Teacher education: Harnessing the affordances of ICT and abandoning tool-oriented

outcomes

Duan van der Westhuizen

Faculty of EducationUniversity of Johannesburg

We tend to be stuck in patterned

behaviour

Our actions are fundamentalist:

perpetuating past practice

What does this mean?

• Most ICT curricula in Teacher Education considers the ICT tools as the object

• Consider the Activity System

Tool

Subject Object

Therefore

• Course outlines read like MS Office Manuals• The Computer System• Word Processor• Spreadsheet• Etc

• Typically, the work is “contextualised” by providing examples from teaching

• Students are expected to create typical artefacts that a teacher will use

• A large portion of the assessment related to these are for “technical” skills

• In some cases, external tools are used• Helderberg Systems• ICDL

“It certifies that the holder has the knowledge and skill needed to use the most common applications practically and productively.”

ICDL BENEFITS* Raises the level of IT knowledge and competency of all computer users* Improve productivity at work* Reduces IT support cost* Enable employers to invest more efficiently in IT* Improve individual's job prospects and job mobility

ICDL

So in the past ….

Outcomes were formulated along technology outcomes

Curricula looked like a MS-Office Manual

“Application” in a teaching context was slotted in

Guilty as charged!

Our basis - our design

• ICT is the mediating tool (not the object)• Don’t teach about, or even with – SEVEN roles of the Teacher (N &

S)• What are the affordances that we want to exploit?

• Connection (experts, peers)• Collaboration• Creation of content• Upload (not download – Web 2.0)• Non-sequential (rejection of step by step)• Complexity – problems are ill defined

• Theoretically:• Social contructivism (rejection of instructivism)• Boundary expansion and crossing (not knowledge transfer)• Authenticism• Learning Activity Design (not Instructional Design)• Learning to be (Bruner)

21st Century Teaching and Learning

• Learning to be Students learn not only about something but rather learn to be

• Learning is the enculturation into the practice of the discipline or profession, through participation in authentic tasks

• Learning to speak digitally Multimedia literacy is part of learning to be and fosters pattern-making, skill development, nonlinear thinking, navigation in incongruent spaces and complex story-telling

• Learning to networkSocial networking is a lived experience of most students as they organize themselves into communities

• Learning to share and to collaborateDownload-rip-and-burn approaches to music sharing speaks to how students think of plagiarism)

21st Learning Information

•Possessing information does not imply that learning has occurred, learning takes place ”when students act on content, when they shape and form it. Content is the clay of knowledge construction”

•Information is not knowledge•Merely providing information is not teaching

Learning Activity Design > Change •Learning to be (a teacher)•Educational practices should lead to individual

change•Complex changes that are

• A break with the past • Operate outside existing paradigms• Are emergent and unbounded • Complex • Nonlinear • Require new skills to implement • Are neither problem- nor solution orientated• Are implemented by stakeholders

•Individual change to be followed by organisational change

Design

• Tasks – authentic, real (Learning to be)• Content not taught explicitly – just-in-time• Emphasis on group work

• Assigned (skills distribution)• Self appointed groups (2 – 4)

• Tasks (Group)• Group derive rules, task allocation, search strategies• Searching, compiling and assessing information• Constructing (templates, design principles, rules, models, etc.)

• Tasks (Individual)• Apply, complete• Adding value

• Reflection• Group: construct rubrics• Group/Individual: Assess peer artefacts• Rubric to assess the rubric/identify flaws in assessment

instruments• Modification of artefacts

Assessment

• Use complex rubrics• Peers rate contribution – effort factor• Advantage – group mark is shared, only marked once• Individual effort needs to show value-add

What we found

• Student reaction• I don’t like this way at all• I did most of the work•This is a cool way to learn• I learnt so much from my friends• I would have liked to choose my own group• It was scary in the beginning, but then I liked it• I would have liked the lecturer to teach more• I enjoyed working with others, got to know them

on a different level• I think I could have learnt more

What we found

• Student artefacts still largely reflect instructivist thinking

• It is about adapting content, re-packaging content, reducing it

• Learning activities and assessment mostly on lower level of Bloom’s taxonomy (recall)

• There is little evidence of designing learning or assessment that requires collaboration or reflection on own processes of learning

Possible causes

• Legacy of instructivist schooling• The modelling in the module is not adequate exemplar of

constructivist teaching• Group work leads to surface learning• Students still see the technology as the object of the learning• Students fail to see how the affordances of the technology

supports learning, they view the technology as agent for content production

So ….

We think that …. For teacher education …. we need to look at educational technology in terms of Activity Theory and I argue that all technology should be used as a tool to mediate learning and never as the object of activity

Change in the making

• National and Provincial audits•Teacher Education Programmes•Teacher Practice in the school classroom

• Establishing a national research agenda• Using appropriate Research Design Methodologies

•DBR• No more “smile sheet “evaluation• Examine the question: ICT Capable

Recent research into research

•Seven leading universities•Sample studies were identified through

library keyword searches•Samples were either taken off the shelves

or obtained digitally•Research template was applied to 103

studies•Template captured summaries of

•Research question•Supporting theories•Research paradigms•Findings (conclusions)

Current research

• This study has shown that, on the whole, most of the work is poor in theory and that the studies are thus also poor scholarly outputs.

• A link is established between methodologically and conceptually coherent studies with depth of analysis and the role of theory.

• Technicist approaches lead to technicist results.

Afterward

• Technology will increasingly become a catalyst for change in the future

• Teachers should be the pathfinders in finding meaningful and appropriate ways to use technology to support learning.

• We question the assumptions that propel the deployment of computers into institutions of learning.

• We ask questions about how technology can support the values of democracy, community and citizenship.

• The theoretical thinness, together with the methodological inadequateness will not lead to better understanding of the effect of computers in the classroom.

• That would only happen if a far more robust research agenda is proposed

Thank you!!

Duan van der Westhuizen

duanvdw@uj.ac.za