#PivotOnline…Now what?.
In my previous medium post I posed a series of questions about designing for meaningful learning. These questions focussed on building relationships and interactions with your students.
Student-student
Student-teacher
Student-knowledge
The underlying belief here is that learning is a social act.
I am a teacher at heart and I learnt to run my classrooms by asking lots of questions. Sure my middle-years students would push back saying “Just tell us the answer, Sir.’ But, of course learning is much more than a game of questions and answers. Quite often it is about swimming through currents of ambiguity where there are no clear answers to the problems we encounter. This can be a tricky space but I suggest if you’ve built strong student-student and student-teacher interactions, surfing ambiguous moments and unknowns becomes easier when everyone can actively participate in the process.
COVID-19
As we swim the currents of change forced upon us by the COVID-19 pandemic how do we keep learning happening as our students adapt to learning from home? One solution is a technological fix; to #pivotonline. However, I suggest this technological shift is not enough. We’ve now fallen into a new context where I suggest we must keep asking lots and lots of questions about teaching, learning, knowledge and technology as a tool to support social learning. Let me give you two humdinger questions to start with.
Two questions
As you keep building relationships and digital interactions with your students continually discuss with them the following two questions:
I’ve taught and worked in many different educational settings but wasn’t really forced to ponder these questions until I undertook my M.Ed along with a shift to online and digital learning at a distance from my learning peers. I’ll be blunt here. My first reaction and maybe it still is “I’ve got no f#c*i%! clue.” When you ponder these questions keep in mind your changed context of teaching and learning, which is most likely now defined by social distancing and relies on digital networks to help keep learning happening. But also remember that learning is very social.
In this shifted context also be empowered by the idea that your identity and beliefs about teaching and learning may now be less informed by the institute you work for and more by the digital and participatory networks you are now building with your students.
Simon works for Graccon Learning Solutions. At Graccon we focus on digital learning design. We put design thinking to work.
Reference:
Weller, M. (2011). The digital scholar: How technology is transforming scholarly practice [Kindle version]. Retrieved from https://play.google.com/
