Author: Gül Bilge Han

Topic 5: Reflections on the course and suggestions

A Reflection on the course:

This was generally a stimulating course with a challenging amount of work. Although we had challenges in the beginning when it comes to forming our group as a community in practice, the connections and commitments were clearer and a collaborative environment was built as we went along.

The course at the beginning was concentrated a little too much on the “medium” rather than the message in the sense that we were bombarded with several tools and links and tasks: the dominant focus on the medium of expression and the format of how we should communicate our ideas  presided over at times the content itself and the substance of our reflections. This “medium is the message” approach however was later on balanced by  our proper engagement with the topics given each week. There were two main insights that we discussed in our group that I would like to share here as part of my personal reflection:

While the FISH model in this course has been stimulating, it still could be improved by turning the scenarios into more directly thought provoking and at times provocative forms of inquiry and storytelling.

We even came up with a FISH document ourselves adopting a more povoking and critical approach for a future course. Here is the link in case you are interested!

https://docs.google.com/document/d/186KlAl1uF-A7iF2HSRsD6K4swbmA5ds_u9mS4WcRp0g/edit#heading=h.jogc32ehm5om

 

Topic 4: Online and Blended learning design

For topic 4, we were asked to reflect on Online and Blended learning design with an approach that seeks to “encourage learners’ engagement and learning processes” in online and blended learning design.

I would like to reflect a little further on one of the sources included in our reading and one that we have touched upon in our discussions which is called “Universal Learning Design” and see what aspects can be important to consider for an inclusive approach to blended learning design: The aspect considered specifically is our role as teachers to encourage students to acquire self-reflection, self-knowledge, and representation.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) guidelines consists of a pedagogical approach to education that aims to provide all students, including those with disabilities, with equal opportunities to learn by making learning accessible and engaging.

UDL aims to create an inclusive learning environment that accommodates diverse learners, and self-insight helps students identify their own learning needs and preferences to fully engage with the learning materials and demonstrate their understanding.

Section 1: self-knowledge and UDL in connection to learning design

One of the key principles of UDL is providing multiple means of representation, which means presenting information in a variety of ways to cater to different learning styles and preferences. Self-insight is an essential component of this principle as it helps students understand how they learn best and what strategies work for them. By understanding their own learning style and preferences, students can select materials and resources that are most suitable for their needs, and engage with the content more effectively. This would particulary be helpful in a blended learning setting, since the variety of media and tools they can use for learning is increased and they need self-insight to be able to communicate their needs for learning with the instructors.

Another principle of UDL is providing multiple means of expression, which means allowing students to demonstrate their learning in various ways. Self-insight can help students identify their strengths and weaknesses and select a mode of expression that best showcases their learning. For example, some students may prefer to demonstrate their understanding through written essays, while others may prefer to give presentations or create visual representations.

Section 2: inclusivity and UDL in connection to AI.

The question that remains here is: how does the new digital environments of learning and teaching have an impact on our understanding of ULD and the principles of self-insight, representation and self-reflection, as important elements for teachers to pedagogically help students navigate themselves and to feel included?

For the inclusion of differently-abled students for instance, can such self-knowledge and reflection be further acquired with the help of new digital and technological tools? Recent research gives hints to this,

  • Research points to the “potential of AI for improving outcomes for learners” especially for those  “with disabilities” for instance (Brasiel & Lunn 2023): “AI has been used to support children with ASD who have difficulties understanding people’s emotions, with AI-driven apps and robots helping students practice emotion recognition and other social skills.”

Not only the student communities but also instructors can benefit from recognizing and assessing and giving feedback to students who are differently abled:

“AI has informed the development of algorithms that can help those involved in assessment identify disabilities in students, such as ASD, specific learning disabilities (dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia), and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). (Brasiel & Lunn 2023)

Such AI driven developments catering to learner communities with disabilities might correspond to Quyand and Pehcheng’s “Paradigm Three” where, they argue, “AI is used to empower learning while learners take agency to learn” rather than AI solely functioning as a representative of knowledge.

 

Topic 3: Learning Communities and Communities in Practice

For topic 3, we were asked to reflect upon the formation of learning communities and communities of practice including in online settings. In our group and panel discussion (recorded), we talked a lot about the 5-stage model for online learning proposed by Gilly Salmon, The Five Stage Model (2022) and reflected on how, the development between the different stages ranging from access and motivation to “development” in online learning (for it to be successful) is not necessarily a linear process although the model indicates that these are stages that one goes through in a progressive manner.

Another topic that was raised has to do with the notion of learning as a social practice and the importance of the notion of community, a concept that, at times in Salmon and later in Wenger’s text, is taken for granted.

In the next few part I would like to pick up on a few ideas about learning as a community practice (from Wenger’s text: Wenger, E. (2010). Communities of practice and social learning systems: the career of a concept) and expand on these two by linking them to Paulo Freire’s foundational pedagogical text on The Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Wenger’s idea of learning as a community practice is based on a relational understanding of pedagogy; meaning making processes are understood in terms of individuals/identities in interaction with community and the world at large.

One of the points that deserves further reflection is the consideration of community as a concept: in W’s theory at times seems as if “community” is inherently horizontal and productive or positive. Is there here perhaps a an underlying assumption here that communities work on a horizontal basis or are homogeneous and a problem with not attending to the structures of hierarchy and power that determine relationalities of learning as a social practice whether it is class race gender etc.? The author in fact acknowledges this point toward the end of the article so it is a relevant point to expand on.

One way of expanding on the social theory of learning and communities of practice and education in this context might be to go back to one of the foundational texts by Paulo Freire The Pedagogy of the Oppressed from 1968.

Like Wenger’s, Freire’s notion of learning is based upon communal/collective practice and it deeply relational: “It is a perspective that locates learning, not in the head or outside it, but in the relationship between the person and the world”

But at the center of Freire’s is also a materialist review of relations of domination in learning contexts with the ultimate purpose “to be more fully human” via social change.

In this scenario, a horizontal notion of a learning community is not a given but is necessarily entangled with acts of domination”.

Within institutions and without (societal, on a more general level), there are processes of dehumanization: The logic of the oppressor, whether it manifests itself directly in the classroom, in text books, or outside the classroom (the state or the corporate world) desires to “transform everything surrounding it into an object of its domination”. This need to objectify humans is driven by the authority’s belief that “Humanity is a thing, and they possess it as an exclusive right”

In a learning context, for the community, the power dynamic between teacher and learner is key: “learning as a joint venture instead of having a vertical structure”; learning not as transfer of knowledge but as co-creation of knowledge where the student is seen as an active subject of the process and not as passive objects.

For silent learners and for students lacking resources (background), this process of subjectivization is particularly hard. Here are some hands on strategies:

  1. Spontaneity: reading the classroom and the sensing the vibe are significant although difficult especially in online settings. Slowing down when is at times necessary, and more important than covering everything that is in the curriculum. Daring to change things on the spot, unplanned.
  2. Taking a problem posing approach rather than a vertical listening/transference of knowledge model; and creating a brave space.
  3. Working with conscientization: a critical pedagogical method, teaching to “negotiate the world in a thoughtful way that exposes and engages the relations between the oppressor and the oppressed.” Enabling students to pose questions themselves to evaluate and reflect on their own positions (their privileges as well as disadvantages).

Perhaps these ideas about community building in teaching are too idealistic at a time when universities are increasingly seen by many students as career centers?

Topic 2: Open Learning – Sharing and Openness

For our second topic, we were given the topic of openness and sharing in learning and teaching related areas and a scenario where we considered the impact of AI tools as well as hybrid forms of education and participation/accessibility. While the blending of in person and online teaching/learning environments seem to promise new types of accessibility in practice, they might also pose challenges to the notion of community building and socialization with colleagues as well as students. Creating an open and inclusive space often requires a stimuting and safe classroom environment and the blending of many technologies might at times be alienating or might be characterized by the lack of a stimulating and organically formed sense of community.

Additionally, the notion of openness is at times used as a buzz word in different contexts including in higher education. Without confronting the uneven structures of power and hierarchy and without a reflection of inequity, all of which determine the accessibility, opportunity, and sharing of sources at the level of different student groups as well as the general academic work culture, it is hard to talk about openness in its true sense.

We can however, talk about openness in terms of the specific case of sharing of sources in the context of digitalization and AI technologies, which is what I will reflect on a little here with reference to Maha Bhali’s talk (2023) and Anders Guadamuz’s article (2023) “Openness, AI, and the changing creative landscape”. The rapid increase in uses of AI in educational contexts and its impact of openness resulted in heated debates about its positive and negative implications. Positively inclined views on the use of AI (or those who claim that there is no escape from it so let’s find ways to adopt) often seek to underline its potentials as in the case of Guadamuz’s article. He argues that AI follows a tradition of openness and democratization, and its use of knowledge and art is “a very straightforward case of fair use”. I think Guadamuz’s case represents one of the many instances of the use of the word openness as a buzz word which he does first:

1. By easily bypassing the issue of fair use of knowledge in the AI production of new sources of knowledge: the only reason why, as Naomi Klein states in her latest article, the AI can produce a new creative landscape with new artistic and intellectual products is because of the huge amount of theft it is grounded upon: “What work are these benevolent stories doing in the culture as we encounter these strange new tools? Here is one hypothesis: they are the powerful and enticing cover stories for what may turn out to be the largest and most consequential theft in human history.”

2. The second problem with Guadamuz’s claim has to do with the uncritical and naive idea that AI is a promoter of democracy. In fact, tools such as ChatGPT for instance, as Bhali agues so brilliantly, rather than promoting democratization of knowledge, do in fact reinforce the hegemonic structures of knowledge creation compared to older forms like Wikipedia for instance where individuals are both content creators and users whereas in uses of Chat GPT, the creation of knowledge and its storage is concentrated in a single totalizing tool. “Projects that emphasize “open for all” may” in this sense “not necessarily meet the needs of those farthest from justice”

Such questions should not be easily bypassed by the celebrators of new inventions of technologies; we as academics cannot afford letting go off the critical take on such developments, a take that forms the basis of our profession.

More on this in the next topic…

Topic 1, Self-reflection: digitalization, language, self-presentation…

DIGITALIZATION, SELF-PRESENTATION, KNOWLEDGE

DIGITALIZATION, SELF-PRESENTATION, KNOWLEDGE

For our first topic, we were asked to consider the personal and professional boundaries surrounding our media presence, which was presented to us in a scenario reflecting on the challenges of participating and conducting an online course. We have discussed in our group that we do not really feel the kind of anxiety and uncertainty while dealing with digital tools as instructors which is indicated in the scenario.

In fact, Most of us had the idea that since the pandemic we have grown rather accustomed to using online tools, esp. via Zoom, for teaching and there is not really much anxiety we feel about our presence online as teachers and instructors/lecturers. We have on the other hand reflected more deeply on our presence as individual researchers and as colleagues, talking about how personal, political, ethical and social aspects of ourselves, preferences and beliefs are often entangled with our professional selves on online platforms. It is at times difficult to draw clear boundaries and at times these boundaries are not even desirable. For those of us whose subjects (especially in the humanities) often involve tackling political and social aspects of the topics and texts we deal with are perhaps even more prone to dealing with this aspect (conflict?) of social media presence and online presence as researchers and academics.

 

The fast changing nature of digital tools, however, which was discussed also in the article “Developing Digital Literacies” (2014) poses challenges still regarding how we adapt as researches and teachers to the new digital environments. Not only technical skills but also the demand for new “soft skills” as outlined in Beetham and Sharpe’s “pyramid model” (2010) for digital literacy are relevant for a discussion of how we deal with the challenges posed by the implementation of new digital environments in our fields. Notions of identity, practices, skills and access and awareness constitute the different stages of the pyramid. Among there, identity and awareness I think are essential for the development of our digital literacy and they correspond to new “soft skills” in this context. New types of identity building and new types of social awareness (whether it is in the form of student-teacher interaction or in the form of research related digital presence) are needed apart from the purely technical skills in new digital environments of interaction.

Another aspect that was raised in our discussions about digital presence had to do with the language and terminology we use when we talk about digitalization in an academic context. The phrase for instance about how we “brand ourselves” was used in one of the questions raised among our conversation starters. What does it mean to transfer words/vocabulary that comes from “marketing” (such as “branding”) to think about self-presence and identity in an academic context and in relation to our academic self-representation on digital platforms? A similar question was raised in relation to the notion of “openness” which is widely used while “promoting” digitalization and online distribution of knowledge

We need to ask also how digitalization of knowledge (as in the case of new technologies of AI in knowledge production) reinforces or at times creates new relations of hierarchy and power and thus contributes to existing forms of systemic injustice in education. What about the ownership of knowledge produced by new digital tools such as ChatGPT? Does Chat GPT for instance “totalize” knowledge, assembling various kinds of information into a single AI tool? Is it unlike other internet based digital tools of knowledge production in this sense like wikipedia for instance where “anyone” can produce content and share? What does this mean for the democratization of knowledge and access?

I suppose, strategies of “critical literacy” are relevant for an informed response to such developments…but more on AI for our topic two!

 

Gül