A post from Maren Deepwell, Chief Executive and\u00a0Martin Hawksey, Chief Innovation, Community and Technology Officer, Association for Learning Technology (ALT).<\/p>\n
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Many of you will be familiar with the LTHEchat<\/a>, \u2018the weekly Learning and Teaching in HE chat created by the community for the community\u2019. Recently the chat invited us, Maren Deepwell and Martin Hawksey, to provide a topic and the questions and we happily accepted the invitation and took the chance to get talking about critical approaches to Learning Technology.<\/p>\n You can revisit the chat for yourself by exploring it on Wakelet,<\/a> but in this post we want to share our reflections prompted by the lively conversation. A big thank you is due to all the participants who took to exploring our questions with real gusto and also the organisers of the chat, who gave us the opportunity to join in, listen and learn. Thank you!<\/p>\n At the outset, here is how we described the topic for the chat:<\/p>\n With the 25th Annual Conference of ALT<\/a>, the Association for Learning Technology, just around the corner, we have been looking forward as well as back over how things have changed (revisit some of the developments with Prof Martin Weller, President of ALT, in his ongoing blog series \u201c25 years of EdTech\u201d<\/a>).<\/p>\n We define Learning Technology as the broad range of communication, information and related technologies that can be used to support learning, teaching and assessment. ALT\u2019s membership is made up of people who are actively involved in understanding, managing, researching, supporting or enabling learning with the use of Learning Technology. Using technology for learning, teaching and assessment hasn\u2019t been a \u2018new\u2019 thing for a long time. But one thing that remains constant is the pace with which innovation moves forward, learner expectations develop and our constant need to evolve our pedagogical approaches. This creates demands\/pressures and staff development needs for academics to develop competencies with digital pedagogies\/approaches.<\/p>\n Regardless of where we are, or indeed where our institution is, in spreading or scaling up use of technology, we now have research, case studies and practice to move beyond advocacy, beyond enthusiasm for shiny gadgets or dashboards to developing a more critical, nuanced relationship to Learning Technology and to share our work in order to build a stronger, more diverse and robust discourse.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And these were the six questions we provided to kick of the conversation:<\/p>\n We didn\u2019t have a lot of experience with this kind of format other than as participants and it was our intention to stimulate a thought-provoking, critical and reflective responses to the topic we chose – something beyond the technology and the \u201cwhat works, what doesn\u2019t work\u201d frame of reference. We hoped to prompt participants to share their perspectives on where we need to go next in our thinking about Learning Technology.<\/p>\n Themes that came out strongly in the first part of the chat were the importance of curiosity and the learner, in particular in response to our first question, and also a desire to share more experiences of failure, in response to question 3 and 4.<\/p>\n A1 nice to see learners being mentioned. This was top in the last ALT Annual Survey https:\/\/t.co\/sWcTbcwT68<\/a> (staff dev. opportunities was a big mover in the last survey) #LTHEchat<\/a> pic.twitter.com\/1nq5VVpuWg<\/a><\/p>\n — Martin Hawksey (@mhawksey) June 6, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n
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