Contextual Statement

Brief Bio

Why CMALT?

CMALT provides an opportunity to curate and reflect upon the body of work and knowledge that I have been immersed in for over 20 years of practice as an educator. CMALT also provides the on-going support of an active global community of educational technology researchers and practitioners.

My Contextual Statement:

The prime driver behind my research into the scholarship of technology enhanced learning or SOTEL (Wickens, 2006) is my own experience of developing as a tertiary lecturer. In my observations as an academic advisor, reflective teachers develop their own synthesis of various pedagogical models, choosing the aspects that align with their own learning and teaching style, and their ever developing understanding of the learning environment. This comes from reflecting upon teaching experiences, and aligning these with current learning theory (Brookfield, 1995, Larrivee, 2000). There have been several key influences in the development of my pedagogical outlook:

1. Constructive learning theory (Bruner, 1966, Weimer, 2002, Wadsworth, 1996)
2. Constructive alignment (Biggs, 2003)
3. Diana Laurillard’s Conversational Framework (Laurillard, 2001)
4. Social Constructivism in its many emergent forms (Herrington and Herrington, 2006a, McLoughlin and Lee, 2008b)
5. Communities of Practice (Wenger et al., 2005)
6. The concept of the Pedagogy-Andragogy-Heutagogy Continuum and student-determined learning (Luckin et al., 2010).
7. The SAMR framework of educational technology adoption (Puentedura, 2006).

These have resonated with my personal experiences of teaching and learning, and from these I have developed a synthesis that I have successfully used in teaching, in particular in utilizing technology to enhance the learning environment for myself and my students. My experience of establishing a wireless laptop scheme for students in my previous role of Audio Engineering and Music Production lecturer (Cochrane, 2003, Webster, 2004) convinced me of the transformative impact of mlearning in education. My experience of multimedia learning object development for my Masters Thesis also convinced me of the limitations of multimedia content delivery with its reliance upon specialised developer skills (Cochrane, 2005, Cochrane, 2007). Therefore I favour a student-centred, interactive, collaborative approach to developing a unique learning community for each different group of learners, enhanced by collaborative communications made available by technology. Wireless mobile computing and social software have matured into useful tools to facilitate this approach to learning communities within mainstream tertiary education, creating a foundation for student-generated content and student-generated contexts.
However this is not the norm in tertiary education, as Herrington and Herrington (2006b) observe, behaviourism and content transmission are still the dominant paradigms, which is supported by my own observations in my role as an academic advisor. Good pedagogy, as defined by Dewald (1999) focuses upon enhancing the student experience and the desired graduate profiles. Graduate profiles include student capabilities and how they will be expected to engage in the workforce community (Allen Consulting Group, 2004). Today’s graduates need to be life-long learners, and capable of critical, reflective, and creative thinking, able to work in and contribute to teams (Hager and Holland, 2006). Behaviourism focuses upon teacher-centred approaches in higher education (Dewald, 1999, Ally, 2008, Brown, 2006), whereas social constructivism focuses upon learner-centred approaches that model and facilitate the type of graduate profiles described above (Bruns, 2007, McLoughlin and Lee, 2008b). For example, Herrington and Herrington (2006b) critique the predominant behaviourist, knowledge-transmission pedagogies found in higher education, and present authentic learning as an alternative:
Typically university education has been a place to learn theoretical knowledge devoid of context… What employers, governments and nations require are graduates that display attributes necessary for knowledge building communities: graduates who can create, innovate, and communicate in their chosen profession. (Herrington and Herrington, 2006b)

I have been driven by a desire to bring about positive pedagogical change, informed by reflective practice research, in the areas of: professional development for lecturers to utilize and integrate mobile and social media tools into their curricula to facilitate flexible social constructivist learning environments for their students, and facilitating the changes in institutional strategy and wireless infrastructure required to facilitate a student-owned (BYOD) wireless mobile device model of computing. Several factors have contributed to make this a possibility: the roll-out of almost ubiquitous wireless connectivity via wifi and 4G broadband, the maturing of smartphones into powerful mobile multimedia computers with unique affordances to augment how we conceptualise and interact with the world around us, the rapid development of mobile social media, and the conceptualisation of new social constructivist pedagogies such as authentic learning (Herrington and Herrington, 2006a, Herrington and Oliver, 2000), pedagogy 2.0 (McLoughlin and Lee, 2008a, McLoughlin and Lee, 2010), connectivism (Siemens, 2004), navigationism (Brown, 2005, Brown, 2006), and heutagogy (Hase & Kenyon, 2007).

In summary I view mlearning as a catalyst of pedagogical change that can be leveraged by lecturers modeling the pedagogical use of mobile and social media tools for facilitating reflective reconception of teaching and learning, moving from teacher-directed pedagogy to learner-generated content and learner-generated contexts.

UPDATE 2018: While my specialisation is still mobile learning, my focus has broadened to encompass the scholarship of technology enhanced learning (Haynes, 2016) as a framework for lecturer professional development and critical reflective praxis in higher education. this is reified in the development of the SOTEL Research Cluster network, that I initiated in late 2017 and launched at the inaugural SOTEL.NZ Symposium 15 February 2018. This is a collaborative project, particularly with my CfLAT colleague Dr Vickel Narayan. We now have a network of 12 Cluster Groups, and 79 members – this is an exciting work in progress, and a great vehicle for mentoring colleagues into the global community of TEL researcher/practitioners.

2023 Update: At the end of 2018 I was elected as a member of the ASCILITE Executive and have been re-elected twice since. In 2019 I received promotion to Associate Professor while at Auckland University of Technology (AUT) and then in 2020 accepted a position as Associate Professor Technology Enhanced Learning in Higher Education at the Centre for the Study of Higher Education (CSHE) at the University of Melbourne. However, while preparing to move to Melbourne in April 2020 New Zealand closed its borders and went into hard lockdown in response to the COVID19 global pandemic! Consequently I worked remotely from NZ for CSHE for an entire year via Zoom and MS Teams etc… until the border bubble briefly opened in 2021 when I moved to Melbourne. In June 2021 Melbourne (Victoria, Australia) went into lockdown4-5&6 and I found myself working remotely from a small apartment in Carlton, Melbourne once again via Zoom and MS Teams etc… and unable to visit family in NZ for an entire year due to border closures! It was a difficult time to start a new job in a new country and make networks with new colleagues and students – many of whom I never met beyond a Zoom webcam for over two years! While education and the world grappled with change I found support from the networks established prior to the pandemic, in particular the SoTEL network and the ASCILITE Mobile Learning Special Interest Group (MLSIG) and making new networks with new colleagues online. During 2020 I established the SoTEL Research Network at the University of Melbourne and CSHE pivoted to primarily online Webinars, Workshops, and the GCUT (Graduate Certificate in Higher Education) going fully online for the first time. Semester2 2022 and 2023 have seen the development of a new normal and rethinking the place of F2F education – and I have finally met most of my University of Melbourne colleagues. In 2021-2022 I led the development of ASCILITE Publications (APUBS) to publish ASCILITE Conference proceedings and the past 27 years proceedings, and the MLSIG reimagined the evolution of Mobile Learning (Cochrane et al., 2022; Birt et al., 2023). 2023 also highlighted the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and in particular the public awareness of Large Language Models such as ChatGPT and their impact on academic integrity – as well as the potential (Cochrane & Ryan, 2023). I’ll unpack the impact of these events and highlights in my 2023 updates for each section of my SCMALT eportfolio.

References:

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Biggs, J. 2003. Teaching for Quality Learning at University, Buckingham, The Society for Research into Higher Education.

Birt, J., Cochrane, T., Narayan, V., & Goldacre, P. (2023). Evolution of mobile learning. In D. B. Porter, C. Campbell, D. Logan-Fleming, & H. Jones (Eds.), Bringing the Australasian Technology and Practice Trends into Focus: The 2022–2023 Contextualising Horizon Report (pp. 20-21). https://ascilite.org/get-involved/contextualising-horizon/

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Cochrane, T. Creating an e-learning environment for a polytechnic course. eFest 2003, 2003 CPIT Christchurch. IAssociation of Polytechnics of New Zealand.

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Cochrane, T., Narayan, V., Aiello, S., Alizadeh, M., Birt, J., Bone, E., Cowie, N., Cowling, M., Deneen, C., Goldacre, P., Sinfield, D., Stretton, T., & Worthington, T. (2022). Analysing Mobile Learning Designs: A Framework for Transforming Learning Post COVID. Australasia Journal of Educational Technology (AJET), 38(4), 1-21. https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.7997

Cochrane, T., & Ryan, T. (2023). CHATGPT and Academic Integrity: Options for adapting assessment in semester 1 2023. CSHE. Retrieved 13 December from https://melbourne-cshe.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/4671856/ChatGPT-and-Academic-Integrity.pdf

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Mcloughlin, C. & Lee, M. 2010. Pedagogy 2.0: Critical challenges and responses to web 2.0 and social software in tertiary teaching. In: Lee, M. & Mcloughlin, C. (eds.) Web 2.0-Based E-Learning: Applying Social Informatics for Tertiary Teaching. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.

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Wenger, E., White, N., Smith, J. & Rowe, K. 2005. Technology for Communities. In: Langelier, L. (ed.) Working, Learning and Collaborating in a Network: Guide to the implementation and leadership of intentional communities of practice. Quebec City: CEFIRO.

Wickens, R. 2006. SoTEL: Toward a Scholarship of Technology Enhanced Learning. Canadian Journal of University Continuing Education 32, 21-41.