Workshop
Title:
36
Responding to questions emerging from
educational development practice:
Teachers’ attitudes to new technologies
Presenter(s):
Debra Boyask and Neil Porritt
University of the West of England
Abstract:
In our roles as educational developers and technologists, we consider it important to
engage in the kinds of professional reflection and action research strategies ourselves
that we encourage the teachers we support to use (Schön, 1987, Kemmis, 1993,
Whitehead, 1998).
In our work with academic staff relating to use of ICT resources for learning and
teaching, our multidisciplinary team has become interested in the ways in which teaching
staff think about, and make use of, educational technology. Our reflections on our work
with teachers have led us to consider whether some approaches to technical support
might be making them more constrained by their tools, rather than enabling them to use
the tools to enhance learning.
We wanted to check out our emergent questions and evaluate our own efforts in
supporting the development of teachers' skills in planning for effective learning using
ICT. Our strategies have involved exploring literature on the adoption of technology in
educational settings (including Wilson, B., Sherry, L., Dobrovolny, J., Batty, M., &
Ryder, M. (2002), and Selwyn, N., (2003)), and conducting a broad based consultation
in our faculty about attitudes to ICT, and about the resources we provide in particular.
More recently, we have begun to talk with some of our faculty members in greater depth
about factors impacting on the decisions they make when using computer based
educational technology.
During this workshop, through sharing our experiences of our own project (briefly), we
aim to initiate discussion about the kinds of questions that emerge from educational
development practice, how we, as educational developers might go about planning
methodical approaches to address them and how our investigations inform ongoing
practice in a multidisciplinary educational development team.
The main part of the workshop will be discussion based. Participants will be encouraged
to discuss the kinds of questions that emerge from educational development practice, the
relationship between emergent questions and theoretical work about reflective practice
and action research and how individual developers and development teams plan for
methodical enquiry to help determine effective practice in their own context.
References:
Wilson, B., Sherry, L., Dobrovolny, J., Batty, M., & Ryder, M. (2002), 'Adoption of
Learning Technologies in Schools and Universities', In H. H. Adelsberger, B. Collis, & J. M.
Pawlowski (Eds.), Handbook on information technologies for education & training, pp.
293-307. New York: Springer-Verlag.
Selwyn, N., (2003), Why students do (and do not) make use of ICT in university, Paper
presented to the 'Finding Common Ground: IT Education, Dearing and Democracy in
Information Society' Conference, University of Leeds, July 2003