{"id":1218,"date":"2012-04-24T15:25:42","date_gmt":"2012-04-24T15:25:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk\/?p=1218"},"modified":"2012-06-01T08:19:25","modified_gmt":"2012-06-01T08:19:25","slug":"education-should-move-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/2012\/04\/24\/education-should-move-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Education should move us"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week I was involved in the \u2018New Places to Learn\u2019<\/a> HEA event held at the Said Business School in Oxford. The focus of the event was Flexible Learning and online Residency. It was my job to frame the day by laying out the Visitors and Residents<\/a> metaphor and encourage the participants to consider the relevance of the Resident end of the continuum.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a complex area and one which the HE sector is only just beginning to consider properly. It\u2019s not clear where the boundaries lie (or even if there should be boundaries) in terms of ownership, roles and time.<\/p>\n

\"Academic<\/a>

Academic and Personal Development in the context of Visitors and Residents (Photo by Josie Fraser)<\/p><\/div>\n

What is becoming clear, as mentioned by Alison Le Cornu<\/a>, is the cultural shift away from the institution and towards the individual. With the erosion of the job-for-life principle our learning and professional progression is rarely framed by a single institution. Over time we are likely to become temporarily tethered to a sequence of institutions or to clusters of institutions. Any continuity is likely to be provided by our activity or presence online, the web providing the meta-place in which, to a certain extent, all the institutions we encounter exist. The continuity I\u2019m referring to goes beyond the notion of the CV or even the ePortfolio, it includes the knowledge we produce and the communities\/networks we belong to. The web allows the individual, beyond the institution, to become the hub that knowledge and value clusters around. Our relationships with institutions lend weight to the knowledge we produce and to our influence, but they no longer own those aspects of our persona as wholly as they used to.\u00a0 As an example consider the movers and shakers in the field of Edtech – do they mainly blog under an institutional banner or as \u2018themselves\u2019?<\/p>\n

This has always been the case for the high-flyers or the \u2018thought leaders\u2019 in many fields but the ubiquity of the web is giving those of us in more humble positions the opportunity to operate beyond the institution.<\/p>\n

Will this be the predominant professional and learning mode-of-operation in the near future?<\/p>\n

Those promoting Digital Literacies as more than a simple set of skills, such as JISC<\/a>, certainly seem to think so. Their descriptions of \u2018Digital Literacies\u2019 often incorporate words like \u2018professional, \u2018lifelong\u2019 and \u2018personal\u2019 in the same sentence. This broad remit which has been fostered by the social-web is also reflected in many of the graduate attributes universities aspire towards. For example, Brookes University talks of graduates \u2018\u2026engaging productively in relevant online communities\u2019 while Southampton University promotes the importance of\u00a0 using technology \u2018\u2026to work, research, learn and influence others in an increasingly digital world\u2019. In my talk at New Places to Learn I proposed that to gain these \u2018attributes\u2019 individuals would increasingly need to engage with the web in a Resident as well as a Visitor mode.<\/p>\n

At the event Dave Cormier<\/a> proposed that the role of education should be to equip learners with the ability to cope with uncertainty, that we should be encouraging agile, innovative thinkers who can move and create in rapidly changing sectors. He suggested that having a \u2018Resident\u2019 approach online is now an important element of that agility.<\/p>\n

\"Lindsay<\/a>

Lindsay Jordan and Dave Cormier - (Photo by Josie Fraser)<\/p><\/div>\n

It could be the case that building an extra-institutional persona and engaging with professional communities online is a good way to respond to increasing uncertainty? Is a Resident approach an opportunity for individuals to become more resilient at a time when institutions are becoming less so?<\/p>\n

Even if this is the case many find being visible in their practice online stressful. Reflecting on her own teaching practice Lindsay Jordan<\/a> highlighted that moving students from a Visitor to a more Resident mode online is often a painful process. She spoke of how distressing encouraging her students to start sharing in an open manner via blogging was – distressing both for her and for them.<\/p>\n

Alan Cann<\/a> spoke about his use of Google+ with students and showed that although they all had profiles on the platform their modes of engagement were actually spread evenly along the Visitor Resident continuum. It was clear that some students were tentative about sharing their thoughts and themselves online and engaged only because activity within the social media platform was being assessed. As a sector we struggle to engage students at the Resident end of the continuum and haven\u2019t yet found elegant ways of activating learner-owned-literacies in an institutional context.<\/p>\n

Last year I blogged about how I felt education should make us anxious<\/a>. It\u2019s a fine line to tread but I think it\u2019s the role of the educator to push learners in this way. This is what Lindsay has been doing and it sounded like a tough but ultimately rewarding journey.\u00a0 If we are going to equip learners to live and learn in an uncertain world it will surely involve a certain amount of pain and anxiety?<\/p>\n

While I don\u2019t think that a Resident mode of engagement is \u2018better\u2019 than a Visitor mode I am beginning to realise its importance in equipping individuals to become resilient beyond a single role or institution. Moving is always a painful process and this holds true when we move to inhabit \u2018places\u2019 online. The anxiety that this causes is, in my opinion, part of what it is to learn. Whatever our direction of travel education should move us.<\/p>\n

My slides from the day:<\/p>\n

New Places to Learn: Flexible Learning and Online Residency<\/a><\/strong><\/object><\/p>\n
View more presentations<\/a> from University of Oxford<\/a>.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reflections on the New Places to Learn event run by the Higher Education Academy Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,84,29,7,6,28,38,59,82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-digital-literacy","category-hea","category-jisc","category-presentations","category-projects","category-research","category-society-online","category-teaching-and-learning","category-visitors-and-residents"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1218"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1218\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1244,"href":"https:\/\/tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1218\/revisions\/1244"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tallblog.conted.ox.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}