The blended professional : Jack of all trades, and master of some?

Within the last decade we have experienced an unprecedented growth in the use of technology in education. The adoption of Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) for many universities has been widespread. Granted the speed of which this has been integrated is influenced by local policy, the academics themselves and the support available to learn how to use the VLE and its suite of tools. However, there has been a shift from just having a small central eLearning team who reached out to encourage staff to use the VLE, to a growing need for a wider pool of people to support colleagues who want to learn why and how technology can be used to enhance their teaching practice. Today the VLE is just one aspect; mobile learning and educational Apps, social media, and webinars are just some of the many examples being used to develop communication, collaboration and social learning. Some institutions (or indeed faculties within them) have looked to create roles for Learning Technologists to support such development, and yet others have relied on the early adopters and enthusiasts to assume this role. This chapter will look at some short case studies and reflections of the ‘blended professionals’ who are advocates of #EdTech and how the need to wear different hats to meet very different objectives can present surprising results when supported within a community of practice

Developing a professional online presence and effective network

This chapter considers the significance and value of using social media to develop an online presence to showcase professional and academic achievements as a student or educator, and how this can demonstrate student learning gain and teaching excellence. There are a variety of different ways to present academic work; contributing to the success of this, is understanding how social media can be used in a professional context to maximise reach and engagement. It explores how an online presence can be utilised to network with others and how this can open ‘virtual doors’ to CPD and informal learning, potential scholarly collaborations, plus new job opportunities or work experience. Furthermore a framework is introduced to illustrate the important areas to focus on to develop an online presence

BYOD4L – Our Open Magical Box to Enhance Individuals’ Learning Ecologies

This chapter describes our search for a design and an appropriate conceptual vocabulary to describe an approach to encouraging, supporting and recognising individuals’ lifewide learning gained through their engagement with an open online opportunity for learning and sharing learning about the use of mobile devices and a suite of social media applications. We called this opportunity 'Bring Your Own Device for Learning' abbreviated to BYOD4L. The chapter describes the thinking underlying the learning design, the design itself and a flavour of the dynamics of the community process of learning. It draws on theories of learning that appear to offer the most useful explanations for this type of lifewide learning. We draw attention to the potential role of Open Educational Practices (OEP) and Open Educational Resources (OER) in lifewide learning and highlight a number of theories of learning that are particularly relevant to our ecological process

Scaling-up open CPD for teachers in higher education using a snowballing approach

In this paper, we explore the snowballing approach developed for the openly licensed course Bring Your Own Device for Learning (BYOD4L) and the opportunities this presents to open cross-institutional CPD and open course development more generally. BYOD4L is a course for teachers and students in higher education which aims to help them gain both a better understanding of and develop their knowledge and skills in using their own smart devices for learning, teaching and professional development. BYOD4L has been developed by the authors and offered three times since 2014 with colleagues and students, participating Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) from the UK and Australia and further collaborators in the US and Germany. The development of the snowballing approach is shared using an action research methodology. We propose a rethink of current CPD practices. We invite course designers, academic developers and the wider academic community to explore new and emerging models of CPD that capitalise on scalable collaborative open educational practices

BYOD4L : learning to use own smart devices for learning and teaching through the 5C framework

Opportunities to learn informally have exploded since the arrival of social media and mobile technologies. These technologies disrupt the way we learn and create new opportunities for learning (Beetham & Sharpe, 2013). Google is rapidly becoming our dynamic encyclopaedia and connecting to global sources of information and learning is normal behaviour for anyone with a question or desire to learn. This chapter discusses an open approach to learning which was designed to engage educators in HE innovatively with CPD for learning and teaching called Bring Your Own Devices for Learning (BYOD4L). The design of BYOD4L harnessed social media, mobile learning and ideas about open learning to create a rich and interactive learning space mediated through personal smart technologies. It was conceptualised as an immersive open CPD event to be run mostly online over five days. Previously (Nerantzi & Beckingham, 2014, in review) we have described open CPD as professional development afforded by Open Educational Practices (OEP) and Open Educational Resources (OER). Such practices and resources encompass open courses or events, online and face-to-face events and MOOCS as well as freely available and accessible materials, both digital and physical. These create opportunities for “self-directed and self organised CPD driven by professional interests, priorities and aspirations.” (Nerantzi & Beckingham, in review, p. 3). At the time of writing three iterations of BYOD4L have informed the development of a collaborative and scalable open CPD model which presents a versatile approach to delivering CPD for institutions while the 5C framework has been used unmodified

Social media for learning : a framework to inspire innovation

Introduction The Social Media for Learning (SM4L) framework has been constructed to demonstrate how social media can be used by students and academics to promote learning. The framework supports innovation through curriculum design and has also been used in staff development activities to clarify how social media provide academics with a powerful and dynamic context in which to foster active student engagement. This chapter introduces the seven elements in the framework, each of which present a design principle associated with a theory for effective learner engagement. Each of these principles will be introduced and then illustrated with an example for how it informs effective and imaginative curriculum design incorporating the use of social media. The SM4L framework follows the Viewpoints approach to mediating collaborative design activities (O'Donnell, Galley & Ross, 2012). In sum, the framework is a structured set of principles which can be used separately or in combination to inspire the design of effective social-media enhanced pedagogy