Category Archives: Learning

Rumpus research

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Research question: ‘In what ways is the Covid-19 pandemic changing understandings of the relationships between learning and fun?’

A limited case study of a research group in a UK university. We expect our findings to have implications beyond that group.

Data collection using epistolary interviews (via email – one question per email, enabling thoughtful responses that can build over time) with everyone in the research group who wants to take part. Participation is voluntary and participants can drop out at any time.

Questions for epistolary interviews:

  • What have been your main experiences of learning and teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic?
  • What have been your main experiences of fun during the Covid-19 pandemic?
  • How has learning and teaching changed (if at all) during the Covid-19 pandemic? In your answer, please take into account your own perspective and the wider perspective.
  • How have you experienced fun changing (if at all) during the Covid-19 pandemic? In your answer, please take into account your own perspective and the wider perspective.
  • How has your understanding of the relationship between fun and learning/teaching changed (if at all) during the Covid-19 pandemic?
  • In what ways (if any) do you think the relationship between learning and fun will change after the Covid-19 pandemic?

Method:

According to Yin (who I like following for case study research because he has a clear structure to work to) there are five important components of case study design.

  1. Five components of a case-study research design are particularly important
  2. Its questions (see above)
  3. Its propositions, if any (Prop 1- there is a relationship between learning and fun. Prop 2 – this relationship will be highlighted during the pandemic Prop 3- this relationship may be changed by the pandemic and some of these changes can be foreseen)
  4. Its unit(s) of analysis (individual members of the research group)
  5. The logic linking the data to the propositions (data are collected from people who have reflected on the relationship between learning and fun and who have thought deeply by what is meant by fun and by learning. Also we engage in fun and learning. Also we are influenced by the pandemic)
  6. The criteria for interpreting the findings (thematic analysis to support explanation building, themes drawn from the data but also compared with existing frameworks of fun that were covered in our frameworks of fun paper. Interpretations are originally drawn together by one or two of us but are checked against the understandings of all participants. This is a reflexive case study and this phase of comparing understandings will enrich the analysis)

 

A PhD is more than a thesis

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Inspired by a Tweet I read recently about the distinction between a thesis and a PhD, I have been thinking about the difference between the two.

The university really focuses on the thesis, which must :

  • be of good presentation and style
  • be a significant contribution to knowledge and/or to understanding
  • demonstrate capacity to pursue further research without supervision
  • contain a significant amount of material worthy of publication or public presentation.

What else? Well, our university specifies you must be a registered student, you must live in the UK, you must pass your probationary period, you must spend a minimum amount of time as a registered student, you must make satisfactory progress, you must have a viva, you must make any specified corrections and you must present your thesis according to the guidelines.

All very thesis focused.

Vitae has a Researcher Development Framework that covers knowledge and intellectual abilities;  personal effectiveness;  research governance and organisation; engagement, influence and impact. The university encourages students to engage with this but, apart from reporting satisfactory progress at probationary review, it isn’t enforced or assessed.

Typically, students are assessment focused. They learn what they will be assessed on. It’s not surprising, then, that many doctoral students focus their entire attention on the thesis. That is the centre of their activity – everything else that takes place at the university is a distraction and has lower priority. In extreme cases, they only visit the university for supervision sessions, talk to nobody but their supervisors about their research, and focus totally on putting their thesis together and passing their viva.

But what then? A PhD is one line in a CV – perhaps five or six if you bulk it out with a description of your research. Permanent academic jobs in the UK and in many other countries may not be as rare as hens’ teeth, but they come pretty close. Even fixed-term contracts are difficult to get.

For employers, the PhD is not just one line in a CV, it’s also one line in a long job specification.

Academic employers want to know that you can publish papers, put together grant proposals, attract funding, increase impact via social media, create course materials, teach, mentor, work as part of a team, initiate projects, provide connections to a wider academic community and work on several projects at the same time.

The people getting the academic jobs are the people who can produce evidence that they can do all those things, and that they have already done those things. The people who treated their PhD as a period of academic apprenticeship, when the thesis is just one activity among many. The people struggling to get a toehold in the academic sector are the ones who have simply written a thesis.

Capturing an online student feedback history to enable ipsative assessment and sustained motivation

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CALRG seminar by Dr Gwyneth Hughes, Reader in Higher Education, Institute of Education, UCL

‘Ipsative’ assessment is about comparing your current performance with your past perfomance. It comes from the Latin word ‘ipse’, meaning herself or himself

Assessment is predominantly taken to be a measurement of learning, and can be considered to be one of the cornerstones of a meritocracy.

A focus on marks, grades and performance distracts attention from the learning process. It can reduce the motivation of students who consistently receive low marks.

Ipsative assessment distinguishes between learning and attainment, it also helps to build motivation and self-esteem. It involves feedback on how a learner has progressed. One approach is the use of learning portfolios in which students provide evidence of how they have learned and developed.

A funded project on assessment found that students were rarely given written feedback on progress. However, assessors found it very difficult, because they did not know what feedback students had been given in the past – particularly if the feedback had been provided by other educators. Feedback is not stored centrally.

They developed a Moodle plug-in that provides a reports dashboard, bringing together all previous feedback.

Assessment Careers: Enhancing Learning Pathways through Assessment: funded project

Ipsative Assessment: book by Gwyneth, published by Palgrave

 

Communication and collaboration

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(Notes from the Technology Enhanced Learning event at The Open University on 9 Feb)

Sharon Monie – LTS

Further examples of communication and collaboration

Blog L140 (personal reflection)

B201 (group comment and responses to reflective questions)
Database D872 (graphically calculates and displays collated results)
Elluminate Library (live bookable information literacy session)

L203 (student-only sessions in ALE (alternative learning experience). Speaking assessments)
Forums H810 (topic specific group forums) B777 (intense use in activity groups) K311 (separate tutor group forums for online tutorials.
Glossary L130 (student glossary of new and interesting vocabulary

AA100. Tutorial idea resource banks
Wiki M883 Students adopt defined characters within a given scenario

T215 Group contributions and comments form part of one TMA

SDK125 Group research and data within a set wiki template
Other U1010 OpenDesign Studio. Image-based social web environment. Design Thinking needs the work and opinions of all its students to be a success.

Technology Enhanced Learning: DSE232

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(Notes from the Technology Enhanced Learning event at The Open University on 9 Feb)

Volker Patent DSE232

http://www3.open.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/course/dse232.htm

Applying Psychology – provides an example of a second-level course where the team spent some time considering how to use learning systems to help students communicate with one another online and use their online experiences to inform their assessment. The team will describe how the size, shape and scope of their asynchronous forums changes during the course, as students become more confident in working online.

  • 15-point course. Recruits around 500 students each presentation. Just finished fourth presentation.
  • Uses a range of VLE tools, including quizzes, wikis, fora and polls.
  • Clear about learning outcomes: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, evaluation
  • Forum structure is provided and referred to as a meeting place, rather than created by tutors and students. Threads are under student and tutor control.
  • Different design options. Single, course-wide forum. Used as a pre-course forum and one to support tutors. Multiple, parallel forums, which run for a few weeks. Single grouped forum for multiple groups. Each week’s forum becomes its own archive.
  • Default in Moodle is to have a tutor group as equal to a forum group, but this does not afford team teaching. Team teaching needs to be built in from the start of the design.
  • Use the polling tool to work out which subjects students are interested in, and to divide them into groups.

applying technology to help students communicate and collaborate

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Andy Northedge: K101

(Notes from the Technology Enhanced Learning event at The Open University on 9 Feb)

http://www3.open.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/course/k101.htm

K101 An Introduction to Health and Social Care – a course in its second presentation that walks new students through different learning systems, encouraging students to communicate with one another before a major collaborative activity half way through the course. The course team will share with you why they took the approach to communications and collaboration that they did; how successful it has been and what their aspirations are for the future.

  • Trying to replicate the dynamics of summer-school group work.
  • Has been presented seven times
  • Around 800 teams have started the project.
  • Small teams work intensively without tutor intervention
  • Less than 1% have not completed their project and produced a report.
  • Quality of reports is impressive
  • Students tend to be enthusiastic.
  • Two weeks of highly coordinated teamwork halfway through course
  • Agree a subject, review websites, submit reviews of two websites – team members review each others website, there is structured discussion
  • 10% for team-forming tasks. No marks for team project report. 50% for individual essay, 30% for project-related skills and 10% for library skills
  • Website provides narrative of activities, work of each member is displayed to entire team, each team has its own forum and sub-forums, collaborative activities are highly structured, time targets re closely managed and very visible. Students cannot complete tasks for other team members (as can happen at residential school). Teachers can track progress,
  • Can compare website reviews.
  • Discuss quality, breadth, access, trust, power and effects of websites – each of these in different forums.
  • End up with a collectively written report. Can only alter their own section of the report – so if they want to change other areas, they need to discuss changes with that section’s author.
  • Develop skills in independent inquiry, team working and information literacy.

How does one teach creativity?

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Notes on a seminar given by Keith Sawyer.

Relevant literature includes:
Paul Torrance 1960s-80s – concerned with both teaching and assessing creativity. Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) is still widely used in the US – primarily for admission into gifted and talented programmes.
Howard Gardner 1970s – brought cognitive psychology to bear on creativity (he also worked on multiple intelligences).
Woods and Jeffrey 1996 – creative teaching
Craft, 1997 – distinguished between creative teaching versus teaching for creativity
Carl Bereiter, 2002 – knowledge age
Sawyer, 2004 – disciplined improvisation

Schools have traditionally offered an industrial-age model of teaching and learning. Instructionism (term coined by Seymour Papert): implicit understanding of what schools should look like. Assumes that knowledge is a set of static facts and procedures. Goal of schooling is to get these facts and procedures into students’ heads. Teachers know these facts and procedures and their job is to transmit them.

Creative

Instructionism
Knowledge Deeper conceptual knowledge Set of static facts and procedures
Goal of school Prepare students to build new knowledge Get facts and procedures into students’ heads
Role of teacher Scaffold and facilitate collaborative knowledge building Transmit facts and procedures
Curriculum Integrated and contextualized knowledge (within authentic practice) Simple ideas and procedures should be learned first
Assessment Formative and authentic Assess how many of these facts and procedures have been acquired

Emergence: higher-level properties and structures emerge from systems of lower level components in interaction. Features of emergence include unpredictability, irreducibility and novelty. Classic example is birds flocking in a V shape.

Creativity is emergent, in that it is a constant combination of many small ideas. Each idea builds incrementally on a chain of prior ideas. Creativity is accelerated in collaborative teams.

Collaborative emergence is a way of talking about how creativity emerges in small groups. It has some additional properties: moment-to-moment contingency, retrospective interpretation, and it is more likely to happen if you have equal participation.

Learning as emergent. Instructionist learning is not emergent. Creative learning requires unpredictability, irreducibility and novelty – and is more likely to happen where there is moment-to-moment contingency, retrospective interpretation and equal participation.

Case Study: The Exploratorium
Four weeks on site and carried out 47 one-hour interviews. Attended many internal meetings and studied internal documents and memos. They engage in three model practices:

  1. Fostering creative learning
  2. Designing creative learning environments
  3. Educating creative teachers.

Fostering creative learning
There is an emphasis on compelling phenomena that draw the attention. This must allow hands-on interactivity. You are provoked to inquire about it and you end up with learning that is directed by the learner.

Designing creative learning environments

  • They have an organic culture with low boundaries, flat organization and weak formal authority.
  • Rapid prototyping
  • There is an external focus – for example, on scientists, artists and innovative companies.

Educating creative teachers
Have a deep commitment to inquiry – with a formal mission to change how the world learns.

Challenges encountered
There are many pressures for such science centres to become more like school.  How do you reconcile free-choice learning with standards? How do we guide bottom-up innovation and top-down guidance? How do we ensure that distinct innovations connect to build coherent integrated learning? How to foster emergent learning that is guided by curricular structures and intended learning outcomes?

Writing for publication

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Researchers write all the time, writing is the means through which we work on and work out our ideas. We don’t just write up – we have not found a transparent truth which we then just put into words. Writing is a representation – we make choices and what we choose to write is a situated approximation.

In writing an article we are advancing what we know and also producing a representation of it. We are not just producing a text, we are producing ourselves as scholars — we are doing identity work.

Rhetorically, we are producing persuasive texts that persuade the reader that what we have done is a contribution to knowledge. The genre of the journal article is an argument. Research writing is dialogic. There are internal conversations which invite readers to make meaning. Don’t make it like a laundry list. Invite the reader in to make meaning. Encourage readers to make associations with other conversations (mainly through references).

When looking at a journal, consider the editorial board. Would you like to meet them and have a conversation with them? Look at recent issues. Which conversations are going on? Do you want to engage with them? Why do people need to know about what you are writing about – this gives a method of selecting a journal. What is the readership and what do they already know? This helps to create a space for your article. Significance is so what and now what? What’s new? What’s different? What does this add to the conversation? Don’t let other scholars do all the talking in your article. Refer to them, but don’t be overpowered by them.

The strongest papers usually have one point to make. They make that point powerfully, with evidence, and they locate that point within the orevious literature.

Can you do an elevator pitch on your article?

Just share it

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Interesting post on issues relating to SocialLearn by Scott Leslie in his EdTech blog. These are his sub-heads:

  • Planning to Share versus Just Sharing
  • We grow our network by sharing, they start their network by setting up initial agreements
  • We share what we share, they want to share what they often don’t have (or even really want)
  • We share with people, they share with “Institutions”
  • We develop multiple (informal) channels while they focus on a single official mechanism
  • What to do if you are stuck having to facilitate sharing amongst a large group of institutions?