Exploring conceptions of technology: Implications for learning, teaching, and meso-level practitioners#
Abstract#
It appears likely that the post-COVID landscape for learning in tertiary education will entail more widespread adoption, conversion and transformation or practice through educational technology. - Meso-level practitioners are currently seen as important to enabling this greater use of educational technology - But what is educational technology? There is significant research literature suggesting that current conceptions of educational technology are practically and theoretically limited/naïve and under theorized. - Different theoretical conceptions promise to provide productive lenses through which to make sense of and plan for how and what to do in this educational technology rich post-COVID landscape - This paper uses a particular theoretical conception of educational technology to look anew at the experiences before and during COVID of a group of meso-level practitioners. It uses that analysis to tentatively suggest some implications for useful practices in the post-COVID landsape.
Keywords: One line of key or focus terms by which your paper can be indexed. [Abstract and keywords style]
Introduction#
covid-response-digital-learning COVID led necessarily to the widespread adoption of digital technology. Talk about why and what was done.
Meso-level practitioners – like everyone else - were busy during this stage. Define these roles e.g. (Aitchison et al., 2020) educational developers. Draw in some of the literature from before and during COVID times.
The outcomes weren’t that great. Students are aching to get back on-campus. Student satisfaction dipped. Workloads were high. Outcomes were not great. Exam proctoring. Etc.
What could/should the post covid landscape look like? How can MLPs help? Post-COVID there is a need to improve. To think anew. E.g. Microsoft
Theory is a way to think anew. It’s practical. But under utilized, both in the literature and in practice. Long been interest in theorization of technology and educational technology. Touch on these. Post-digital. Critical. Illich. Franklin.
Make the case why doing this is relevent. The hole in how things were responded to. But going beyond simlar reporting, but on ed designers doing personal reflection with theory. Not the only theory, or the best theory but a different theory that may contribute useful insights
Research question: What might different conceptions imply for learning, teaching and meso-level practitioners in a post-COVID landscape?
This paper uses a particular theory of educational technology to analyse the experiences of X meso-level practitioners before and during COVID. More on research method.
Summarise the paper
What is educational technology?#
Introduce and explain Dron’s take on educational technology
Use the room example
Lead up to the following summary
The orchestration of phenomena for a purpose
Establish this definition as the main lenses that will be used to analyse our experiences below
Plan for the rest of the paper#
The idea is the main content of the paper is three sections: purpose; orchestration; and phenomena. The three important bits from Arthur's definition.
The idea is that each section includes a number of sub-sections. Each sub-section has two broad parts - Illustration - description of our experience in our pre/during COVID work - Implications - discussion of how Dron's ed tech definition helps understand and reframe that experience to suggest different understandings/approaches
Purpose#
Purpose, context and unhelpful pedagogy/technology binaries#
pedagogy-before-technology is just wrong. Fails to grasp the full complexity and that neither is the most important - purpose/context is.
Illustration - Illustrate this from our practice. Colleagues driven by pedagogical concerns e.g. constructive alignment, a type of technology, lets start by revisiting the learning outcomes. Rather than being driven by purpose/context of project. this might be the better hook
This might be good as an implication that is picked up later, but gets a mention here
- Reality that hard technologies (timetabling etc) actually do come first and constraint what is possible. Some of those assemblies are quite hard. E.g. lecturer in job title. Timetabling system UA Chief Executive Catriona Jackson explaining (Zhou, 2021)
“When universities do their timetables and their curriculum, they do them months out,” she says. “Really strict lockdown requirements were very much in force in December and January. They made those curriculums in December and January. You cannot change a curriculum mid-term. You just can’t.”
Implication??
Calls to put pedagogy before technology – unhelpful binary – Dron’s take mirrors (Fawns, 2020) (context+purpose) drives pedagogy which includes use of technology Dron’s definition can be seen to mirror the move away from binaries to relational – Bigum, Goodyear, Fawn etc. Long established that
- Context is the assemblage of technologies that we have to deal with e.g. timetabling. which cause problems that a focus on pedagogy is never going to help with
- Purpose is also important..covered in the next point
What is the purpose of universities?#
Illustration Matching surveys work of educational developers (Aitchison et al., 2020) reveal a move away from developing people to developing products. An increase in focus on products to sell. e.g. recent government push for micro-credentials and an earlier emphasis on modularisation to enable reuse
Implication Purpose is important. We can either be complicit or make moves to fight back against increasing commercialisation. Outline some possibilities from literature
(Macgilchrist et al., 2019) and the three future ‘histories’ of education. Which do we want to encourage?
We can't do much, but should do something. Rather than just be complicit. mention some suggestions from literature
Purpose proxies and purpose pushers#
Due to stepwise refinement our organisations get broken down hierarchically into different boxes with different responsibilities...with different purposes. Creating a tendency to lose the "purpose of the whole" and focus on our little important bit.
Illustrations - Trying to figure out how to provide access to videos from SBS - playing rounders between different parts o the library etc - Professional bodies requiring “certification” of student’s own work (almost) requiring use of exam proctoring software - Institutions who focus more on establishing outcomes – graduate attributes, course design standards etc – rather than knowing how to help individuals orchestrate pheneomena for their own purpose - Project and product managers
Jasmine Huang, Kelly Matthews and Jason Lodge (all Uni Queensland) make this clear in a study of staff experience when management of an unnamed Australian university rolled out 16 large-enrolment blended-learning courses in 2019. Staff involved, “perceived institutional drivers for blending to be misaligned towards indiscriminately translating all courses, necessary or not, to an online format akin to a polished massive open online course product” the authors report (CMM May 28).
Implication
Ellis and Goodyear (2019) institutions should focus on a small set of activity systems where the different expertises work together.
not sure about this one Dron’s take is that the individuals involved in learning tasks bring and work toward their own individual purposes. Arguably that the best work is done helping with those specific purposes
Phenomena#
??Should phenomena go last?? The idea being that it's the thing current practice tends to focus most on, rather than on orchestration (broadlly defined)
The (im)possibilities of modality agnostic and phenomena independent#
Illustration
Calls for learning resources/activities that are independent of modality. e.g. Hybrid learning but also modularisation and the idea of HyFlex and others suggesting that L&T should be prepared in modality independent ways. (Turnbull et al., 2021)
Experiences during COVID of the students not turning on videos. Not engaging fully with online lectures
Implications
These modes are different contexts. They harness different phenemona. They are different.
Perhaps link to (Stokoe, 2021) and similar points about in-person and online being very different phenomena. But also link to the point below about conservation of complexity. i.e. harnessing certain phenomena have a lot of “libraries” collected together to help.
Primitive assemblies of technologies / Conservation of Complexity#
Illustration
- The CYO studios being great assemblies for producing video, but little advice about what to do next? Or about design and broader considerations.
- The card and content interface stuff
The lack of digital fluency amongst students and especially staff have often been idenetified as a factor limiting the quality of online learning and teaching. (horizon report) Common recommendations has been the provision of e-learning training support for faculty (Turnbull et al., 2021) but…
Pellaby et al (2020) found a lot of people developing L&T resources etc
When was the last time you ran PD on how to use a lecture room? Maybe when new audio-visual equipment was added. Why don't they need training for that, but...
Implications
Phenomena are assemblies of other technologies. Over a long history unviersities have developed quite complex assemblies of technologies designed to support face-to-face learning and teaching. Very different modes require different assemblies of technologies. What
The nature of the pheneomna for face-to-face has significantly less complexity for vast majority than online. Significantly underestimated the complexity required conservation of complexity
Our digital learning and teaching environments are crap. We need higher level phenomena to help learners and teachers to orchestrate. Ellis and Goodyear (2019)
Orchestration#
Link to Dillenbourg (2013)
The reality of orchestrating digital platforms#
Illustrations
- The lack of clean integration (and in places duplication) between all of the Microsoft products: Teams, Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive etc. i.e. o365 is not an integrated system but a disparate patchwork platform that is slowly getting better
- The promise of Graph API and Citizen Development enabling appropriate development but that being shut off by questions of security, but at the same time recommending SharePoint Lists for data storage
- PAM atendance Power Automate where issues with scalability and wireless
- Sway not allowing embedding of Location Explorer and Response Tool
Implications
These platforms are not just given, finished products. They need significant orchestration at multiple levels in the institution. The competing purposes of those orchestrations (purpopse proxies) lead to decisions that hamstring other practices. Decisions that can be made at the level of Microsoft excluding what we can do locally.
Who is making the decision to harden our technologies? Microsoft? Security? Learning and teaching?
Benefits of open standards (softer technologies) WWW, etc. But that these benefits come with costs (more knowledge required) but that's compared to the cost of others making decisions about what we can/can't do
...
Which University account are you using?#
Illustrations
Illustrations - Unable to access Stream and other O365 resources, even though you’re logged in. - PebblePad language/conceptions being very difficult - Echo360 lecture embedding the new hated technology
Implications
Orchestration is key, but support for that orchestration is at a very low level.
Best of Breed versus integrated system. #ngdle/VLE. Fragmented digital learning experiences