‘social media’, learning & teaching

some questions & issues

Graham Jeffery

Porous institutions

• Increasingly we are teaching and learning ‘in public’• Consideration of learning environments – physical, social, digital

• Awareness of networked/hybrid identities – professional, personal, social -for students and academics

• What about time for disconnection, repair, quiet and reflection? • Traditionally, universities might have been regarded as ‘places of retreat’ -

now – ‘places of engagement’

• Equally, overbearing demands of marketised/vocational ideologies that need critical interrogation – we are still the public university, not (yet?) the privatized/corporate/marketised university

• Connecting communities of learning/building engagement beyond the campus

Environments for learning

1. Different types of physical learning spaces -

2. Ambulatory/peripatetic pedagogies – or walking/place-based…

3. Wider networked informational environments

…all now technologically mediated – we capture experience using portable media tools

Environments for learning• Typologies of spaces

• The classroom, lab, studio, library, etc

• Social/digital media changes the ways we can work in these spaces – bringing the outside in etc

Environments for learning

• Ambulatory/peripatetic pedagogies

Creating mobility – movement – opening up spaces of encounter/questioning – what Wenger/Lave might call ‘situated learning’ . Technologically augmented/technologically surveilled –GPS, mobile, instant response (cf. Occupy). Public space as technologically mediated – responsive – open to constant re-interpretation – re-invention

Environments for learning• Mass of online resources

• Filtering for authenticity/authority/value

• Curating and sorting relevant content

New kinds of public academic practice?

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g&list=PL8305209F433E1CAB

(Michael Wesch’s Digital Ethnographies at Kansas State University)

• Generating public engagement

• Generating conversation

• Generating reputation? And shared enquiry?

Environments for learning• Digital spaces/hybrid spaces/augmented spaces –

screens, tactile, sensory, immersive

• Networked informational environments, whether open/closed

• Blogging, sharing, collaborating etc

• Learning to work and communicate in public – different kinds of etiquette, values, awareness of ability of information to travel

Eugenia Balcells: Frequencies

A challenge

Consider typologies of learning spaces and how your programmes of study mobilize different modes of learning

This is what learning design is about

e.g. Social learning, spatial learning, not just logical-mathematical-verbal (back to Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences) – and whether we recognise/reward/allow for variations in ways of knowing… (systems of assessment come into play here…)

Formal/informal dimensions of learning

• Environment, climate, culture, atmosphere

• Not just task-orientation & certification

• The kinds of spaces in which different people learn effectively – different kinds of tasks, different ways of knowing, different kinds of creative approaches

Hyperconnectivity

• Makes possible all sorts of new project-based pedagogies

• Collaboration and shared planning between individuals and organisations can be very fast

• Organizational systems and processes (particularly around resources and decision making) however have failed to keep pace

• Navigating dissonance, risk and uncertainty

Disembodied learning?

• What about information overload?

• Being discriminating and critical – mobilisingtheory takes time

• Hyper-individualised society? Or new forms of collectivity? Or both?

• Marketisation, branding, stratification and fakery

• Ethics, values, authenticity remain important

New platforms/new frontiers

• Plethora of ‘challenger’ platforms – universities have ‘authority’ to certify – but for how long?

• E-learning suits some kinds of knowledge ecologies but not others. Changing roles of the educator - curator, designer, collaborator, not just ‘instructor’? New kinds of pedagogic authority - beyond ‘the face at the front’

• wider communities, online sharing, wider dissemination, potential for misrepresentation…

Futures?

• ‘Technologies of the self’

• Tools for future occupations/inventing the future – becoming media literate

• Strategies that enable collaboration and shared enquiry

• Maintaining offline space for quiet, privacy, reflection,

• Not everything needs to be done in public

…my public selves

www.twitter.com/grahamjeffery

generalpraxis.blogspot.com

graham.jeffery@uws.ac.uk