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14 December 2012

MirandaNet Winter 2012 Newsletter

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STOP PRESS: MirandaNet lounge: BETT13 30.01.13 – 02.02.13

Exploring Education Futures series: the ICT curriculum and professional development in ICT and underpinned by ICT

Thanks to our associate companies this year we have a MirandaNet lounge in the new Excel home for BETT13 in East London. We hope you will join us to debate some key issues as well as relaxing with a coffee in North Gallery, Room 15. Bring your sandwiches, and your friends too.

A variety of members’ talks will take place all day everyday ending with a MirandaMod. We invite MirandaNetters to congregate each day for supper or post-exhibition events after the show.

Saturday is set aside for teachers’ to exchange curriculum ideas. If you cannot be released in the week join us on Saturday.

We still have space on the programme for participants in the MirandaMods: draft programme. Email christina@mirandanet.ac.uk to have your name and topic on the programme.

* Remember to register online beforehand to avoid the queues. Please note we will not have space for coats and bags in the MirandaNet Lounge.

MirandaNet supporters

People often ask how we run these events when membership of the MirandaNet Fellowship is free and the organisation is not for profit. Membership remains free because of volunteer support. In addition the MirandaNet team, Professor Christina Preston, Dr John Cuthell, Francis Howlett, Theo Kuechel and Leon Cych, are able to run a series of events because of the generosity of our associate companies: Classroom Communications, Follett, Iris Connect, Lightspeed and Oracle.

We are also thankful to our BETT13 MirandaNet Lounge Sponsors: Group Call; KO-SU; Steljes; and, Texas Instruments.

Bob Geldof will open our BETT13 programme talking about technology and childhood. The interview has been set up by our new associate, Groupcall. KO-SU will also be running an informal drop in workshop in the MirandaNet Lounge every day called: Come and Create your own Mobile Tests and Challenge.

MirandaNet as a community of enquirers

Through our events, face to face and online, MirandaNetters have moved nearer to our aim of sharing our professional knowledge and practice across the membership and publicly across the world. In particular, MirandaNetters have been focusing on methods of strengthening the teaching profession in all phases by curating our collaborative thinking. During this process there has been melding and mixing of working groups as well as the introduction of a new topic: the ICT curriculum. The latter has been highlighted by the communities because of significant government changes in the UK that we compared with practice in four other countries.

Five broad themes that have emerged from this collaborative activity that reflect changes made by the working groups since the last meeting in Prague:

These working groups will now reassemble at BETT13. Members are encouraged to join the groups online or face to face at this event – and also to quote from these articles and resources in local, national and international discussions about ICT policy and practice. We now have new publications to offer on these topics that have all been collected here. The resources developed by members in this November programme can be found here. More detail about each publication follows.

Articles by the MirandaNet Fellows

The articles relate to the new series of unconferences, 2012/2013, called Exploring Education Futures, that started in Prague, in June and Bedford in November 2012. The next unconference is in East London at BETT13.

An ICT curriculum for the knowledge age;

Co-ordinators of MirandaNet contributions to the ICT curriculum consultation who were awarded a Fellowship were Ian Lynch, GEBOL; Andrea Forbes, Texas Instruments; and, Iris Lanny, Oracle. This Bedford working group submitted a MirandaNet report to the UK consultation about the current ICT curriculum. In this report they identified a crisis in the perception of digital technologies in education. ‘Unlike the craft based traditional school technologies, digital technologies have shifting requirements of the expertise required to teach them. Most of the resourcing effort has been constant refresh of rapidly dating equipment as technological fashions change, rather than investing in people. It is not very surprising that this situation is unsustainable. It has been expensive as well as uncertain in its impact. The proposed solution is to remove much of the prescription associated with the programme of study and specify a much slimmer version. A first draft of this proposal was a key focus for the “Exploring Education Futures” conference. Read more…

At Bedford a debate was led by Dr Vanessa Pittard, Department for Education about the changes to the ICT Curriculum. We also invited members from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Germany and New Zealand to comment on the differences between the systems in their countries compared with the UK. These presentations can be found in the unconference resources amongst the abstracts and the videos.

Furthermore, Dr Noeline Wright from Waikato University, New Zealand, is awarded a Senior Fellowship for a thought-piece that was stimulated by subsequent threads on MirandaLink about the changes to the ICT curriculum and as a result has published a thought piece on curriculum issues in relation to the New Zealand educational ICT landscape. Her piece certainly raises some awkward questions about the role of politicians in education. ‘Education is, internationally, a political football, even though the rules are not international, but adapted according to the vagaries of political interests’. Noeline suggests, ‘Politicians interfere with it for mainly ideological ends; seldom, it seems, is educational policy based on the lessons from educational evidence…

Secretary of State, Gove’s interference in ICT in the UK is a case in point. Given my reading of the MirandaNet discussion threads, his perspective seems to be predicated on insisting that UK students of the twenty-first century replicate the education of someone who went through school in the twentieth century….’

After delivering a wealth of detail about the ways in which digital technologies are now used in education globally, Noeline’s conclusions about the British challenge strike home.

‘Perhaps it necessary to return to first principles: that both teaching and learning really matter, that neither are linear, unproblematic or clear-cut. That they are heavily context-dependent and this includes the kinds of technologies and affordances available to both learners and teachers, who, in fact, are necessarily part of the learning complex, and who illustrate the intimately connected nature of teaching and learning; that we can be both simultaneously. I suppose I’m grateful that in New Zealand, whatever the political flavour of the government of the day, there is a consistent development agenda about digital technologies in learning contexts.’ Read more...

The current ICT curriculum was seen as a product of the rural and the industrial ages. The 21st century was seen as the Knowledge Age. This group is now looking into a design to fulfil the learning needs of the future and will be discussing this further at BETT13.

Developing effective informal professional communication models using technology

Dr Matthew Pearson; Rachel Jones, Steljes; Roger Turner, Lightspeed; and Dr Katya Toneva, St Mary’s College, won Fellowship awards for co-ordinating contributions to the article, Digital Approaches to Collaboration, that was also based on contributions in Prague. They open with the comments that ‘Professional Development needs to change radically to meet the needs and challenges of the digital age. We now have very powerful tools at our disposal for sharing professional knowledge in new ways, and the challenges to all, especially academics and policy makers, is to develop ways of harnessing this potential so that impacts on practice are maximized and a real culture of innovation and creativity is fostered amongst teachers’. This article is an important contribution to the practice of the MirandaNet professional development programme, iCatalyst.

Formal ICT continuing professional development: multimedia resources and training for teachers;

The same working group Dr Matthew Pearson; Rachel Jones, Steljes; Roger Turner, Lightspeed; and Dr Katya Toneva, St Mary’s College, won Fellowship awards for co-ordinating contributions to a second article, ICT Professional Development; the challenges. They prophesy that:

“The challenges to teacher professional development that will arise in the next 5 to 10 years are considerable, yet the opportunities to transform practice and create a generation of teachers delivering a world class ICT curriculum are within our grasp. Innovations in ICT and the exponential growth of the digital world will not patiently wait for educators to catch up and implement change at their own pace. Rather than a programme that is built on gradual and incremental improvements to existing practice, we need to embrace methodologies for CPD in ICT that move practice on at a much greater pace.

Current CPD is often based on the premise of making an individual teacher better within her or his classroom, and supporting them to become a better teacher within these parameters. Such an approach will not allow teachers to keep pace with the rapid societal changes being caused by the new technologies and new ways of working”. Read more…

Ensuring that professional research counts in policy

Our partnership with the Education Futures Collaboration led by Professor Marilyn Leask, and Dr Sarah Younie is an important thread in the campaign to have the knowledge and expertise of teachers as professionals recognised throughout the world because so far ‘education is still far from being a knowledge industry in the sense that its own practices are not yet being transformed by knowledge about the efficacy of those practices’ (OECD 2009).

Mapping Education Specialist knowHow (MESH) seems to us to be the most viable opportunity to provide access to subject specific research-based knowledge about barriers to students’ learning and interventions most likely to dissolve barriers. The MESH approach uses multimedia mindmaps, as a way of presenting complex knowledge, each node providing a link to an annotatable display of more in-depth fully referenced knowledge. Read more…

The impact of digital technologies on learning theory and practice

Although MirandaNet is still publishing on the ICT agenda and how it is taught, the perspective has widened to include how pedagogy is impacted by digital technologies throughout formal education and informal learning. Professor Diana Laurillard, who has been commenting on digital technologies world for many years, has made pedagogy in formal teaching central in her thought-provoking book, Teaching as a Design Science. She writes that teachers in the twenty-first century, in all educational sectors, have to cope with an ever-changing cultural and technological environment. Teaching is now a design science. Like other design professionals – architects, engineers, programmers – teachers have to work out creative and evidence-based ways of improving what they do. Yet teaching is not treated as a design profession.’

In the MirandaNet Fellowship we are working on the design element of teaching especially in the area of collaborative learning. The progress of our professional thinking can be traced in a series of collaborative articles that have been developed by our working groups. Web publication is our route for drawing attention to research findings and professional expertise in influencing policy makers at local, national and international levels.

Read more about the MirandaNet approach to theory and practice here.

Dr Raiker, Dr Cuthell and Professor Preston are working on a draft papers on the subject of collaborative learning and would welcome feedback. Email christina@mirandanet.ac.uk for copies.

Fellowship news

The core MirandaNet team

The core MirandaNet Ltd Consultancy Team is Professor Christina Preston, Dr John Cuthell, Research and Implementation Director, and Francis Howlett, web editor. We run the MirandaNet Fellowship which is not for profit funded by overheads from our projects when this is possible. In addition, Francis and John are generous with their free time when times are hard because we believe that MirandaNet has real value. In this context we greatly appreciated Noeline Wright’s thought-piece observation:

Members also play their part in sharing knowledge: we ask MirandaNetters to share their ideas with the membership as a kind of membership fee and we reward members when they publish their articles with Fellowships and Senior Fellowships. Many members give other kinds of service too and so we have instituted a new title, MirandaNet Ambassador, to thank those who consistently give their time and expertise to the MirandaNet Fellowship ‘through thick and thin.’

MirandaNet Ambassadors
Professor Marilyn Leask: Professional Knowledge Management
Dr Bozena Mannova: International Research and Development
Theo Kuechel: Visual Learning
Leon Cych: Digital communications
Lawrence Williams: World Peace Advocate
Dr Katya Toneva: Senior research adviser
Dr Eva Dakich: Senior research adviser

A Senior Fellowship has been awarded to Dr Andrea Raiker whose thinking about collaborative learning that has been influential in the unconferences agenda this year. She has published a summary of the collaborative learning process that underpins the 2011/2012 MirandaNet unconferences as well as her part in the joint authorship of an academic paper and the chapter of a book that are currently being reviewed for publication. Adding her thinking to the theoretical approach taken by Dr John Cuthell and Professor Christina Preston over many years has increased the value of unconferences for participants. The new development has been to encouraging the working groups to publish summaries of their shared thinking as well as the concept maps that have helped to promote collaborative approaches. Read more...

A Fellowship has been awarded to Kevin Burden for his study, based in eight schools and six local authorities across Scotland where iPad devices were being piloted to investigate a range of issues associated with the deployment of personal mobile devices as tools for teaching and learning. This study follows the launch in May 2012 by Mr. Michael Russell, the Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning in Scotland, of a series of pilots to assess the issues associated with personal ownership of technologies for learning. It is anticipated the current evaluation will contribute to the evidence base which Scotland is looking to develop in this important aspect of education. Read more…

Congratulations to Dr John Potter, a Senior Lecturer in Education and New Media in the Department of Culture, Communication and Media at the Institute of Education, University of London, UK, on the publication of this new book, Digital Media and Learner Identity: The New Curatorship Print, that looks at looks at identities of young people formed and influenced by digital media, and the implications for teaching and learning. The blurb says, “Many studies of digital education focus on technology rather than on the learners or on what they make and do with the devices they use every day. This book takes a different path, putting the learners and their lives at the heart of the narrative. Through an in-depth account of media production activities by younger learners it shows their motivations and dispositions in storying their identity in short video pieces. It suggests that their authoring and editing practices are examples of the new curatorship: the representation through life of identity and affiliation in digital media. It considers the implications of this for teaching and learning in the years to come and concludes with a manifesto for a future media education.”

In the last two years our associate companies have been closely involved in our collaborative activities as professional equals and have contributed greatly to our thinking. This is reflected in our Associate Fellowship Awards for collaborative authorship of our articles going to: Graham Newell, Iris Connect; Gerlinde Gniewosz, KO-SU; Roger Turner, Lightspeed; Rachel Jones and Matthew Pearson, Steljes; Andrea Forbes, Texas Instruments. The contribution from this group has been invaluable.

EndNote

All the work that goes into keeping MirandaNet afloat was rewarded by Dr Noeline Wright in her thought piece:

“Within TKI [the NZ Ministry supported education-oriented site], there is an area called software for learning, designed to help teachers make decisions about what to use and why. These kinds of mechanisms indicate a structural support of elearning and digital technologies in schools. Something, it seems, is being dismantled in the UK.

On the other hand, MirandaNet-organised conferences bring together people from a wide range of interests to examine the state of play in the UK regarding the ICT curriculum. It is through such meetings and the affordance of the discussion threads that education with and through digital technologies is being practiced in a wide educational community that transcends political and geographic borders. Its advocacy agenda is a wonderful antidote to the onslaught of ignorant political will”.

Thanks Noeline we will all keep this advocacy going.

Dr Christina Preston

Professor of Educational Innovation

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