Long-Term Student Experiences in a Hybrid, Open-Ended and Problem Based Adventure Learning Program

In this paper we investigate the experiences of elementary school children over a two-year period during which they engaged with a hybrid Adventure Learning program. In addition to delineating Adventure Learning experiences, we report on educational technology implementations in ecologically valid and complex environments, while drawing inferences on the design of sustainable and successful innovations. Our research indicates that the Adventure Learning experience over the two-year period was dynamic, participatory, engaging, collaborative, and social. Students eagerly became part of the experience both inside and outside of the classroom, and it quickly became apparent that they saw themselves as valued members of the unfolding storyline that mediated their learning. Our recommendations for future research and practice include a call to evaluate "authenticity," focus on the learner experience and narrative, and consider the interplay between pedagogy, technology, and design.Center for Learning and Memor

The moral baseline of social media policies: institutions and scholars need to examine practices with a critical eye

Although scholars are often encouraged to promote their research online, institutional recognition of networked scholarship often appears to be as much about control and surveillance as about integrating public scholarship into academic criteria for success. George Veletsianos argues staff members, faculty, and administrators need to work together to devise forward-thinking policies that take into account the complex realities present in networked spaces

Academics and Social Networking Sites: Benefits, Problems and Tensions in Professional Engagement with Online Networking

The web has had a profound effect on the ways people interact, with online social networks arguably playing an important role in changing or augmenting how we connect with others. However, uptake of online social networking by the academic community varies, and needs to be understood. This paper presents an independent, novel analysis of a large-scale dataset published by Nature Publishing Group detailing the results of a survey about academics use of online social networking services. An open coding approach was used to analyse 480 previously unused text responses. The analysis revealed a wide range of benefits and also problems associated with engaging with online networking, and tensions within this. The analysis provides further insight into the nuances of uptake, by exploring clusters of co-reported benefits and problems within the qualitative analysis. The findings will help move forward current debates surrounding social media use by academics from being viewed in solely beneficial terms, towards an understanding of the problems and tensions that arise through academic work online

Editorial: Crossing boundaries: Learning and teaching in virtual worlds

The January 2010 special issue of the British Journal of Educational Technology presents papers on virtual-world environments into teaching and learning practices. A theme that is present in all papers in this special issue is that of sociability and the capabilities of VirtualWorlds to support groups or communities of learners. Dalgarno and Lee review the unique characteristics of virtual worlds, identifying opportunities for researchers and practitioners to use virtual worlds in education in relation to the potential learning benefits they provide. Bellotti and colleagues in this issue focus on describing the development of tools and processes that allow for the development of re-usable learning tasks that can be embedded across virtual worlds. Veletsianos and colleagues focus on intelligent and conversational pedagogical agents/avatars. The issue ranges from the directions of research and practice in the use and application of virtual worlds for learning and training

2023 Special Topics Report

Report examining "faculty member and administrator perspectives on Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is a technology popularized by ChatGPT that uses machine learning to process data and produce new content, including audio, code, images, text, simulations, and videos" (p. 2)

“The facts alone will not save us”: A workshop on speculative education future and history making

This workshop aims to explore speculative fiction as a form of educational enquiry and practice. In this pursuit it draws upon the provocative contention of Ruha Benjamin (2016) that “the facts, alone, will not save us.” Instead, she argues, “social change requires novel fictions that reimagine and rework all that is taken for granted about the current structure of society. Such narratives are not meant to convince others of what is, but to expand our own visions of what is possible” (Benjamin, 2016).The ethical implications of educational technologies (EdTech) from simple classroom tools to almighty platforms are raising increasing concerns. These are postdigital concerns insofar as they are inescapable yet also emergent and ongoing. They are amplified by the power and influence of AI (Bozkurt et al, 2023; Cox et al 2023) with its implications for fraud, scams, surveillance, privacy and more fundamentally encodings of privileged norms of race, gender, sexuality, religion and so on. In addition the material and carbon costs of digital learning may force us to reckon with EdTech as inherently ecologically destructive (Selwyn, 2021).Is this to say that all our futures are grim and that hope has been foreclosed? Or if not, how can we work together to plot our way out of these problems? Indeed, would trying to solve all of this too quickly be part of the problem and start another round of techno-solutionism? One approach that has seen increasing attention is the use of storytelling as a sense-making activity that may allow us to first “stay with the trouble” (Harraway, 2020) and describe it, before rushing to the fix. This recent speculative turn has seen educational researchers attempt to cast themselves as writers of fictions that can explore the multitude of interrelated socio-technical issues that are characteristic of complex contemporary networked learning environments (Houlden & Veletsianos, 2023; Hrastinski, 2023; Selwyn et al., 2020; Macgilchrist et al., 2020). It has seen teachers and educators developing or adopting speculative scenarios as tools for students to explore the types of socio-technical entanglements that our world now involves (Krutka et al., 2022).In this workshop participants will co-create speculative fictions that explore hopeful and dystopic possibilities of education. Participants will explore the development of educational fictions based on speculative futuring, of no-yet-ness (Ross, 2017), but also alternative histories that might allow us see the prospective tools of our work, including texts, as neither neutral nor ahistorical. The concept of anti-patterns and deliberately destructive design will be introduced to allow participants to pull on conceptual threads that help unravel education as a relentless and progressive assembly and instead see it as a story that may be unlearned and retold.In summary this workshop provides an invitation to participants to use their deep imaginative capabilities to dream new educational interfaces, via speculative fiction, that allow us to be more awake and alive to ourselves, our students and the communities we serve

Inoculating an Infodemic: An Ecological Approach to Understanding Engagement With COVID-19 Online Information

As the global COVID-19 pandemic has been concurrently labelled an “infodemic,” researchers have sought to improve how the general public engages with information that is relevant, timely, and accurate. In this study, we provide an overview of the reasons why people engage and disengage with COVID-19 information. We use context-rich semi-structured interviews which invited participants to discuss online COVID-19-related content they encountered. This qualitative approach allows us to uncover subtle but important details of influences that drive online engagement. Participants both engaged and disengaged with content for individual and social reasons, with seven themes emerging connected to their engagement including actions in response to information, reasoning for engagement, content, motivating concerns, frequency of engagement with information, site of exposure, and given reason for not engaging. Many of these themes intersected and informed each other. Our findings suggest that researchers and public health communicators should approach engagement as an ecology of intersecting influences, both human and algorithmic, which change over time. This information could be potentially helpful to public health communicators who are trying to engage the public with the best information to keep them safe during the pandemic

Canadian Faculty Members’ Hopes and Anxieties About the Near-Future of Higher Education

Higher education worldwide is facing several challenges spanning from economic, social, technological, demographic, environmental, to political tensions. Calls to rethink, reimagine, and reform higher education to respond to such challenges are ongoing, and need to be informed by a wide variety of stakeholders. To inform such efforts, we interviewed thirty-seven faculty members at Canadian colleges and universities to develop a greater understanding of their hopes and anxieties about the future of higher education as they considered what higher education may look like five years into the future. Results centred on four themes: (1) anxieties and hopes are shaped by supports and resources from various sources, (2) faculty members face anxiety over matters that negatively impact them but are beyond their control, (3) faculty members hope that “good” comes from the COVID-19 pandemic, and (4) faculty members hope for a well-rounded education that will enable students to succeed both within and beyond their careers. Implications for these findings suggest a need to direct research efforts and practices toward more hopeful futures for higher education, especially in the context of online and blended learning

Feminist Critical Digital Pedagogy: An Open Book

Feminist critical digital pedagogy is a lens through which digital educational practice is examined to reveal, challenge, and impact systems of power. In this book, authors employ feminist critical digital pedagogy to examine teaching, learning, faculty support, and research in post-secondary and higher education contexts. This book adopts two innovative processes: pedagogical peer-review and ongoing contributions