Hello there! I haven’t been assigned a blog tutor yet, so apologies for not directly addressing anyone in this post!
I’m Kate, and I’ve been a Learning Technologist at University of Galway for the last seven and a half years. From 2019 – 2022, I was the university lead on a national project through the IUA, Enhancing Digital Teaching and Learning. While I was still employed locally as a Learning Technologist, my work was very different during that time, not just due to the Covid crisis. The project team worked collaboratively on resources, webinars, chapters, etc. and at the university, I worked on an inclusive learning project and started to teach the Learning Technologies module in our PgDip in CELT. It’s a bit deflating to finish a wonderfully collaborative project and return to your day job, even though I’ve been allowed to continue my teaching and work on inclusion and UDL. I knew I wanted to do some type of CPD soon to reorient, and re-motivate, myself. I’ve always wanted to do my Ph.D., and if I hadn’t been in so many precarious contracts with no financial ability to pursue it, I would have done it long ago. I respect the people and work in Edinburgh so much that I thought this course might help me start to reflect on my career, reframe some things, and maybe decide on a topic. I remain cautiously optimistic!
Just before Christmas, I was told I was leading our LT team on the university’s migration from Blackboard to Canvas. We have a pilot this semester and will move fully in September. While I’m comfortable enough installing and testing multiple LTIs and testing admin settings, I personally care much more deeply about course design, accessibility, thinking critically, and values. I can do the work, but it’s not my passion. I also know it’s going to take up so much time, but that gives me more motivation to focus on this course as I’ll have so little of the critical aspect of ed tech present in my own work. I’m not sure I’m the best person to ask to lead this given my critical lens. In my own teaching, I ask our staff to investigate who owns ed tech companies, what are the values/politics associated with them, what data is gathered, etc.
Anyway, apologies for rambling a bit, but I felt it important to outline where I’m at in my own work. I’m looking forward to the course, and I hope to keep up as best I can. I think it will help to energise me, and some of my best learning/teaching experiences have been online/asynchronous, so there’s that!
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Hi Kate
As you’ve probably gathered by now, I am your blog tutor! Thanks for filling me in on your background – I can relate to your frustration regarding the demands of your job as a Learning Technologist and your desire to teach and think critically about digital learning. I worked as a Learning Technologist at a university for a while and also on their CELT course and then later as a Digital Education Consultant for schools in Yorkshire area. The Inclusive Learning project sounds fascinating – I hope to hear more about it in later blog posts. Feel free to make short blog posts about any aspect of digital learning in your job or elsewhere in addition to the obligatory assessed blog posts.
Just worth saying that this first course CIDE may not seem very practice-based and at times, may be hard-going. It is, by design, quite theoretical because we want you to have a good grounding for future courses which tend to be more practical ie course design and so on. As I said in my welcome email, I very strongly advise that you put aside specific time each week for reading and for writing blog posts. If you don’t ring-fence the time, it’s easy to fall behind. A good tip about reading academic articles (I use it so I’m not being patronising, I hope!) is to highlight key sections as you read – I found an excellent online site (Sumnotes) which extracts all the highlighted sections (plus any comments you make) and you can store them for future reference. I used OneNote Notebook (it’s included in your University of Edinburgh Office 365) to organise my notes, posts and so on..
When you write your blog post around a particular reading, remember you don’t have to comment on everything in the article – just select key points from highlighted sections to focus on in your response. Try to relate key points to your own professional experience and context – you will find this makes the content more understandable and relevant, particularly in your case Kate!
If you can respond to a task in other ways than text, such as by making an audio recording or a video recording, an infographic then we would encourage you to do so. All responses don’t have to be in textual form. I look forward to reading your response to this week’s blog task next Monday!