Boy bands are back in style again so I hear on my radio! I had 2 young sons in the 1990's and they loved a little boogie to a boy band. This was one of my favourite tracks from that era and it has resonance for me again today. My Twitter (X) account is now removed and I have to move on. I had used it to authenticate a few of my other accounts so now I need to pick them up in new ways.
I had used List.ly now and again but could no longer access my account as it was tied to Twitter. I can see no other choice but to set up a new account but just so I don't lose the lists I had made, here they are:
This migration away from X was a timely reminder to review all my accounts and address some of the long forgotten ones. Doing this periodically is really important as abandonned accounts present an opportunity to mischief makers online. The list above was made to share the learning and encourage others to carry out some spring (or winter) cleaning. Internet scammers are getting even more ruthless and there's no doubt that they are quick to pick up on vulnerabilities and exploit new technologies such as AI in order to line their pockets.
Many educators had to climb a steep learning curve through the pandemic and we need to support each other in staying safe online. It may help to think about how you protect yourself when you are away from home in an unfamiliar environment. No less care is needed online. We are now in an era of deep fakes and industrial scale exploitation of technology, critical digital skills could not be more important.
In the process of revisiting my digital online presence I remembered that another of my occasional tools, Haiku Deck, was linked to my Twittter (X) account. I investigated a link on my online CV but the site was not reachable. Fortunately the session had been recorded and that was still available. I'm including it here as I think it is very relevant to our situation today. Technology is changing rapidly and poses many challenges. This presentation (at a Mahara eportfolio event in 2015) is about the nature of learning in the internet age.
This year sees a new venture added to my retirement activities. An unexpected invitation came from the UK Future Teacher 3.0 team and this was too good an opportunity to turn down. The small UK team are an absolute powerhouse, a great example of how much can be achieved with the right blend of experience, and expertise and a shared commitment to inclusive practice in teaching. Lilian, Alistair and Ron have orchestrated monthly webinars for teachers in HE and FE since 2017 firstly as part of an Erasmus Plus funded project but now unfunded and undaunted! I have had the privilege of contributing to several sessions over the years and I really value the network and the resources they create as OERs.
Using an open source tool called Xerte they are able to create reusable learning objects which include interactive content and are media rich and accessible.
I have used the Tool Savvy resource from the 2018 webinar series several times as part of my work on tool choice for UNICollaboration and it is so good to be able to focus minds on key questions when choosing authoring tools. Xerte also means that our trainees can learn about tools whilst using one of the best examples available.
So this is a network that lives the values of its originators, in the same way as we in #virtualexchange like to "walk the talk". So you can see why I was so excited to be asked to join the team this year.
Of course, one of the bugbears of doing anything at the "bleeding edge" is that new tools and approaches are constantly being developed but the FT3 UK team have even turned this to an advantage! The second iteration of webinars was Reactivated -bringing new ideas to enhance the earlier recordings and this current series is Reflected, where the focus is on building upon what we have learned through reflection "because future teachers never stop learning".
In my final years at Warwick I led a course for final year students who were considering teaching as a career. Central to my course design was both virtual exchange and reflection. We used an open source tool Mahara as a private reflection space and students were able to keep private journal posts every week which could, if they so wished, be used as part of their assessed eportfolio. This process of regular reflection incorporated into the course design helped to establish the importance of reflection to those working in time constrained and often demanding roles in teaching. Taking time to take account of how you are feeling and to, over time, develop a picture of the direction you wish to take - these things are so important in life. Sharing some of these thoughts with others can also help to strengthen your professional network and can even lead to unexpected outcomes such as new connections.
I'm not great at sticking to routines but I do use my blogs to think things through and it has been helpful over the years. Reflecting through writing on a diary or a blog can really bring my thoughts into focus and help me find a way forward. I look forward to reading reflections from others who have been part of the Future Teacher network.
This post is a continuation of the keynote I prepared for #innoconf21 to acknowledge the many details I would have liked to say but didn't have time to include!
I used Vevox to garner information from participants during my presentation so I will use the data submitted anonymously in response to my questions to make sure that the participant voices are heard. This is an extension of the approach I took to my keynote which was to open the process so that the recording showed the interaction which would often be left "behind the scenes".
As you can see in the first image above, the participants had a range of experience of using technology for teaching with over 50% saying they had little or no experience of teaching using online tools prior to the pandemic. Immediately this impacted on my keynote. Seeing this I was immediately very aware of how tired these people must be. Rethinking your usual teaching style and reframing it through computer mediation takes time, to do it whilst juggling a global pandemic is exhausting. As Laura Czerniewicz says in her blogpost :
"the classroom has been made strange"
Despite the exhaustion, they were engaging in an online conference, eager to find out more about mastering the skills necessary. The response to the next question showed lots of experimentation has been happening.
I see here a mixture of institutional tools such as the VLE Blackboard/Moodle and relatively new internet Zoom and Padlet. Also some references to hardware such as ipads, phone and a router, things that may not have featured in the vocabulary of teaching tools for some until recently. After lockdown many had to get familiar with these pretty quickly. In such a situation, when a technologist tells you to follow a few steps and use this "solution" it is easy to be left with the impression that there is magic in the technology that solves your problem. It was this very mindset that was questioned on the arrival of CD-ROMs years ago, showing the dangers of succumbing to the WOW factor. I was eager not to further feed this myth of "solutionism" which remains rife in this space.
I believe that the current pace of change in technology has outpaced the capacity of practitioners, especially if they are isolated and not part of of a helpful Community of Practice. That thought was illustrated when I asked about professional support networks:
Unsurprisingly given the emergency situation we see informal support coming from friends, colleagues and even partners. Social media looks like it has provided a connection to colleagues now disconnected physically. However the immediate emergency has passed so how are we best to proceed in a world which may yet undergo more changes? I would propose that joining an appropriate expert network would be a good first step. Let's get good quality information to ensure that we build on the initial "magic" with greater understanding of what is actually going on in the background. As I tweeted later:
If we are going to bust myths about #edtech we have to see behind the magic curtain. Ask better questions of your tech support and students- what happens to the student data? How much did this platform cost? who cannot access? #innoconf21
If we are to carve out something using technological tools that carries our values and priorities we have to be more confident that we understand what we are doing. There is a risk that otherwise our work will be carved up.
Such great work is already happening in languages, driven by practitioners who love to learn and who are willing to collaborate in order to create great learner experiences. I shared examples on our padlet board of produsage (using extracts from media to create exciting learning opportunities) and virtual exchange (international collaborations between practitioners and students). Wider adoption of innovative assessment techniques such as blogging, wikipedia editing and eportfolio use would also be welcomed as they provide meaningful ways of acquiring skills which will shift the balance from students as consumers to students as producers of knowledge. See links document.
Connecting with folk already doing these things, according to what you think you can change this year will be a useful shortcut to build upon their expertise. My experience of these folk is that they welcome those who take an interest in their work. They are generally open to human centred approaches, we all need to be if we are to sustain our influence and our role in the future of language teaching. It really is in our hands. We need to bear in mind that great carving takes time, Google tells me that even experienced sculptors can take up to 80 hours to make a relatively simple piece. So identify your priorities for the new term, get informed and connected and then make your own masterpiece.
Over the years I have used eportfolios for many different purposes. Prior to the ALT Winter conference 2020 where I will be a panel member talking about e-portfolios I think it would be useful to draw all my explorations and activities into one place. This will be a post with lots of links but I hope also to summarize the rationale for looking to eportfolios in my work. The image above is taken from the Mahara #MUM (Mahara users Midlands) group which now resides in mahara.org.
Firstly, it is important to distinguish between a portfolio and an eportfolio. There are many professions which expect to see a portfolio in order to recruit. A typical portfolio in this context (photography, modelling etc) would include examples of the work you are most proud of. A curation which shows your talents and expertise. An e-portfolio can also be used in this way of course. An electronic version of the same. This is how I used mahara for my CMALT assessment and subsequent review for example. The beauty of a digital curation is of course that it displays multimedia evidence wrapped with contextual narration. It reflects the fact that much of my activity is online and open. Display of my open badges also tells the story of my activity. So for me an e-portfolio is the logical choice.
My rationale for supporting e-portfolio is more that just encouraging folk to "show off" however. An eportfolio is a very useful personal collection tool. By default, using Mahara the pages and collections you create are visible only to the user. This makes it a "domain of one's own" a space online (as I presented in ALT winter conference 2016) which can be used to collect your work, a space to reflect upon your experiences of online or blended learning which may for example have happened in a more formal VLE space. This is the approach we adopted in Languages@Warwick mahoodle and in the EVOLVE training co-laboratory. This store of personal reflection and evidence can easily be curated, selecting good examples which can then be shared more widely. There is an economy of time and effort gained in this approach and the results I've seen in our Assessed e-portfolio for language learning summarised in this e-book for example bear witness to the power of this approach. The eportfolio owner can acquire vital digital literacies (management of IP/copyright, permissions and online visibility) which improve the quality of their online presence. I have written extensively and openly about the process of forming a construct for assessment, leaving the documents available openly on scribd. A more recent final year module I created, Developing Language Teaching was 100% eportfolio assessed. A fact which was fully appreciated when lockdown arrived this year. Using their eportfolio as a private space throughout the course encouraged students to evidence the evolution of their development over time. Some extracts are included in this recent presentation for the MaharaHui2020 conference.
Finally, I have also used an eportfolio shared space (Mahara group) to support shared research such as in the case of the WIHEA #knowhow project. Shared pages allowed us to collaborate and view each other's research and then decide together where we should investigate further. In a project such as this where staff and students in different roles had limited time to get together the shared group space mediated our interactions, saving time and allowing us to collaborate remotely. The digital artefacts we stored there were then easily accessible for us to create a digital poster for dissemination at the end of the project.
My conviction that eportfolios can be a really useful tool for staff and students alike has several key contributing factors:
Deep thought and reflection require private space and time as well as mediated discussion. We provide for both in the physical world, I believe we need to provide digital spaces with the same affordances. Especially in a pandemic.
Ownership is a crucial conversation in the digital domain. Legally there is too little protection for the rights of the individual who creates online, the industry would prefer us to all be consumers. There is much to do to increase understanding of Creative Commons licences.
The assumption that all academic work should reside on institutional platforms to which you lose access at the end of your course or contract should be challenged. The possibility to export and retain your work should be supported.
Designing assessment which use e-portfolios is a really useful collaborative activity. For a practitioner it requires questioning what we value and empirically investigating how best to achieve that learning. There are of course disciplinary differences but sharing your construct openly can inspire others.
Learning is not a tidy, linear process. It is full of twists and turns. Making that explicit through reflection can help us come to terms with the challenges we face and find better strategies.
Here's the recording from the ALT Winter conference 2020:
