Establishing digital and pedagogical openness

This is a very late contribution to ONL171 and Topic 2 on Open learning - Sharing and openness

I would like to discuss the notions of openness in higher education and that of scholarship of teaching. Weller & Anderson (2013) discuss issues of resilience and openness in higher education. Resilience is taken from ecology (see Walker, Holling, Carpenter, & Kinzig, 2004) and, very simply put, helps us to understand how an organism adapts to various forces of change. Weller and Anderson argue that higher education institutions can be seen as "organisms" in this sense and that the same basic assumptions can apply. There is no doubt that digital technology affects higher education on both an institutional and on an individual level. 

Here I would like to connect to Boyer’s 1990 classification of scholarly activity, referenced in Weller & Anderson (2013): 

• discovery
• integration
• application
• teaching

Of these four types of activity, discovery, integration and application can be seen as forming one cluster, focusing on research and innovation, and the fourth one stands somewhat alone. As Weller and Anderson point out, Boyer's classification from 1990 was no doubt meant as a way of enhancing the teaching component, but research suggests that scholars who want to pursue a pedagogical career in higher education institutions are not rewarded to the same extent as those who pursue a more scholarly career path. Kreber (2002) puts this down to a lack of rigor in definitions of such concepts as teaching excellence and scholarship of teaching. One of the key factors suggested by Kreber to define scholarship of teaching is the idea of openness and sharing.

Being an appointed pedagogical ambassador for Stockholm University this year, I can see that I have excellent opportunities for engaging with these issues and there have also been several opportunities for me. Together with a colleague at the Department of Romance studies and Classics I have constructed a questionnaire on how our teachers perceive their needs when it comes to pedagogical development in a digital age. Several respondents say that they would like to be able to interact with their students more, and they are also looking for ways in which to increase student activity in general.

At a workshop held recently with one of the subject divisions in my own department it became rather clear that further information about possible ways of interacting with students is needed, together with sustained discussions about pedagogical issues. It also struck me at this workshop that before a more probing pedagogical discussion can take place, we need a shared minimum of knowledge and insight into the vast area of digital resources. At present there is no such joint space in which to share knowledge and discuss ideas in our subject field. One way in which we are going to remedy this is by establishing a Google+ group. I’m very excited about this and look forward to seeing how it develops.

I hope that this can help to establish a resilient community of learning able to deal with some of the challenges of the digital world in language teacher education.  

  

References

Boyer, E. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: priorities of the professoriate. Jossey-Bass.

Kreber, C. (2002). Teaching Excellence, Teaching Expertise, and the Scholarship of Teaching. Innovative Higher Educaiton, 27(1), 5-23.

Walker, B., Holling, C., Carpenter, S., & Kinzig, A. (2004). Resilience, Adaptability and Transformability in Social–ecological Systems. Ecology and Society, 9(2). Hämtat från http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss2/art5/

Weller, M., & Anderson, T. (2013). Digital resilience in higher education. European Journal of Open, distance and e-Learning, 16(1), 53-66. Hämtat från http://www.eurodl.org/?p=current&article=559