How learning with technology is like being on Jury Service.

I am a bit behind with my blog posts – my sincere apologies. Curriculum review, Christmas and deadlines. However, I am currently on jury service and find myself in an over warm, unventilated room with a lot of people and nothing to do so I thought I would write you a blog post about it, related to learning technology of course. I have come up with a few similarities between jury service and implementing learning technologies.

• You only have internet on your phone – how can you ever survive the day!

Well for your students, this is probably the norm. They experience most of their life through a hand-held device so embrace it. Be like them. Look for technologies that are mobile friendly, this way your students can work on the bus or while on jury service! Discussion boards are pretty mobile friendly and a good way of getting students to interact. The native Blackboard ones, hideous as they are, will give you the most reliability but other tools like Piazza also have mobile apps. 

 

Podcasts and short videos are also a good way of providing pre-learning information. Anything under 15 minutes and preferably downloadable (for the underground) would be great. You can make these yourself on Panopto or you can direct your students to online sources like TED talks, YouTube or BoB. It is worth being mindful of time as anything that cannot be downloaded will mean using mobile data or being somewhere with Wi-Fi which restricts the places in which students can interact with the content.

• You have no idea what you are doing.

There is an expectation that you will do something. Activate your classroom? Flip it? Digitise it? However, the instructions about how to do it, when to do it and how long it will take are very vague. We can only apologise for this, but things change all the time.

That is not very helpful when you are expected to do something (beware shameless self-promotion). This is why we developed the IMPLEMnT project. It is a community-based tool which collects different technologies and shows their potential uses. It also has a collection of user case studies that allow the community to share practice around what works and what doesn’t. My next project may be to design something similar for the jury service. IMPLEMnT is currently undergoing some upgrades so it not fully functional but we absolutely welcome comments at this stage!

• It’s so boring…. No, it is really interesting…. Oh dear I am so conflicted!

That’s the thing about jury service it could be so interesting, you could learn so much but in reality, you have better things to do and it just gets in the way. Digital learning is like that – you might like to, it might be cool but where are you going to find the time. Not to mention the fact that you have no idea what you are doing. In answer to this I offer my learned friend the long-term view. Many of the reasons people like me advocate for digital is because in the long run it will save you time. Switching that essay to an online peer assessment may be tough the first time around but next time – think of how much less marking you will have to do.

Creating that pre-learning content will take me days!!! Possibly – but once you have done it… you can re-use it as many times as you like. Of course, this is where the likeness to jury service fails. I am not sure there is a long-term benefit (other than lasting damage to my sanity), although I am in a room with no internet catching up on my writing which is a bonus!