Half an Hour,
Sept 24, 2021
This is an unedited automated transcription by https://otter.aiof my talk given at Nottingham Trent University (online via Teams) Trent Institute for Teaching and Learning (TILT). The full presentation page is here and includes audio, video, slides and a link to this transcript.
Thank you very much. And sorry about the short delay, I was unmuting. It's funny how, you know, after years of doing this online, I still have an issue too. And I can't tell you how many times I've jumped into a conversation on mute. So thank you, everyone, for welcoming me here.
Just so that, you know, I'm using something called Open broadcasting systems as my tool of choice. And the reason why is it lets me do stuff like this. So that that's not what I meant. Right? Like this. So that, you know, I look like a professional TV monitor. Although as you can see from my office, I'm definitely not professional here. And like, I think that's a bit better and more authentic. That's just my personal view.
Sorry about the bright lights. As you can see, I've got an Amazon box trying to block the light, but we're having brilliant sunshine today. For those of you in the UK, that's when the clouds go away. And you get, it's kind of like, well, they call it sky blue in the sky. And then there's this big yellow or that we call this sun. Okay, I'm just kidding.
Okay, so today's talks called Learning and Teaching and pandemic opportunities, challenges and lessons learned. And I've made all kinds of promises. I see we're getting rain there. Yeah, that's the that's the Britain I know. This is what it was like here yesterday. In fact, I was out on a bike ride. And if you're wondering that crop is soybeans, so if you wonder where your soybeans come from, there it is. I mean, I've made all kinds of promises for my talk today. So I'm going to go through reasonably quickly, although I do want to welcome you as as was mentioned in the introduction, to indicate if you have a comment or a question or anything like that, I'm happy to take them.
So I wanted to focus on the three conference themes to begin, they asked me to do you know, the, the 10 lessons learn three, this three, that and the three conference themes. And I thought, okay, I could do it in a grid. But that gives me a grid of something like 30 million items less than a minute each. No. So I'm going to look at the conference themes first. And then I'm going to consider these other points from the perspective of the conference themes.
Another thing, just, you know, housekeeping, I tend to forget where my camera is, for the longest time, my camera was over here. And so I'm going to constantly be looking back here, I think I'm looking at the camera, but I'm not. Alright. You'd never know I've been doing this for a long time, would you?
The three themes, active collaborative learning, teaching technology in the pandemic, everyday scholarship, and then being together while apart sustaining learning communities. That gives us kind of a picture of collaborative scholarship communities. So what does that mean? I always, you know, I always question these conference themes.
So we have this idea of collaborative. And we always want to be collaborative. My first question I always ask when I'm thinking of the word collaboration is, are we really working together toward common outcomes, because that's what collaboration typically means. A lot of the time when people talk about collaboration, what they mean is something like cooperation. We're working together, we're sharing resources, but you have your objective, I have my objective, you know, so we're not necessarily working toward the same aim.
And that's an important theme that I think we need to keep in mind. Sometimes by collaboration, really, we just mean better communication, better ways of interacting with each other using tools and technology like this technology here. And sometimes we talk about, you know, the different modes, whether we're having conferences, whether we're having video conferences like this, etc.
(Whoops, that's not so there we go. You'd think I'm better at this. But no, I'm not better at this. Let's move that over here. There we go. Sorry about that. Every time I learn a little bit about how I'm doing this.)
It also mentioned active collaborative learning. And I wonder, what do we mean by active? I mean, different people have different perspectives? Do we mean just pushing buttons? Or do we mean playing games? There was a tilt fringe thing all about? games and learning, we'll come back to that. Do we mean creating, doing competing, finding so many different ways of being active? And I think one of the puzzles is how do we sort between the things that are really active and the things that are just, we call them active, but they're, they're sort of not really active?
Now we move to scholarship, and you know, everyday scholarship of digital tools, and technologies. This is from another one of the old fringe presentations. What is teaching? I would ask you, is teaching? Is this teaching my teaching here? Or should we say teaching is dead? And really all we mean, is a mentor, guide and facilitator. What is teaching? Is it conveying information? Is it setting up an environment? What is teaching? Do we keep the formal classroom, a lot of people think of moving online? As you know, just taking everything we're doing and putting it on a computer? Is that the way to look at it? It's not clear to me.
(, yes, you will have access to these slides. Definitely. You don't have access to them at this exact moment, however, because I haven't uploaded them. So they only exist on my computer. But I'll make them bigger for you. Is this and this this came up? Yeah. Okay.)
This came up as well. In one of the alt fringe events, quoting George Couros, technology is not the learning medium, or sorry, he's not the learning outcome. It is a medium it is a tool, and learning has to be platform agnostic. Is this true? I don't think it's true. And the reason why I don't think it's true, and I think we saw this during the pandemic, is that the things that we can do online are very different from the things that we can do in the classroom. The affordances are different, the ways of interacting are different, the kinds of activities are different. So I don't and therefore the learning outcomes are different. So I don't think it's simply about doing the same thing using different tools. Let's say doing the same thing with a hammer as you would do with a wrench that makes no sense to me.
Even you know the concept of teaching, does there have to be a learning objective? Here's from the game presentation. Sheesh, Mt. Talked about serious games. And the idea of using the game to teach rather than just playing the game. And I asked, do we always have to have this learning objective in what we're doing? If you look at what the game actually produces, it produces cohesion, cooperation. It produces perceptive perception skills, etc. It'll be a different thing for each different person playing the game. I play games just for the fun of playing the game. But even playing the game, I may learn something. darts. Have you ever played darts how many people have learned to do multiplication playing darts. Now the point of darts isn't to teach math application, but it certainly works.
This is good early years discussion, play for play sake. Exactly. And, you know, even if we take this a step further, there was one game that was introduced was called entre Polly, I guess a portmanteau of entrepreneur and monopoly. And the idea is to encourage people to be entrepreneurs. And, you know, I wonder sometimes if we put the objective into the game, he already even the objective into the learning whether we cross that fine line between teaching and propaganda, is it right to teach everybody to be entrepreneurs? It's not clear to me that it is some sure for people who like that, that.
Community's always a big word in education, but but a word that we don't think about enough. Who's in our community, who's not in our community, think about our learning institutions. There was a study that came out in Canada just recently, it was quoted by Tony Bates, and it surveyed, lessons learned about the pandemic, from university boards and administrators. And it was a it was a list of concerns that they had, at the bottom of the list of concerns were things like accessibility, and learning outcomes. And they were much more worried about financial resources, attracting students, things like that. As Bates commented, the most pressing concerns of students and teachers would probably be very different.
And we need to understand, even in our community, our community isn't one undifferentiated whole, it's a community of communities and in society at large, there are communities, insider community communities outside our community. Yeah, it's not just one big thing. And you know, sometimes we think of ourselves as being the community, I'm making hand gestures here. Sometimes we think of ourselves as the community, but almost certainly, we're not I see this a lot in open education. There are five distinct communities that I can think of dedicated to open education that say, We are the community for open education. Now there's conference organizers saying we want to convene the open education community. And no, that's not right, because they are not the community, there are many different communities. How do they talk to each other? Do they agree, probably not.
Another issue is whether we can create community and this is something that educators love to do is create community. In the case of this conference, we use the term sustaining learning community, but presumably, that's the community that we created. I'm not sure we can create community. I'm of the view that communities are kind of organic, they grow, they grow for different reasons. And that as educators, what we really want to do is be able to tap into different communities.
I ran I'm sorry for using your conference as an experiment. But I ran a little experiment. unsolicited, I put in a question into the MLS teams area, asking simply what did you learn during the pandemic, and there were about 600, and some odd people attending the conference. I'm not sure how many people are watching this keynote. But I've got I think, was like six or seven responses. Now, that's not unusual. I hate to say it, but it's true. It's not unusual.
The communities that get created, especially things like teams in that unless you already have a pre existing community, like the staff of an organization, or a class of students even gathered together, it's very unlikely you're going to create a community on the fly like that. That's why so many conferences like these Twitter hashtags, and I assume there's a Twitter hashtag for this conference as well. But it all goes to you know, what is the nature of communities, how do they form? How do they grow? How do they communicate with each other?
So that's the preliminary, how am I doing? I took way too long in the preliminary but that's because I tend to go off topic. So as faculty and instructors, so let's the community that I'm talking to here, it's never the community that I think about, but it's the community we're talking about here. What are we learning? What can we build on? What changes can we make? Here we go.
First of all, 10 lessons. Now, I taught, I've talked about these 10 lessons before and some of the stuff I've written and talked about online. These are lessons not only that I've personally learned, but these are lessons that I see showing up over and over in the various lessons learned, documents that I've been reading, in the course of producing my newsletter. So it's not just me saying these things.
Here's the first lesson, this is the most important lesson, any change will be hard at first. And I think those of you who began to teach online, at the beginning of the pandemic, somebody says his community, the byproduct of the activities, I think, just as an aside, I think personally, community is consensus. Community is created when a group of people decide that they're going to come to an agreement by some or another process. So community is the process of coming together to make a decision. Just my thoughts.
And now it's hard at first, you're gonna get stuff like that, like that, like that. When you're trying to do this, you know, any technology. Any activity, remember your first game of cricket, if you've played cricket, I said cricket and sort of baseball because anyhow, it's going to be hard at first. And so was converting to online delivery. So we need to give ourselves some time. It gets easier. You know, and you know, so many people say, Well, yeah, it just feels so unnatural to be doing it online as compared to in the classroom. Oh, yeah. Not a surprise, right? You spent 20 years in the classroom, you spent a few months online, what would you expect? I feel as comfortable online as I do in front of a classroom, because I've been doing it for a long time. pretty comfortable, the tools, not nearly as comfortable as I'd like to be. But you know, that's the way it goes. And I think that, you know,
(as sorry about the pause, I was reading a comment is they show up, they show up and there's a little game. So I know every time there's one that comes in, so you know, takes time).
So this is one of the discussions from the team's discussion that I mentioned. So making the same quad is saying, oh, everything takes longer than you expect, plan and prepare for that. That's true. Offline group record is challenging. Yes, it is until you get used to it. I cut my teeth and online group work playing in multi user dungeons, doing group coding projects, never seen past experience with an online platform. And that's right.
Everybody's coming in on a different stage of awareness. Not everybody has why reliable Wi Fi? Yeah, that's absolutely true. Nicola Richards says, I've learned to roll with it. That's probably the main skill that we're learning online. And it's a hard one to learn in the classroom. And I want you to think about this in the classroom. You can kind of wing it, right? Do you remember? Remember back then? You know, if you've ever gone into a classroom and you didn't do the full day's preparation, I'm sure none of you actually did that. But I did, because I thought I could get away with it. And you know what, I got away with it. You come into the classroom. You write out a few notes, what you want to do for this class, you do the class, and it actually works. And maybe you did something like you know, more help for more time to talk For the students, you know, get them into a discussion. me knowing me, I'd go off into a digression etc. Well, the lesson here is, you can do that online too. And just roll with it. We have this idea that things that are in digital media need to be absolutely perfect. But no, look at this. I mean, is the lack of perfection of my presentation really distracting from the presentation? You are supposed to say no, here.
Learning is social, is the second lesson we knew that already. There are even some outcomes that are social lamb, I don't think we knew so clearly. But now, you know, although this whole idea that immunity is a community phenomenon, this whole thing that we're all in this together, I don't know, if you got that in the UK, we certainly got that here. People would say, well, it's not like we're all in the same boat. It's more like we're all in the same storm. But nonetheless, right? Getting out of the storm is a community outcome. So we learn not just individually, but as a community. The community learns and individuals learn and the way we do that is exchanging ideas, conduct trade, develop networks, etc.
Laura Stinson comments on this, focusing on the tilt online community, supporting staff, but also in the student community. You know, online, I don't want to say we've built community because that's not right. But community grows and it grows online, just the same way it grows offline, use a different technologies, some of the characteristics of that community are different. But nonetheless, the social element is there. You don't feel it so much at the start. But it grows and it develops Miko. lalande says hello, Laughlin, I'm sorry, Michael. Talking about the energy produced from a live face to face session. And, you know, people feel that they've lost something. And I want to talk about this, because this is really important, because I hear so often the comments, you know, you know, I feel so alone and isolated when I'm teaching or working online, or when I'm studying online. And my thought is, you know, it's, it's kind of sad, if your social connections with the world are exclusively with the people you work with, or the people you learn with.
I found working at home working alone, that I was still having social connection with family some more often, with the community, we'd go out for hikes every week, in different bush around, you know, different forests around here. And we were joking at the beginning of the pandemic, you know, this is our social event, right, we're seeing all kinds of we were seeing more people going out hiking, than we did before the pandemic hit. And I think that's true. I don't think that we should be depending on work or on learning to create our social interaction with the world. It's nice when it happens, but it shouldn't be a central, just my view.
You also, there, this is the discussion that came up with at least wakelin, again, in the friends you know, people being geographically distributed and feeling isolated, and lacking pure social support, you can build the social support systems online. But really, you know, I think that the place to get social support is in your community, in your home, in your town, where you live, or the urban area where you live. And I think that, you know, way back in prehistory, there was a model that I talked about called the triad model where the educational institution, the educational institution was one part of the triad. The student or learner was the other part of the triad. And then the third part of the Triad was the local community. And I think you want all three of these things. I'm trying to draw a triangle. You want all three of these things, and the online learning distance learning in initiatives that I've seen that worked the best were those that worked in the triad.
And we've also learned, this is another lesson in the pandemic, that teaching is not a solitary profession. It used to be well, we thought it was it wasn't really even in prehistory. That is before the pandemic, we needed buildings, we needed maintenance staff, cafeteria workers, admin assistants, it's just professors and instructors ignored them. That's not nice. But but but the point here is, there actually were other people involved. And then we went into the classroom, we really did feel alone. But now more than before, we see the need for that support system.
And I like to draw the analogy of like, when we watch the news, and even in this presentation, I spent time with the people involved in the conference, setting up you know, I kept having problems with green screens and things like that, you know, we need these technical people behind us, my presentation would be a lot better if I had somebody else to put in my slides and managing OBS, but whatever. Think of it, like the news. So you see the meteorologist. Right? And you see the map, what you don't see is the whole crew of people working together behind the scenes to make it work. So it's not just the one person working solitary anymore. It really is much more of I don't want to say a team effort. But yeah, it's kind of like a team effort.
And related to that we're learning during the pandemic that we need live events, not necessarily in person events. We still like to I went to a football game last week. Yay. We lost boo. But but just having these live events, you know, like this conference, we kept doing things like this conference, we didn't can everything into videos and say okay, that's what we're doing for this year. We're doing stuff live Why? Well, there's the planning the stimulation, the anticipation. You know, we kind of get ourselves up for a live events. I know Id Neon is wake up in the middle of the night before I give a talk. Oh, no, I forgot to put that in the slides, etc. They provide interaction presence. I love getting those comments popping up as they talk, I wish wish I had respond to them better. But But I love getting that, that response, right?
Live Events provide interaction, they provide presence. Now, you can't do everything online that you can do in person Laura squirrels talks about language learning online, you know, and talks about some of the things that are hard to hard to gauge, like, you know, quiet reading comprehension, etc. But you know, you have to adapt, right? You can't sit there watching somebody read something. Well, you could but it would be a terrible live event, wouldn't it? Although I've been watching live streams on Tick tock, and some of them are more exciting than that. But it's funny how the existence of live streams on Tick Tock is evidence.
We just need this this spontaneity of live events. And so we shouldn't expect the live event to completely replace the live classroom. That would be a mistake. But we can capture a lot of the essence of a live cat classroom with a live online event. how's it gonna change?
Well, here's a neat thing. This Is Us footballers. It's sometimes called grid iron. Not to be confused with football as the rest of the world understands it. They've created by Dave I've seen some undeserved designated group of people have created something called fan controlled football. Football is very strategy oriented right? The that the two sides line up beside each other and then they have strategy and they run plays and writing you try to throw the football and etc. And so what they did in the in the fan control league is they put all of that into the hands of the fan. The fans watching the event called the place they would tell the player what played and run they named the teams and Teen MC teen face was an early leader Just so you know, but they decided not to go with that. I'm kind of personally finding disappointed. And so the fans and the people playing the game are really in this live kind of interaction. And then different teams set that up differently. That's the kind of event that we should be looking for more and more in the future.
You know, open media is a part of this. And you can't do this live stuff. You can't do this interactive stuff without open media. You know, I think that we're learning about the we're all open educational resources plays in online learning through this pandemic. I saw one comment somewhere about, you know, someone really enjoys creating these Oh, VR apps. And yeah, it's kind of a fun thing to do. I love creating these slideshows down down the rabbit hole of imagining Whose Line is in any way type lectures? Oh, yeah, that's a great idea. Yeah, improv. Students like creating open media students. People generally create open media all the time. Who's learning? Is It Anyway? Yeah.
And if you actually if you think about improv, right, there's a repertoire of tools and strategies and things that the improv actors draw from, you know, and you pick a scene, pick a character, etc, right. And just like that, in open resources, there's a repertoire of images, videos, etc, that live bass from means that people draw from this becomes a common currency. And that's the role open media plays, it becomes an aid in our interaction, rather than some kind of formalized presentation.
And now we need to look at, you know, what assets and this is Tony Hirst, here asking what assets are really reusable. It's the things that are hard to produce, the things that are hard to get right, and the things that somebody might have already done. You know, not whole courses, not books, necessarily. Now, it's good to have open courses and open books, I'm doing my own open courses. But in terms of reusability, these granular things that people can grab and use for whatever person, that's the kind of open media that makes this kind of interactive, improv kind of learning work.
There was also a presentation from three people, Luke, Kerry, and Chris, about devolving, they're making spaces. And what I found really interesting about that presentation was the way they moved from having a very strong reliance on central facilities support and also I would agree management to a kind of devolved decentralized, democratically run, making spaces environment. And I think that that changes, the nature of instruction, changes what people can do, and it gives them responsibility and gives them ownership and addresses things like motivation. And I think that this is something that we're learning during the pandemic. If we haven't seen this, we should be looking for this.
Quality Matters. Another lesson. Yeah, quality matters. One of the big key lessons of the pandemic was the impact of fake news, misinformation, propaganda, advocacy. And the response to that developing things like zero knowledge proofs, and crypto addressing. So there's this back and forth. quality isn't guaranteed. Not even from the professionals. I am an example of, I'm just kidding. You can always expect quality from your quality isn't a given. People need to learn to be able to assess for themselves what counts as quality. The events of the pandemic have shown how bad we are at that, and how we need to get that right and socially how important it is to get that right.
But having said that, we can go too far. The other way. Um, if we focus simply in solely on quality. And you know, here I have in mind, people like Michael Feldstein and David Wiley and others who, who really are focused on the existing student body and making sure that their education as high quality as possible. You know, that kind of focus can push against other important criteria like accessibility, openness, interactivity, and so on. So there's a two edged sword here, right? To Ed's whatever, you know, we need quality, we need to ensure quality for ourselves. But an over focus on quality can also lead to bad outcomes.
Another lesson that we learned and of course, we knew this, but we didn't know this really, right. Teaching is more than broadcasting. Now, sometimes broadcasting is good, what I'm doing right? Sometimes, you know, eight hour videos usually bad, sometimes good. I've put in here. This is the story of Michael the brave, who's a Romanian hero from the Middle Ages, who was one of the first people who created the United Romania and ever hear of him. probably haven't, I haven't, actually, I should be pronouncing his name Mikkel. And I watched an hour and a half long video all about this. Loop tons of these online, so they're not necessarily bad.
I have my own video series that I do. hours and hours of me following instructions are hours and hours of me playing video games. It's not always bad. But it's more than just this. It's working with and interacting with people who are online.
Now, another lesson, reading room is hard. It's funny at the meaning of the pandemic, especially the phrase reading the room became really popular. And just as an aside, all kinds of new phrases and expressions really became popular. Once the pandemic hit as though we had to completely change the way we talked about the world. Reading the room was one of them. Remote learning was another one. Now we're getting things like hybrid or high flex, all kinds of all kinds of different ways of talking about what we're talking about.
Reading the room is hard. It's hard for me to know how you all right now are reacting. The light this Jima like this, I can't see your face. So I'm depending on those little pop up comments. You know, and if I were really good at what I was doing, I'd be stopping asking for questions or whatever. But so keynote, so you know, the format's a bit different. It needs to be a deliberate practice, it needs to be the sort of thing that you're doing on an ongoing basis. And you're not, this is key, you're not always going to be able to do it in the moment, the way you can in a classroom. That's because it's a different medium. So you need to plan more before and after in order to be able to gauge the reaction.
I will happily binge watch eight hours and some TV shows and documentaries. Yeah, exactly. So that's not necessarily bad.
We need structure, order and routines. We did before the pandemic too, but we can sort of hide that behind the spontaneity of, you know what, maybe I will go for a coffee this morning or whatever. At home, especially. We don't have those externally imposed structure, order and routines. And we have to impose them on ourselves as people and this is something I learned years ago, because you know, I work in technology, I work I deal with change, new things happening all the time.
My work is completely different every single day. And people ask me, How do you manage that? And my answer is simple. I do the same thing. Every day I wake up at the same time I eat the same breakfast I do. I do the same thing in the morning. I eat the same lunch every day, the same supper every day. I'm like a cat cats love habits, we have cats. And if I go off my habit, my cat will remind me like, I'm five minutes late for lunch. I can't be five minutes late for lunch, because my cat will tell me.
Professional Baseball players who play a 162 games schedule, say the same thing. Right? It's such a, it's a hard game. And it's such a variable game and you have good days, you have bad days. And the way you respond to that is you stick to a routine, you set up the routine, you stick to a routine. And so we've learned or should be learning that this is what we need to do. In a world that is as uncertain and chaotic as we have right now. Stick to the routine, find the things that work for you and stick to that cats of the conference. Not just school subjects. Very important lesson.
One of the things that we learned during the pandemic is that the impact of schools goes beyond schools. The impact of academics goes beyond academics. And it works both ways. What happens outside the act and our academic environment, enters into the academic environment, things that we wouldn't have asked about before, like someone's home bandwidth, or, you know, whether people are living eight people in a house. Well, yeah, it just wasn't a problem. For universities in the past. Now it's a problem.
And this well, you know, we look at, you know, in health, we suddenly realized we had to look after no homework or self employed workers, you know, that some of the biggest victims of the pandemic were were people living in retirement homes, which was in this country a disgrace. These are all people that matter in society. And I think that any of our institutions that are ignoring them, are fulfilling their responsibility to society. And this is a lesson learned not simply by the health care system, but by all national infrastructure in a society, including the educational system.
What are the challenges? By challenges? I mean, problems? Just kidding.
Alright, first challenge is motivation, right? motivation for ourselves, motivation for our students. Now, this varies depending on, you know, who we are and who our students are, it matters, you know, it's much more of a factor with primary school children than it is with doctoral students, obviously, but but, but you know, even when I was a doctoral student, I had days, I had months when motivation was a problem. So it happens to everyone.
And one of the things you learn really early when you're working online is you can't force people to do things, you can't, they will simply log off. Or worse, they will stay become a troll. So that changes your power dynamic dramatically. It changes your power, it changes your outlook on life. It changes your theories of learning. This is one of these things. You know, it's it's not obvious at first and only becomes obvious.
And I think people spend a lot of time fighting it, how do I motivate my students, right? And I've always thought of as motivation as trying to get people to do something that they don't want to do. And I think that the best and most direct way of addressing motivation is how people do what they want to do. That means changing the power dynamic. That means changing the relation between teacher and student where the student is there because they want to be now that's really hard to do in a system of compulsory education. Right?
But that's the challenge highlighting the challenge section. making it easy for them to do the right thing is also important that is dead on absolutely right. And really crucial. So we come back to the democratic manufacturing for the 3d printer project and look what they did, giving students independence and confidence in their skills. And then they adapted the Navy easier for them to manage themselves by creating a video induction series. Cycle
second challenge people have diverse needs. So much of education is designed for the mainstream. We've learned that this creates built in systematic discrimination, and we need to take the attitude or the approach that everyone has special needs.
Pamela Henderson is indirectly addressing this but I think she is addressed This one, she says something like this materials need to be more visually appealing than the ones we might use in the classroom. And then there's a lot of, you know, software that can be used to enhance the presentation of documents five minutes ago, gotcha. I agree. That's why I spend more time on my slides. And I do thinking about them. That's not true. I spend more time thinking about the presentation. But I do spend time thinking about the design of the slides. And what the presentation is going to look like, how I'm going to set it up with different things to make it more interesting and more engaging. And then I go back to just present the full core Point slides. More likely, there's a point where we make it hard to Yes, that's true.
People have diverse needs. And the flip side of that is inequities harm learning. Again, duh. But you know, it's something that really people weren't acknowledging until the pandemic hit school. And this is a really interesting lesson school, mitigating some of the worst inequities, at least in this country. In other countries, not so much. But in this country, you go to school, you'd get your vaccines at school, you get food at school, you'd get reading material at school, access to computers, access to the Internet, and the list goes on sports.
You know, the sociality all of that disappeared when we went online. And even worse, the people who were in need disappeared first. Now we know how to solve these problems. What we need is the will to solve it, we need to spend the money on things like community broadband, open educational resources, personal support services, etc. And we need to think about how we are addressing inequities. In our learning.
This is from PL Thomas, something that I ran in my newsletter, you know, moving from this attitude where we say all students must, to each student deserves. And this shift is really important because you can't empower people you can't give them you know, autonomy and responsibility by saying they must do something, no matter how well intentioned, the must is.
You know, in that vein out, see the other alt C, came up with this definition of ethics in distance or remote learning, awareness, professionalism, caring community and values. Now, I don't have time to look at that in detail. I will look at that in more detail. I'm doing a course on ethics, analytics and the duty of care later on. But look at this and ask yourself, does this promote that? Is this the tool that will promote the redress of inequities in learning?
So finally, how to improve, we need to learn how learn how many teachers say, Well, I can't learn the new technology I need to class. I've done sessions on how you can take personal professional development into your own hands. Why? Because you have to. You know, there are so many people where if nobody's there to teach them, they don't try to learn. This is something we need to change. Mostly, you know, and change. I don't mean in other people, I mean, even ourselves, right?
Learning should be something that we're doing on an ongoing basis every day and not waiting for someone to give us a class. You know, and when you do this, you become more successful and as we move online, people become more successful at being able to learn for themselves. This is again, the way the new technology changes the affordances and changes the outcomes. And Pam Henderson talked about no video scribe I've never heard of video scribe so here I am learning something as I'm doing this presentation.
The other thing we need to do is employ a range of strategies. There's no one answer, there's no one thing that will work for everyone. So we need to develop what has been called hybrid learning. But the other thing is, don't try to do it all at once, it would be impossible for me to do this presentation with a group of people in the room and all of you and treat all of you fairly and equitably, someone's going to get ignored. So, and that's a lesson that hasn't been learned yet by our political leaders.
So and think of it as you know, I mean, think of it as a kit bag. Think of think of it as you know, a bunch of things we can pull off the shelf. They're not just tools, they will change what you're saying the medium really is the message, but you know, different strategies for different situations.
And then finally, and I won't talk much about this, because a there isn't time and B, there isn't time. For assessment needs to be more flexible. We've seen the dysfunctionality of traditional testing. We've seen during the pandemic, some of the issues with surveillance and surveillance culture, we need a mechanism of going of circumventing the whole concept of assessment and being able to use our work itself as the assessment method, maybe I'll call that content based assessment.
Anyhow, that's the talk. I hope you enjoyed it. I am one minute late, I'm sorry. And I really appreciated the comments. They slowed me down but I think they made for a better presentation. Thank you.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
