The problem with Pedagogy

As I have been reading through papers on my course, I have been reflecting on the problems that continue to persist with using technology in learning and teaching. The Price and Kirkwood paper from 2010 tries to make sense of evidence that can be used as a basis for evaluating technology enhanced learning, however, goes on to say that evidence is still lacking in this area - this is one of the things that annoyed me about the H800 course.

What I did find especially interesting is that the paper concludes with saying that teaching in HE is very much driven by research, and learning and teaching is almost secondary and that academics may lack the necessary pedagogical skills as it is not a requirement for them to be teacher trained.

Last June I delivered a workshop to around 20 teaching staff on using technology for learning and teaching. This was a range of staff from new to experienced. The focus for the workshop was on pedagogy and how to map it to appropriate technology i.e. blogs for reflective learning. What struck me during this session was that staff were struggling to understand what pedagogy actually was, just one mention of the word and heads were sinking!

This issue is raised again with Sharples et al. (2012) where it is mentioned that '...impediments relate to pedagogy rather than with technology...'

I think this is quite worrying. How are we expected to promote technology enhanced learning if teachers are lacking the fundamentals?

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Price, L. and Kirkwood, A. (2010) ‘Technology enhanced learning – where’s the evidence?’ in Steel, C.H., Keppell, M.J., Gerbic, P. and Housego, S. (eds) Curriculum, Technology and Transformation for an Unknown Future, Proceedings ASCILITE Sydney 2010, 5–8 December 2010, Sydney, Australia; also available online athttp://ascilite.org.au/ conferences/ sydney10/ procs/ Price-concise.pdf[Tip: hold ⌘ and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]  (accessed 22 June 2012).

Sharples, M., McAndrew, P., Weller, M., Ferguson, R., FitzGerald, E., Hirst, T., Mor, Y., Gaved, M. and Whitelock, D. (2012) Innovating Pedagogy 2012: Open University Innovation Report No. 1, Milton Keynes, The Open University; also available online at http://www.open.ac.uk/ blogs/ innovating/ (accessed 13 August 2012).