The #SotonTel Technology Enhanced Conference at the University of Southampton

The University of Southampton has an enhancement theme each year. This year the theme is Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL), and this conference is one of the activities around this theme. The conference has been intense, with many high profile speakers and a wide range of TEL discussions have taken place. Fiona Harvey, @fionajharvey , one of the lead organisers, has also been the MC at the conference. In a theatrical setup with blue curtains behind her -how cool would have been to open them showing presenters on the stage after being introduced- she welcomed the audience. In her welcoming talk, she introduced Whova, an app designed for networking in events such as this conference. This app needs a bit of refining: I ended up sending friendly messages to all attendees in which apparently I was telling them that “we need to catch up”. The thing is I didn’t mean to do so!

Professor Alex Neill, @alexdneill finished the opening talk by explaining the width and importance of the TEL theme at the university. TEL encompasses MOOCs, VLEs, video recording of lectures, online learning programmes, and many other technologies and uses of technology. TEL can lead to an engaged community that makes learning more meaningful, and sharing ideas about TEL within the community is of paramount importance. This is the leitmotiv Alex was putting forward.

Julie Wintrup: To Blog or not to Blog

Julie Wintrup @juliewintrup started the presentations round by discussing the use of social media. More precisely, about the implications of publishing content through 2.0 technologies. It is now very easy to write for a wide audience, and this can be dangerous, as writing in social media is taken too lightly very often. Julie provides examples from the healthcare environment, her area of expertise. One is that girl who got in trouble for misusing facebook. This girl posted images from the hospital where she was being treated, and breached a series of policies and laws that brought dire consequences for her.

Julie continues discussing the use of social media by medical doctors. The use of social media breaks traditional boundaries between patients and doctors, doctors and colleagues, and other relationships. This is why she recommends doctors to explore social media, through a decalog of ten reasons why doctors should explore social media.

Julie also encourages doctors and medical students to read blogs, and to blog. For example, Alison blogs blogs about her experience in health care. One of the outcomes is the crowdsourcing that blogging can lead to for health recovery.

Social media can changes things. Gary and Lance have been working together, learning about each other´s world through Facebook.

Another example is Kate Granger. A doctor who suffered from cancer, she did not appreciate the impersonal and distant treatment from doctors. He then started  “Hi, my name is Kate”, in which she was encouraging identification for a more human treat to patients.

Russell Bentley: Technologies for Democracy. Our Ethical Challenge.

Through a metaphor from ancient Egipt, (how Thanos enhanced the human experience through the invention of writing), Russell explains how technology can transform humanity but can hinder human capabilities.

Writing can assist the powers of imagination, but can distort reality. Socrates didn´t write. Plato did. All we know about Socrates is through Plato, because he wrote. We can imagine the power Plato had at that moment, as he could have written what he wanted about Socrate´s teachings. These teachings have made modern civilisation as it is now.

If education is transformative, what transformation can we expect from TEL? Many technologies lend themselves to moral panics, such as the pocket calculator when it was introduced in schools. It scared many mathematical teachers who were afraid that pupils would lose the capacity to make arithmetic operations.

It has been said that all innovation is futile, because nothing really changes. Russell encourages to turn skepticism upside down, although emphasising the ethical point. That is, education is profoundly political. If we educate, we unavoidingly commit a political act. The transformation we want from learners is that that can make a difference towards educating a generation that can contribute to the improvement of the whole society.

Russell differentiates education with the development of personality. Our challenge is to harness cutting edge technology towards empowering students to contribute to the society we want to have.

Eleanor Quince: Harnessing Technology for Employability. Digital Literacy Skills in Student-led Career Activity

Elena runs the employability section of the faculty of Humanities. She often gets enquiries from students on ‘what to do’. She helps students to know what they want to do with their careers as early as possible. She created an employability module to this end. For this, she decided to get ideas from the students. Four interns  helped her develop the module. They created the ‘Mission: employable’ brand.

The way they harness technology to develop the module and their functionalities is the use of scoop.it for knowing what other universities are doing. They also use Trello to visualise projects, and Eventbrite to organise events. Storify, ISurvey, Kahoot and other technologies were also part of the building process of the module content. All these technologies were used with the primary aim of engaging students to think about career paths. Eleanor believes that awareness and good use of these technologies can enhance students’ employability from early stages.

As part of the support network, they created a peer mentoring scheme. This scheme was displayed in a site embedded in the University webpage. This mentoring scheme was set up to work on distance, with technologies such as ISurvey and Facebook (there is a mentoring Facebook group for this purpose).

Eleanor believes that digital literacy and skills are of paramount importance to the employability of humanities students, and the employability programme she developed has got a clear technological focus.

Scott Border: A vision for teaching anatomy in the 21st century – reasons to be cheerful part 3

Anatomy studies have evolved. Initially, with Hypocrates, dissection was forbidden. In the renaissance, a lecturer would disect a body for passive students. Now, most universities want students to be actively involved in the study of anatomy. Medical education moved towards medical imaging. Now, many students are taught anatomy without the use of human tissue, using clinical imaging instead. There were concerns that students would never learn things about the human body without actually dissecting a human body. The cost of getting rid of anatomy laboratories with human tissues was reputational, rather than practical. In practical terms, TEL can really do job.

In Southampton, students learn anatomy through bespoke packages. They don´t have paper-based textbooks anymore. They have an electronic booklet instead. Stats show that the booklet is being used and students are engaging with it. What did not work so well is the use of the interactive elements of the booklet. Students’ favourite components were passive elements of the booklet.

Another success has been that the departments has managed to get students involved in the development and design of the learning packages. Through this collaboration, the department has developed the Virtual Anatomy Laboratory, a personalised tool that gathers each student´s learning materials in the same space, so that an individual storyline can be created out of the curations fo each of the studnets.

Debate: can BlackBoard revolutionise (higher) education?

Adam Warren: Yes, it can. It makes learning management easier. It only needs appropriate guidance. Actually, BB has already revolusionised education. The thing that only a tiny part of it has been exploited.

Hugh Davis: Blackboard cannot revolutionise education because it is not authentic and it has too many limitations. Many of the things you can do with BB, you can do them with any other piece of software with even more ease.

Christian Bokhove. Yes, it can. Blackboard has been underestimated, and many of the facilities that are already in Blackboard are unknown to the majority. The tools in blackboard can communicate together, whereas the isolated tools that you would use otherwise, don´t.

Rebecca @rkulidzan : BB looks obsolete. We (students) don´t use it for interaction. We use other cloud computing based technologies. Simply put, students don´t like it.

After the debate and final remarks

The debate finished at around 3PM and I had to leave, so I cannot report on what was going on after the debate. There is another blog post by Rachel Jones ‏@rlj1981 where this is explained very well.

This conference is the reflection that technology and innovation are unavoidable matters in universities. Experience on use of these technologies in all aspects of the teaching and learning experience has to be shared, challenged and discussed in order to be improved. Practitioners and researchers from all departments need to engage in events such as #sotonTEL. Educational change may not be exclusively driven by technology, but it would be unrealistic to ignore its role.