Digital communities: context for leading learning into the future?

In 2011, a robust, on-campus, three-element Community of Practice model consisting of growing community, sharing of practice and building domain knowledge was piloted in a digital learning environment. An interim evaluation of the pilot study revealed that the three-element framework, when used in a digital environment, required a fourth element. This element, which appears to happen incidentally in the face-to-face context, is that of reflecting, reporting and revising. This paper outlines the extension of the pilot study to the national tertiary education context in order to explore the implications for the design, leadership roles, and selection of appropriate technologies to support and sustain digital communities using the four-element model

The Future Affordances of Digital Learning and Teaching within The School of Education

This report illustrates the discussion outcome on digital education within the University of Glasgow School of Education. It is not a strategy document but it does explore the conditions for nurturing digital culture and how these can be channelled into a strategy on digital learning and teaching. The report is based on a review of literature and on a number of local, national and international case study vignettes

Creative Challenge research report

The exploratory research tries to understand a tripartite relationship between the academic, the creative industry employer and the student and their expectations within it. The role of the student being an important one here in this mix as a embodying academic education and rigour, but also a potential future employee with appropriate enterprise skills. It further tries to understand how an entrepreneurship programme, such as the Creative Challenge, can add value in this relationship and explore its role. From feedback of those students who have participated in the Creative Challenge, we know that it had a whole range of perceived benefits, including the development of new skills, better learning strategies, increased confidence, a clearer understanding of how their creative skills can potentially be applied in the world outside university. Finally the research touches on the relationship between entrepreneurship education and creative arts education

Seeing sustainable futures: the potential of design education

The process of sustainable development requires us all to think differently about what we do, how we do it and why we do what we do. Questioning activities in the context of sustainability can often result in difficult and perhaps uncomfortable conclusions about our current development paradigm – one that gives primacy to economic growth and wealth creation over welfare and well-being. The practice of design operates within this development paradigm and is complicit in the unsustainable activities of the business domain. Designers support the economic system through the conceptualisation and production of goods: goods multiplying in variety and number, responding to escalating global demand. Unfortunately most current business operates for economic profit alone, ignorant of key sustainable ecological and social parameters. For example material throughput is linear rather than cyclic in nature; social inequities exist in relation to trade and well-being; and natural resources are considered convenient dumps for pollutants and toxins. Designers, among many others, are thus implicated in the augmentation of unsustainable outcomes rather than the reduction of them. This paper aims to explore how this situation can be reversed to enable design to play a positive and supporting role towards the goals of sustainable development. Challenging the current paradigm of development will need people who have the ability to think creatively and laterally and draw on disparate areas of knowledge to vision new, more sustainable futures. Design education has a big role to play in this transformation and as such needs to alter its focus from the current outcomes of design activity to a range of alternative responses that embrace joined-up thinking and generate apposite learning outcomes. This paper investigates the sort of knowledge required and discusses the potential shift in values needed for design for sustainability to be accepted as a catalyst for change. It addresses the potential of current design education in channelling such change and investigates the sort of tools required for this to happen. Ultimately, the paper proposes, it is a key responsibility of existing design educators to prepare the graduate designers of tomorrow with the skills and inspiration to vision sustainable futures for this century and beyond

Lessons from the future: ICT scenarios and the education of teachers

This paper reviews significant events of the last 25 years in schools and teacher education in England and looks ahead to the next 25 years. Various scenarios for the future are examined and the potential is considered for new forms of teachers' initial education and continuing professional development using information and communications technology. It is concluded that the current centrally-controlled national system is increasingly inappropriate to present needs and will fracture under the combination of pressures of a commodified education market, learners' consumerist expectations of personalised provision, and networks of informal learning enabled by widespread access to portable communications technology. Four lessons from this future prediction are drawn, with recommendations for radical changes in government policy and orientation. © 2005 Taylor & Francis

Pedagogy For Employability

This guide, produced by the HEA, constitutes a revised and updated version of the Pedagogy for Employability publication first published in 2006. The publication has been updated with the practitioner in mind – those teaching in the classroom and those engaging with policy and student interactions in other ways, such as careers guidance and learning development workers. Practitioners are our focus, as we discuss the policy and institutional context that frames the environment within which people work. The early sections of this publication are intended to illuminate the possibilities and constraints that operate in different national, institutional and departmental situations, having a direct impact on the way that teaching and learning takes place between practitioners and students. Case studies of learning and teaching that support the development of student employability, in the classroom, through distance and part-time learning and in co-curricular and extra-curricular activities, are provided throughout the publication. In the later sections of the publication we focus particularly on the curriculum and learning and teaching practice

Valid knowledge: The economy and the academy

The future of Western universities as public institutions is the subject of extensive continuing debate, underpinned by the issue of what constitutes valid knowledge. Where in the past only prepositional knowledge codified by academics was considered valid, in the new economy enabled by information and communications technology, the procedural knowledge of expertise has become a key commodity, and the acquisition of this expertise is increasingly seen as a priority by intending university students. Universities have traditionally proved adaptable to changing circumstances, but there is little evidence to date of their success in accommodating to the scale and unprecedented pace of change of the Knowledge Economy or to the new vocationally-oriented demands of their course clients. And in addition to these external factors, internal ones are now at work. Recent developments in eLearning have enabled the infiltration of commercial providers who are cherry-picking the most lucrative subject areas. The prospect is of a fracturing higher education system, with the less adaptable universities consigned to a shrinking public-funded sector supporting less vocationally saleable courses, and the more enterprising universities developing commercial partnerships in eLearning and knowledge transfer. This paper analyses pressures upon universities, their attempts to adapt to changing circumstances, and the institutional transformations which may result. It is concluded that a diversity of partnerships will emerge for the capture and transfer of knowledge, combining expertise from the economy with the conceptual frameworks of the academy

Unpacking capabilities underlying design (thinking) process

Engineering graduates must know how to frame and solve non-routine problems. While design classes explicitly teach problem framing and solving, it is lacking throughout much of the rest of the engineering curriculum and is often relegated to capstone classes at the end of the students’ educational experience. This paper explores problem framing and solving through the lens of experiential learning theory. It captures core problem framing and solving approaches from critical, design and systems thinking and concludes with a table of learning outcomes that might be drawn upon in designing an engineering curriculum that more fully develops the problem framing and solving capabilities of its students

Teacher Education Futures: Developing learning and teaching in ITE across the UK

A selection of papers from the Teacher Education Futures conference 2006