Much of my time over the last year has been spent in Lecture mode. I don’t want to do this but the architecture of the University makes it very hard to avoid, when teaching technology applications. All technical teaching takes place in our Media Labs, serried rows of computers facing to the front, with the…

So how does my MOOC map onto the UKPSF? The UKPSF, or UK Professional Standards Framework for teaching and supporting learning in higher education (2011) to give it’s full title, has been developed by The Higher Education Academy on behalf of the UK higher education sector, Guild HE and Universities UK. The material and content is…

These notes started with me asking myself “Why are students allergic to research?” Ask new students about research, and they’ll see it as a bookish pursuit, which invariably means sitting down and concentrating, neither of which are overly popular. There’s also an assumption that research is at the planning stage- before the exciting ‘doing’ stage,…

Preface “I am convinced that the best learning takes place when the learner takes charge” Seymour Papert Looking at how we structure higher education and the taxonomies we use to support that structure led me to wonder how far our understanding of teaching and learning is led by those structures. Frameworks, Units, Projects, Tasks, like…

I wrote this article over 3 years ago on halogenic.me but it’s a useful intro to the history, so I’ve copied it over here…. In the US, 2012 was the year of the MOOC or Massive Open Online Classroom. The surprise development of free courses at the likes of the Higher Education elite like Yale, Stanford and Harvard…

Note: This is a draft exploring some ideas. Diana Laurillard talks about teaching as a ‘Design Science’ not as a craft, or art. With readily available learning designs or pedagogical patterns teachers can share what works and build on the knowledge of others. I want to examine the ways in which the teacher interacts with…

To me, there’s an attractive teleological progression from Pedagogical to Andragogical frameworks, but I also think part of our job in HE is to make ourselves less relevant to the student in the long run. Knowle’s Andragogy still has a program of study outlined by the teacher, – it’s still teacher managed. So to me,…

Education has traditionally been seen as a form of transmission, of broadcast. It was always the teacher and the institution who decided what the learner needed to know, and how knowledge and skills should be transmitted. This is to be expected since Pedagogy concerned itself initially with teaching children- empty vessels to be filled. Although…

  “The Cartesian worldview of “I think, therefore I am” seems to be finally giving way. A next step, “We participate, therefore we are,” better captures today’s ethos, we think” John Seely Brown and Estee Solomon Gray, Creating a Learning Culture: Strategy, Practice, and Technology (2003)  I first heard the term Communities of Practice (CoP) used in…

The business of Communities of Practice I found it interesting that Etienne Wenger was initially surprised to see that the first people who adopted Communities of Practice were Businesses and not Education. They saw that their typical learning strategies based around schooling- bundling people off to training courses- were not working. So I decided to…

One of the texts we were encouraged to look at as part of HEA ADAM was the TED talk “The maker mind” by Jen Ryan at TEDxDirigo Generate in 2013. I saw this in the same week I saw Ridley Scott’s “The Martian” and was struck by some connections. To Marx, class consciousness was needed…