In this series of articles, the Educational Technology team will be providing an insight into existing practice using technology for learning and teaching at Falmouth University and various projects being undertaken within the sector. Our previous articles have covered a wide range of topics including Inclusivity, Digital Literacy and Course Design.
This week we’re focusing on Creative Education, a subject the Ed Tech team are more than familiar with. Falmouth is the highest ranked University for arts in many of the University league tables; The Guardian University Guide 2016, The Sunday Times League Table 2016 and Complete University Guide 2017. As such we have experience working with many diverse subjects spanning arts, media, performance and design to name a few.
Additionally the university has a dedicated MA in Creative Education which focuses specifically on educational practice and research being undertaken within the creative arts.
Many of our academic staff have come from professional practitioner backgrounds and bring their own experience of industry to the HE environment. This can make for really exciting interventions where technology and arts combine to create meaningful learning experiences. We’ve recently blogged about some of these current activities, such as Project Tango and Slack for assessment.
Unsurprisingly the abundance of specialist academics allows for diverse approaches to teaching and learning to exist within the University. Working closely with academic teams allows us to have an excellent overall view of the types of teaching practice occurring on modules at Falmouth and their impact on student learning.
Both of these example projects recognise the importance of discovery and play as part of creative educational experiences. Children are taught the benefits of discovery through play at a very early age, companies such as Tech Will Save Us introduce coding concepts to children through physical construction of technology. While for adults, Lego advocates its serious play method (LSP) to encourage individuals to creatively engage with concepts and ideas using Lego construction.
From a staff development perspective having a safe constructive environment to experiment and trial creative educational approaches is essential. So pause, reflect and find a creative experience that might work for you in your teaching.
The Dean’s list pulls together blogs from around the world about the hottest education technology issues occurring, and introduces higher ed stakeholders to a group of education technology thought leaders who share not-to-be-missed analyses of higher ed technology trends, challenges and opportunities.
The list is a peer-reviewed collection of education community experts, classroom leaders, admins and IT gurus’ blogs. We’re really pleased to be included!
“All part of the technology team at Falmouth University in the United Kingdom, these passionate bloggers offer lessons learned from the many IT projects they’ve attempted at Falmouth. They also widen the scope to discuss higher ed IT initiatives at large.”
A few months ago I stumbled across Gitbook, a tool that allows you to publish content as Markdown/HTML and then access it in a range of formats appropriate to web, print and mobile. I’ve written about it in a post on inclusivity, but it really deserves it’s own post and some wider recognition.
Here’s a video overview of the Gitbook web interface when you set up a new project.
What draws you in is the thoughtfulness that has gone into the design and the simplicity. You can set up your account with standard social media accounts; Facebook, Twitter, Google+ to verify authorship but if you also do any code development you can link the account to GitHub creating extra opportunities for publishing documentation. You can import Github, a Word document or HTML making it simple to work with existing material.
In the same way as Github, you can allow your publications to be forked/remixed by others and when you commit/save a change it has associated metadata with author, time date etc. You also have version control, so individuals/groups could work on different branches/versions, making it a pretty exciting tool for collaborative writing work.
If you’re familiar with CSS styles, you can also customise separate styles for each format, so you can have your .pdf looking different to your web version, which might be useful for readability purposes.
There’s an editing app for Mac, Windows and Linux, meaning you don’t have to use a code editor when you’re offline.
I’ve started a couple of projects in Gitbook; one about Digital Literacies in HE, as I think there might be room for a collaborative publication in the area and another is my portfolio for Certified Membership of the Association for Learning Technology which is gradually developing.
As if all the features and apps weren’t enough, you can even have enterprise accounts, which would mean all of your institutional documentation can live as code, facilitating better governance, interoperability, transparency, accessibility… literally every buzzword that you need to tick off for HE.
In this series of articles we’ll be casting our gaze over some examples of practice currently being undertaken at Falmouth University. We work extensively with a variety of subjects and often find that the learning experiences are as diverse as those teaching on the courses.
This month we’re focusing on Computing for Games, a relatively new course located within the Games Academy. The course had its first intake this academic year and is the only Bachelor of Science degree to be offered at Falmouth University.
EdTech recently met with course leader Michael Scott to discuss some of the tools and initiatives used as part of taught delivery on the modules. Peer support was a common theme that arose during our discussion with students encouraged to make use of Slack throughout the course. Michael has set up sub channels for each module and student groups are invited to also set up their own channels that relate to project teams. Students are also encouraged to use Slack alongside delivered sessions to discuss topics covered in the lecture.
Michael also described the role of Slack in setting formative tasks to the students, “Active learning through engagement and reflection is very important, so I regularly set tasks where each student does some work and then posts their approach to tackling that particular task to Slack”, using this method they’re able to view each other’s work and create a dialogue around their own solution, while also reflecting on the responses of peers.
Michael put some of the success of peer communication down to small group size and it will be interesting to follow how this translates into larger cohorts as the course grows in size.
Another tool particularly prevalent across Computing for Games is Github, a powerful platform for developers that can be used to share projects and work collaboratively with code. Michael has found a way to utilise the ‘pull request’ functionality of this tool to provide formative feedback to his students, “When students create a pull request, I am able to post comments directly within their code, so I go through projects and write inline feedback within Github to provide instant feedback to the students on their works-in-progress”.
As with many of the subjects at Falmouth we tend to see many industry specific tools permeate into the courses, it’s not surprising that Computing for Games are incorporating specialised tools into taught delivery, especially as it prepares students for an industry where knowledge of their use is expected.
So what’s next for Computing for Games, Michael has expressed an interest in finding a solution for viewing live streaming of code for workshop demonstrations, “At the moment I project what I’m doing at the front of a session, but it would be good to provide a link to students so they can stream what is happening and follow on their own machines”, the ET team are now looking into potential live streaming options like codeshare.io that would facilitate the functionality Michael would like to see added to his seminars.
If you’re interested in implementing any technology into your teaching or would like further information on the tools discussed, please get in touch.
