“The changing experience of learning for undergraduates”

“The changing experience of learning for undergraduates”

Charles CrookLearning Sciences Research Institute

University of Nottingham

http://todaysmeet.com/falun




1) Protecting the traditional residential experience

2) Querying some impacts of modern tools and designs


The “social turn”….

« Visibility »

Relative frequency of highlighted word year-on-year

Visibility


• Mediating the social experience• Digital technology tensions

Two symptoms of changing social structures…

UK: 1986 – number of students (for each teacher)

UK: 2006 - number of students (for each teacher)

Representations of « learning » in University prospectuses:

1980

2009

Motives for embracing educational technology in HE

• The innovation imperative• The efficiency imperative• The accountability imperative

Mediating and re-mediating the social

1. The lecture as an interpersonal event2. The assessment relationship3. The voice in the curriculum

4. Peer collaborative review5. The ecology of informal collaboration



Lost in the darkness…

Eclipsed by the image…

Deference to lists…



Assessment feedback

Digital feedback

“You feel as if someone’s marking your work...they don’t know who you are. They don’t care who you are, they just want to get it done as quickly as possible so they can move onto whatever it is they have to do next.. It might be the wrong impression I get, but that’s the impression I get” (3C).

“My French teacher used to sit me down for every piece of work that I did. And there was red ink all over the page, and even if, you know, you got nineteen out of twenty there was red ink all over the page and he’d tell you how you could improve regardless of how good it was”. (3B)



Virtual learning environment: one course homepage

1) Expressive establishing communicative tone

(a) Images: Entertaining graphics (lightweight images not relevant to content)

10%

(b) Flourishes: informal textual devices (“P.S.”, exclamation marks)

5%

(c) Asides: informal textual comments (“..and this is interesting stuff”)

11%

2) Personalising modes of addressing reader

(a) Salutations: greetings and good wishes (“best of luck”, “welcome to…”)

36%

(b) You-reference: second person singular links to the other (“you could try these”)

11%

(c) Self-reference: biography or first person comment (self photos, “I find this more interesting”)

11%

3) Empathic assuming interaction

(a) Access: sympathetic availability (“we are here to help”) 20%

(b) Invitations: participatory encouragement (“feel free to make suggestions”)

14%

(c) Reassurance: personalised encouragement (“we don’t expect perfection”)

7%

A voice on the learning platform?



Reviewing around teacher online notes

Reviewing from students’ own notes

**



( )

“Open world”Comfortable dispositionPossible social frictions

“Opened library”Comfortable disposition

Lost structure >frictions enter?

Student voice

Open world: Neighbours from hell Open library: Neighbours from hell

“When they were playing a Formula 1 on the big screen with the volume out, I thought that was a little bit excessive”

“like if you’re here at 8 or 9 o’clock at night, people then start to get like a bit silly and there’s no kind of control over it and there’s no like exact knowing of how silent like the place is supposed to be, because you are allowed to talk, but, you know, screaming is not really..”

Open world: Obstructive territoriality Open library: Obstructive territoriality

“..there is a tendency for people just to plonk their stuff on one of those group things, chat about the night, blah-de-blah, do a little bit of work, have some lunch, come back and it’s like you’re taking up quite a lot of space”

“..there was this girl that literally every day she’d come to the same booth and she left her stuff. And there was one guy in the booth in front that put posters up! It’s like it’s not yours! It’s actually personalising a desk to make it his. Yes, and that is really taking it too far.”

Open world: Guerrilla parking Open library: Guerrilla parking

“Do you remember that guy who [was trying really awkwardly to plug his thing in where I was sitting? And in the end I said ‘Do you just want to sit here and I’ll go and sit over there?’ and he was like ‘That would be great.’ And then I noticed that the next day he’d like sat there”

“Basically there was a girl using a big table with some guy and I think it was like the small table was for mouse usage, it was basically a large mouse pad and we didn’t have any table and we were like ‘Can we use it?’ and they were like: ‘Errrr, no!’”

Open world: “Just one more drink” Open library: “Just one more drink”

“if there’s like three or four of you that will come to work you’ll like chat, but you’ll just still work unless someone comes down and then sometimes you just get an hour wasted”

“I mean, I’ve got like a large group of mates here and I could go with them, but I don’t necessarily always do, just because I know that it’s more distracting with a group”

Summary• The “social turn” goes beyond (narrow) collaboration• The social experience of learning has been reconfigured• There are new tools for mediating the communication• These can create interpersonal distance• The lecture is a dialogue• Assessment is a relationship• The curriculum has a voice• Collaboration is animated by resources• But… social practice must be imported with care and insight

Documents

“The changing experience of learning for undergraduates”