EDUCATORS’ DIGITAL LITERACIES: THE ROLE OF PEDAGOGICAL DESIGN IN INNOVATION

F. Dujardin, Sheffield Hallam University, UK

Knowledge society

Higher Education

• Digital literacies

• Networked self

• Standards• Relevance

MA professional communication

• Quality in teaching• Innovation

Designing for multiple contexts

Pedagogical design – Collective blogging as case study

Outline

Three key concepts: Blogging Metaphor of learning Academic literacies

‘New’ methodological approach – ethnographic action research

Discussion points Widening the communicative ecology Planning socio-cultural animation Implication for educators’ digital literacies

Why focus on blogging?

Paradigmatic technology

Knowledge sharing tool

Personal or collective?

Powerful metaphors

personal space privacy difficult to share

and to assess

blog as ‘open’ space public community

“active sociality” (Lankshear and Knobel 2006)

assessment?

‘Diary’ ‘Participation’

Trialogical approach to ‘knowledge creation’ – self, community, outputs

‘Academic literacies’

Part of the New Literacies movement looking beyond established literacies power relations and expectations

Self-awareness – educators as “recontextualisation agents” (Coleman 2012) in the use of ICT ‘authentic’ use of ICT or normalisation? enculturation into a dominant order of high

tech and global capitalism (Tusting 2008) or encouraging critical confidence (Goodfellow and

Lea 2007) ?

Ethnographic action research

Social mapping

Socio-cultural

animation

Communicative

ecologyReflexivity

Widening the communicative ecology

1. Routine stage – using the VLE and observing students’ reactions

2. Refinement stage – introducing blogs within the VLE

3. Integration stage – using a private collective blog set up in WordPress, while keeping the VLE for module information and submissions

Socio-cultural animation

Scaffolding ‘new’ practices in knowledge creation enabling mature learners to

become ‘digital residents’ managing understandings of

educational practices Authentic use of blog for

meaning-making Mediating more than

disciplinary knowlege

Conclusion: new roles for educators

Catalyst Curator

Mediator

Thank you for listening