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!
