In this post I explore what is meant by ritual in relation to the teaching and learning experience and, as we reset our post-pandemic classrooms, why we should care.
Given that there is little obligation to care, beyond a notion of professional value and …
In this post I explore creativity and critical thinking and how they connect with the fostering of curiosity.
This post continues my exploration of curiosity as a state of learning in which learner motivation and agency are central. Following on from the earlier post on …
I keep returning to the phrase Community of Enhancement to describe my philosophy behind my staff development role. It is not astounding but, significantly for me, it is a better than Community of Practice.
It reflects and models the ethos of student-centred active learning …
Continuing from the post ‘Sublime, curious and distracted – challenging conceptions of learning’, I want to examine curiosity towards finding strategies that can be deployed by the academic and the learner themselves to create an engaging learning environment. Surely, curiosity is a defining human attribute? We exercise our …
Tyson E. Lewis in ‘The Dude Abides, or Why Curiosity Is Important for Education Today’, looks at the idea of curiosity from a pedagogical perspective. He sets curiosity in stark contrast to widely held beliefs about education where blind faith in truth and certainty keep the world …
I have been reading Thomassen’s (2014) ‘Liminality and the modern: living through the in-between’. Liminality comes up in my work on a daily basis, whether I am thinking about the connections we make through models of hybrid learning, interdisciplinary learning, or learning spaces – …
I am in reflective mode – it’s summer 2021 and in the West we’re trying to get over the pandemic, catch our breath, and decide what we value, what we have done, what changes will stick. It is both a time to explain what …
“One student’s safe uncertainty is another student’s chaotic nightmare.”
(Orr & Shreeve, 2018)
Photo on UnsplashBased on research I conducted with others into student satisfaction of learning (Heaton et al., 2015), being clear with students about what is expected of them has become a key principle in my thinking …
Loopmans et al. (2012) observe that photographs incite public debate about place and community. When that public context is the university course and where there is a desire for learning engagement and community building, how can photography empower the learner?
A useful baseline for …
In a previous post I suggested that the art of teaching to an active learning philosophy is about creating loose structures so that each and every student has the space to bring their own knowledge, experience and imagination to their learning. Designing for learner deviation is about …
This presentation is useful for thinking about the difference between collaborative and co-operative learning. My interest in social media for learning, studio-based learning, and hybrid learning centres on how people work and learn …
Photo by Matt Popovich on Unsplash
Educational simulation is an interesting and, in my view, underutilised area of active learning. Often associated with technology-based approaches, educational simulation is in fact a broader field. In this broad sense it creates a …
At Wonkfest I attended a panel session titled Changing the Culture of Changing the Culture in which Charlotte Summers, who is Head of Commercial Development at the RSA, referred to the RSA’s excellent Future Change Framework.
Admittedly, I am a sucker for a framework, but …
Active learning is essentially conversational – a ‘to-ing and fro-ing’ of ideas, whether this is a collaborative exchange or personal cogitation and reflection. Pedagogically, there is a lot to exploit here.
I was recently involved in a discussion about the difference between dialogue and …
Awe walks boost emotional well-being according to a recent study conducted by researchers from UC San Francisco and Trinity College Dublin. The study looked at the effect of a weekly 15 minute walk on adults in which selected walkers reported positive effects on their …
In Reimagining Spaces for Learning in Higher Education I examine the inadequacies of binary descriptions of space and time for representing contemporary learning experiences. Within the exploration I considered social media for learning and two of the case studies described tweetchats. An analysis of …
It’s the Global Festival of Active Learning this week. Our secret question in the organising group is ‘so how do we make this a festival and not a conference?’ It’s got to be about people and attitude. Just feeling good with each other!
It’s …
Learning, for me, often describes a state of being between. This betweenness may refer to ideas, knowledge and understanding, modalities, or spaces.
In this post I examine the nuances of terminology used to describe these states; terminology that goes beyond the impersonal …
Being able to distinguish between skills, literacy and fluency is a perennial part of my job as an educational developer. This is most visible in thinking about how to communicate and engage people in conversations to do with digital capabilities, as is the case …
I noted in my previous post on mapping our learning that I would be engaging in the collaborative inquiry ‘Towards a Better Understanding of Our Own Learning Lives’ led by Norman Jackson, Rob …
A few posts ago I thought through some ideas about using metaphorical maps as a way of navigating learning. I want to pursue this here to discover further intersections and connections, especially as …
I have had an immense feeling of warmth and solidarity this evening as good thoughts and memories have been triggered by Sheila’s post on How Sheila Sees It ‘Bring your own device for learning or bringing learning to your device?’
Bring Your Own Device …
Bring your own device for learning or bringing learning to your device? – howsheilaseesIT
— Read on howsheilaseesit.net/curriculum-design/bring-your-own-device-for-learning-or-bringing-learning-to-your-device/…
The idiom ‘from pillar to post’ both indicates the role of structure in a journey and cautions that substance, purpose and clarity are needed if an experience is to be fruitful. In the previous post, I discussed divergence and convergence as ideas that can …
Active learning is a process of opening up and closing down possibilities.
Whether you look at course, module, session or activity design, knowing that your role as an academic is to play with divergence and convergence can be really helpful. As a …
This infographic represents the complexity of learning space discourse and points to the experiential value of the ‘hidden depths’ where the space is least understood because it is least represented and least visible – who are the advocates for the non-formal experience in which the agency and spatial literacy of …
The idea of ‘being’ is about presence and is central to an active learning philosophy. It reflects two things: personal identity and social presence in the learning environment. Lehman and Conceicao (2010) describe this as ‘being there’ and ‘being together’. Both relate to embodiment and …
I have touched on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) in a previous post and the challenging idea that many actors are non-human – they are therefore actors without the potential to intentionally affect change. Objects, ideas, and processes have a role and may be share the …
Why do I explore ideas like being, belonging and becoming in relation to networks, but I hardly talk about communities any more? In this post I will look at why networks and affinity spaces more than communities have come to dominate my thinking. My professional …
While the title of this post is intentionally contentious, it allows me to reflect on one or two recent discussions and reinforce some key ideas about active learning design, especially in the context of ‘unified’ active learning (UAL): how it is recorded and how activity …
