Programme Available here!

Lost in Disruption? Reclaiming Innovation

The idea that higher education institutions and educators themselves need to be innovative is often taken for granted, to the extent of seeming now trite and meaningless, but What does innovation in teaching and learning actually mean? Why is it so important? What does it look like? What is the role of technologies in all this? What are the implications for the future of teaching as a profession? The next DMLL Expo will address some of these questions and provide opportunities to familiarise with examples of meaningful innovation exploring approaches to teaching and learning that are alternative to mainstream practices.

Keynote Speakers:

Brian Lamb

Ed Tech Isn’t Dead, It Just Smells Funny

It has been an angst-filled few years for educational technology as a field. The entrenchment of the enterprise virtual learning environment as institutional hegemon. The pounding waves of hype and profit driven innovations keeping educators off-balance, always responding to the latest breathless claims, and fears of being “left behind”. Inside and outside the academy, we are presented with a series of unaccountable black boxes that define our media consumption, our interactions, our identities, our finances.

How did we get to this point? To what extent are we culpable? And where will we find the principles and the allies to guide and propel us ahead? Can we recapture the spirit of fun, adventure and sense of limitless possibility that once energized ed tech? Can places of learning be a force of agency rather than algorithms?

Brian Lamb is Director of Innovation - Open Learning at Thompson Rivers University (TRU), Canada. Before joining TRU he spent more than a decade at the University of British Columbia as a Strategist contributing to a wide range of new media, open education and sustainability education initiatives. He founded some of the earliest campus services for blogs and wikis in higher education.

Jim Groom:

Back to the Future of EdTech

"Knowing our ed-tech history is completely necessary for building an ed-tech future."

Audrey Watters

One of the greatest dangers of the rhetoric around innovation and disruption in Ed-Tech is its ahistoricism. How do we understand the current state of digital culture in higher education as part of a digital revolution that is couched within the impossibility of privacy, the omnipotence of data, and the educational affordances of a surveillance society. This presentation will go back to the possible futures of higher ed in the not-so-distant past: the 1990s. We will look at an earlier context of educational technologies as it first comes into contact with the World Wide Web in order to suggest alternative paths for innovation and disruption that are premised on reclaiming privacy online, controlling one's personal data, and creating a cooperative web built and managed by an intellectual community.

Jim Groom is the co-founder of Reclaim Hosting, an independent web hosting company focused on the higher education community. Previously he was the director of the Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies and adjunct professor at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Fiona Harvey and Jacqui Speculand:

Open Badges

Open Badges are digital representations of skills and knowledge gained and evidenced by individuals. They can be used for formal and informal education, and are particularly suitable for employability and portfolio evidence. Badges earned can be displayed on the earners social media and online profiles.

In the past five years, the Open Badges movement has gained momentum and evolved out of its gaming roots and into the mainstream. It is particularly relevant in education, where Open Badges are increasingly being used to recognise skills, learning and achievement. Badges are not an alternative to assessment, but a means of recognising and rewarding extra-curricular activity. They have value and reach beyond the educational environment and their digital nature means that they are portable from one environment to another. In this talk, we will discuss the use of Open Badges in education and work environments and consider the potential for disrupting traditional models of self-presentation and online identities.

Workshops:

We will be hosting two streams of workshops at the Expo: 'why' and 'how'. The 'why' workshops will look at what the affordances are for piloting innovations in teaching and learning, balanced with the challenges of working with innovations. The 'how' workshops will directly deal with how we can apply new methods into our practices, giving you practical toolkits to take away.

Why Games:

Luca Morini: The Bulwark of Uselessness, or: Why we also need a Culture of Play.

In later years games have been widely and successfully employed as tools in a variety of fields, from Health, to Management, to Education. However, there are limitations and critical issues that a purposive approach to games entails, particularly as pertaining the field of Education, that need to be explored and confronted

Kam Star: never learnt nothing from playing games

Education is broken. Students are bored. We need engagement or else! Enter GAMES. Games are exciting, thrilling, transformative and oh so 'engaging'. Yes all we need to do is add games to our education and we'll have gamified edutainment that will inspire the next Einstein to work out the formulas that govern the universe's dark energy whilst having fun. Really?

Why Flipped?

David Ridley

It will be argued that 'flipped classroom' has become instrumentalised within the current marketisation of higher education, and that this instrumentalisation of 'flipping' could lead to possible dystopian futures for the university. The recent Green Paper on higher education, however, has re-opened the question of 'quality' teaching, and suggests that 'flipping' could be re-imagined as something radically different.

Alan Richards

‘Flipped' is a term utilised ad nauseum within Higher Education, but what does it mean in reality and how can I utilise techniques to reduce administrative overhead whilst providing a killer student experience?

How Games?

This workshop is a gamified session exploring creativity in the use of narratives and visual cues when describing abstract concepts. The session will employ cards, tokens and team competition. The themes will include Flipped Learning, Game-based Learning and Self-directed Learning.

How Flipped?

This session will provide an overview of the Coventry University ethos for flipping the classroom, alongside tools and techniques that have proven effective within our institution.

How Badges?

There are a number of frameworks available to help you define and design your Open Badge. We are currently using the template designed by the Open Badge Academy to define the purpose and role of badges. We then identify where (and if) they fit in our Coventry Badges Framework. In this workshop you will use the template to define the purpose and use of your badge and have the opportunity to design your own badge. Bring your ideas and see them turn into an Open Badge for your students / colleagues / clients to claim.

Live Streaming:

In the spirit of open access and sharing, the DMLL will be live streaming all the activities hosted in the Grass area. The live stream link will be available at http://dmll.org.uk/expo/

Join the Conversation:

At the DMLL we believe that everyone should have the ability to access and participate in our projects and events whether in or outside of the lab. We will be live streaming today’s event and we invite you to join us making our online audiences feel part of the conversation by tweeting your commentary, reflections, pictures and questions throughout the day.

How can you participate in the DMLL’s online network?

• Join Twitter
• Follow the DMLL (@disrupt_learn)
• Tweet throughout the day, remember to include #dmllexpo in every tweet.