Keynote 3 pptx

Friday 13 May 11.20 Cockcroft Theatre

Keynote 3: Supporting the teacher as learner

Diana Laurillard, London Knowledge Lab, Institute of Education

Abstract: Teachers who wish to update and upgrade their teaching and learning designs using new learning technologies have some difficult issues to confront, and we have to recognise that teachers deserve far more help with the development of digital learning. This paper starts from the premise that only teachers have the knowledge, experience, and appropriate context for developing the new forms of pedagogy made possible by digital learning methods. They are close to their students, they see how they react to the teaching, and what they produce as a result. The act of teaching provides the fieldwork that needs to be carried out to test, re-design, and re-test the new methods being developed. Effective use of learning technology will not come about unless teachers are at the helm of innovation. We can make a very good case for giving teachers sufficient time and professional development to achieve the skills and new thinking needed, and there are some initiatives currently in play to do that. But time and training alone will never really meet the need, because the rapid development of the technology means that further updating will always be needed. Teachers have to learn as we argue students have to learn: through practice, experience, discovery, inquiry, discussion, argument, collaboration… and just as students need the tools and resources to do that, so do teachers. Open Educational Resources help to make it feasible for teachers to act as a community of learners, developing the knowledge, ideas and principles of learning technology. But as a recent journal special edition on OER argued, we have to design these resources "for greater flexibility to enable the users to adapt and structure the use of the resources to meet their own particular requirements" (Boyle 2010). Teachers also need the digital tools to explore, design, adopt, adapt, test, and share their ideas. The paper will argue that we need to pay more attention to supporting the teacher, and will propose the kinds of tools and resources that are needed to enable them to develop this new specialised knowledge and skill base.

References:

Boyle, T. (2010). Introduction to JIME special Issue on Open Educational Resources (OER). Journal of Interactive Media in Education, ISSN: 1365-893X  http://jime.open.ac.uk/issue/2010-OER