What is assessment for good in the current higher education landscape? Assessment does not just “... more What is assessment for good in the current higher education landscape? Assessment does not just “drive learning”. It plays a role in shaping students’ orientations towards future learning, beyond any course, and beyond graduation. It influences the kinds of knowledge and identity that hold legitimate status in disciplines and communities. It shapes power and trust relationships between junior and senior members of organisations, between those with different roles, between educational institutions and society. Through dialogue, this chapter challenges foundational assumptions about assessment in HE by considering meanings, possibilities and examples of ‘assessment for good’ in two disciplinary contexts of medical (Tim) and mathematics (Juuso) education. In doing so, tensions are highlighted between traditions of individualism and authentic, messy forms of learning and unpredictable outcomes. The dialogue in this chapter emphasises that there is no right way to go about assessment for...
The launch of Postdigital Science and Education helped generate a burst of new scholarship about ... more The launch of Postdigital Science and Education helped generate a burst of new scholarship about this emerging turn in educational research and theory. Yet, what it means to do postdigital research remains obscure to many. Ongoing debates around definitions, combined with the complexity of analysing digital activity within rich contexts that are also social, material, political, economic, and so on, make it challenging to understand what constitutes postdigital research. Meanings of the postdigital emerge from within the processes of postdigital research. Furthermore, while some individual contributions to postdigital research may be grounded in particular disciplines, we argue that postdigital research, in general, benefits from transdisciplinary knowledge. All of this points to a need for flexibility, and principled, rather than prescriptive, research and scholarship practices. It situates postdigital research in the tradition of compositional and inventive research approaches, an...
An increase in online and hybrid education during and after the Covid-19 pandemic has rapidly acc... more An increase in online and hybrid education during and after the Covid-19 pandemic has rapidly accelerated the infiltration of digital media into mainstream university teaching. Global challenges, such as ecological crises, call for further radical changes in university teaching, requiring an even richer convergence of ‘natural,’ ‘human’ and ‘digital’. In this paper, we argue that this convergence demands us to go beyond ‘the great online transition’ and reframe how we think about university, teachers’ roles and their competencies to use digital technologies. We focus on what it takes to be a teacher in a sustainable university and consider emerging trends at three levels of the educational ecosystem—global developments (macro), teachers’ local practices (meso), and daily activities (micro). Through discussion of examples of ecopedagogies and pedagogies of care and self-care, we argue that teaching requires a fluency to embrace different ways of knowing and collective awareness of ho...
Studies that locate memory entirely within the head may pay less attention to the properties, pra... more Studies that locate memory entirely within the head may pay less attention to the properties, practices or cultures of the media with which people remember than studies of ‘memory in the wild’, where memory is seen to extend beyond the individual, into the distributed activities of people and material things. While memory in the head is, apparently, individual and susceptible to universal effects, memory in the wild is emergent and relational. Studies of memory in the wild, therefore, produce results that are harder to pin down but may form a stronger basis for interpreting the importance of context. It is an important, interdisciplinary challenge to reconcile evidence from studies based on these different conceptions, so that we can better understand how people remember and forget, individually and collectively, and the relationship between context, environment, and memory. I argue that wherever memory is located or studied, all remembering can be framed as in the wild, and that do...
In May 2020, the University of Edinburgh announced the September launch of a hybrid model for all... more In May 2020, the University of Edinburgh announced the September launch of a hybrid model for all oncampus programmes. Teaching would be neither fully online nor fully on-campus, but able to take place in either or both modalities (e.g. remote and on-campus students learning together), and change location without major disruption to its design. The significant pedagogical challenges were most keenly felt in professional education, where learning practical skills through engagement in complex practice is crucial. Focusing on examples from medicine, we begin by discussing hybrid learning in a 2-metre world (i.e. where physical distancing requires a 2metre separation between people), or "H2m". Our "chemistry" notation indicates the influence of the 2m requirement on the structural composition of the hybrid model (H). At the same time, we argue that, as unusual as the conditions are, they do not call for fundamentally different design principles and processes (the "how" of design). Design for H2m learning requires flexible design tools that help teachers see and focus attention on relationships between a priori design decisions and the wider, distributed environments and emergent activity that are co-assembled in situ with students at "learntime". Drawing on insights from a professional development course to help clinical educators redesign their own courses for H2m learning, we show how such relational design tools facilitated the creation of different design outputs (the "what" of designs), better attuned to situational affordances. Among other things, these design outputs foreground: ways of encouraging student co-design of learning environments; explicit consideration of diversity among students; and reflection on the relationships between what students bring to the learning space, their emergent learning experiences, and what they must yet learn for professional practice. We also argue that in order to deal with the complexity of designing for H2m, teacherdesigners need a good appreciation of the relationships between designable structures and student agency.
Traditional assessment in higher education often measures performance in controlled conditions, i... more Traditional assessment in higher education often measures performance in controlled conditions, isolating students from the people and many of the resources they have interacted with in the process of learning. While a desire to maximise reliability and standardise the measurement of ability is understandable, there is a danger that such practices privilege internal, individual and abstract forms of knowledge at the expense of contextualised, collective and adaptive practices. Most university graduates will need to be effective networked learners, using social and material resources to adapt to changing and complex workplace settings and, increasingly, digital networks. If we accept that assessment is an important driver of learning, then it follows that assessments in which students are able to make use of available resources and networks, may afford a more appropriate preparation for future employment, particularly in light of an increasing need to adapt to technological change. I...
Clinicians develop as teachers via many activities, from on-the-job training to formal academic p... more Clinicians develop as teachers via many activities, from on-the-job training to formal academic programmes. Yet, understanding how clinicians develop the sensibilities of an educator and an appreciation of the complexity of educational environments is challenging. Studies of teacher development have maintained a relatively narrow definition of educational practice. A more expansive view encompasses clinical teachers’ roles in relation to elements beyond learners or content, such as the cultures and other structures of healthcare institutions. In our online Postgraduate Certificate in Clinical Education, space and structure are intentionally created for teachers to think and talk about education with colleagues in other disciplinary contexts. We interviewed 17 students about how their approaches to teaching had changed over a year of part-time study, using their teaching philosophies, written at the start of the programme, as points of contrast. We took an abductive approach to data ...
Research into sustainable assessment highlights that students must not only learn to evaluate the... more Research into sustainable assessment highlights that students must not only learn to evaluate their final products and performances but also the processes of learning they engage in while producing these final outputs. However, what is missing in this research is a focus on practices – the specific activities that are undertaken in completing tasks – and on how these are adapted to different, increasingly technologically-mediated environments. The capacity to improvise, to work around or subvert formal or expected procedures, and effectively adjust working practices, is critical for learning to operate across different situations, with different combinations of people, technologies and systems. Drawing on examples from sociomaterial research in educational and clinical environments, we argue that developing evaluative judgement of working practices will help students to overcome some of the challenges of moving between university and professional settings. To this end, we propose a ...
This article offers a framework for understanding how different kinds of memory work together in ... more This article offers a framework for understanding how different kinds of memory work together in interaction with people, photographs and other resources. Drawing on evidence from two qualitative studies of photography and memory, as well as literature from cognitive psychology, distributed cognition and media studies, I highlight complexities that have seldom been taken into account in cognitive psychology research. I then develop a ‘blended memory’ framework in which memory and photography can be interdependent, blending together as part of a wider activity of distributed remembering that is structured by interaction and phenomenology. In contrast to studies of cued recall, which commonly feature isolated categories or single instances of recall, this framework takes account of people’s histories of photographic practices and beliefs to explain the long-term convergence of episodic, semantic and inferential memory. Finally, I discuss implications for understanding and designing fu...
What is assessment for good in the current higher education landscape? Assessment does not just “... more What is assessment for good in the current higher education landscape? Assessment does not just “drive learning”. It plays a role in shaping students’ orientations towards future learning, beyond any course, and beyond graduation. It influences the kinds of knowledge and identity that hold legitimate status in disciplines and communities. It shapes power and trust relationships between junior and senior members of organisations, between those with different roles, between educational institutions and society. Through dialogue, this chapter challenges foundational assumptions about assessment in HE by considering meanings, possibilities and examples of ‘assessment for good’ in two disciplinary contexts of medical (Tim) and mathematics (Juuso) education. In doing so, tensions are highlighted between traditions of individualism and authentic, messy forms of learning and unpredictable outcomes. The dialogue in this chapter emphasises that there is no right way to go about assessment for...
The launch of Postdigital Science and Education helped generate a burst of new scholarship about ... more The launch of Postdigital Science and Education helped generate a burst of new scholarship about this emerging turn in educational research and theory. Yet, what it means to do postdigital research remains obscure to many. Ongoing debates around definitions, combined with the complexity of analysing digital activity within rich contexts that are also social, material, political, economic, and so on, make it challenging to understand what constitutes postdigital research. Meanings of the postdigital emerge from within the processes of postdigital research. Furthermore, while some individual contributions to postdigital research may be grounded in particular disciplines, we argue that postdigital research, in general, benefits from transdisciplinary knowledge. All of this points to a need for flexibility, and principled, rather than prescriptive, research and scholarship practices. It situates postdigital research in the tradition of compositional and inventive research approaches, an...
An increase in online and hybrid education during and after the Covid-19 pandemic has rapidly acc... more An increase in online and hybrid education during and after the Covid-19 pandemic has rapidly accelerated the infiltration of digital media into mainstream university teaching. Global challenges, such as ecological crises, call for further radical changes in university teaching, requiring an even richer convergence of ‘natural,’ ‘human’ and ‘digital’. In this paper, we argue that this convergence demands us to go beyond ‘the great online transition’ and reframe how we think about university, teachers’ roles and their competencies to use digital technologies. We focus on what it takes to be a teacher in a sustainable university and consider emerging trends at three levels of the educational ecosystem—global developments (macro), teachers’ local practices (meso), and daily activities (micro). Through discussion of examples of ecopedagogies and pedagogies of care and self-care, we argue that teaching requires a fluency to embrace different ways of knowing and collective awareness of ho...
Studies that locate memory entirely within the head may pay less attention to the properties, pra... more Studies that locate memory entirely within the head may pay less attention to the properties, practices or cultures of the media with which people remember than studies of ‘memory in the wild’, where memory is seen to extend beyond the individual, into the distributed activities of people and material things. While memory in the head is, apparently, individual and susceptible to universal effects, memory in the wild is emergent and relational. Studies of memory in the wild, therefore, produce results that are harder to pin down but may form a stronger basis for interpreting the importance of context. It is an important, interdisciplinary challenge to reconcile evidence from studies based on these different conceptions, so that we can better understand how people remember and forget, individually and collectively, and the relationship between context, environment, and memory. I argue that wherever memory is located or studied, all remembering can be framed as in the wild, and that do...
In May 2020, the University of Edinburgh announced the September launch of a hybrid model for all... more In May 2020, the University of Edinburgh announced the September launch of a hybrid model for all oncampus programmes. Teaching would be neither fully online nor fully on-campus, but able to take place in either or both modalities (e.g. remote and on-campus students learning together), and change location without major disruption to its design. The significant pedagogical challenges were most keenly felt in professional education, where learning practical skills through engagement in complex practice is crucial. Focusing on examples from medicine, we begin by discussing hybrid learning in a 2-metre world (i.e. where physical distancing requires a 2metre separation between people), or "H2m". Our "chemistry" notation indicates the influence of the 2m requirement on the structural composition of the hybrid model (H). At the same time, we argue that, as unusual as the conditions are, they do not call for fundamentally different design principles and processes (the "how" of design). Design for H2m learning requires flexible design tools that help teachers see and focus attention on relationships between a priori design decisions and the wider, distributed environments and emergent activity that are co-assembled in situ with students at "learntime". Drawing on insights from a professional development course to help clinical educators redesign their own courses for H2m learning, we show how such relational design tools facilitated the creation of different design outputs (the "what" of designs), better attuned to situational affordances. Among other things, these design outputs foreground: ways of encouraging student co-design of learning environments; explicit consideration of diversity among students; and reflection on the relationships between what students bring to the learning space, their emergent learning experiences, and what they must yet learn for professional practice. We also argue that in order to deal with the complexity of designing for H2m, teacherdesigners need a good appreciation of the relationships between designable structures and student agency.
Traditional assessment in higher education often measures performance in controlled conditions, i... more Traditional assessment in higher education often measures performance in controlled conditions, isolating students from the people and many of the resources they have interacted with in the process of learning. While a desire to maximise reliability and standardise the measurement of ability is understandable, there is a danger that such practices privilege internal, individual and abstract forms of knowledge at the expense of contextualised, collective and adaptive practices. Most university graduates will need to be effective networked learners, using social and material resources to adapt to changing and complex workplace settings and, increasingly, digital networks. If we accept that assessment is an important driver of learning, then it follows that assessments in which students are able to make use of available resources and networks, may afford a more appropriate preparation for future employment, particularly in light of an increasing need to adapt to technological change. I...
Clinicians develop as teachers via many activities, from on-the-job training to formal academic p... more Clinicians develop as teachers via many activities, from on-the-job training to formal academic programmes. Yet, understanding how clinicians develop the sensibilities of an educator and an appreciation of the complexity of educational environments is challenging. Studies of teacher development have maintained a relatively narrow definition of educational practice. A more expansive view encompasses clinical teachers’ roles in relation to elements beyond learners or content, such as the cultures and other structures of healthcare institutions. In our online Postgraduate Certificate in Clinical Education, space and structure are intentionally created for teachers to think and talk about education with colleagues in other disciplinary contexts. We interviewed 17 students about how their approaches to teaching had changed over a year of part-time study, using their teaching philosophies, written at the start of the programme, as points of contrast. We took an abductive approach to data ...
Research into sustainable assessment highlights that students must not only learn to evaluate the... more Research into sustainable assessment highlights that students must not only learn to evaluate their final products and performances but also the processes of learning they engage in while producing these final outputs. However, what is missing in this research is a focus on practices – the specific activities that are undertaken in completing tasks – and on how these are adapted to different, increasingly technologically-mediated environments. The capacity to improvise, to work around or subvert formal or expected procedures, and effectively adjust working practices, is critical for learning to operate across different situations, with different combinations of people, technologies and systems. Drawing on examples from sociomaterial research in educational and clinical environments, we argue that developing evaluative judgement of working practices will help students to overcome some of the challenges of moving between university and professional settings. To this end, we propose a ...
This article offers a framework for understanding how different kinds of memory work together in ... more This article offers a framework for understanding how different kinds of memory work together in interaction with people, photographs and other resources. Drawing on evidence from two qualitative studies of photography and memory, as well as literature from cognitive psychology, distributed cognition and media studies, I highlight complexities that have seldom been taken into account in cognitive psychology research. I then develop a ‘blended memory’ framework in which memory and photography can be interdependent, blending together as part of a wider activity of distributed remembering that is structured by interaction and phenomenology. In contrast to studies of cued recall, which commonly feature isolated categories or single instances of recall, this framework takes account of people’s histories of photographic practices and beliefs to explain the long-term convergence of episodic, semantic and inferential memory. Finally, I discuss implications for understanding and designing fu...
In May 2020, the University of Edinburgh announced the September launch of a hybrid model for all... more In May 2020, the University of Edinburgh announced the September launch of a hybrid model for all oncampus programmes. Teaching would be neither fully online nor fully on-campus, but able to take place in either or both modalities (e.g. remote and on-campus students learning together), and change location without major disruption to its design. The significant pedagogical challenges were most keenly felt in professional education, where learning practical skills through engagement in complex practice is crucial. Focusing on examples from medicine, we begin by discussing hybrid learning in a 2-metre world (i.e. where physical distancing requires a 2metre separation between people), or "H2m". Our "chemistry" notation indicates the influence of the 2m requirement on the structural composition of the hybrid model (H). At the same time, we argue that, as unusual as the conditions are, they do not call for fundamentally different design principles and processes (the "how" of design). Design for H2m learning requires flexible design tools that help teachers see and focus attention on relationships between a priori design decisions and the wider, distributed environments and emergent activity that are co-assembled in situ with students at "learntime". Drawing on insights from a professional development course to help clinical educators redesign their own courses for H2m learning, we show how such relational design tools facilitated the creation of different design outputs (the "what" of designs), better attuned to situational affordances. Among other things, these design outputs foreground: ways of encouraging student co-design of learning environments; explicit consideration of diversity among students; and reflection on the relationships between what students bring to the learning space, their emergent learning experiences, and what they must yet learn for professional practice. We also argue that in order to deal with the complexity of designing for H2m, teacherdesigners need a good appreciation of the relationships between designable structures and student agency.
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