Keynote, Dundee E-learning Symposium june 2012

1. Digital literacies:
Opening the frontier or
Is there a pedagogy of e-learning?
#els12 #digilit
George Roberts
OCSLD, Oxford Brookes University
Dundee, June 2012

2. Is there a pedagogy
of e-learning?

3. Feedback
• Yes
• No

4. The Nays Have it?

5. But
There is a pedagogy of e-learning

8. Pedagogies
Studies and understandings
of various practices of
teaching

9. my pedagogy of e-learning
• expressed through two broad
themes:
–digital literacy and
–open academic practice
• grounded in identity and community

10. Pedagogy with purpose
• Furthering assembly
• Opening third spaces
• Acknowledging, building on, but not
privileging originary knowledge
cultures

11. If you cannot answer
QUESTION: If SOPA/PIPA had
been passed into U.S. law in
that question, you are
2002, would Wikipedia exist
not literate nor are you
today? If either law had passed in
in control of your life—
2012, would Wikipedia exist in
2022? Why or why not? Discuss.
even if you think you are.

12. What happens when we
stop privileging
traditional ways of
organizing knowledge?
(HASTAC)

13. Pedagogy for what?
… for what happens when
we stop privileging
traditional ways of
organizing knowledge
(HASTAC)

14. Pedagogy for what?
• Novelty, change and innovation?
"Novelty provides a refuge from
things that the powerful do not
wish to see discussed.”
(Hind 2012)

15. E-learning turns our attention
Alternative modes of Reorganisation of
• Creating knowledge
• Innovating
• Interconnected
• Critiquing
• Interactive
• Global
• Democratic

16. Graduate attributes
• Academic Literacy
• Research Literacy
• Digital and Information Literacy
• Personal Literacy and Critical Self
Awareness
• Global Citizenship

17. Graduate attributes
• Academic Literacy
• Research Literacy
• Digital and Information Literacy
• Personal Literacy and Critical Self
Awareness
• Global Citizenship

18. digital literacy?
… for personal, academic & professional use …
• Functional access, skills & practices
• Critically evaluate and engage with
information
• Reflect on & record learning
• Engage productively in relevant
online communities.

19. So far, so safe…
But
• Definitions of literacy that neglect
the processes of making meaning
are impoverished.
• Meaning is something that happens
between people.

20. The Digital Literacy debate has
been reduced to an argument
between
• skills-only
– eSkills, NetSkills
• skills-plus-critical-theory
– e.g. Beetham, Campbell, McGill

21. Skills + Critical Theory?
• Strategic adaptation
• Confronting a range of excluding
practices
• Well worth doing
– But mere dialectic in the end
– The dialogue with meaning has barely
started

23. • Native – Immigrant
(Prensky 2001)
• Visitor – Resident
(White Le Cornu 2011)
• Voyeur – Flaneur
(boyd 2011)

24. Literacy - including digital - is
the practice of enunciation in a
community:
“speaking” in the broadest
sense, projecting an identity
with, through and to others
who concur

26. Christ Handing the Keys to St. Peter, Perugino, 1481

34. Andy Wharhol, 1986

35. Discourses around higher education are:
“… a field of competition for the
legitimate exercise of symbolic
violence,
… an arena of conflict between rival
principles of legitimacy, and
competition for political, economic
and cultural power
(Bourdieu 1993, 121)

36. Digital literacy is far more
than skills with keyboard &
apps. It is how we & our
students negotiate the
ICT-mediated frontier
between rival principles.

38. digital literacy cannot be
separated from other
educational - or social, or
economic, or political -
developments.

39. Open online academic practice offers a
radical challenge to the “polyarchic”
limits to the discussion of digital
literacy within institutions, which are
in conflict with themselves.
(Richard Hall 2012)

40. Coursera
MITx
EDx

42. The e-learning myth has always in
part been built on the proposition
that more people can be taught by
fewer.
But new networks and groups may
supplant older ones.

43. Questions
Can you teach more people with e-learning?
– What is the role of the teacher?
– What is the social value of teachers?
– What does this do to educational employment
models?
– How open can a firm be?
– Are universities “firms” in the sense that
companies are?
– What kind of tenure, security and living might a
teaching academic expect?

44. Pedagoies of e-learning
That range of technologies
• Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Open
Academic Practice
• Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
• Social citation
• Academic multimedia (lecture capture, audio
feedback, etc)
• Distributed collaboration

45. New non-text representations of
knowledge: podcasting, lecture
capture, audio and video feedback, oral
presentation, lead to a challenging of
traditional epistemologies:
how do we know it is true if it isn’t text in
a stable, printed form?

46. http://www.xmind.net/share/_embed/georgeroberts/xmind-198337/

47. It is kicking off everywhere.
The Arab Spring movement can be
seen as an example of wide-scale
distributed collaboration, and the
London (and other city) riots last
summer had a collaborative social
media element to them.

49. Limits of navigation
• MOOCs
– Radical openness is not for
everyone
– Extrovert Introvert difference
• Multimedia for assessment
– Text citation and commentary asserts itself through
every fissure
– Opportunity for digital “vivas”
• Distributed collaboration
– We crave – and are good at – contact
Sian Bayne on embodiment

50. Digital literacy is as fundamental
as – and yet is distinct from –
the literacy of the printed word.
(Stephen Downes 2009)
Therefore
• YES!
–there is a pedagogy of e-learning

51. Thank you
Dr George Roberts
OCSLD, Oxford Brookes University
June 2012
groberts@brookes.ac.uk