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

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

• Duan van der Westhuizen
• Faculty of Education
• University of Johannesburg

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We tend to be stuck in patterned behaviour
Our actions are fundamentalist perpetuating past
practice
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What does this mean?

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

Tool
Subject
Object
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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

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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
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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
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Guilty as charged!
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Our basis - our design

• ICT is the mediating tool (not the object)
• Dont 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)

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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)

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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

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Learning Activity Design gt 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

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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

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Assessment

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

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What we found

• Student reaction
• I dont 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

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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 Blooms taxonomy (recall)
• There is little evidence of designing learning or
  assessment that requires collaboration or
  reflection on own processes of learning

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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

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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

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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

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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)

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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.
  

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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

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Thank you!! Duan van der Westhuizen duanvdw_at_u
j.ac.za