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Digital Literacy - Making sense of a complex world online

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Though hollowed out by 'stage fright' for most of the day I last night deliverd a formal, observed 90 minute online class to a group of students. To get my head in order I successfully used the UCL Learning Designer; I have been learning how to use this on the UCL FutureLearn Massive Open Online Course which has been running for the last two weeks and end this week.

Summary and Pie Chart Introducing a 90 minute online class on Digital Literacy

This is one the Learning Designs I created > Digital Literacy  

The session was recorded. Though I'll need some breathing space before I revisit it. I will also have formal feedback from the person who observed.

I have to wonder why I put myself through this kind of thing! I guess I wanted to wake up my sleepy soul and have succceeded in doing so. 15 minute before I would have (I had the line in my head) "Eat Shit". This is somewhat exaggerated - I would have made excuses. I would have preferred to have been going on stage to deliver Hamlet in a thong.

But I settled in quickly. I am not delivering a TED lecture.

The pacing was about right. Introduce this, show about of that, seeking their point of view. And I purposively kept the Tec low key (despite the subject). This is not the place for me to show off my skills - it is all about them.

My insight into teaching and learning could not be greater. As I realised a decade ago, even 20 years ago when I first did an OU Module on Open and Distance Learning - the theory has to complement practice, not be something that is done in isolation. Who does? How could I think I can study education without doing it myself? You can't learnt to dance only by reading books - you can only acquire an appreciation. But you can be an art critic without being able to paint? 

I've attached my rationale and a 'running order' with timings for the lesson I delivered. The timings were spot on - more or less. We took a 10 minute break an hour in which I readily accommodate and just added 10 minutes to the plan and continued accordingly. 

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EdTech Insight 7

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Digital literacy surveys of students may show high confidence levels but this confidence is often with highly intuitive apps rather than digital tools required for the world of work or independent learning.

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What 10 Digital Skills do Employers most want ?

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Assessment and Feedback

 

Learning as a journey or skill acquisition to be the best that you can be, either like interrailing between London and Rome via Amsterdam, Paris, Vienna, and Madrid, or running a swimming club for disability swimmers.


orI1pWHykRnmPkRgbUmC8fG-TYnCFhoI7bCPCtvYNUakxAH-dD78FZlSJaKn1HntZQKMFCjuVtEUDFn0JXhqQdlJPwBK8z5QQdmz1HidFBABAoodcQWTIVsaecQ7zCUJ_zDccPxjRvOA6CblVNzFYmZ9rMawu6KBsy91QRWVuMFMGI-KV2YnoVElrF8HDx6HxtHfZ1MbhS2MEE_uTo6on63ANzXSq7PgsPG0o1rSlm4wVo6RtNDPKMDUoO7CjfMi5a84D0sg_jTFv-2c

A disability a person may have can be physical or mental, or a combination of both and will present itself along a spectrum.

Accessibility set up

On/ off

Chair, position of screen and keyboard

Touch screen - voice activated

What is being assessed? Know what they can do, believe what they could do.

Find content

Differentiate between true and false, safe and dangerous

Profile and passwords

Employability

What 10 Digital Skills do Employers most want ?


  1. The ability to understand and utilize social media effectively. 

  2. Search engine marketing

  3. Analytics

  4. Content marketing

  5. Email 

  6. Mobile

  7. Strategy & Planning

  8. Social Selling

  9. Pay per click

  10. Video 

From NESTA

  • Animation

  • Multimedia production

  • Design in engineering

  • Building and maintaining IT systems and networks

  • Research and quantitative data analysis

Suggestions

  • Respond to and send email

  • Complete an online form (application)

  • Create a profile and then a CV

  • Safeguarding yourself and others

  • Take part in an online discussion

  • Do an interactive quiz

  • Find your way to x

  • Purchase a ticket

  • Decide if something is true or false

Activity 1

Simple computer related tasks

Book something

Answer a question

Communicate

Organise: a trip to the beach, to see a film... 

Activity 2

What was your grade?

Grade yourself

Grade others

Activity 3

Feedback to students based on their needs.

Complete a workbook

Yes/no answers

Add an image

Tell me your learning story

Outcome

Explain what is meant by accessibility (who it applies to and who benefits)

Explain what feedback is.

Explain how the above differ in the digital domain

List some strategies for implementing digital assessment and feedback methods for a variety of students with accessibility needs.

Create a working example of both digital assessment and digital feedback in practice



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How online courses are starting to make a change to how we learn

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Wednesday, 4 Feb 2015, 18:15

Fig.1 A publicity still from my own short film 'Listening In.' Did you catch it on Channel 4? I know seven people who did smile

Marshall McLuhan had a lot to say about the medium being the message when TV came along in the 1960s.

I always put the message first and with online courses (MOOCs by another name?) I would liken them to books or TV programmes ... there are many as you can imagine for every kind of audience, by educational attainment, and subject. I agree that learning is inherently social.

Having got kids who could touch type before they could handwrite and use the Internet before they could use the telephone I have witnessed them learn, collectively, online in various 'online' activities - almost always with the very same people they are seeing during the day in class.

Platforms, such as FutureLearn are tailored for this - EdX, by way of contrast is not.

Learning outcomes must be an important raison d'etre for MOOCs, but I don't see this at all as being the only reason institutions are producing them. They are seeking to attract students to courses that are either taught on campus or online at a distance. If a MOOC on Aviation Comes of Age in the First World War attracts 5000 and 500 finish the course 50 buy certificates and 5 sign up for the MA then they have doubled their student intake to a niche subject. I'm making a wild stab at the numbers: I don't know what they were. I can hazard a guess by the activity in the discussions. They are producing them to learn from the experience, gain the in-house knowledge and support their educators and producing online content for their regular courses too. 

The numbers I do know are for the FutureLearn course 'Start Writing Fiction' which had 23,000 students to start with and bucked the trend by having 25,000 in week two. I can only guess at the numbers who made it through to the end based on the crude stats we have for 'MOOCs' to date. A new outcome for this course is that nearly two months after it officially ended people are still starting and still completing the course: I know this as I set up both LinkedIn and WordPress groups to support them and actively return to the course myself to refresh ideas and contribute to reviews of work submitted and discussions with those there.

By way of comparison, the University of Southampton WebScience MOOC is aimed at PhD candidates: I should now as I was one of those candidates and interview to study a PhD. I had no answer for my not having a medical degree or having done a randomised control trial before.

The 'Oxbridge Tutorial' is commonly used in the UK and is a tutorial system used at Oxford Cambridge, Bristol, Durham and LSE I believe. Is it also the Socratic Method?

The method of knowledge transfer may be the same but numbers are lower 1:1, or 1:3 max. A MOOC experience that works, at this level includes both Socratic and Madras approaches, for better or worse. Worse according to Oxford's Internet Institute (Rebecca Eynon) where cliques form around the leading student educators that appear to block out others.

PhD students may have to study on their own, but do they want to? MA students don't.

The Educators I know at university want to teach too.

Digital literacy, like any kind of literacy matters. I engage those who have been online for a decade and those that are newcomers. They pick it up pretty fasts if helped by others.

Other MOOCs I've looked at are aimed at those at school (High School in England) to help them with university entrance and preparation, I've mentioned an MA even PhD level MOOC while the Exploring Filmmaking would have been on TV in the past.

EdX won't let you in without paying.

Udemy is getting a dreadful reputation.

Lumesse is a corporate platform a bit like FutureLearn.

A gem of a Free Course from FutureLearn that has just started is 'Exploring Filmmaking' with the National Film and Television School. As you'd expect the value are top notch. A great mix. Bitesize learning. Great discussions. 90 mins to 2 hours a week - a lot more if you get deeply engaged. 

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D is for Digital Literacy

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Wednesday, 7 May 2014, 06:50
  • Digital Literacy

  • Data Visualization

  • Diaryland

  • Design for all

  • The Digital Scholar

  • Deep Learning

  • Dewey

Everyone needs to develop digital literacy alongside literacy and numeracy. Knowing your way around the Internet and skill at using computers, whether they are in your pocket or on someone else's desktop matters in the 21st century.

Data visualised and animated, with a voice over, can help explain the complex. Beware the nonsense infographic produced by an advertising agency though.

The Digital Scholar is a spurious and elitist concept. Either a person is or is not scholarly whether or not they use the Internet a lot or not at all. For digital we could just as well so e-Scholar, which rather undermines my idea for the 'A to Z or e-learning' as, if not already, and to some, learning is learning however it is achieved and where it matters is in the brain of the student wherever they read or do.

Whether learning goes deep or is left a the surface is platform non-specific too. Indeed, too many games or watching videos might be the surface learning that is of such little value compared to the effort of reading, the effort of sitting in class and the effort of revising for and taking an exam.

Diaryland is one of the earliest blogging platforms where much that we see online was first played with: friends, likes, groups, surveys, stats, advertising ... 

Dewey is one of a couple of dozen learning gurus that you need to know about to understand learning, which is no less important just because you stick an 'e' in front of it. Dewey saw reflection as a specialised form of thinking. ‘a kind of thinking that consists in turning a subject over in the mind and giving it serious thought’. More on reflection later. Here the Internet has a valuable role to play - you reflect online in order to share thoughts, issues and ideas.

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Multimodality vs. a messup (also known as a mashup)

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Saturday, 27 Aug 2011, 10:52

Mulitmodality is the professional and practicle expression of a mashup.

Multimodality (Kress, 2010) is unique to using mixed electronic media. It is what I crave when listening to a podcast or watching something on YouTube. I want the interactivity, the non-linearity and the connectivity that is unique to a multimodal response to learning.

There's not much of it about.

Or is there?

Compendium's pretty neat. Not the best user interface, but it is non-linear and multi-layered and most of all, it only works in its digital form.

What else?

I enjoy Spaced-ed where I am currently doing World History in Maps and Core Anatomy for Medical Students.

See Learning by Degrees in the Harvard Magazine for a piece on the creator of Spaced-Ed, also Floreat Domus 2010, the alumni magazine for Balliol College, Oxford,

Acrobat Presentations

Although I am yet to use this, it feels like a combination of Skype and Power Point, with audio and video thrown in and superior graphics (it is after all Acrobat).

 

I invite further suggestions:


+

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REFERENCE

Kress,G. (2010) Digital Literacies. A research Briefing by the Technology Enhanced Learning phase of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme. Julian Gillen and David Barton. London Knowledge Lab. Institute of Education. University of London. www.tlrp.org/tel

On of a pack of leaflets, reports and brochures I picked up at JISC in April. I only dug them out because I craved some e-learning literature in print. Odd that.

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The value of electronic literacy in the Internet Age

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Edited by Jonathan Vernon, Saturday, 3 Nov 2012, 06:32

Did serendipity bring me to ‘Contemporary Perspectives in E-learning Research.’ Conole and Oliver (2007) or did I notice that H808 students were reading and critting it?

Either way I bought it as I’m yet to get my head around e-Reader.

Can you recommend an e-Reader?

A kindle or the Sony Reader perhaps? I can’t see the point in an iPad for reading academic journals and books. I don’t want to be printing off a forest and filing on shelves I don’t have either.

Chapter 11 of ‘Contemporary Perspectives in E-learning Research’ looks at ‘Academic literacy in the 21st century’

E-literacy is an irresistible term of course.

‘Electronic Literacy’ or ‘E-literacy’

‘Involving the capacity to locate, organise, interpret and use digital information.’ Conole (2007:160)

Martin (2003) appears to get the credit for coining the term.

There are many forms of literacy, all have their place:

  • information literacy
  • digital literacy
  • electronic communication
  • computer literacy
  • transliteracy
  • information/IT skills
  • computer-mediated communications
  • knowledge construction
  • research


Shetzer and Warshauer (2000), McKenna (2002), ‘Writing as a social practice’ (Ivonic et al, 1999)

These literacies are:

  • shaped by disciplinary norms
  • institutional power dynamics
  • impact of audience
  • notions of identity


‘What we choose to read and how we read may lead to fundamental changes in our understanding of authoritative scholarship.’ Conole (2007:160)

It interesting that Google is often the preferred means of locating academic information (Borphy et al, 2004). Does this apply to undergraduates and graduates? At times frustrated with the OU Library Services I ended up in Google Scholastic but no longer had the access privileges so had to back pedal. Too often links given in text, journals and book are out of date. By way of example of the three links I wished to follow up in this chapter I found only one and that was at a different URL I am yet to find the SCONUL or SCORM articles.

SCONUL (1999) ‘information skills in higher education’, SCONUL position paper. Available online at: www.sconul.ac.uk/activities/inf-lit/papers/seven-pillars.html (CAN’T FIND)

SCORM (2004) Shareable content object reference model. http://www.adlnet.org/scorm/history/2004/index.cfm (ERROR PAGE)

Ingraham (2005b) Filmic and even melodramatic narrative ... used purposefully.

Ingraham (2005b) Exploring the Frontiers of E-learning: border, outposts and migration. ALT-j, 2005. 6-8 Sept 2005.

Beyond the ‘essentially medieval apprenticeship system’ (Ingraham and Ingraham, 2006) ‘E-Quality: a dialogue between quality and academia’, E-learning, 31) http://www.wwwords.co.uk/elea/content/pdfs/3/issue3_1.asp

(ACCESSED 16 AUG 2010. But not at this address, but at this onesmile

http://www.wwwords.co.uk/pdf/freetoview.asp?j=elea&vol=3&issue=1&year=2006&article=11_Ingraham_ELEA_3_1_web

I have a problem with some PDF files too, but that’s down to an eight year old iBook not being able to upgrade to the latest ADOBE PDF software. A new iBook beckons.

This theme of literacy given a book in its own right. How though do institutions recognise the many different ways students may wish to pursue and assemble content and information in future?

Literacy and multiple literacies (Kress, 1997)

‘It is a normal and fundamental characteristic of language and literacy to be constantly remade in relation to the needs of the moment.’ Conole (2007:169)

Kress, G (1997) Before writing: rethinking the paths to literacy.

‘The are many ways of making and communicating meaning in the world today.’ Conole (2007:169)

The goals of education

The development of ‘concrete-operational skills of technical reason coupled with functional, utilitarian language skill.’ (Jones, 1991)

Two conflicting directions for education

‘The desire to stimulate the growth of autonomous, entrepreneurial, IT-literate, multi-skilled individuals’ or ‘the desire to create a compliant, low-expectation labour force inured to the demands of flexibilisation.’ Conole (2007:171)

Surely this isn’t a case of either or, and surely both ends of the scale can be viewed positively – society needs a community of people working at different jobs to remain viable and coherent. Conole should be quoting Government policy here but prefer to suggest that there is a choice while clearly favouring one over the other.

Prison Officers, we are told, don’t need a university degree; they aren’t the only ones. Unless you want people to endure their necessary jobs like Marvin the Paranoid Android. Adams. (1979)

REF Kress, G (2003) Literacy in the new media age.

REFERENCE

Adams, D (1979) The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Conole, G and Oliver, M (eds)  2007. Contemporary perspectives in E-Learning Research. Themes, methods and impact on practice.







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