Archive for the ‘Pedagogy’ Category

Open learning is a movement that isn’t going to go away

Wednesday, June 20th, 2012

The idea that technology can be deployed to support learners isn’t new to those who work at the OU. Suddenly, however, it is in the headlines because Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have formed a $60m (£38m) alliance to launch edX, a platform to deliver courses online – with the modest ambition of ‘revolutionising education around the world’.

(more…)

Asa Briggs and the OU

Friday, May 18th, 2012

In a few days Asa Briggs will launch his book which includes material on his relationship with the OU. This is a good moment to reflect on three contributions that he has made to the OU. (more…)

Before Life on Mars, and Other Roman Gods

Thursday, May 17th, 2012
The 1970s are conventionally associated with apocalyptic heradlines, ‘3 million face the dole queue’ screamed The Sun (15 01.79), redicting the impact of the events in the ’80s. Others phrased their views as questions: ‘Is anyone running Britain?’ asked the Daily Express (08.02.79) and ‘Is everyone going mad? was the Daily Mirror‘s poser on 05.12.73. However, amidst the petrol and bread shortages and the closedown of TV at 10.30 (due to power cuts and strikes) the decade also saw some exciting use of television for educational purposes. Now associated with the strange messages from another era beamed out to the central character in ‘Life on Mars’ the OU’s TV output was pf significance to many more than this fictional late-night learner. To find out more check out the 22nd International Screen Studies Conference, 29th June – 1st July 2012 at the University of Glasgow. It is there that Amanda Wrigley is to give a paper on ‘Theatre, education, television: the BBC and the Open University in the 1970s’. (more…)

OU 70s drama: first time as tragedy. Rerun and analysis

Wednesday, May 16th, 2012

On 22nd June a symposium at the University of Westminster will consider the presentation of Greek tragedies on television. The speakers include Professor Lorna Hardwick of The Open University. She will talk about the use of television transmissions for the teaching of drama by The Open University and how this has developed and changed from 1971 to the present, drawing on her personal experience working in the Department of Classical Studies during some of this period.

Other confirmed speakers: (more…)

Decades of impact: TAD292 lives on

Thursday, May 3rd, 2012

TAD292 Art and environment (1976-85) was a distinctive course chaired by Simon Nicholson (1934-1990) who had studied at the Royal College of Art, London, and the University of Cambridge and between 1964 and 1971 taught at the University of Berkeley, California. It sought to develop ‘strategies for creative work’ and it dealt with

the processes and attitudes of art not so much as these were evidenced in products of art but as they underlie the very act of doing art. This can be seen already from the titles which were given to some of the units in the course: ‘Boundary Shifting’, ‘Imagery and Visual Thinking’, ‘Having Ideas by Handling Materials’.

TAD292 students were offered a range of projects on this 30-point course. These included the suggestion that the student stop activity and engage in listening. Another was to compose a score for sounds made from differently textured papers and a third was to enumerate the household’s activities and categorise these in terms of role and sex stereotyping. The aims of the course were attitudional, sensory and subjective rather than cognitive, relating to feeling rather than knowledge. They were ‘more phenomenological than conceptual in nature’. Assessment involved a student not only submitting the product, such as a self-portrait photograph, but also notes describing the process and rationale. The criteria were not specific but involved formulations including enthusiasm, imagination and authenticity. See Philippe C. Duchastel, ‘TAD292 – and its challenge to Educational Technology’, Programmed Learning & Educational Technology, 13, 4, October 1976, pp. 61-66. The course received considerable publicity. In 1976 The World  At One, a BBC radio news programme, reported on TAD292 at one summer school:

Bizarre games and happenings formed a part of experimental residential course for a group of students at Sussex University. They were encouraged to make prints of various parts of their bodies. Some made bare bottom prints, other dragged rubbish through the streets and one group appeared to be aimlessly kicking a giant rugby ball about. (more…)

Adult education since 1862

Monday, March 26th, 2012

Distaining to take the hint offered by Professor Malcolm Chase who suggested that ‘there are rather more histories of adult education than of other fields which would seem as deserving of historical scutiny, for example … higher education’, Vaughan College, Leicester has seized the opportunity of an anniversary, its 150th birthday, to reflect on its past (Chase ‘”Mythmaking and mortmain”: the uses of adult education history’, Studies in the Education of Adults, 27, 1 ,1995, p.52). The event will be marked by three main sessions over July 2nd – July 3rd 2012 which will look at what Vaughan College has stood for, how ‘the Vaughan tradition’ now fits into current thinking, policy and practice and the place of adult education in contemporary society.

It opens at 4.30 on the 2nd with a talk by AA100 author and AL at the OU, Dr Lucy Faire who is also Director of the HE Certificate in Modern British History at Vaughan College.  (more…)

Critical friend returns

Monday, March 19th, 2012

David Harris author of Openness and closure in distance education, Falmer Sussex, 1987 returned to the OU this week to deliver some papers relating to his work as a Research Assistant in Curriculum Design at The Open University between 1970 and 1973. Despite his critique of the OU he said that he was a big fan and had maintained an interest in adult educaiton throughout his subsequent career. He was one of the contributors to OU teaching material which was said to have a Marxist bias (see David Harris, ‘Openness and Control in Higher Education: towards a critique of the Open University’ (with J Holmes) in Dale R. et al. (eds) Schooling and Capitalism, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1978). He has also written on  ‘On Marxist Bias’ aboth the OU in the Journal of Further and Higher Education, 2, 2, 1978, pp. 68 – 71.

Educational film

Wednesday, March 7th, 2012

Professor Devin Orgeron and Professor Marsha Orgeron (North Carolina State University) will lead a graduate seminar at the London College of Communications on 7 March and will deliver a lecture on ‘The Facts Behind Nonfiction: Educational Film and the Documentary Canon’ at 4pm on the same day. This is related to their recently published book, ‘Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States’ (Oxford UP, 2012). They will also give a talk at the University of Surrey on March 9.

Educational film was a matter of considerable interest to William Benton, who owned an educational film company ans was an enthusiastic backer of Harold Wilson’s ideas for ‘a university of the air’.

Ode to Joy

Thursday, February 9th, 2012
Is this part of the secret history of the OU? Did Garry B Trudeau’s character Duke (based on Hunter S Thompson) invent the idea of teaching via the tele? Well, the cartoon dates from the wrong millennium so it is unlikely. However, it does foreground that technologies have often been seen as the cheap and efficient way to deliver education as if it was another commodity which could be pumped out down the cathode tubes.  For a more sophisticated understanding of the history of the OU try the website.
 
And here is a genuine bit of history which ought to be less secret: the website owes much to the work of Rachel Garnham the Senior Project Manager who is leaving the project today in order to have a baby. Project minding a baby should be easy after making sure that things here run to time and budget.
  
Another secret (possibly) is that she will select a name for the forthcoming youth based on your votes. Top of the polls at the moment? Walter Perry II. 
 
Bye bye, au revoir really, Rachel, many thanks for all the work and we look forward to meeting Walter Junior.
 

University of the airwaves

Thursday, October 27th, 2011

Although it is a child of the sixties the precedents for The Open University are numerous and international. Harold Wilson was influenced by the work on educational broadcasting carried out in Chicago. For a posting about the American School of the Air and The University of Chicago Round Table and Judith Waller, a radio programming manager and later the Educational/Public Service Director for NBC’s Central division in the 1920s see here.  It seems that

Waller helped craft a number of educational programs, including a joint venture between the Chicago Public Schools that successfully connected city-wide special exhibits and the Chicago Daily News into an audio/visual/experiential learning experience.