When Digital Natives Go to College
Background; This blog post is to complement the slides Digital Practitioner 2011 on slideshare. The topic of the Digital Practitioner emerged from an LSIS survey into FE College staff capabilities during the summer of 2011. It was derived from the work of Geoff Rebbeck at Thanet College who had developed original ways of surveying staff capability and built upon by Nigel Ecclesfield, with support from Fred Garnett, who redesigned the survey in a number of ways. Geoff evolved the approach of moving beyond a quantitative survey of practitioner use of technology for learning to one based upon attitudes and feelings towards the use of technology in action. Nigel developed the survey instrument on SurveyMonkey so that it both captured practitioner attitudes and provided an opportunity for additional free-text responses.
Survey Construction; Whilst the survey took a different, more qualitative, approach to the more typical number crunching approach (e.g. 1 PC to every 7 students) employed previously in the Becta survey of FE College use of technology, run since 2000, the outcomes were surprising. Firstly the subjective approach focussed on how users felt about their technology use in practice clearly resonated, but more surprising was the huge amount of data revealed in the free-text responses. The free-text boxes were provided to allow participants to clarify or modify their answers in case the options provided were too limiting, however they were used to provide much deeper, reflective, comments on their professional practice overall thus, unwittingly, providing a huge amount of relevant data on current professional practice. Nigel, currently experimenting with a number of Learning Analytics tools, simply sucked in all this bonus data and started analysing it. The results were refreshingly surprising.
Survey Findings; We surveyed 20 colleges and 850 practitioners overall in English FE Colleges and we found that
1. The survey methodology opened up a whole new understanding of the use of technology in college, we got a picture of professional practice.
2. The tagging of survey responses meant we could slice the data individual, by department, by college, by subject and nationally.
3. By offering survey answers based on how they used technology, how much support they needed and how they worked with colleagues we got a picture of the relationships being built as technology was introduced, tested, used and embedded in practice and then shared.
4. In the main we found college lecturers were “curious and confident” They tried technology out experimentally and, rather than seeing that learning technology started and ended with the college VLE, they would use as much or as little technology to support learning as seemed to work for them, based on their professional opinion of its pedagogic value.
Deeper Findings from Learning Analytics; With the huge amount of free text response Nigel was able to run a number of processing sequences to review the data.
1. The five key terms referred to the most were a) student b) Moodle c) resources d) college e) learning
2. The use of technology was clearly based on a student-centred approach and the choice of technology was driven by its pedagogic usefulness.
3. Much of the confidence came from the personal use of various technologies at home before using them professionally, leading us to describe this as being “when digital natives go to college”, or more clearly, as Digital Practitioners.
4. It was clear that practitioners were taking decisions on using technology for learning which was based on their expertise as professional educators and was not derived from college technology plans.
Conclusions; The notion of the professionally driven Digital Practitioner suggests we need to rethink both the way we introduce technology for learning into institutions and how personal professional development is carried out. We will expand on these ideas further.
Further information; There is more information on the Digital Practitioner 2011 slides which were prepared for the JISC e-learning experts group held on October 19th 2011. If you have any questions on the survey please ask them in the comments below and we will answer them.
