About my study
Nov 19th, 2007 by nicol
About me: I’m a research student at the University of Hong Kong. My area of study is about technology in higher education, especially IT. The particular area I’m researching in is how physical and virtual learning spaces or environments in higher education institutions are evolving and how this is connected to the way students learn or socialize in such spaces.
My research topic: Pedagogical bodies & technological spaces: a critical study of ‘learning commons’ as a site for both collaborative learning and social interaction
Research abstract: This project will investigate how the designated sites/areas carrying the function of ‘learning commons’ are used by teachers and students at the University of Hong Kong. The purpose of the study is to provide an in-depth and comprehensive review, examining aspects of usage, satisfaction, culture, and pedagogical effects arising from the experiences of teachers, and students who use and dwell in such a space. The study will address issues within four research foci, namely: pedagogical practice, cultural practice, social interactions and techno-spatial framework.
Working definition of Learning Commons: ‘Learning Commons’ is described by the University of Hong Kong’s Knowledge Team as “an emerging concept in university communities around the world. In some places, they are called Information Commons. Learning Commons serve a one-stop shop location where students can study, learn, discuss, interact, and relax. The basic components of Learning Commons usually include reference and student workstations, collaborative learning rooms, electronic classrooms, multimedia workstations, consultation stations, writing lab and lounge. They are also open for extended hours, sometimes 24×7.” Also stated in the Executive Summary of the Knowledge Team’s report and recommendation (2006), the major goal of a Learning Commons is “to transform the educational experience given its undergraduates, to give them opportunities to learn skills needed to compete in our rapidly changing environment, to be able to engage in interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary collaboration, to be able to interact with the world outside the University, to learn democratic values, and to learn critical language and ICT skills.” (p. 2). The Learning Commons is therefore, envisioned by the University governing bodies as a physical facility that support the above mentioned kinds of ‘student-centered’ or ‘learner-centered’ approach to teaching and learning in higher education (Alexi Marmot Associates, 2006)
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Here’s something I wrote in my professional journal in 1999 that relates in part to your study focus. Hope it is of some interest.
Technology shifts and new university cultures
The notion of the technology shift as an alternative perspective for looking at IT and educational change reflects an examination of complex and heterogeneous changed practices and pressures, as Luke describes:
the acts and artifacts used to reproduce collective understandings among specific social groups are changing profoundly: print discourses, face-to-face classes, paper documents are being displaced by digital discourses, on-line classes, electronic documents. The former will not entirely disappear, but so too can they not be counted upon to reign hegemonic (Luke, 1998, p.2).
Luke describes collective understandings that reinforce entrenched ways of operating within universities: universities have a physical environment, halls, lecture theatres, a presence that reinforces certain routinised pedagogical practices, for example, face-to-face classes, the lecture, the tutorial and the seminar. In this environment, print technologies have influenced and organised subjects and disciplines and have produced a culture of ‘book’ based education (Green, 1997a). The book has been the central medium of knowledge production and contains and constrains pedagogy in various ways, standing between the learner and the ‘real world.’ Books are bounded, having a certain physical shape, printed text on paper, pages with edges, borders, margins, encouraging a particular form of interaction and rationality (Tuman, 1992; Schriver, 1997; Green, 1997b). The learner’s experiences of the educational world out there has been dominated by reading printed text. Books encapsulate meanings, and the task of the learner is to extract this meaning. The role of the teacher, as a presumed authority in the classroom, stands in for the author and for the (experiential) world (Idhe, 1982). Students complete assignments and exams in print, while the university degree itself is based on assessing students’ writing. Luke argues that these conventional practices, ‘tied to mechanism, print and corporal embodiment’, is now challenged by a newer and wired electronic, coded and hypertextual telepresence’ (1998, p.2) where the digital environment is a new technology – requiring a new social imperative and form of life (Bolter, 1991, 1995; Bigum, 1997a).
Green (1997c) has argued that we are seeing a profound shift from, and a decisive movement of a very complex kind: a transition between the Age of Print and the Age of Digital-Electronics. He argues that we are in the midst of a shift from print to digital-electronics – ‘from the print apparatus as the organising context and resource for educational and social practice to the digital-electronic apparatus’ (Green, 1997c, p. 2). This shift in the ‘apparatus of culture is changing … not only in technology but in institutional practices and the ideology of the subject as well’ (Ulmer, 1989, p. xii).
Elson-Green in an interview, quotes an argument forwarded by Spender (1999) that digital technology and especially online technology is changing cultures in education and placing new pressures on learning outside the control of teachers. She adds that Twenty-First century education will centre on the business of learning, and questions what role universities and teachers will play in the future: ‘unless academics acquire the mind set and the competencies to be leaders in the learning business, the prospects could be all gloom and doom’. Spender suggests a likely scenario in the future for academics is as ‘learning managers’ that aim not to be the best in the world but who know how and where to go in the world to access the best through online technologies (Elson-Green, 1999).
A glimpse to future possibilities for online learning in higher education can be explored, Luke (1998) suggests, by examining the consortium of seventeen western states, the Western Governors Association creation of a ‘virtual university.’ In February, 1996 the Western Governors University (WGU) was formed to offer degree programs to ‘enhance the marketplace for demonstrated competence through certification that is widely accepted by employers and traditional institutions of higher learning’ (Western Governors Association, 1997). The WGU was established as a broker of knowledge between outsourced content providers and individual learners. WGU courses are accompanied by ‘an explicit statement of the competencies that should be achieved upon completion, as well as an indication of the assessment methods that will be employed to certify these competencies’ (Western Governors Association, 1997). The WGU offices are small and relatively inexpensive to run, providing administrative support, which sets quality control standards, develops rules and policies, and organises ‘franchises’ of instructional inputs:
By undercutting the average annual student costs of $9,000 at a typical state university, the WGU aims to serve non-traditional older students, traditional college students needing extra courses, employees seeking various sorts of training, and life-long learners in the personal enrichment market. Competency-assessment, and not degrees, is to be the main measure of student success, but the WGU now offers a multi-track Associate of Arts degree (Luke, 1998, p.8).
WGU uses ‘technologically-delivered educational programming’ to offer degree and nondegree awarding competency-based courses which are competitive, cost-effective, flexible, client-centred and market-oriented, in a non-traditional university form (Western Governors University, 1997). WGU breaks ‘down the barriers of regulations, bureaucracies, tradition and turf’ (Western Governors University), which, as Luke points out, is the main innovation of WGU: not WGU’s use of online technologies but the institutional changes embedded ‘behind its operations and structures’ (Luke, 1998, p.9). As Governor Leavitt points out, WGU operates as:
a kind of New York Stock Exchange of technology-delivered courses.’ He envisions a catalogue with listings from hundreds of institutions, corporations, and publishers, giving students ready access to thousands of educational opportunities’ (Blumenstyk, 1998).
Online technology makes the operation and structure of WGU possible, providing a very different model of higher education to the traditional universities, which Utah Governor Michael Leavitt, a founding member of WGU, describes as bastions of a ‘feudal system’ designed to award outmoded guild privileges (Blumenstyk, 1998). One outcome predicted is a financial shift from state university systems:
to systems of individual choice, giving students vouchers to spend where the marketplace and competency regime show the best education can be had. … The real innovation of the WGU is this new symbolic economy of academic achievement, moral economy of personal choice, and public economy of lower costs (Luke, 1998, p.10).
The use of new digital-electronic technologies are seen as bringing education to the students rather than forcing students to subsidize so-called, ‘fancy’ campuses and ‘feather bedding’ faculties (Gubernick & Ebeling, 1997, p.3). This image of higher education has gained a degree of favour in Australia, as exemplified in the recommendations of the West Report (1998).