Time has been short for Week 1 activities due to the winter vomiting virus making a late and unwelcome visit to my family! So I’ve only had time to have a quick shufti at the videos giving examples of technology enhancing learning and the one that really stood out for me was Eric Mazur.
As other people have already commented, his ideas in this keynote are really more about a specific approach to teaching and learning – peer instruction as he has dubbed it, rather than about the technology. He has encouraged students to use clicker for many years in order to vote on questions, but the big idea is not the use of this technology, it’s just one of the methods he uses to facilitate peer instruction. I really like his idea of getting the students to do the first “easy” stage of learning (information transfer) by reading, watching or listening to something before the lecture and then using the face to face time to focus on the “hard part” (assimilation). Teaching by asking rather than telling seems counter-intuitive, but it is the ideal way to encourage active learning. I haven’t had time yet to think about how I am going to incorporate these ideas into my teaching, but they definitely lend themselves to the teaching of information skills so I do intend to.
Behavioural and Social Sciences Subject Librarian at the University of Huddersfield.