4. Reasonable Expectations
Module level:
VLE area – interactive, ‘hub’, open source links
Electronic reading resources as the norm
Audio, video content and uploading
Programming
WEEKLY updating by tutor
Forum discussion – range of dynamics (tutor chaired, open,
student chaired, combinations)
Blended learning – avoid novelty / tokenism
Access issues – physical
Access issues – CONDITIONS OF POSSIBILITY / academic ‘capital’
Linkage (to email / networks) – consultation / strategic / varied
Virtual world learning – do stuff you can’t do otherwise.
5. Pedagogy = making
• Creative practice is concerned with making and so is education.
Such a duality of making sees lecturers at once teaching making
and fashioning an effective learning environment for their students.
• Thus we might conceive of ‘learning makers’ as well as a ‘creative
makers’ and from this conception we see ‘the work’ through this
double-lens, or this mirroring.
• The moves a lecturer / practitioner makes in a studio - minute by
minute - as they design teaching constitute the process of
pedagogy.
• This applies to designing learning with technology but the pedagogy
of e-learning is often neglected.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11. Emerging field of virtual educational research skewed towards
opportunities and constraints at the level of the institution.
Assumes ‘student needs’ for new ways of learning?
Dominant discursive themes - student collaboration and reflection;
social constructivist pedagogy; institutional and design barriers for
teachers; learning through / in play; open, daring and ‘risky’
pedagogy; the interplay of learning and education (or edutainment);
experiential pedagogies and ‘learning by becoming’.
Lack of student voice?
12. Media Futur
10 minute assessed conference presentation ‘in world’.
Gaming research journal (online).
Most online worlds I have ever been in don’t really play to be
a ‘second life’ but instead other a completely different
universe which isn’t similar to our own. I feel Second life has
too many similarities to our real world.
Student 4, Cohort 09-10 (Source: Assessed Journal)
13.
14.
15. Identity
• What we do
• Who we are
• Tools we have
• Roles
• Community
• Rules
• Presence
Childs, 2010 (‘mash-up’ – his words - of Activity Theory
and Communities of Practice Model)
16.
17. Forms of Capital
Virtual worlds such as Second
Life may not carry attendant
perceptions of the
systemworld (such as with
Virtual Learning Environments).
But there may be as much
inequality in access to these
spaces as there will be to
books.
18. Forms of Capital
For those within this group lacking cultural capital in the
orthodox mode, the ’trangressive’ benefits of the experience
fell below expectations, and this was particularly apparent for
those that can be considered as gamers.
These students found it difficult to get past the idea that
Second Life was an inferior version of their ‘passion
communities’ (gaming).
This provided a layer of prejudice that had to be surmounted
before any potential benefit could be achieved.
19. Conditions of possibility
Reflexive critical literacy rests on the compulsion for students to
take risks, , to negotiate identities and to deconstruct the ‘idea’ of
the virtual world at the same time as learning within it.
Just as we would ask students to question the traditional
curriculum (what is knowledge, what ‘counts’ as legitimate, how is
power exercised in education?) so we must afford them time and
space for such genuine enquiry in the digital world.
EPISTEMOLOGICAL AND ONTOLOGICAL QUESTIONS.
----- Meeting Notes (07/03/2012 11:07) ----- Blending the virtual with the traditional often - eg an 'in world' journal converts to a powerpoint presentation (in world but fundamentally not transgressive in terms of QAA / learning outcomes / assessment) - new wine in old bottles. Importance of novelty to engagement - scaleable / depth over time?
----- Meeting Notes (07/03/2012 11:07) ----- Starting point - literature review, emerging field of virtual world pedagogy + in particular existing work in the field of Media / Cultural Studies / Education.
----- Meeting Notes (07/03/2012 11:07) ----- Our project focussed on the last point.
----- Meeting Notes (07/03/2012 11:07) ----- Identity cubes as formative activity - high premium on identity theory + notions of virtual 'selves' related to Foucaultian / Butlerian ideas - so, again, the content and the activities are more 'in synch' always-already perhaps than would be the case for module on Film Noir? Add comment - literally lost my shirt and haven't found the time in preparing for this seminar to get fully dressed. Anecdotes about protocols etc.
----- Meeting Notes (07/03/2012 11:07) ----- PLay vid - example of the 'old wine in new bottles'?
----- Meeting Notes (07/03/2012 11:07) ----- Mark Childs' input and anecdote about Walsall / Prague. Crucial point here is that these are the questions we should ask with our students about ALL of our teaching and learning, so this is an 'After the Media' example - all the technology does is allow us to more clearly see the critical power / knowledge questions that were already there in the 'offline' world of Education 1.0 or whatever. In this case we can see how Activty Theory and Communities of Practice might be easier to 'unpack' with students in a virtual world because the learning environment is so explicity constructed before their eyes - but then we can go back to talk about lectures, seminars, books and essays through the same kind of critical lens? So postmodern in this important political sense - DECONSTRUCTING teaching and learning.
----- Meeting Notes (07/03/2012 11:07) ----- So, yes, they experiment with identity in ways that are more difficult to replicate on campus, perhaps. Talk about videogaming and virtual worlds within aesthetic and formal visibilities / practices – Ranciere, Adorno revisited – playful resistance and pastiche is built into the consumption – frivolity and metalanguage?
Importance of form as well as aesthetics. Ludology as well as narratology. FORMS of being literate – more or less ‘differently.’
----- Meeting Notes (07/03/2012 11:07) ----- These are the important questions about access and equality but it isn't to do with technical training (validation panel focus) or just access to fast broadband, it's to do with understanding the translation between language games. Our key unexpected finding was that the crossover from traditional academic studentship into virtual world enquiry is easier than from gaming into virtual world enquiry. They know too much. This allows us to rework Bowles and Gintis' work on the correspondence principle + Bernstein on modalities - autonomous, vocational, lifeworld / systemworld etc. The digital natives are academic migrants, don't forget!
----- Meeting Notes (07/03/2012 11:07) ----- Our tentative recommendations - the conditions of possibility.