DeL Conference

Disruptive Engagement

I was recently lucky enough to be able to attend (& present a paper with Dr McIver) at the Designs in E-Learning conference hosted by the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and organised by The University of North Carolina at Wilmington’s Center for Teaching Excellence with Penn State University and the University of the Arts London. What attracted me to the conference was the theme; ‘The Art Disruptive Engagement’

http://www.designsonelearning.net/2013/content/welcome

DeL 2103 McIver & Nottingham

The conference was small and in some ways that made it a better experience, I enjoyed being able to talk to practitioners in disciplines who bought to the conference some really interesting aspects of ‘disruptive engagement’. It seemed to me to have been some time since I was able to reflect on what happens to the ‘rules and technologies’ we collectively introduce and maintain within our institutions, it caused me some some pause for thought.

My session was in partnership with a Programme Leader from another UK university where we ‘posited’ on the role of the CIO and the ‘lowly academic’ who just wanted to use some of these great tools ‘out there’. I’m not sure we reached a consensus but it was none the less a good debate, what was clear was that the distance we believe there is between our Academic colleagues views about technology and ‘managements’ is far greater than I imagined.

This led me to think more about the role that we play in supporting learning & teaching, are we ‘my way or the highway’ and ‘holding academics to ransom’ or do we re-think the academy and release aspects of ‘control’ and fully embrace the almost limitless options for digital literacy. This I believe is a key debate.

I attended a session with a group of students from the University of North Carolina, and their views about social media, the boundaries between the University and their personal life were clearly delineated…i.e. would you mind if your Professor followed you on Facebook answer;

‘No -- but it would be a bit creepy and I would adjust my FB settings so they couldn’t see much’. Which led to the inevitable question; ‘do you worry about what you put on Facebook?’, ‘no we don’t and besides you shouldn’t be using Facebook if you don’t know how to use the privacy settings’

…another questioner then asked ‘do you use other sites?’, they all used Linked in as their ‘professional contact site’. I asked about the use of portals and virtual one stop shops, they all stated they used it at UNC and it was a great idea, however they also hated using the UNC internal file storage (which they did not trust) and wished the UNC system would just use drop box…which they fully trusted.

I asked about their Professors and how they used digital tools, they said some good some bad but believed the generation gap had allot to do with adoption of digital skills, they used the examples of software they just pick up and use without any training such as slide share and felt the intuitive process they go through when faced with new software was a direct result of the exposure they had to digital tools.

It was interesting to debate with other delegates what services ‘e’ Universities should offer and what services should be allowed to happen externally, my own view is by all means use freely available tools if you like but return to the University systems when needing to interact formally with the University. In response some delegates asked for a set of guidelines to be developed not only for Directors of Services but also for our Academic colleagues, this is something that UCISA are hoping to produce by mid 2014.