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Stephen Wheeler

eLearning Technologist

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Does adopting the dialogic approach in technology enhanced learning improve student outcomes and learning gain for widening participation students in English higher education? A literature review

In Leonardo (2010) and Flecha (1999), Freire - a (founding) key thinker in the development of Critical Pedagogy - is credited with adopting a dialogic approach that counters postmodernism’s racism.

They describe this approach as seeing cultures as different but equal. How this is achieved, or even if the claim is correct, or on what terms all cultures are deemed to be equal, is not made clear.

This seems problematic. The J.S. Mill observation that we adopt the culture we are born into suggests a certain randomness about the prism through which we make sense of the world - a prism we would do well to reject so as to have a more truthful understanding of the world.

Sam Harris in The End of Faith (2004), when talking about religious culture, asserts that all religions are not all equal, especially when claiming to be religions of peace. Where fundamentalist Christians or fundamentalist Muslims might cite their religious texts as a reason to take up arms, nobody is going to live in fear of a fundamentalist Jain. It’s not the fundamentalists that are the problem, it’s the sexist, racist, violent cultures fundamentalists come from that is the problem.

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Are there conflicts or contradictions in practice where TEL/NL theory is not realized in PASS in the Faculty of Science and Engineering at The University of Manchester, a research intensive university?

This research will looks at conflicts and contradictions between the theory of network learning and its practice as demonstrated in Peer Assisted Study Sessions (PASS) (also known as Supplemental Instruction (SI) in the USA) in the Faculty of Science and Engineering at The University of Manchester.

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What technology was used in Peer Assisted Study Sessions, and how effective was it at developing a critical consciousness in students in the Faculty of Science and Engineering at The University of Manchester?

This research takes place in the Faculty of Science and Engineering at The University of Manchester, a research intensive university. It looks at the use of technology to support the development of critical consciousness in Peer Assisted Study Sessions deployed in all nine Schools in the Faculty. The study uses the theoretical framework of critical pedagogy and ethnography as a methodology. The study concludes that there are large differences in how PASS is deployed across the Faculty and that developing critical consciousness is rarely a concern with little support needed from technology, but where critical consciousness does develop, the support of technology is valuable.

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How effective are Blackboard Community Spaces, established for the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences Schools, for enhancing the professional practice of their academics staff members for Critical Pedagogy?

The purpose of this research is to explore the opportunities available to academics to develop their teaching professional practice in an online environment and assess its affordance for the development of a Critical Pedagogy approach.

This research should be seen in the context of being the second study undertaken as part of a larger ongoing project. The first part of the project, titled “Are lecture capture videos deployed in a science and engineering faculty affording student critical thinking?”, was conducted using the Design Based Research (DBR) methodology, and this current research will also use the DBR methodology. The larger project will continue to explore the attitudes of academics to lecture podcasts in their teaching as well as a collaboration with an academic, or practitioner in DBR terminology, to design a course module that makes use of lecture podcasts, that once deployed will be subject to further intervention, research, evaluation and redesign. It is then hoped that successive iterations of this process will lead to the widespread adoption of good practice for the use of lecture podcasts to afford critical thinking.

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Are lecture capture videos deployed in a science and engineering faculty affording student critical thinking?

The University of Manchester is a major research university in the North of England. A scheme to systematically make videos of lectures and distribute them as podcasts was implemented as a pilot scheme in 2011 and rolled-out across the University in subsequent years. All 340 centrally administered teaching spaces are equipped with lecture capture technology. 40,000 hours of teaching and learning activities are recorded every year and are accessed in excess of 2 million times by students.

There are no cameras used in the teaching spaces. The system captures the output of the projector, a PowerPoint presentation for example, and the microphones the teaching spaces are equipped with.

The system is linked to and depends upon the University’s central room booking system: any teaching is automatically recorded and the link to the RSS feed is placed into the respective course space in the institutional Virtual Learning Environment. Importantly, lecturers do not opt-in to the system, but have to opt-out if they do not want their lecture recorded.

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