 Ond ychydig i gyda'r gweithio o'r ffordd, mae'n cael ei wneud i gyfnod i ddweud ar dweud I Wlin, wedi gynhyrchu'r cyfnod eich gwirio'r cyllid. Mae'n cael ei ddod i'r holl o'r clywed o'r cyfrifiad, wedi'u cyfrifiad gen'na gweithio'r gwahau yma, a'i yn gwneud y bydd y mynd yn y ffordd o'i cynhyrchu. Felly, a oedd yn cael ei gwirio'u cyfrifiad arall mewn ei ffordd. Fe yna cael ei gŵr, mae'n gwahanol i'r ysgol, I am originally Irish, I was born in Cork, my dad was from Clare. That's me on the left with the knobbly knees at my uncle's wedding when I was five. My parents moved to England when I was five or six. You did not want to have a West Cork accent in London in the 70s I can assure you. So hence the very non West Cork accent nowadays. I now live in a very beautiful small village in Northamptonshire called Grimscut. There's only about 40 or 50 houses, it's really, really lovely part of the world. I've got two daughters, Eleanor who's 22, she's in her final year at University in Bristol. Mega into climbing and caving sends me these terrifying pictures. Recently fell off a mountain and broke a leg. And my little one Tabby who's just turned 18 and this was her on her 18th birthday. We sent her to the bar to buy the round of drinks. I paid of course. And we have a bit of a thing about cats in the house and there's a bit of a Harry Potter theme. So this is my favorite Mr Snape's who's sitting on the food box, of course. So just because it's after lunch and you're probably a bit sleepy, I just want to take a couple of minutes to get you to think about this question. What do you think are the five transformative technologies? And I won't give any caveat to that, but I just want you to talk on your table for just a couple of minutes. What do you think have been the transformative technologies in our area? OK, I know I probably haven't given you enough time for that, but I just wanted to get you thinking a little bit. Anybody want to shout out some of the technologies that came up in their discussions? Sorry? Mobile phones, absolutely. Yep. Yep. Which? Yep. Good one. One more? Sorry? Yep. And of course the caveat is it depends on what time scale you're talking about. You can go right back to, as you say, the emergence of the printing press, or you can start with recent things. For me, and it's always dangerous to do this, if we think about recent years, I've listed these five as important for me. The first is the web and Wi-Fi, and I don't think any of us could have imagined the transformative effect that the web would have on our lives, on all aspects of our lives. We would just expect to be able to be on all the time. Learning management systems. Now I know that's a bit of a controversial one. There's a backlash against learning management system, the rise of the discourse of personal learning environments. Nonetheless, I do think they were fundamentally important, because our institutions then had to say that technologies were no longer peripheral to education, but were a core part of what we were offering our learners. So I think they've been very important in that sense. Mobile devices, I would totally agree. So anywhere without my iPad Air, it's amazing. I find it absolutely fantastic, likewise my mobile phone. Open education resources, massive open online courses, and Sharon this morning touched a little bit about the impressive range of courses that they have at Edinburgh. For me, social media. Social media has transformed my practice in terms of what I'm doing. I've said this many times before, if I publish in a closed journal, I'm lucky if maybe five people read the abstract. If I publish a blog post and tweet it, it goes out to 8,000 people, and if three people retweet that, it goes out to many, many more. So for many of us, as teachers, as learners, as researchers, social media is a fundamental part of what we're doing. We heard today that we're trending in Ireland on Twitter, which is great, and I'm sure lots of people are following the conference virtually through Twitter or through the posts that people are putting on Facebook. So these are great in many senses. It means we have access as learners, as teachers, as researchers to a rich variety of interactive resources and materials. We have many, many ways to communicate and collaborate, and I have worked at many institutions now, but actually I feel much more part of a global community of peers through social media. We have instant access to knowledge, arguably anything you want to know is available on the web, and these practices enable us to be more open in terms of what we do, and we can be portable across different devices and locations. But there are, of course, challenges. In terms of the web and Wi-Fi, we've got an issue if we don't have connectivity, we expect to be able to be online all the time, and there are issues in terms of downtime, in terms of the dangers of being online 24-7. LMSs have been criticised particularly because they tend to be institutionally focused and often they're not transferable, and in a world where we're trying to engender lifelong learners, that's an issue. There can be issues in terms of battery life for mobile devices, there can be fragile, and many times web pages are not rendered appropriately. MOOCs, finding and evaluating appropriate resources can be an issue. There can be a lack of support and we've heard lots about the discourse about the high dropout rates of MOOCs, for example, and the issues around no formal mechanisms for recognition. Although I'll come back to that from a study that we were recently involved with with the IPTS in Seville. Social media, many people would argue, can be confusing, and there can be an issue about the balance of white noise versus relevance. So what about researching digital learning? What is digital learning and what do we mean by researching digital learning? To me, it's about researching and critiquing the use of technologies in education, and I agree with many, many of the points that Sean made this morning about the different discourses and the issues around the discourses. So at the heart of this, we've got the learner and the teacher who are interacting with technologies and their associated affordances. It was nice to hear the President this morning talking about affordances. I'm very fond of in terms of the notion of technologies have particular characteristics, but those are only instantiated when they interact with the user. And also learners and teachers are interacting with resources and in particular increasingly OERs and MOOCs. And then alongside that, we can look at some of the interventions we can take up in terms of what's happening in the space between learners and teachers, technologies and resources. We can put in place different pedagogical approaches and strategies and learning designs, and then we can critique and evaluate it if you like through various theory and methodology. So for me, that's the kind of landscape that we're looking at in terms of researching digital learning. So what are the facets of digital learning? For me, there are three main aspects. The first are organisational issues in terms of things like structures and processes around the use of technology for education, mechanisms and support for staff development, changing roles, the role of strategy and policy. And then there are the pedagogical aspects, which is probably where my heart lies. Things like illiteracies, and I'll come back to some work I'm currently doing on a MOOC on illiteracies, different pedagogical approaches, learning design, which is one of my key areas of interest, a notion that we can help teachers make more informed design decisions that are pedagogically effective and make appropriate use of technologies. Experiences, perceptions of teachers, of students of the use of technology, different case studies of innovation and how we can transfer those to other contexts and modes of practice. And finally, the underpinning technologies in terms of new emergent technologies, mobile we heard about before and ubiquitous technologies, cloud computing, personalised and adaptive technologies, increasingly coming back into the discourses and the nature of infrastructures. I was interested to hear in Mark Brown's presentation earlier on about the Irish Horizon report in terms of the need to develop infrastructures to support technologies. So where are we in terms of our field? We've been around, if you like, as I said in the abstract, you could argue back to the 1960s, depends on where you want to take your timeframe. But really for me, an emergence of a research field goes through these five stages and it's interesting for me to reflect my personal experience because I came into this area in the late 80s when I was originally a lecturer in chemistry. So you have the initial stage, there's no field, there's no research questions of interest. And then you get the beginnings of questions to be asked and you see the emergence of people starting to take an interest in this. And that was certainly the case for me personally because as a lecturer in chemistry, I found creating interactive resources for my students raised questions for me about how effective those resources were and made me want to research them. Stage three, you start to see more people moving to the field. Stage four, you get diversification and different schools of thoughts and approaches and finally you get an established field. Now I think in terms of where we are, I would argue that we're between stages four and five and we're saying about the quality of the papers at this conference which I also think have been really, really excellent. So I think we are between stages four and five, we're not quite there and there are fundamental issues still with our field. But we've seen an influx of researchers, we've seen many, many masters in PhD programmes, we've got a growth of research centres such as the one here at DCU, specialised journals and conferences, I've put up distance education in the pink there which is one of the most established journals in the field and then you've got the emergence of open journals such as the Rodel at Nexon Journal which was edited by Terry Anderson, I think somebody else is doing it now. And we have a community fostering debate both face-to-face through conferences like this and through the use of social media. Fundamentally, our field is very interdisciplinary and this is at the heart of work I've been doing with Eileen Scanlon as part of some ESRC funded research in the UK. We published a report in 2010 on that and we have a paper we've literally just submitted to BJet on this actually just a couple of days ago. We interviewed about 25 key researchers in the field from around the world and we asked them various questions, their background, their methodological approaches, their theoretical perspectives, what they thought were the key benefits and challenges of the field and we found there was a variety of feeder disciplines, education, computing, subject disciplines. The benefits that they cited were that there were wealth of methods and approaches and different perspectives which was very valuable and that goes to the heart of it being interdisciplinary. But the drawbacks were that there were no shared, that we have no proper shared language or understanding. Many still criticise us as a field for being lacking rigor and there's little although there is some theoretical underpinning. I caught the end of a presentation before lunch where somebody was talking about activity theory for example and that socio-cultural approach has been a key aspect of what a lot of us draw on. And it also relates to a very nice project which was led by Richard Millwood at Trinity here, the hotel project which did a map of the different learning theories back to their original cognate discipline and I think that very much highlights the nature of the interdisciplinarity of our field. So what kind of research methods are we using? Of course choice of methods has an impact on the outcomes of our research and our findings and we tend to be biased towards our own previous experience and favoured methods and there's still a tension between quantitative and qualitative approaches. I would argue in Europe we tend to be much more qualitative in what we do because in North America they're much more quantitative in what they do. So there's really quite a stark difference between the research in this area across the two continents. Lots of different approaches, case studies are very popular, ways in which we can develop generic models to understand our area, undergoing systematic reviews although I think there's not enough of that, applying specific theoretical perspectives to understand our findings and of course good old action research. So what are some of the characteristics of digital learning research? I go back to a book that I co-edited with Martin Oliver in 2007 where we got together about 30 researchers in the field at the time and we locked ourselves away in a beautiful castle, Soodley Castle in the UK for three days and we tried to thrash out what we meant by at the time we called e-learning research. We tried to articulate is this a new field? What do we mean by what constitutes it? And we came up with these characteristics across the various aspects of things we were interested in. First by the very nature of what we're doing the field is constantly changing. We're constantly seeing new emerging technologies. We're constantly seeing the way in which we interact with technologies changing, we're changing our practices, the co-evolution of the affordances of technologies and how we interact with them. By nature the field is very political. It can't stand in isolation. It's not a pure theoretical field, it's very much applied. It has major implications for policy and practice and that often causes tensions for where the research is located, whether it's in a central unit or in a discipline area. As I mentioned before it's very interdisciplinary which I think is a strength on the whole but there are weaknesses and there are issues around inclusion versus exclusion in terms of the field and for Mark a few years ago at an acolyte conference in New Zealand I did a talk specifically looking at inclusion and exclusion around OERs and MOOCs and as with every aspect of technology there are always two sides of a coin. There's always the good and the bad. It's interactive and as Sean very eloquently stated in her keynote this morning there's this issue about the hype, the promise of technologies and whether we have enough of a critical discourse. So in the second half I just want to look at some key themes. I want to pick out some of the good and bad of technologies, the nature of speed of change and what that means for our fields, look at new collaborations and discourses, the need to be user focused, changing practice and the wider impact. So in terms of the good and the bad we have a tension between institutionally focused systems and more open practices and what that means and that's very much evident in the discourse around VLEs, LMSs versus personal learning environments or more open practices. We have the issue of the affordances of technologies and fit for purpose. Who owns what in the nature of these things? If I give a lecture and it's not recorded, it's out there in the ether. If I write something down and put it on the web who owns that practice, who owns that material? There's the issue of simplifying the complex which is a real issue for our fields and raises fundamental methodological and theoretical challenges I would argue and the balance in terms of how we use technologies to present content or enable activity. In terms of speed of change we're constantly seeing new tools and resources emerging every day. We can't possibly keep up and many argue that we're in a world of an ecology of abundance and we should be talking about ecologies of practice rather than economics of practice. How do we predict the unpredictable? Mark again in his talk raised the issue about the horizon reports trying to predict what technologies will have an impact in one and three and five years time and that there's a gap in fact between the predictions and what they suggest might happen and what actually happens. It's very difficult to see into the future even in the near future in our fields. Castells talks about inform to bewilderment which I think is a really nice phrase and I think fits very well with our area and we're seeing a blurring of real and virtual in the area. In terms of new collaborations and discourses we're seeing new and exciting distributed communities of practice and we have a variety of ways to communicate. I on a daily basis would use Twitter and Facebook on a regular basis to interact with peers and I have an onion layer of people I interact with over time so we have an amazing way in which we can communicate and I do think it's fundamentally changed our practice. We have the issue of distributed cognition going back to Salomon's work in the early 90s the notion that our understanding now our experience of the world is not just in our heads it's distributed in our network of things we connect with and it's how we use the power of filtering to be able to get to the information we need at the time things like of course hashtags or looking at so and so to find out what somebody is saying. So it's about tailoring and contextualising and making sense of that white noise so we find the information that we find useful and of course and it links to what Catherine was saying earlier on in a talk she gave earlier on Catherine Cronan it's about new forms of digital literacy and the power of the narrative and working out what is our personal narrative and what does it mean what does it mean to be me in a virtual environment how do I want to be perceived how open do I want to be what does that mean. In terms of digital literacy I'm currently involved in a project for the OERU foundation which is an international consortium led by Wayne McIntosh from New Zealand where institutions sign up and students can go to those institutions and say I've learnt through these OERs or these MOOCs and I want credit through your institution Athabasca or UNISA or wherever for this material very interesting organisation I'm currently developing with Wayne a course called Learning in a Digital Age MOOC which is aimed at first year undergraduate students to help them to develop their digital learning literacies for their learning practices The course is very much open in nature and uses a lot of social media and we encourage participant engagement We've got four micro courses of 40 hours each one on digital skills for online learning digital citizenship, open education and media literacy and digital practices The next theme I wanted to talk about is the nature of understanding users and I would argue that we need to adopt a much more ethnographic approach to what's going on, thanks and it's about understanding that it's about interacting with the technologies and adapting and personalising but we also need to think of the role of teachers in this whole process and the fact that it's constantly changing in terms of the perpetual beta I heard a talk just before lunch looking at design-based research and that very much is at the heart of design-based research and of course it's about developing for the unknown going back again to those overarching characteristics and the fact that fundamentally in our field change is a key component So what about changing practices? I'd like to draw on Martin Wellersbrook from 2011 Anyone of you who know Martin will know he totally adopts open practices so everything he does is freely available and this is online I haven't read this, I really recommend it and the changing roles we're seeing as learners as teachers and researchers the new kind of organisational structures and processes we're seeing how do we motivate teachers and learners in this area particularly in research-led institutions there's a real tension between somebody doing research and innovating in their teaching where are the rewards and what kind of new methodologies do we need to understand this changing practice? In terms of open practices more generally there's a very nice book that came out at the end of last year by Curtis, Bonk and others Mook's an open education it's an edited book and it's got some of the key researchers in the field giving you a real flavour of research in this area so the fundamental premises digital technologies enable more open practices and we're increasingly seeing free resources and expertise and increasingly Mook's and OER's have been seen as very important and need to be taken account of in relation to the whole spectrum of educational offerings and with this respect I recently led a team when I was at Leicester University where we did a report for the IPTS organisation in Seville and we looked at ways in which you can recognise non-formal and informal learning and we found a range of practices and were able to articulate some of those and we saw a number of barriers that online interestingly is still seen as lower value there's a lack of guidance for institutions and individuals in terms of recognition options there's the issue of the cost of recognition and there's a need to unbondle learning provision so the final theme I wanted to talk about is the wider impact as a result of open practices and digital technologies we're seeing a whole range of new models for education and many things like OER's and Mook's are challenging traditional educational offerings we're seeing a blurring of boundaries in all sorts of ways and we're working in a changing world we're training learners to go out into a world to do jobs that don't even exist yet and I think we're starting to see an unbundling of education where learners will choose to pay for high quality resources, learning pathways to support or accreditation but not necessarily the traditional three year degree and the final point is that technologies are here and they're here to stay and they're going to continue to have a major impact on our sector so I just wanted to put this in context in terms of digital learning research in terms of the past, the current and the future and I think the research needs to impact an informed practice I think that's very important as I said before it's a applied field and we need to be aware of that it should fundamentally be about improving resources for our learners and hence enhancing the learner experience it should be able to harness technologies and their affordances effectively so the research should inform how we use technologies and it should guide strategy and shape policy and it should help develop the theoretical perspective so I still think that's an under theorised area that we need to think more about the theoretical perspectives under pinning our field and finally it should support professional development always dangerous but to conclude I wanted to peer a little bit into the future Mark talked about the new media consortium Horizon reports which give an indication of the technologies that are likely to have an impact in one, three and five years time as he rightly said and he mentioned Stephen Downs and Audrey Waters there's been much criticisms in these reports and that they're quite technologically deterministic if you like but nonetheless they are important useful pointers I personally like the innovating pedagogy reports that the Open University UK come out with on an annual basis they haven't yet done the one for this year but they list 10 technologies and all practices that are changing so they're more nuanced than the Horizon reports so if you haven't seen those I recommend looking at them but picking up across these different reports I think there are a number of things for me that are likely to be important in the next few years or if you like maybe I should say we should keep an eye on artificial intelligence very interesting video by Stephen Hawking who is a physicist about the dangers of AI and why we should be worried about what that might mean in the UK a series called humans has just started have people seen that? so that's just started this week which is about the kind of dangers of AI and of course then you've got the black mirror series as well about the kind of darker side of technologies cloud computing augmented and virtual reality and as Mark said in his talk have come and gone over time and we've seen hype around things like virtual worlds in 2005 you hear nothing about them now and you get things creeping back into the discourse for example gamification learning analytics and adaptive learning and there's been quite a lot of discussion over the day so far about learning analytics and effective computing so I think for me these are some of the things I'll certainly be keeping an eye on next year or two and Mark also mentioned the Irish horizon report and I picked out three things in relation to that the need to rethink the role of educators which is fundamentally at the heart of the work I do on learning design the rise and importance of blended and hybrid learning and the need for more robust and technologically enabled infrastructures in the Irish context if you haven't seen it before Pearson's have done a very nice series of videos looking at the future of education 2020 and they've got a series of about four or five videos and they've got this overarching infographic which kind of says these changes point to the way forward a diverse learning ecosystem in which learning adapts to each child instead of each child trying to adapt to school so it kind of articulates a vision of what the future of learning could or maybe should be if technologies are used appropriately very finally and I put this back in after some discussions with people at the beginning of today how do we enable digital learning, where do we go forward with this, how do we get beyond the hype and the often disappointment that the hype isn't realised for me fundamentally I think the issue at the heart of the lack of take-up of technologies is that teachers lack the necessary digital literacy skills to make effective use of digital technologies and I think we need to think more closely about the relationship between learning design and learning analytics learning design as it enables us to help teachers make informed pedagogically informed design decisions and effective or appropriate use of digital technologies and learning analytics in terms of analysing the data underneath for example our learning management systems to better understand how students can learn so we put in place good design practice we implement it, we look at the analytics and we adapt and we cycle around iteratively. So finally to conclude take home messages I think it's a really really exciting time for our field I think we are seeing increasingly critical perspectives and methodologies but I think we need to do more on this there are challenges the balance of noise and relevance finding good quality resources both as teachers and learners issues around fragmented identities and the need for new digital illiteracies the continuing need for professional development and the need to change our assessment practices to deal with the world which is constantly changing and we need to go beyond knowledge recall Finally I'll leave you with a couple of questions What are the key research questions that we need to address as a field, as a community of peers and how do we ensure that our work actually has a real impact on policy and practice Thank you for listening