digital institution, there is no discernible difference. They will will in open, free learning and closed residential experiences. I know, we have made them work. This is the shape of learning in the 21st century. It is complex for sure. It is not as simple as a voice in the room and the furious scribbling of pens. It is not something that can be summarised in a high stakes exam. But to be honest; effective, active, real learning has never been that anyway.
The idea of being a critically reflective practitioner is fundamental to many professions. In terms of work based learning, we talk about the different theoretical and practical approaches to reflection, whether that is Kolb’s experiential learning cycle, or Schon’s reflection in action. However, social networking provides us with some interesting curveballs in terms of critical reflection.
How do we use web 2.0 to encourage reflection on our own practice, facilitate it with others or impact on the behaviours of others around us. Riedinger (2006) suggests that web 2.0 applications, such e-portfolios ‘…open wide the possibilities for reflections of all types: in action, before action, after action, in solitude, in consultation with peers, in consultation with instructors, coaches, and advisers, written, spoken, videotaped, or graphically represented’ (Riedinger 2006: 93)
The ability to undertake reflection using a variety of instruments, whilst suggesting that we might be spoilt for choice, also encourages us to use the tools or mediums we are most comfortable with, whether that be text, audio, video or simply sharing experiences with others using chat or skype. Tosh and Werdmuller (2004) argue that the combination of these tools as instruments of learning is an extremely powerful form of critical reflection, where we are engaged not just as consumers of information but as evaluators and creators. They call this multi-platform space a ‘learning landscape’, where ‘…learners engage in the whole process both academically and socially should increase the opportunity to build one’s learning instead of just being the recipients of information’ (Tosh & Werdmuller 2004: 7).
Have we considered the role of engagement in this process of critical reflection? To this point, we have assumed we are engaged in our practice, keen enough to ask questions and seek to improve it. However, Jenny Moon (2001) suggests that learning can occur, at a less detailed level, when we simply ‘notice’ things. A deeper level of learning we need to make sense of the things we notice, construct meaning from them, work with that meaning and finally transform our practices (see Jenny Moon, http://www.york.ac.uk/admin/hr/researcher-development/students/resources/pgwt/reflectivepractice.pdf). These deep layers of learning occur when we engage and become connected to the practices of reflection and the outcomes of that reflection
In the context of our wider discussion about facilitating reflection using web 2.0 platforms, let’s look at two very unique notions with reflection, feedback and collaboration. They both bring other people into the reflective circle. They widen they scope of contemplation past out own navels and into our community, our networks, our peers or our leaders. Feedback positions our practice within a wider structure of other practices and asks others to critically evaluate it, feeding back to us the output of that evaluation. Collaboration at its simplest level is informed by the old cliché that ‘two heads are better than one’, but at a complex level accesses the power of the whole, the work of teams, the creative energy that can flow from the collaborative process and innovation and excitement that comes from working with some one.
Kroop, Nussbaumer and Fruhmann (2010) expand on these two notions in the context of learning by breaking down the reflective processes that a web 2.0 environment can enable, which support the practices of feedback and collaboration. They include ‘…discussing, arguing, disputing, revising, reviewing, assessing, writing, reworking and producing articles’. (see http://mature-ip.eu/files/matel10/kroop.pdf). These active processes are enabled by the tools we use in social networking and social media. In general, they also require an engaged approach to reflection, not simply absorbing information or noticing it, but becoming involved in its production and sharing.
I found this youtube video by accident. It is a well evidenced argument that the modern student engages in a different way of thinking, consumes more information digitally and reflects in a different way on their experiences and practices. Have a look.
