George Veletsianos, PhD

Author: George Veletsianos Page 6 of 81

Traxler’s review of our book: Critical Digital Pedagogy in Higher Education

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On July 13, 2023

In papers, scholarship, work

Johh Traxler wrote a very kind review of Critical Digital Pedagogy in Higher Education, the open access book that Suzan, Chris, and I co-edited. In it, he begins by noting that he is concerned of a growing chasm in digital education, as

there seem to be two parallel universes of learning, of two different sets of ideas about how we learn, what we learn, who we learned it from, and we show we have learnt it: one inside higher education, the other in the world outside. On one side are the closed systems around the dedicated EdTech systems in higher education, and around the different cadres and professions that develop, sell, procure, install, and deploy them to deliver the formal curriculum. On the other side are the ever fluid and informal groups and relationships that exploit social media and Web 2.0 to produce ideas, images, information, identities, and opinions, and to share, store, transform, merge, and discard them.

After reviewing individual chapters, he concludes that each chapter populates the spaces in the chasm and “makes an extraordinary contribution, tackling the chasm from a surprising variety of angles and should be valued and explored accordingly.”

I’m filing this into the “positive words” folder, which is a folder that I refer to when I need reminders that gloomy days are temporary.

So very tired of predictions about AI in education…

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On July 7, 2023

In futures, generative artificial intelligence, my research, scholarship, short reflections, teacherbots

By people who aren’t AIEd experts, education technology experts, education experts, and the like.

Case in point: “AI likely to spell end of traditional school classroom, leading [computer science] expert says.”

I appreciate cross disciplinary engagement as much as I love guacamole (which is to say, a lot), but I’d also appreciate that we stop wasting our time on these same unfulfilled prophecies year after year, decade after decade.

Will AI impact education? In some ways it will, and in others it won’t. Will education shape the ways AI comes to be used in classrooms? In some ways it will, and in others it won’t.

Truth be told, this negotiated relationship isn’t as appealing as DISRUPTION, AVALANCHE, MIND-READING ROBO-TUTOR IN THE SKY, etc, which are words that readers of the history of edtech will recognize.

Are cohort-based course platforms “universities of the future?”

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On June 28, 2023

In courses, future education, my research, online course marketplace, online learning, papers

The edtech industry includes numerous learning providers and platforms providing tools, technologies, and resources for course creators to create and sell online courses. These platforms are interesting for very many reasons. What roles do they play in the learning and development ecosystem? How do they measure effectiveness and learning outcomes? What kinds of pedagogical and instructional design practices do they support and advocate for? What education-related claims do they make?

two people working on five laptops. They sit at a table littered with other devices, like phones, headset, and ipads. Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash

In a paper we published a few months ago, we examined one such platform because it describes itself as building ‘the university of the future’ and has recently received significant attention and funding. This makes it a compelling case study to better understand the potential roles and risks associated with education platforms operating outside of and alongside more traditional higher education institutions.

We highlight specific concerns about cohort-based platforms. These include lack of transparency, risk of surveillance, lack of adequate financial support for learners, and over-reliance on social media networks as signifiers of educator/instructor qualification (this last one is a big one). Suggested benefits include adaptability, suitability to changing skills needs, and responsiveness to changing environmental scenarios.

The published version of the paper is here, but here’s a pre-print pdf: Veletsianos, G., & Houlden, S. (in press). On the “university of the future”: A critical analysis of cohort-based course platform Maven. Learning, Media, & Technology. 

 

A crowdsourced collection of 101 creative ideas to use AI in education

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On June 26, 2023

In sharing

I recently came across a crowdsourced open educational resource which includes 101 ways that AI can be used in education, ranging anywhere from “ask students to read a paper about AI” to engaging in think-pair-share activities, to creating and interviewing learner personas, to exploring gender biases inherent in the data guiding AI tools.

Overall, an expansive and wonderful resource that you can download at https://zenodo.org/record/8072950

Chrissi Nerantzi, Sandra Abbeglen, Marianna Karatsiori, & Antonio Martínez-Arboleda (Eds.). (2023). 101 creative ideas to use AI in education, A crowdsourced collection (2023 1.0) [Computer software]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8072950

Speculative Learning Futures podcast: Episode 7 with Drs. Mark Brown and Kathrin Otrel-Cass

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On June 5, 2023

In speculative futures, speculative learning futures podcast

One of the knowledge mobilization activities of my SSHRC grant on education futures was a podcast. This post shares episode 7 of 7.

First, a bit of background

The future of education is open and contested. In this podcast we approach the future of education from a storytelling perspective.Stories about the future of education are diverse, complex, and run the gamut of wild hope to doom and despair. In some of these stories techno-optimism drives what is thought to be possible. In others, education is imagined to be a regenerative cultural force. In yet others, the impact of capitalism and authoritarian systems of surveillance already taking hold in education create dystopian spaces of control and management. The stories we tell have the power to create the world we live in. Understanding the stories we tell about what is possible, and the trends in those stories, can give us insight into the present, into ourselves and each other, and the worlds we might seek to or are already in the process of creating.

What are the stories being told about the future of higher education today? Who tells them? What do these stories reveal about our values and our assumptions? What do they reveal about technology and about our universities? What do they say about the future, but also about the present? The speculative learning futures podcast,brings together diverse voices and perspectives, from artists to scholars of different backgrounds, to imagine and discuss the future of education and the role of storytelling in moving towards or away from those futures. [As an aside: More on this questions in this paper and this paper. And if you have a paper of yours that centers these questions, consider submitting it to a journal special issue I am co-editing].

Subscribe to all episodes on Google, Apple, or Spotify. Or, if you prefer to download the mp3 files without subscribing, you can download all of them from here.

Episode 6

In this episode, George and Shandell sit down with Mark Brown and Kathrin Otrel-Cassto bring a sense of closure to the podcast. Our guests voice similar hopes to other guests around a desire for slower, more ethical futures. We also get into the nitty gritty of what futures can and can’t do for us in the present. What are we actually doing when we imagine the future? What are the limits of this work? What are our responsibilities as publicly-funded scholars when  futures methodologies become part of how we do research?

Professor Mark Borwn has over 30-years experience of working in Higher Education and has played key leadership roles in the development, implementation and evaluation of several major university-wide digital learning and teaching initiatives. Before taking up his current position, as Ireland’s first Chair in Digital Learning and Director of the National Institute for Digital Learning, Mark was Director of the National Centre for Teaching and Learning at Massey University, New Zealand.

Kathrin Otrel-Cass, Ph.D., is Professor of educational research and digital transformation at the University of Graz, Austria. Her research methods are in many cases grounded in visual ethnography. Her interest in visuality has led to the establishment of a video research laboratory at her previous workplace at the University of Aalborg in Denmark and in Graz she has built the first Austrian video case archive for teacher education. She is the coordinator of the ESERA SIG on video based research and has a published record on topics to do with visuality in educational research.

Acknowledgements

We are deeply grateful to the guests who spoke with us for each of the episodes of this series. We’re also fraeful to the Digital Public Interest Collective for their support, in dedicating the third series of the Digital Public Interest Collective podcast to education. Editing was provided by Andrea Galizia, and production advice was provided by Dr. Jaigris Hodson. The podcast was produced with funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Grant #430-2020-00404)

Speculative Learning Futures podcast: Episode 6 with Amy Sojot

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On June 3, 2023

In speculative futures, speculative learning futures podcast

One of the knowledge mobilization activities of my SSHRC grant on education futures was a podcast. This post shares episode 6 of 7.

First, a bit of background

The future of education is open and contested. In this podcast we approach the future of education from a storytelling perspective.Stories about the future of education are diverse, complex, and run the gamut of wild hope to doom and despair. In some of these stories techno-optimism drives what is thought to be possible. In others, education is imagined to be a regenerative cultural force. In yet others, the impact of capitalism and authoritarian systems of surveillance already taking hold in education create dystopian spaces of control and management. The stories we tell have the power to create the world we live in. Understanding the stories we tell about what is possible, and the trends in those stories, can give us insight into the present, into ourselves and each other, and the worlds we might seek to or are already in the process of creating.

What are the stories being told about the future of higher education today? Who tells them? What do these stories reveal about our values and our assumptions? What do they reveal about technology and about our universities? What do they say about the future, but also about the present? The speculative learning futures podcast,brings together diverse voices and perspectives, from artists to scholars of different backgrounds, to imagine and discuss the future of education and the role of storytelling in moving towards or away from those futures. [As an aside: More on this questions in this paper and this paper. And if you have a paper of yours that centers these questions, consider submitting it to a journal special issue I am co-editing].

Subscribe to all episodes on Google, Apple, or Spotify. Or, if you prefer to download the mp3 files without subscribing, you can download all of them from here.

Episode 6

In this episode, Shandell chats with Amy Sojot, a PhD candidate in the Department of Educational Foundations at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Amy’s research uses interdisciplinary approaches to address contemporary educational assumptions through philosophy, political theory, cultural studies, and pop-cultural critique. She is an active member of the Tinalak Filipino Education Advisory Council and the College of Education Doctoral Students Association (COEDSA) Council, serving as COEDSA Chair from 2017–2019. Appreciating the playful side of theory and philosophy, Amy relishes a nerdy conceptual pun. This focused conversation, drills down into the details of a recent paper Amy wrote on “Cronenberg Pedagogies,” a paper which is a weird as it sounds. Amy’s take on the future of education is grounded in ethics but Shandell says “joy, given how much fun it was to talk.”

Acknowledgements

We are deeply grateful to the guests who spoke with us for each of the episodes of this series. We’re also fraeful to the Digital Public Interest Collective for their support, in dedicating the third series of the Digital Public Interest Collective podcast to education. Editing was provided by Andrea Galizia, and production advice was provided by Dr. Jaigris Hodson. The podcast was produced with funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Grant #430-2020-00404)

Speculative Learning Futures podcast: Episode 5 with Dr. Nilofar Shidmehr

By

On June 2, 2023

In speculative futures, speculative learning futures podcast

One of the knowledge mobilization activities of my SSHRC grant on education futures was a podcast. This post shares episode 5 of 7.

First, a bit of background

The future of education is open and contested. In this podcast we approach the future of education from a storytelling perspective.Stories about the future of education are diverse, complex, and run the gamut of wild hope to doom and despair. In some of these stories techno-optimism drives what is thought to be possible. In others, education is imagined to be a regenerative cultural force. In yet others, the impact of capitalism and authoritarian systems of surveillance already taking hold in education create dystopian spaces of control and management. The stories we tell have the power to create the world we live in. Understanding the stories we tell about what is possible, and the trends in those stories, can give us insight into the present, into ourselves and each other, and the worlds we might seek to or are already in the process of creating.

What are the stories being told about the future of higher education today? Who tells them? What do these stories reveal about our values and our assumptions? What do they reveal about technology and about our universities? What do they say about the future, but also about the present? The speculative learning futures podcast,brings together diverse voices and perspectives, from artists to scholars of different backgrounds, to imagine and discuss the future of education and the role of storytelling in moving towards or away from those futures. [As an aside: More on this questions in this paper and this paper. And if you have a paper of yours that centers these questions, consider submitting it to a journal special issue I am co-editing].

Subscribe to all episodes on Google, Apple, or Spotify. Or, if you prefer to download the mp3 files without subscribing, you can download all of them from here.

Episode 5

In this episode, Shandell has an intimate conversation with Dr. Nilofar Shidmehr, an Iranian Canadian poet, where they explore what creativity, imagination, and perhaps most importantly, connection mean to learning today. What is the value of making art for doing scholarly research and creating knowledge? What can we learn about learning and education from appreciating what different education systems offer or constrain? Nilofar is a bit of a renaissance woman, earning a BSc in Mechanical Engineering, before abandoning that career to go on and earn a BA in Philosophy and Creative Writing, an MFA in Creative Writing, and a PhD in Cross Faculty Inquiry in Education, all from the University of British Columbia. She’s published widely in literary journals as well as in scholarly contexts, and is a scholar of arts-informed research and one of the pioneers of poetic inquiry as a methodology of research. Currently, she teaches related courses in the Liberal Arts Program at Simon Fraser University. She has published five books of poetry and two collections of short stories in English and Persian.

Acknowledgements

We are deeply grateful to the guests who spoke with us for each of the episodes of this series. We’re also fraeful to the Digital Public Interest Collective for their support, in dedicating the third series of the Digital Public Interest Collective podcast to education. Editing was provided by Andrea Galizia, and production advice was provided by Dr. Jaigris Hodson. The podcast was produced with funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Grant #430-2020-00404)

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