Thank you for stopping by!
This session is a follow-up from my last year's presentation. I gathered feedback from the audience and the suggestion was to design a session with more time for discussion, so here it is.
There is a tendency to think that the emerging digital technology landscape is inexorably positive, that it removes barriers thus it equalises the access to knowledge and resources. It is also said that digital technologies enable individuals to access ‘effortlessly’ some sort of inevitable progress. I am not so sure...let us think together about this rather determinisitic assumptions.
This action-lab will immerse you in a guided debate around the daily use of (open/closed) digital tools in educational settings. It will consist of two blocks. In the first, you will gather in small groups to create ‘personas and scenarios’ using as input quantitative and qualitative data collected for my PhD research. I will provide different materials to create the artifacts. A bit of art and craft :-)
Briefly, personas are a research-driven narrative about a person, and scenarios are stories about people and their activities (Carroll, 1999). They capture the essence of the activity, in this particular case, digital practices of different actors. Originally developed in the field of Human-Computer Interaction, personas and scenarios recently have been used in the context of learning design (Luckin, 2010). Once finished, each group will share their artefacts and stories using an interactive tool, Padlet, and we will have a group discussion around them.
In the second block, I will tell the story of the participants of my study and see how they compare with the artefacts you have created opening the space for discussion and brainstorming for potential ideas that could shed light on new ways of addressing the use and appropriation of open and participatory technologies in Higher Education. The artefacts created by you will help us to reflect and find possible solutions to the research problem.
The content of the session will be manifold. It will touch areas related to the impact that our beliefs have in Higher Education learning and teaching and regarding decisions around the provision of digital education for students and teachers. It will also include elements regarding digital literacies as socio-cultural practices, the interplay of structure and agency in open and closed learning spaces and the importance of agency as reflexive engagement with digital practices as a means to flourish in a digitally mediated society and of course, emergent topics that arise organically from the group discussion.
