Innovating Pedagogy 2012

Photo of William Gibson by Frederic Poirot; original source; file licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Mike Sharples sent me a link to this pre-release version [PDF] of Innovating Pedagogy 2012, which he has written for the Open University with Patrick McAndrew, Martin Weller, Rachel Ferguson, Elizabeth FitzGerald, Tony Hirst, Yishay Mor, Mark Gaven, and Denise Whitelock.

The report gives an accessible overview of ten new forms of teaching, learning and assessment, and it has been written for non-academics. It looks to have been inspired by the EDUCAUSE Horizon Reports, but with a focus on learning and teaching.

Three things struck me about the report:

1. The report misses an opportunity by not cross-linking to the work of the about-to-be-concluded Technology Enhanced Learning research programme, whose recent public-facing reports cover some similar ground, and, more importantly, are aimed at a similar audience. The same could be said about lack of linkage to the Ufi Trust's May 2012 Scaling Up - Achieving a Breakthrough in Adult Learning with Technology. [Disclosure - I am a co-author of that report.]

2. The section on Assessment for Learning ought to have clearly referenced the much earlier (and seminal) work of Dylan Wiliam and Paul Black [PDF], and the ongoing (and equally seminal) work of Eric Mazur on Peer Instruction. This comment reflects a personal bugbear that too often ideas are presented as newer than they actually are, when what policy-makers and others need to understand is how rooted ideas often are in - especially the good ones, which Assessment for Learning most definitely is..... - are in the established work of others.

3. The report takes the risk - Horizon Report style - of setting timescales on each of the "new forms of teaching learning and assessment" that it covers. This strikes me as ill-advised, partly because it gives users of the report a justification for saying "this is not going to happen for 3 years, so we should not be trying it now", and partly because in respect of several of the new forms described, for example MOOCs (impact - Medium / timescale - Medium 2 to 5 years), things are already happening, right now, on a big scale, with a high impact, and not just on learners. (As William Gibson said, the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.)

Despite these mostly minor criticisms, this report deserves to be widely read by people inside and outside the world of technology enhanced learning - particularly the latter. And there is an Open University WordPress site associated with the report, where people can comment on the report and its various sections.

Comments

[David Smith]

Bravo Seb! I agree entirely with your comments. Extending your thinking on point 3, by not acknowledging work that is already happening it muddies the waters for funding initiatives and projects. There are many cases in recent EU funding approvals where the projects are re-inventing the wheel and whilst the aims are laudable the end results are that there have been minimal gains...the distribution is more uneven.

[martin.cooke@rsc-em.ac.uk]

"a personal bugbear that too often ideas are presented as newer than they actually are"

Seb - thousands of years old that one! and you are not alone. Keep smiling.
Martin Cooke