digital literacies: opening the frontier

Digital literacies:Opening the frontier orIs there a pedagogy of e-

learning?

#els12 #digilit

George RobertsOCSLD, Oxford Brookes University

Dundee, June 2012

Is there a pedagogy of e-learning?

Feedback

• Yes

• No

The Nays Have it?

But

Yes!There is a pedagogy of e-learning

Pedagogies

Studies and understandings

of various practices of

teaching

my pedagogy of e-learning

• expressed through two broad themes: –digital literacy and –open academic practice

• grounded in identity and community

Pedagogy with purpose

• Furthering assembly

• Opening third spaces

• Acknowledging, building on, but not

privileging originary knowledge

cultures

QUESTION: If SOPA/PIPA had been passed into U.S. law in 2002, would Wikipedia exist today? If either law had passed in 2012, would Wikipedia exist in 2022? Why or why not? Discuss.

If you cannot answer that question, you are

not literate nor are you in control of your life—

even if you think you are.

What happens when we stop privileging

traditional ways of organizing knowledge?

(HASTAC)

… for what happens when we stop privileging traditional ways of

organizing knowledge (HASTAC)

Pedagogy for what?

Pedagogy for what?

• Novelty, change and innovation?

"Novelty provides a refuge from things that the powerful do not

wish to see discussed.”(Hind 2012)

Reorganisation of knowledge

Alternative modes of• Creating• Innovating• Critiquing

• Interconnected• Interactive• Global• Democratic

E-learning turns our attention

Graduate attributes

• Academic Literacy• Research Literacy• Digital and Information Literacy• Personal Literacy and Critical Self

Awareness• Global Citizenship

Graduate attributes

• Academic Literacy• Research Literacy• Digital and Information Literacy• Personal Literacy and Critical Self

Awareness• Global Citizenship

digital literacy?… for personal, academic & professional use …

• Functional access, skills & practices

• Critically evaluate and engage with information

• Reflect on & record learning

• Engage productively in relevant online communities.

So far, so safe…

But

• Definitions of literacy that neglect the processes of making meaning are impoverished.

• Meaning is something that happens between people.

The Digital Literacy debate has been reduced to an argument between

• skills-only – eSkills, NetSkills

• skills-plus-critical-theory – e.g. Beetham, Campbell, McGill

Skills + Critical Theory?

• Strategic adaptation• Confronting a range of excluding

practices• Well worth doing

– But mere dialectic in the end– The dialogue with meaning has barely

started

• Native – Immigrant (Prensky 2001)

• Visitor – Resident(White Le Cornu 2011)

• Voyeur – Flaneur (boyd 2011)

Literacy - including digital - is the practice of enunciation in a

community:

“speaking” in the broadest sense, projecting an identity

with, through and to others who concur

Christ Handing the Keys to St. Peter, Perugino, 1481

Andy Wharhol, 1986

Discourses around higher education are:

“… a field of competition for the legitimate exercise of symbolic

violence,

… an arena of conflict between rival principles of legitimacy, and

competition for political, economic and cultural power

(Bourdieu 1993, 121)

Digital literacy is far more than skills with keyboard &

apps. It is how we & our students negotiate the ICT-mediated frontier

between rival principles.

digital literacy cannot be separated from other

educational - or social, or economic, or political -

developments.

Open online academic practice offers a

radical challenge to the “polyarchic”

limits to the discussion of digital

literacy within institutions, which are

in conflict with themselves.

(Richard Hall 2012)

Coursera

MITx EDx

The e-learning myth has always in part been built on the proposition that more people can be taught by

fewer.

But new networks and groups may supplant older ones.

QuestionsCan you teach more people with e-learning?

– What is the role of the teacher?– What is the social value of teachers?– What does this do to educational employment

models?– How open can a firm be?– Are universities “firms” in the sense that

companies are?– What kind of tenure, security and living might a

teaching academic expect?

Pedagoies of e-learning

That range of technologies

• Open Educational Resources (OERs) and Open

Academic Practice

• Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)

• Social citation

• Academic multimedia (lecture capture, audio

feedback, etc)

• Distributed collaboration

New non-text representations of

knowledge: podcasting, lecture

capture, audio and video feedback,

oral presentation, lead to a challenging

of traditional epistemologies:

how do we know it is true if it isn’t text

in a stable, printed form?

http://www.xmind.net/share/_embed/georgeroberts/xmind-198337/

It is kicking off everywhere.

The Arab Spring movement can be seen as an example of wide-scale distributed

collaboration, and the London (and other city) riots last summer had a

collaborative social media element to them.

Limits of navigation

• MOOCs– Radical openness is not for

everyone– Extrovert Introvert difference

• Multimedia for assessment– Text citation and commentary asserts itself through every

fissure– Opportunity for digital “vivas”

• Distributed collaboration– We crave – and are good at – contact

Sian Bayne on embodiment

Digital literacy is as fundamental as – and yet is distinct from – the

literacy of the printed word.(Stephen Downes 2009)

Therefore• YES!

–there is a pedagogy of e-learning

Thank you

Dr George RobertsOCSLD, Oxford Brookes University

June 2012groberts@brookes.ac.uk