Be in the conversation, not just the room – Hack your way to influencing pedagogical and technological strategy [1644] Home : Annual Conference 2017

Public Group active 7 months, 2 weeks ago

Tue, Sep 5 2017, 3:30pm – 5:00pm
Authors: Peter Bryant, David White, and Donna Lanclos
Room: Mandela Rm (2)
Theme: Moving from the practical to the ‘publishable’
Type: 60-minute session

Description

It is easy to make pronouncements about pedagogical, technological or institutional change from the ‘islands’, when the consequences of advocating for and implementing that change are limited to your world, your classroom, your twitter feed. They are safe spaces, full of friendly faces and welcoming and supportive practices. But decisions, assertions and opinions all have consequences; for your students, for the worlds they inhabit and for your institutions. The challenge comes when you need to scale what you speak. You need to make the future happen for your entire institution. What happens when the VC, the Dean or the Director says ‘we need to this transform the whole institution’? What do you say and do? How do you make sure you say the right things, in the right rooms, with the right people?

This provocative and interactive session will put you in that room. This session will challenge your assumptions and your role in your institution. It will explain and demonstrate through using the Changehack approach how to change the discourse at your institution and empower you to actively shape teaching and learning at our institutions. Building on the Future Happens project run by the London School of Economics and Political Science, it will share and then challenge the key messages, tools and strategies available that put the digital in the heart of the conversation and not as an uncritical duplication of institutional norms or as a fringe activity of the tech savvy.

A changehack is a way of engaging with staff, students and your community to make change happen, coming up with the innovative and workable solutions and ideas. A changehack works because it seeks to challenge head on and avoid some of the standard blockers that prevent real and productive debate and solutions. A changehack draws on the principles of crowdsourcing by not simply generating ideas but asking people to become citizens of the crowd, participating because there is a collective good that comes from that participation (Brabham 2008; Halbert 2015).

This one hour session will outline how a changehack can scale pedagogical and institutional change. It will share the outcomes of the first Future Happens changehack from 2016, which involved over one hundred practitioners from across the globe. It will then provide the you with the tools to be in the conversation and not just in the room by running a crowd-led, mass changehack to shape how you can influence the critical voices in the institution to scale and embed change. This session will use the changehack approach to solve the wicked problems of leading institutional change from the centre, recognizing the need for constructing and preparing for the unknown possible futures for higher education (Davis & Sumara 2009). This session will challenge you to think about the ways you are able to influence your institutions strategic direction and commitments to technology and learning and be a part of the conversation that shapes how they do it. Will you leave with all answers? We doubt it! Will you leave exhausted but informed? We think you will.

Brabham, D.C. 2008, ‘Crowdsourcing as a model for problem solving: An introduction and cases’, Convergence, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 75-90.

Davis, B. & Sumara, D. 2009, ‘Complexity as a theory of education’, TCI (Transnational Curriculum Inquiry), vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 33-44.

Halbert, D. 2015, ‘Reshaping Higher Education for a Globalized Future’, Technology and Workplace Skills for the Twenty-First Century, Springer, pp. 49-67.

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