Learning for a complex world. In Guildford of all places. Good a place to start as any i guess?

 

not what you were expecting? link back to wiki home page                                                                         in the spirit of the wiki and

   in the name of creative commons,

please feel free

to edit me!

           or, drop me a line at d.tinham@roehampton.ac.uk

 

Hi there,

 

 

my name is Dave Tinham and i'm a research assistant from the  Crucible centre at Roehampton University. I'll be using this page during the conference to reflect on ideas that are interesting to me during the conference; both for my work at Crucible in creating case studies for teaching and learning (we're collaborating with various NGOs to provide material primarily for an undergraduate module called 'questioning citizenship'), but also perhaps in more personal areas of interest (i'm also a research student interested in video activism in a 'web 2.0' environment). Also, if anyone's interested in our work at the Crucible, maybe i could post some more material about our case study project? Let me know.

 

I must confess to being quite new to all the pedogogic issues that seem to be pertinent both from a glance at the conference schedule and elsewhere already on this site. In fact, i'm currently a bit confused as to which workshops and symposiums to attend. I did however put down ' exploring with wiki' as my first choice masterclass, so thought it best to start here asap! Hopefully by tomorrow when the conference starts i will begin to get a better idea of how this is all going to work. The welcoming letter made it all sound like we'll have some fun anyway - i'm looking forward to seeing how the 'bring a musical instrument' session is going to pan out!

 

I hope to meet as many of you as possible, either on this wiki or even in real world (!), so i learn as much as possible from a very complex world

 

see you tomorrow

 

Dave

 

 

 

Day 1 Monday, June 25th

 

Intro- welcome to not-so-sunny Surrey

 

Professor Norman Jackson, director of the Surrey CETL for excellence in Professional Training and Education opened the conference with quite a challenge . Influenced by Karl Fisch's film clip Shift Happens, he asked

 

'How do we prepare students:

 

• for jobs that don't yet exist
• using technologies that have not yet been invented
• in order to solve problems that we don'y know are problems yet?

 

In the conference programme, he puts it another way, 'preparing students for an increasingly complex world is a 'wicked problem''. Indeed! And if we get any answers to the wicked problem over the next couple of days it will have been well worth the trip around the M25 in the rain! Certainly looks like we'll have an interesting time while we work on it.

 

Here's a pic from the artist's wall in the conference centre. It's the work of artist in residence Julian Burton and depicts the student going into a placement. My apologies to him that it seems to have inverted somehow, but hey it's a complex world (or rather, i seem to have made it even more so, yet again). For more of the work on the artists in residence see their visual experience page

  

 

Keynote: Learning The Complexity of Professional Practice - Professor Michael Eraut

 

Professor Michael Eraut is the UK's leading researcher in the field of professional learning and has found that in most professional practice, most learning occures informally during normal working hours. This doesn't suprise me too much in itself, but i was suprised that at least 80% of learning occurs just through normal working day interaction, by way of natural processes of the sharing of tacit knowledge and emotional encouragement. And with a lot of this learning, we're not even really conscious that it's occurring. But we should try to be and try to do whatever we can to enhance it, and certainly get away from the idea that learning must necessarily occur in a traditional classroom environment. As he puts it, what is of interest here is 'the knowledge that people know; but don't know they know'.

 

Of course, if you're only use to the traditional classroom environment (where you might get the other 20% or so of learning) you're likely to be like a student ship hitting an iceberg when you go into a placement, to use Professor Eraut's metaphor. Therefore we need a improved representation of learning in higher education by losing the idea that qualifications match capabilities. Instead, he recommends 'learning trajectories', that account for change in contexts and practices and include both formal and informal learning. But lessens the realiance on criterion-based assessment.

 

There was a lot more than this in his paper. Check this link for more info Complexity of Professional Practice. Or see short video clip.

The ideas above are just the main things that i took away.

 

Learning to Learn through Supported Enquiry - an interpretive meta-ethnography: literature review - Maggi Savin-Baden and Rhona Sharpe

 

This was useful for me in clarifying one of those basic questions that you're just too embarassed to ask: what really is the difference between PBL and E-IBL, and can these terms be used interchangably? Probably not. Nonetheless, the real message seemed to be not that much really and does it really matter what it's called anyway? Although PBL opened out to E-IBL (there's no difference there besides spelling right?), much of the latter is not significantly different from the former. And the UK  are possibly world leaders in the field so there's obviously nothing to worry about. Especially if you welcome a bit of academic floundering in the cause of identity building - the more 'stuckness', the better! But i'm being flippant about what appeared to be en excellent and useful piece of work, laing the foundations of what we know about the subject so far. There was a really useful paper handed out that i hope i'll be able to link to later. If not, i'll bring a copy back to Crucible. And it was worth missing Kevin McCarron for (parallel sessions are great but they do have their drawbacks), cos i already know he's a funny and an interesting guy.

 

Drop a pebble, surf the wave: embedding IBL at Undergraduate Foundation Level Zero - Willy Kitchen and Tim Herrick

 

This sessions appealed to me for two reasons. Firstly because i'm interested in the so-called web 2.0 phenomenon (a term coined by Tim O'Reilly) and the rise of sites dependent on user-generated content (UGC); but even more personally because i came back to university myself as an adult through a foundation course, and wanted to see the extent to which the IBL approach had worked in this case with its use of e-learning. The challenges for the learners were familiar - to gain confidence in an unfamiliar learning environment, to refresh key skills, and to develop necessary new ones. It was felt that IBL would play to mature students' strengths and at the same time, address a perceived common weakness in ICT skills.

 

I'd link you their WebCT site if i could, if only to illustrate what Willy described as 'not the prettiest in the world'. I'm sure he's right but it was certaibly an aesthetic improvement on anything i've seen used at Roehampton, where (from my experience), the design sensibility is 'minimalist' to put it kindly. Here we had pictures, and *shock*, BACKGROUND COLOUR. Nurse, the shades. There also seemed to be some interesting reflection and discussion going on (topics ranged from Marx to pastoral care and Descartes to global warming), judging by the anonymised print-outs we looked at in the workshop. A colleague mentioned that the only thing that had worked at their uni to get the students to collaborate online, was to make it integral to the assessment. I'm not sure if assessment was based on online intervention in this particular case but one interesting experiment in assessment had been to tailor subject areas for testing retropectively to areas of online student-led enquiry, to provide a reward for independent learning.

 

Another successful venture (and i share Willy's interest in the potential of open source software as opposed to proprietry software such as Web CT) was the use of a soup blog that enabled students from different disciplines to work together in a fun way. And furthering the use of open source, and even more interesting to me (because i think we could do something similar at Roehampton in questioning citizenship) was the use of Flikr, with the creation of a group called till frog, to support a project called 'my Sheffield'. Basically, the students were asked to be creative in photographic representation of 'their Sheffield and all the photos were uploaded to the group to create a geographic representation of space and identity.

 

Despite the fact that Willy admitted that it had been difficult to enable IBL due to the amount of support needed (or scaffolding as somebody put it), the use of ICTs had helped empower a sharing and supportive environment. Although they might have been left with more questions than answers, as discussed above in the lit review section - that's not necessarily a bad thing.

 

Just time for an ironic picture of web 2.0 collaboration wiki style here at the conference. Here is the base room where a number of computers have been set up to facilitate the wiki (and of course do old-fashioned stuff like email too). The world may be complex, but at least you don't need eyes in the back of your head any more.

 

Some comments from colleagues below - thanks guys

Hi Dave

You are a star and a true pioneer as far as I'm concerned.. You show what can be done by having a go and creatively using the resources that are all round you. I made just one adjustment to your reflections - the back to front wall image (which is such a good metaphor for complexity particularly where technology is concerned) was produced by Julian Burton a graphic facilitator / sceptre artist in residence who couldn't be with us at the conference because he is on holiday.  The wall depicts a conversation I had with him when I tried to expalin what we are trying to do.

You lead by example.Hope you enjoyed the conference dinner and Kai's music??

norman (Dave - thanks for kind words Norman. And also well done for correcting my credit for the artist of the picture above - a good example of wiki functionality i'd say? I wasn't an overnighter myself, so missed the dinner, Kai's music and the Guildford Adventure - which looked particularly fun. There's just too much to do in such a short space of time!)

 

Here's the soup blog link, Dave, and in return I'd be very interested in any and all links to your work at Roehampton as, as discussed in person, I think there are some interesting ways we might be able to explore collaboration beyond the conference - so wikis and the web as an extension of the conference hall too, just what she always wanted ... and I promise to look some more at what you've been posting, and maybe get my own page up and running, tomorrow morning - but must dash for some food and, I hope, a different take on the fieldtrip shortly thereafter ... (Dave - thanks for the link Willy, i will add it into my reflections on your 'surf the wave' session above. I will link to some Roehampton material once i've finished on the reflection stage here (there's so much material to assimilate from the last two days, i'm sure you know what i mean) and i agree, there seems to be plenty of scope for collaboration between what you're doing in Sheffield and some of the things we're up to at Roehampton. Please let me know the link to your page on the wiki if you have time to put one together)

 

Day 2 Tuesday, June 26th

 

Music as a model of enquiry (a recital and enquiring conversation) - Dr Emilie Crapoulet assisted by Dr David Hay

 

(watch film from this event Music.mov)

 

see also Emilie

 

Given my obvious interest in blogging i had originally planned to attend the 'Enquiry through blogging' workshop. I'm sorry that i missed that given the good reports i heard, but i'm nonetheless happy to have followed a last minute gut reaction to go to 'Music as a model of enquiry'. This was really something special. I guess i felt beforehand that i couldn't miss it because it felt so 'left-field' (and in a conference as eclectic and creative as this, that's saying something!) and i'm still not exactly sure what to make of it, but you know that feeling when pre-conceived boundaries get a little shaken and stirred? That's how i felt after this and i like it.

 

We got into small groups and were asked to listen closely to three pieces of music played by Emilie and write down whatever feelings were engendered on a series of post-it notes. Then, we tried to mind map the notes to draw some kind of conclusions around the processes that created our experience. It was interesting to see the extent to which our meanings were shared, or conversely were personal and indifferent. Our group found far more shared than discrete meaning, but when we discussed the last piece of music back with the whole group, Emilie mentioned that another group had heard 'rain'. We hadn't, i think my idea of it was a sense of 'throwness'.

 

Following that however, we listened to the last piece played again, but this time we were told what the title was before Emilie started, namely Debussy's 'gardens in the rain'. I think you can certainly hear it if you know the title  (listen to Hikari Oku playing the piece on YouTube and see if you agree), but we felt a sense of a certain loss of our imagination when we then listened to some of Debussy's preludes after hearing some of Debussy's intentions when writing them (although Emilie's introductions themselves on the work of Debussy were very interesting, ranging from the effect of the rise of psychology on consciousness, through the influence of the Paris expo and  Baudelaire's poetry through to his playful appropriations on the work of English seaside minstrels).

 

In the final mapping session, myself and Viv (my group partner) went from broad concensus to almost polar disagreement about the feelings the music was now invoking. Can't really explain why, but that's how we ended up with a Yin and Yang motif, that you can see reproduced above here in Julian's unique take on proceedings. All in all, therefore an interesting and in one sense singular plurality of experience of music as a model of enquiry.

 

Ambassadors for Inquiry - The CILASS Student Network 1 Year on - Tim Fiennes and Sabine Little

 

One of the things i admired about the conference's underlying concepts was its placement of the student experience as central. Indeed there was a theme running through devoted to 'student voice', not just  metaphorically but literally. The first of these sessions i was able to attend was a report from the CILASS student network. In a remarkable experiment, CILASS created the Student Ambassador Network (SAN) to work alongside the centre and departmental academic champions to promote and encourage Inquiry based learning throughout the university. The SAN is comprised of 24 student representatives, each from a participating department and all of whom are paid for the work they do. This work is based upon the five component groups of the SAN, namely an evaluation group (beyond module evaluation forms, student-led focus groups); journal group (written by students, and with 4,000 hits and counting - read by students. See the publication here); film group (we saw footage showing student perceptions of IBL); information and materials group (disseminating projects, providing welcome packs for student ambassadors, producing a student definition of IBL)  and a technology and user support group (for student training and development). In addition, ICTs are used to facilitate the running of the network (see CILASS student blog). CILASS seem to be doing great work in encouraging IBL at Sheffield, especially with their weekly cross department 'IBL Cafe', which i'd love to go and see if i ever make it up that way. However, we were provided with plenty of evidence that for many, it was the work of the SAN that made CILASS 'come alive'. I'd be interested to follow their progress and wonder if we could do something similar at Roehampton?

 

btw I have a useful hard copy of a paper on the network ('Ambassadors for Inquiry - The CILASS Student Action Network One Year on' by Tim Fiennes and Sabine Little that i'll try and get an electronic link for to post here, unless anone can help me with this?)

 

Plenary: What have we discovered about the role of enquiry learning in a complex world?

 

The plenary consisted of a brief overview followed by discussion on the four main conference themes, namely-

 

• Work as enquiry

   

   

• Disciplinary enquiry

   

   

• student voice

   

   

• using technology to facilitate enquiry

   

  I have linked above strands through to their respective theme pages on the Wiki, as the summing up might be better off not following the more personal style of the rest of this page. Maybe a cop out, but i'm going to bed!

   

  Tomorrow, i'll finish off with a few notes from the master class, then go and find the conference feedback page

 

Master Class: Exploring with wiki - Maja Jankowska and Mark Gamble

 

 

 Web 2.0 - the machine is us/ing us - Michael Wesch video on MySpace