My colleague, Lisa Hoogeboom, and I attended the ACCESS Conference in March (during spring break), hosted at Abilene Christian University. First, any Christian college people interested in distance education should attend ACCESS -- these are the flat-out nicest people at any conference, ever.
We opened our first day with a plenary by Robbie Melton from the Tennessee Board of Regents, who presented many new technologies and apps that can be useful for education. What a dream job -- she has a budget to check out new hardware, software and apps and make deployment recommendations to the university system. Dream job! Based on her recommendations, I've added Nearpod, Haiku Deck, inClass, MyScriptCalculator, Ask3, Flipboard, and Kobo to my iPad.
Another interesting session featured pedagogies for online technology for Christian ministry. There were no surprises in the consideration of pedagogies -- reflection, flipped classroom, service learning, mobile learning -- but the conversation was interesting. I was not fully aware of the research and literature concerning the culture of the internet, digital media and mobile devices. And wrestle with this: How is physical imagery different than digital imagery? If your denomination does not support icons, why can we have digital images used in similar ways? Another point to consider is the difference between an instrumental understanding of technology vs. a relational model -- how can I use this as a tool vs. use technology as an extension of myself, my view of self, how I view others, and how others view me.
Another session brought forward the idea of utilizing social media and social software to allow students to create and co-create a community of scholarship and learning within a class. Students can ask each other for help, create a community for information sharing, work through homework, etc.
Yet another session focused on the apprenticeship model of learning that is embodied, dialectic, interconnected, and subjective. This prompted me to ask myself how some of our more information or content-heavy classes could utilize this -- instead of teaching what the various doctrines ARE exclusively, thinking instead how we can teach our students to DO biblical analysis or DO theology. Another strong note is the trend of students today to depend on technology to be their memories -- we can "recall" anything we want at the click of a few keys. As we rewrite our brain wiring, we may also risk eliminating our biologic memory, or those key ideas or events that will live in our cultural memory and be formative and shaping. In addition, technology intersects with culture and changes our senses.
We also explored the Media Tetrads: technology enhances, reverses, retrieves, obsolesces. It breaks down distance, enhances context, reverses intrusion, retrieves situational meaning, obsolesces centralization. At the same time, it enhances personalization, reverses isolation, retrieves wholeness (synthesis), and obsolesces categorization. The older models of education don't necessarily fit this technological world; today course presentations can be developed dynamically inside and outside of class with students as co-developers. Professors "co-curate" the information to assure its veracity, which is available on-demand to allow students to access it when and where they want. Professors become guides or mentors, emphasizing discovery and application of information in the wild.
A final point that I've taken with me from the conference is the utility of using mobile apps and social software for classroom applications -- you have to use your risk capital wisely. Students are living in this applications and it is comfortable for them. Capitalize on what makes them comfortable to push what makes them uncomfortable. Reduce their cognitive load and allow them to take risks with the course content, not with the course platform or learning management system.
No comments:
Post a Comment