Keep your students active

Photo courtesy of Julochka on Flickr

We are fortunate in art and design. The nature of teaching and learning in the creative arts lends itself to active learning, in which students have the opportunity to participate actively in the classroom. While we do give the odd lecture, this tends to be only one of a range of teaching and learning approaches at our disposal.

But As Dr. Adam Longcroft points out in this SEDA blog post, it’s all too easy to retreat to the safety of the lecture. In particular, he argues, when we are pushed for time sometimes the least challenging option is to just lecture at our students.

But by focusing on active learning strategies, rather than active teaching strategies, our students will have a better learning experience. By focusing on what and how students want to learn, rather than on what we want to teach, our role shifts from teacher to facilitator and we enable students to become active participants in their learning.

Read the full article on the SEDA blog. And you might also like the following:

Sharon Cox’s HEA guide to Active Learning

Time to apply

As somebody who creates and delivers a lot of training sessions, I'm used to putting together workshops and activities.

I have a process which I work through which usually involves providing some background context to the activity, lots of questions to ask participants, and then the key theories or principles that underpin the workshop. Throughout the session I will regularly ask questions to try and determine how well participants are internalising and making sense of the information I'm providing.

But how is it possible to determine whether participants will really be able to apply their new knowledge to their own work once the workshop is over? For example, let's say I'm giving a workshop on creative thinking to a group of car mechanics. I may be an expert in creative thinking, but I have very little understanding of the day-to-day activities and processes that my participants undertake. What happens if they ask me how they can reimagine one of their complex assembly procedures?

The answer is that I can't. But in many ways it's also important that I don't, because if I were to provide an answer they wouldn't feel as if they 'owned' it. As a facilitator, it is always tempting to try and provide answers, especially when participants ask you to do so. But it's much more valuable to give them the time and space to arrive at an answer themselves as this will create the realisation that they have the ability to apply creative thinking to solve problems in their own specific context.

A common issue with many professions is that problems and situations are often complex, what Schon (1983) referred to as 'the swampy lowlands of professional practice'. A workshop facilitator cannot and should not attempt to provide answers, but should instead strive to create the belief in participants that they themselves have the ability to address and resolve these problems. As Schon observes, learners need time to 'reflect in action' as well as 'reflect on action'.

In future I think it might be a good idea to manage participants' expectations by making this abundantly clear at the start of the session. And also build in more time for them to reflect on how they might apply their new knowledge to their own specific practice.

Using Twitter for a group learning activity

Twitter is a useful tool on many levels, but I recently had the opportunity to use it as a way to support a group learning activity. Here's how it worked.

The object of the activity was to try and make a PESTLE analysis more interesting for a 100 1st year Fashion students. If you're not familiar with the term, PESTLE stands for Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Legal and Environmental, and is a way to analyse the ways in which these factors affect a market, product or service. The activity involved taking the students to London and setting them the task of visiting places across the capital that reflected each of these areas, so Political might be the Houses of Parliament, Economic could be Canary Wharf for example. The challenge was to be able to track the students' activity and verify that they had visited places for each PESTLE element.

The activity

Students were divided into sixteen groups and each group was allocated a hashtag ranging from #PESTLE1 through to #PESTLE16. The students were required to use their smartphones to take pictures of each place they visited and send a Tweet which included their group hashtag. The students had to tweet a group photo of themselves holding a copy of the Metro newspaper to prove that they had all attended on the required day.

The course team took up residence in a coffee shop, each tutor was allocated three groups to monitor and the tutor was responsible for replying to messages from their respective groups. Using the Hootsuite social media dashboard, it was possible to set up columns for each group to make it easier to follow their progress. As the tweets came in, a screenshot was taken of each tweet and at the end of the day these screenshots were dropped into iPhoto. This made is possible to quickly generate a slideshow of all the best tweets - see video below.

 
The feedback from the students indicated that they very much enjoyed the activity, and the discursive nature of Twitter provided an effective way for the tutors to communicate with the students. Hootsuite made it possible to track and monitor the activity of each group.

Do you have an example of using Twitter for group work? If so share it below!

What do students think about technology?

Photo credit: Sookie

 
It would be hard to find a student who doesn't use some form of digital device in their learning. But despite the ubiquity of technology in education, how often do we create opportunities for our students to think about how they are actually using these technologies?

I'm preparing a talk for some of our postgraduate Arts students, and am excited by the opportunity to ask them both how they currently use digital technologies and how they expect to use them once they move beyond university. The talk will be based around personal, educational and professional use of technology, and will use the following preliminary readings as a basis for discussion during the session:

Personal use of technology

• In this age of technology is it realistic to assume that we can 'switch off'? Think about this while reading: To connect or not to connect

Educational use of technology

• How do you expect your tutors to use technology in the classroom? Think about this while reading: Is it okay to be a Luddite?

Professional use of technology

• What digital skills and knowledge do you think you will need to succeed in the global arts and culture sector? Think about this while reading: How arts and cultural organisations in England use technology

Please use and adapt these questions for discussion with your own students, and I'd love to hear about the issues that are raised during the session. Also, if you can think of additional questions in these three areas please share them in the comments below.

Using Turnitin to support academic referencing

What is Turnitin?
 
Turnitin is a tool that enables staff and students to verify the academic integrity of written work. While some institutions take a punitive approach to using Turnitin, UCA has adopted a more formative position and advocates that is is used as a tool to support student learning. Although use of Turnitin is not currently mandatory, the university recommends that all students have an opportunity to submit some of their written work through Turnitin so that they can identify any weaknesses with referencing or academic writing.

Once a student uploads a piece of work through Turnitin they obtain what is known as an Originality Report. This indicates the percentage of text that has been found elsewhere on the internet in books, journals and websites. As Turnitin is not a perfect tool there is no fixed threshold above which a piece of work is deemed to be unacceptable. However, tutors are strongly advised to investigate any work where over 10% of the text  is deemed to have been copied from external sources. 


Help with Turnitin

The following videos demonstrate how to set up Turnitin, and what happens when a student submits a piece of work through Turnitin:
 

• Setting up a Turnitin assignment
• TurnItIn: Submitting Work Electronically 
• TurnItIn: Understanding the Originality Report

In addition, UCA provides an Academic Integrity website and Harvard referencing guide to help staff and students address problems with academic writing and referencing:
 

• Academic Integrity - approaching your work honestly
• Harvard Referencing - always source your work

Improving writing and reflection with blogs

How can blogs improve writing and reflective skills?

The act of blogging is beneficial to students on many levels. Although it is a more informal way of writing than a traditional essay, this informality can be an advantage as it reduces the pressure on students to aim for perfection in their writing. In addition, asking students to write their thoughts on a blog obliges then to reflect before doing so, thus helping them to consolidate the knowledge they have acquired. Ferdig and Trammell (2004) summarise the four main pedagogic benefits of blogging for students: 

1. Assisting students to become subject matter experts through a process of regular scouring, filtering and posting.
2. Increasing student interest and ownership in learning.
3. Giving students legitimate chances to participate and enculturating them into a community of practice.
4. Providing opportunities for diverse perspectives. 

Students themselves also report that they find blogging a useful way to learn, stating that "their creativity and productivity skyrocketed because they knew that their work had the potential to be viewed quickly by an authentic audience that mattered to them."

In this article, students commented that "blogging is also a great way to put your writing skills into practice in the real world and develop stronger communication and organization skills" and "starting a blog while in college can help you in your specific industry niche".


A UCA case study

The introduction of mandatory blogging helped reverse the decline in academic standards in the CG Arts and Animation course at UCA Rochester. The course went from a 100% dissatisfaction rating to one of 100% satisfaction within two years, with the blogs leading to a significant improvement in students' writing and critical thinking abilities. This case study explains the role of blogs helping the tutor to turn the course around:

Blogging all over the world: can blogs enhance student engagement by creating a community of practice around a course?

Creating and sustaining online discussion

Q. Why is online discussion useful? 
 
Creating opportunities for online discussion is an effective way of supporting students' language skills. Moreover, the majority of both Home and EU students now entering university have grown up with online communication via social networking sites and many expect that their university learning experience will incorporate these technologies.

Online discussion supports learning in the following ways:

• By increasing opportunities for students to read and write about their subject
• By making it easier for less confident students to contribute to class discussion
• By fostering supportive relationships and a sense of community amongst students

Q. How might I incorporate online discussion in my teaching?

There are many ways of introducing online discussion to your students, but before doing so it is important that you clarify how it will support their learning. Simply asking students to share their thoughts and ideas on a blog is unlikely to work unless they can clearly see the reasons for doing so. It's also important that you are prepared to participate in the online discussion as tutor presence is as important online as it is in the physical classroom. Building on the reasons listed above, here are some examples of how you might introduce online discussion:

Create a class blog and post a weekly discussion question

Setting up a class blog is quick and easy, but it can be a powerful way of stimulating discussion with a new group of students. The Postgraduate course at UCA Farnham used a class blog to encourage less confident students to feel connected to the course. At the end of the first lesson, students were asked to upload a link to one of their favourite songs and write a few sentences about why they liked the song. The tutor also shared a link to one of her favourite songs. This activity was a great ice-breaker as it enabled students to share something about which they were passionate and encouraged them to comment on other students' songs. Here are some more suggestions for kick-starting conversation:

7 conversation starters to stimulate discussion

Students who are sometimes too shy to contribute to class discussion often prefer online discussion as they have time to think about what they want to say before sharing it with the group. In addition, providing students with the abiliity to converse with each other online can foster a sense of community around the cohort. The following articles provides further reading about the benefits of creating an online learning community around your course:

4 reasons to build an online learning community
Make the community about your members


Use Twitter to encourage communication and collaboration
 
Despite the exponential increase in the use of Twitter many people are still unaware of its potential to enhance learning and discussion. Several courses at UCA have created a course Twitter account which they use to send messages and share links to useful resources with their students. Here are some tips for using Twitter in the classroom:

60 inspiring examples of Twitter in the classroom
50 ways to use Twitter in the classroom
Using Twitter for teaching and research

Ideas for online group work

I'm in the process of putting together some tips to help tutors set up online learning activities. This post considers ways of introducing online group work.


Q. What are the advantages of online group work?

Image courtesy of flickr user @gavinkeech

A. Providing opportunities for students to collaborate online can significantly extend their opportunities to learn. Students now entering university are often comfortable with communicating online, and constructing a collaborative online learning task can help them develop a range of skills including:

    literacy and grammar
    negotiation
    appropriate online etiquette and language
    presentation
    communication
    team work
    critical thinking


Q. What sort of activities could I create?

Small-group blogs

Blogs are normally associated with individual learning activities, but they are also able to support group work. One example is to divide students into small groups and allocate a blog to each group, and in addition to creating a final presentation ask them to record all the research, inspiration and discussion that happened along the way. The blog provides a linear folio of research and ideas that both the students and the tutor can access in order to track the progress of the project.

Students can use 'tags' to organise their blog posts and indicate the ones that they would like the tutor to mark. Asking students to tag the blog posts that they would like to submit for final review obliges them to critically reflect on the work they have generated before selecting items to be submitted. In addition, tagging can help with the assessment of each group blog as it prevents the tutor from having to scroll through the whole blog looking for tne final pieces of content.


Whole-class blogs and discussion boards

Setting weekly discussion tasks is an effective way of encouraging students to collaborate in between taught sessions. For example, at the end of a session you can set a question for your students to discuss based on what has been covered so far, or on a topic that you want them to research. This question is posted on a class blog or discussion board. The following taught session then begins with a discussion of the content that students have uploaded.

Another variation on this activity is to set up two or three blogs / discussion boards and to post a different question on each. Students' homework is to write a short summary against each of the questions, and their responses are then used as a basis for discussion at the beginning of the next taught session.


Group mind-mapping with Prezi

Prezi is usually used as an alternative to Powerpoint, but it is also a good tool for supporting visual collaboration. Similar to the group blog activity, students work in small groups and are each allocated a Prezi. Each group is asked to gather visual research on a given topic and upload it to their Prezi workspace.

Using the comments feature, students are then asked to comment on and critique the research of other groups. Tutors can also provide targeted formative feedback on each group's work-in-progress and share additional links that they might find useful.