JISC

Following Gilly Salmon's live Elluminate session there was an asynchronous discussion.

An early thread picked up on an observation of Gilly's that 'design is a generic activity' not confined to education. One delgate wrote that "Tasks and activities that make up tasks are 'designed' [but] the interpretation of task instructions by the teacher and the students lead to varying processes". Design, it was agreed, is an interative, conversational process involving both plans/principles and freedom/play. One aspect of involving learners might be a flexible or 'adaptive curriculum'. One participant felt the problem was all but solved: "work heutagogically, and you negotiate the curriculum with learners". Once we were all comfortable with heutagogics as a term, the discussion moved on to practicalities. A delegate argued that "many learners (especially young learners) find it difficult to recognise that need [to learn], especially when they've been through a system that makes them passive learners. Part of the task for the tutor in negotiating a curriculum is to help learners get back in touch with their curiosity and the values that drive their learning."

In a related thread participants largely agreed that learners need more personal control over how they are assessed. It was noted that this need not conflict with a cohort experience of learning and teaching. However, some participants noted the challenges to achieving this: "internal assessment board members, exam boards and external assessors need to be encouraged to participate more fully in investigating how assessment could be more flexible". Another sticking point was the time required to give individualised feedback on individualised assessment tasks.

In a thread on VLEs and metaphor the question of whether different VLEs express different metaphors for learning was raised. One participant argued that technology DOES make a difference, like language: "one can communicate meaning in any language but some languages facilitate specific meanings better than others", and another agreed that the discourse around a technology can strongly influence how it is used, e.g. the Moodle community and its specific ethos. Perhaps to obviate the biases of the educational community, the presenter was particularly interested in "the development of pedagogical purposes for technologies/applications/devices that don't have educational values built in". This linked to discussions in S1: Learning Space Design for 21st Century Learning and Teaching. Like physical environments, technologies provide both structures for containment and spaces for play. They don't dictate how the balance is worked out in any given learning and teaching situation, but they do have a role to play.

A theme which was re-introduced from the Elluminate session was 'predicting the future shape of HE is hard'. Gilly Salmon had advocated future thinking for institutions as well as learners, but there was some discussion about what this might mean in practice. One delegate said: "We can't tell learners what the world will look like in 10 or even 5 years time but we can help them to develop agility, flexibility and resilience". Perhaps the same was true of institutions. Another delegate agreed that "we create the future and what is really important in that process is that we are clear about our beliefs and values and that we use these as our guide." Some of the biggest blockages, it was noted, were about limited expectations of what was possible. There were some wonderful examples of students thinking in radical ways about their own futures, while one participant made an observation on how decisions about the future are more typically taken by institutions: "based on market hype coupled with unbridled enthusiasm by technophiles and [the] financially motivated."