Learning from the early adopters: developing the digital practitioner

This paper explores how Sharpe and Beetham’s Digital Literacies Framework which was derived to model students’ digital literacies, can be applied to lecturers’ digital literacy practices. Data from a small-scale phenomenological study of higher education lecturers who used Web 2.0 in their teaching and learning practices are used to examine if this pyramid model represents their motivations for adopting technology-enhanced learning in their pedagogic practices. The paper argues that whilst Sharpe and Beetham’s model has utility in many regards, these lecturers were mainly motivated by the desire to achieve their pedagogic goals rather than by a desire to become a digital practitioner

Towards a framework for co-creating Open Scholarship

A recent edition of ALT-J made a call for papers that looked at ‘theoretical approaches in digitally mediated environments'. A key part of this call was to use the Boyer Model of Scholarship as a frame of reference. The authors felt that there were limitations to this model which could be addressed in light of the recent moves to develop Open Scholarship. Our concern with Boyer is that he suggests a separation between researchers, who ‘build new knowledge through traditional research' and teachers who ‘study teaching models and practices to achieve optimal learning'. Boyer identifies four ‘Types' of Scholarship, those of Discovery, Integration, Application and Teaching (DIAT), but places the responsibility for ‘creative work in established field', with the traditional researcher role (Discovery). Furthermore this model implies a linear flow concerning how new knowledge becomes a part of teaching, implying that the teaching is mostly instructional, with a limited view of how new and emerging pedagogies might be utilised. The Learner-Generated Contexts Research Group has been concerned to develop a co-creation approach to learning and find this separation curious. We argue that using the Pedagogy, Andragogy, Heutagogy (PAH) Continuum enables more flexible approaches, through a mix of PAH, allowing for a wide range of technology uses, which also changes the relationship to research. We look at how we might both apply a co-creation approach to Boyer's model, inspired by the Open Scholar movement, and also make DIAT more iterative and less discrete. Consequently we have both extended Boyer's DIAT system to include Co-creating as an additional type and changed some ‘measures of performance' to enable an iterative process of scholarship to emerge which also involves learners. We also examine how network effects ‘enable generative network effects to occur' on scholarship and how applying Epistemic Cognition to evolving subject frameworks might enable the co-creation of research agendas. The co-creation model of Open Scholarship is presented in a table designed to simulate debate on this subject