slides for longbridge v2

Joint Information Systems Committee 11/04/23 | | Slide 1

Learning Literacies for a Digital Age

ELESIG symposiumLongbridge Technology Park

20 November 2008

Helen BeethamBecka Currant


About the LLiDA project

Helen BeethamLou McGillAllison Littlejohn

Small-scale JISC studyReporting in Jan 09 (ish)

Learners’ Experiences of e-Learning Workshops: November 2008 – March 2009 slide 3

Our questions and methods

1. What practices underpin effective learning in the digital age? (a) conceptual and competency frameworks relevant to learning literacies in UK HE and FE

(b) The changing landscape of learning literacies

2. How are learning literacies currently being supported in UK HE and FE institutions?(a) Institutional audits

(b) Best practice exemplars

3. What is the evidence of successful outcomes for learners from different types of learning literacy provision?


What do we mean by digital literacies?


Activity #1 In pairs:

– Talk, write, draw, map, sing, act or dance your definition of digital literacies to each other

Write down:

– Green: definitions and issues in defining digital literacy

– Orange: skills, literacies, competences, capabilities, practices etc you would include in your definition

– Blue: references, resources, frameworks etc

We will be making shameless use of your ideas!


Feedback…

this leaves us with some tensions….


Instrumental (technical/economic) definition

Make your training investment go further…only

invest in the skills your workforce needs!


Socially situated definition

information

representation

media

knowledge

interpreting

understanding

manipulating

analysing

creating

sharing

learning (how to…)

CriticalityAwareness

AgencyValue

Purpose

social value

socially situated practices

what kind of society?


digital = ‘tools are changing really fast!”


literacy = ‘learning stays much the same!”


literacy as entitlement

a foundational knowledge or capability, such as reading, writing or numeracy, on which more specific skills depend

a cultural entitlement – a practice without which a learner is impoverished in relation to culturally valued knowledge

access

skills

strategies

attributes

entitlementequality of

access

Ensuring all learners have functional access to core technologies, services and devices; developing core literacies; building capacity to learn across the lifecourse.


literacy as difference

communication – expressing how an individual relates to culturally significant communications in a variety of media

the need for practice – acquired through continued development and refinement in different contexts, rather than once-and-for-all mastery

a socially and culturally situated practice – often highly dependent on the context in which it is carried out

self-transformation - literacies (and their lack) have a lifelong, lifewide impact access

skills

strategies

attributesenhancementexpression of

difference

Enabling learners to access and integrate own technologies, services, and learning communities; supporting the development of socio-technical practice; supporting achievement of personal goals and learning journeys.


LLiDA’s starting point

By ‘digital literacies’ we mean the range of practices that underpin effective learning in a digital age

We use the term ‘effective learning’ as characteristic of ‘skilled, digitally aware learners with the capacity to participate in learning using technologies of their own choosing’.

We use the term ‘digital age’ as a shorthand for technical, social, economic, cultural and educational contexts in which digital forms of information and communication predominate


LLiDA literacy resources


academic literacies

literacies

information and media literacies

ICT literacies

slow change, cultural and institutional inhibitors

rapid change, economic and techno-social

drivers

critical thinkingproblem solvingreflectionacademic writingnote-takingconcept mappingtime managementanalysis, synthesisevaluationcreativity, innovationself-directed learningcollaborative learning

searching and retrievingquestion framingcritical evaluationmanaging resourcesnavigating info spacescontent creationediting, repurposingenriching resourcesreferencingsharing content

ICT skillsweb skillssocial networkingusing CMCusing TELEusing digital devicesword processingusing databasesanalysis toolsassistive techpersonalisation

engaging with academic

tasks

engaging with digital tools

engaging with academic

knowledge/ content


identifying and critiquing competence frameworks


Auditing institutional provision


Developing the audit

Mainly descriptive/qualitative data that does justice to the complexity of the phenomena

But: quantitative data has rhetorical value, particularly scoping the need for further development

Tools should support institutional change processes as well as data collection


Activity #2

In pairs, choose one section of the audit

Interview each other about how this looks at your respective institutions

How revealing is this exercise? What data collection and analysis issues do you foresee?


Snapshots of best practice

Develop Me!

Meet and chat, pre-entry activities

developme.ning.com

Online resources

www.bradford.ac.uk/developme

Skills tracking

Mobile guides

www.braduni.mobi

Student voice

• Expectations survey• First Year

Experience questionnaire

http://developme.ning.com/

http://www.brad.ac.uk/developme

http://www.braduni.mobi/

The Student Voice

• “The forums are great as you can meet other people before beginning University. It makes you feel less nervous.”

• “[I like] being able to meet and talk to people before starting”

• “You’ve got his huge edifice which is a University, but what you need is a human face on it.”

• “Thanks for the warm welcome note, it gave me a great first impression about the university of Bradford”

Student Reflections

• “I’ve used Facebook before, and I’ve used MySpace before that but found Facebook much easier to use because it’s much simpler. Where I was the computers weren’t so good, so it was very important to have something simple and easy to load up. The Develop Me! website was somewhere between the two in terms of complexity, I found it quite easy to use”

• “I knew their faces, so I was happy to approach them, and they recognised me as well.”

• “Most of the things that related to the serious aspect of University I found on the University of Bradford website.”

• “It was good to be able to find out about things any time of day.”

Comments from Staff

• “This [Develop Me!] is great. I am so pleased that you have set this up and it’s an easy way for me to talk to the new students and get to know them better”

• “They did seem a lot more self reliant with getting themselves registered and getting going with things.”

• “I thought I was too old to do all this [social networking] but it’s not as hard as you think and the students obviously seem to benefit from it”

Talking Walls…

• Opportunity to get more feedback from students and staff• Qualitative based approach – less surveys, more opinions• What is it like living and learning in the 21st century?• Piloted approach at ELESIG Summer Symposium

• Filming will take place on 4 Feb 2009 – ties in with “Welcome Back” event

• Discussion topics posted around atrium space• Learners provide feedback• Process is filmed• Hopefully engage more students in process and different

ones!


Looking under the institutional radar and behind the institutional stories

Excellent practice, not standardised provision

1. Excellent institutional policies and policy frameworks

2. Excellent central services provision e.g. library, learning development, e-learning, ICT support

3. Excellent provision embedded into curricula

a. specialist modules

b. embedded skills

4. Excellent ‘learner-led’ provision, e.g. formal and informal mentoring, buddying, sharing of strategies, learner representation


Activity #3

Consider examples of excellent practice known to you, especially types 3 and 4

Could any of them become one of our snapshots?

Individually, try filling in a submission (you could get £100!)


Discussion: over to you


Why research digital literacies?

What research issues does our project raise (including methods)?

What outputs would actually be useful?


http://www.academy.gcal.ac.uk/llida/


Challenges to this paradigm: capacity

‘I think our teachers have IT lessons, I think maybe once a year’

‘The teachers don’t know how to use them – their understanding of computers is behind ours’

[Students’] experiences in commercial contexts led them to see the university VLE as unimaginative and the tutors’ use of it as lacking in vision. SEEL project, Greenwich

AttentionCreativitySocial participation Developing and projecting identities

Learners are developing and practicing these

outside of formal learning contexts

HEA project ‘UK academics' conceptions of, and pedagogy

for, information literacy ‘ (http://dis.shef.ac.uk/literacy/project/

) found a common perception that supporting literacies was

‘someone else’s job’!


Many of today’s learners use technology primarily for social networking.

Learners often find asynchronous discussion forums (such as those within VLEs) problematic, and they are used less frequently and enthusiastically than other forms of communication. Learners suggest this is due to the lower frequency and promptness of contributions compared with other technologies learners use to support their own social networking.

The studies found that learners share work with each other at previously unsuspected levels. Informal learning, facilitated by technology, is also commonplace. (From LXP report)

knowledge practice is increasingly mediated by technology beyond the

mandate and provision of the institution

attempts to keep ahead of learners’ specific technologies and knowledge

practices may fail


Challenges to this paradigm: cultures

Academic knowledge culture

Evidence-based

Historical justification

Discipline-based methods and explanations

Peer review (closed community)

Evolutionary development (paradigm shifts every 10 yrs?)

Culture of production

Objectivity, critique

Publication, reputation

GoogleGen knowledge culture

Style- and usage-based

Justification-in-use

Issue-based methods and explanations

Peer review (open community)

Rapid response to change

Pro-sumer cultures (cut-and-paste, re-edit, repurpose)

Personal identity, reflection

Circulation, connection

knowledge practices of the academy may be at odds with the values,

beliefs and expectations learners bring from their knowledge practices

in other spaces


Some counter-evidence

‘While the students expect to be able to set themselves up, technologically… they will not expect … the technology to encroach on what they see as the key benefits from university – interaction and learning.’

‘I prefer to learn face to face with a teacher helping me understand any problems that I have.’

‘Traditional teacher/pupil learning methods are preferred as the backbone for everyday learning. Technology needs to be used as a tool to complement this way of learning.’

(JISC Student Expectations study, November 2007)

Consultations carried out with children, parents and other citizen juries to determine preferred scenarios for education in 2025 and beyond (‘Beyond Current Horizons’) find a strong preference for ‘relationships with teachers’ to remain at the heart of the learning experience. (FutureLab, verbal report, February 2008)


An alternative paradigm

Universities and colleges rethink themselves as communities in which learners’ skills are valued and recognised

Learners receive credit for developing their own and other people’s skills: this is an explicit part of the contract between learners and the institution

Universities and colleges focus on what learners value in higher learning, recognising that this is different from what they value in other social and cultural spaces.

Technology is used to support core academic values and practices such as problem solving, creativity, critique depth of attention, scholarly collaboration and research. These uses of technology form the core of institutions’ ICT offering to learners.


Common to both paradigms

Institutions and their staff understand what work and community participation entail in the digital age, and prepare learners to be active participants in those spheres

The focus is on embedding skills for a digital age into all curricula.


Some alternative research questions

‘What do learners value of the experience they get through formal higher/further education?’

‘How can technologies support those values and empower individuals and institutions to uphold them?’

‘When do learners experience themselves as being ‘effective’ agents in this environment,

and what role can/does technology play?

‘What alternative futures are we bringing about (as well as preparing learners for) in our approach to developing digital literacies?

slides for longbridge v2

Education