 First of all, I'd like to say thank you to the organisers for the invitation and the opportunity and wake up and to describe a journey that I've been on over some time to sort of think about my own teaching and learning and the ways in which things can change and be changed. So mine's a very practical exposition if you like of this journey and the ways in which I went about it and the results of that journey ending up with the impact on the students. And even though I work in Hong Kong and most of my students work in English as a second language, for this particular audience I've chosen a couple of native English speakers in order to communicate to everybody the messages that they have. First of all, the outline basically is to talk a little bit about the context I found myself in in Hong Kong. I've been there seven years. A little bit about learning design as I see it and the ways in which I operate in it. Lots about the students themselves and the nature of that particular group. The tools that I chose to use to try and achieve my aims in the process and then the impact and particularly the voices of the students encouraging my students to reflect on the process of what they've been through. And I chose two very, very experienced practitioners, people who were teachers themselves who had considerable experience and but were put in the position of being students after often a very, very long time. And then I'd like to close with some opportunities and some issues. And I might if there's time end with a small comment from one of the people who talked about university assessment in the future which I thought was interesting. So the context that this took place in is my university, my last job, which was the University of Hong Kong, which is research intensive university. In Hong Kong they have the A level system and the entire experience of most students is very, very didactic. They come through extremely competitive system of exams. Only 18% of students are actually successful in getting into universities in Hong Kong. So they've been through a real sort of narrow channel process in trying to get there. And they're very much focused on face to face, very strong belief about a Confucian tradition that face to face is the beginning, the middle and the end of learning. And there are specific responsibilities for teachers and for students. The argument that's raging through Hong Kong at the moment is that we want to be a 21st century university. And if you read all of the documents across the world about graduate attributes, we see these things everywhere. Critical thinking or creative thinking, real problem solving, not just simply looking at algorithms and things like that. Communication and whole person development. In Hong Kong they argue for, and this is really scary because I speak English moderately well I suppose. And nothing else at all particularly well. And what they're asking for is in Hong Kong is for trilingual and biliterate. So Cantonese is the first language, English, Mandarin, and then written English and written Chinese. And so this is a huge undertaking and these issues are very, very important. And the other thing I focused on is transforming information into knowledge. I guess if you told me 20 years ago that content would drive the cost to zero, I probably wouldn't have believed you because at that stage I was still doing my fresh out of studies not too far away and used to paying a fortune for books. And now we have all sorts of movements, ones particularly focused by all the open content, various initiatives around the world including in Hong Kong. So these things are really important. The other things are things like self-engagement and being passionate about what they do. So what's very popular in my part of the world is using the big model of curriculum design and really making an effort. Now the whole of Hong Kong has gone to an outcomes based approach. There is not exactly an argument you can have here. It comes down from the UGC and therefore that's it. You have to move in that direction whether you want to or not. But this is what the sort of model I've taken myself is to try and align the outcomes, the things that I want the students to be able to do. And I have two samples for you to look at their work and share with you the experiences I had with them. One was an undergraduate group of students and the other was a postgraduate group of students. And so you can actually have a look at that. Very important that I get the content and the concepts across and I provide evidence that the students are actually achieving those aims. So I think you're probably all familiar with this, yes? Can I have some hands? People know this particular diagram? Lovely, okay, so we'll skip off for that one. But there's another model that Macnaught and her colleagues at the Chinese University of Hong Kong have published, which looks at thinking about the student learning needs and the actual learning outcomes. And we all know about that particular recipe, where you start off with a series of aims and then you're quite surprised, sometimes pleasantly surprised, but other times not so surprised by the kinds of outcomes you achieve at the end. So my entire process of thinking about the course design was thinking about this middle block here, which is the kinds of learning outcomes I wanted for my students. The concepts I thought were important, how I designed the activities of what students did. How I could give them feedback effectively and of course the giant huge pink elephant in the room called assessment. Now learning technologies, we're all learning technology experts in this room. And I'm quite sure that people could take different approaches, many different approaches. But I think you'll agree that we're sitting in an age where they're often quite disorganized. They're extremely disparate, they keep changing all of the time. And they put a high demand on us in terms of us getting engaging with these things as well as the students engaging with them. And design is really, really important. I think it's absolutely crucial if you're going to be successful. So these are sort of my little basic rules for myself in terms of learning designs is give them real problems. Give them something to do that has a real meaningful outcome that they actually can engage with and not simply create and then walk away from. The second thing that's really important for me is how do we do this? This is often really, really difficult in a traditional setting. How do we provide an environment where we get peer mentoring as well as my own mentoring? And I'm thinking not just from my perspective of me providing feedback to people, but the students providing feedback to each other. And there's lots and lots of resources. And it seemed to me logical that if I could find some tools to manage the feedback and the exemplars and use rubrics that it might actually help me through the process as well as the students. So I think design is very important. I think curriculum alignment is very important. And I'm often reminded that a curriculum's like a packed suitcase, an overpacked suitcase. And the real problem is that when we start to think about new ways of doing things, we have to unpack our suitcase and take some of the things out if we want to replace them with different activities or different engagement or different assessment. So, and the other thing that's very important for me is don't forget research opportunities, the things about the scholarship of teaching, which we all do. Now, obviously I'm going to engage in some technologies and I quite like this one, the old adage, if the only tool you have is a hammer, then everything begins to look like a nail. But we've got all of these other things that are sitting in our environments that are not terribly difficult to engage with. Social networking, we know this is important. As anybody walked into a class in recent time and said in the room, I asked their students, who does not have a Facebook account? And nobody puts their hands up. It simply doesn't happen in my environment. And the other thing that was interesting was a portfolio of assessment because one of the groups I was working with were going to be English teachers and therefore they needed some evidence that they were going to be effective developers of curricula and resources. So here's a picture of Hong Kong at night. It's this massive, complex, crowded environment called Hong Kong. And it's wired up beyond belief in terms of broadband, technology take up, and I think it's number two or three in the world. So what about the students themselves? I did some research at the university and I did a big survey across all the undergraduates coming in in 2007 and 2008. And I noticed that, in fact, the students were actually doing a lot of blogging. And I've got some comparison figures here from the University of Melbourne. And I know there's a time gap, but there's a fundamental difference, I think, in terms of the standard deviations because this was quite a large sample of students. So they were engaging with blogs. But look at the next slide. Did they think these tools were actually useful for learning? And the answer was basically no, they didn't. And part of that, I think, is the learning design, is in fact that they weren't using them for academic purposes. They were actually using them for social purposes. And in fact, with the numbers we have from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where there's a huge intake of mainland students who come out of China, they blog more than anybody because they no longer have big brother watching them because they're over the border. So it seemed to me there was an opportunity here. So this is some of the documents that we used and this is a little wordal document that actually some of the things that we focused on. Now, here's my first visual for you all. And if you try and read it, you'll go crazy. So please try and look at the colors. So let's go back to our previous speaker, a sense of wonder in terms of the colors. And basically, I think most people are familiar with Moodle. We have a raft of technologies here, some that sit on the PC and some that sit on the web. We have things that can be controlled by the students within this environment, which is the pale mauve color. And we've got things that are actually controlled mostly by the teacher. And this environment was one that I had available to me, but it didn't do all of the things that I wanted to do. So I found another one called Mahara. Who's used Mahara, please? Yes, one, two, a few number you, okay. Mahara is a very interesting environment in that when you first go there, there's nothing there, there isn't any framework for you to use. So in a sense, it gives you more opportunity to impose that framework down on top of it. And it has things like blogs, a wall to write on, as Facebook does. Students can form their own groups, which is a very powerful mechanism because normally that sits on the teacher. Very student-centered and then the way Mahara works is that you then present your information, a sense of audience. And this is what I was particularly interested in with this group of students. And you can even export it out later in terms of resume if you want to. Now it gets really, really complicated and messy if you put them all together. And the reason is that on this side, I can do the management side in terms of my responsibility and on this side, the students have responsibility and my job is mentoring, how am I doing? So the first example, some undergraduates demonstrate the use of information technologies, implement curriculum reforms and language education. Huge impetus, huge push to do that. And it seemed to me there was an opportunity here and I've got some screens that I've captured and I'm going to go into this and do it quite quickly. And one of the tasks I set my students to do was to go out and make a podcast. And we wanted to make it realistic, so make a podcast about grammar. One of the things I've discovered living in Hong Kong is that the differences between Chinese and English. And in Chinese, there are no tenses, there are no plurals. So if you ever wonder why staffs is a common word or other plurals and coming from some of the Asian students, it's simply because they don't know what to do with them. So grammar is a really serious issue. And there's several examples here, so my students were creating artifacts. But I thought I'd share one with you, this guy here. So let me just go out into my browser and go and visit the website. And I'd like to show you some work about what one of the students did to accomplish what they were doing. And logged, I hope, in. Yep. Okay, let's go and have a look at Mahara. So one of the things that I wanted to do is to ease my management side. And that was single sign-on, it's very, very important. I didn't want to have to manage that, so let's get over there. And we're going to have a look at one of the students. I do want to get to the student voices. So this is a real class with real artifacts and students operating through the system. And, well, I'm going to choose somebody really good. I assume that you'll understand that. So let's go and have a look at Andrew's stuff. Now, Andrew had to go and demonstrate his competence, both in academic competence, in technical competence, a whole range of literacies he needed to actually create this artifact. So let's go and find it. Here we go. So this is one of the screens you saw a few minutes ago. And he had some examples. Now, please take note of the way in which this screen Andrew's chosen to present this information. Because he's presenting it as part of an audience. And his audience is both me and his peers. So he says what he's doing here. He says what the key problem is, which is the will and will be going to, the description of what he's done, the technical and academic information that shows he understands the language well, his experience of doing it. And of course, the actual object itself. So I won't play at all, but I'll play a few bits of it. Hello, everyone. Grammar Boy here. Today, I would like to talk about some aspects of using simple future tense. We can actually talk about the future using will or be going to. Although will and be going to mean almost the same thing, and are interchangeable sometimes, there are some situations when one is used more than the other. People may not know the differences between the two, and sometimes makes up the two. Now, let's listen to a conversation of a journey and his mom. Will you take me out for ice cream? Yes, I will take you out for ice cream, I promise. Think about the literacies that came in that, okay? Just think about that for a moment, okay? And then there was the post grads, where they had to do whole politics. They had to design, demonstrate they could design environments. And I sort of like this Calvin and Hobbes one, and they had to build a better, a blended learning environment as well. And so they did things like concept mapping, to actually map out their designs, and they could present that with inside their blogs. They could also put a range of artifacts, here and here and here, and they could use a range of media to indicate what they were doing, and explain in more fully details. Now, one of the things I thought would be good to finish on, is what did the students say? So the impact on your learning and class dynamics. Remember, this is a very experienced teacher, and she's being asked about the impact on their learning and what have you. Think more, to be honest. Because it wasn't the finished product at the end, and knowing that it could be an iterative process, and knowing that it could evolve over time, helped me with my thinking. What unanticipated impact did using the application have on your learning and the class dynamics? I think on the class dynamics, because it was so different for a lot of people, and none of us had ever been assessed that way. For all of us, even myself, the last time I studied was back in the Dark Ages, so I had never been assessed in this way. I'd always been assessed by a finished piece of work. So it was the unknown, how much to put in, all those sort of things, and it was, because it was much more academic than a normal blog, that was an unexpected impact, to sort of adapt and come up with a modified blog slash academic paper was interesting, but unexpected. And the second one is a very experienced individual called Peter, and listen to what he's got to say. Oops, hang on, let's go back. I think because it takes you out of comfort zone. And when you're certainly engaged in what we're engaged with, after all, we were looking at e-learning, we were looking at the impact that that has on attitudes for learnings and learning behaviors and so forth. The comfort zone is simply to end up writing an essay, very easy to do and quite mechanical to do, I'd say. I think the experience of the online thing and therefore being required to use the very tools that we were being asked to reflect and think about was extremely powerful. And even though I use those tools a lot myself in the context of me as teacher and encouraging my students to use them to actually myself have to use them as a means of reflecting and capturing and publishing and critiquing my own learning was really far more, had a far bigger impact on me than ever anticipated that it would. And as I said before, I think it also develops this sort of... I understood the language of practice and I think that's something that I think we were introduced to and came to be something that was really very, very meaningful. If you're writing about your own behavior, you're starting to use that language not just as a means of writing an essay. It becomes actually something that becomes much more ingrained into the sorts of conversations you have. We did some quick evaluations and clearly what the students valued was was the ability to actually give feedback and view, arrange views and do it. I think there were lots of opportunities, everyone, and I would like you to think about the questions you might ask me now in terms of these things. It gave me all of these possibilities of doing these, management, modeling, assessment practices, all those sorts of things. And the most important thing in Hong Kong, believe me, it's very important, is getting good teaching and course evaluations in the process. There's lots of issues. The first speaker gave you that issue is changing from a social context to an academic context. This is not something students can do easily. This is a thing that the teachers need to help and frame. That's certainly something I've learned. They don't use these things naturally. You have to actually provide the framework, the guidance and the processes for it to occur in an academic sense. Did it work? I believe it did. Will it work again? We did this over two years and it did work again. And we are very, very happy with the results. I'm supposed to stop, but hopefully I'll get a chance to answer this last slide. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, David. I think the trouble with our two speakers is they both had such interesting things to say. They just keep so much more to come. So I'll open it to questions. I'm sure you have lots for David. Thank you. Well, there's lots of things to pick up on there, David. Thank you, but almost your penultimate statement was that students don't use this naturally. And yet you've shown lots of evidence of the range of technologies they do use and their facility with all kinds of opportunities there. So what's the difference when it comes to learning technologies? Why is that so tough for them? Thank you, Diana. That's a very good question. I think moving from the social context to the academic context is a really serious issue for all of our students. And it's taking them from consumers of the environment to creators of the environment. And there's been considerable things written about that in the last few years. And I think there is a fundamental shift between having a stream of consciousness that you write for a social purpose and a set of resources that you create for a particular purpose, not just for the immediate moment of assessment, but for ways of thinking about how you actually change over time. And I think that's really, really important. And if I may take just one second, I left this last one here because this comes from a colleague that I worked with who saw what I was doing and said, well, can I do that as well? And the answer is, well, yes, you could. But what I find interesting was that once he understood the process and his role of creating the environment, mentoring that creation process, he then admitted he didn't know how to do this. He couldn't have done this screen himself, but his students could do it. And he knows how to grade it appropriately. He can set the rubrics the standards and he can do that. But he admits wholeheartedly that he actually doesn't know how to do it. But taking the skills that they've got but moving them into an academic context I think is really, really important and providing the guidance for that process to occur without too much difficulty in terms of management is a key issue. So here's a guy who really doesn't understand how his students are doing it, but he's not acting as a gatekeeper. He's not saying, well, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to take advantage of these things just because I can't do it. He's going to let the student, he's really good at it and let the students express themselves in ways they can within a framework. Thank you. We had another question down here at the front. Just down the front. And then there's another one over here at the right. Thank you. I'm Patrick McAndrew at the Open University. I think one of the interesting things is whether this is repeatable. I mean, you've just indicated that your colleagues are doing the same thing. But some of the excitement for the students of, to really use these tools might fade away. My son's at school and he's very fed up with having to do PowerPoint presentations that draw together his ideas. And he'd much rather just write the essay by now. And is it going to be the same? I'd much rather just do the assignment and I don't want to go off and blog and podcast because I've done it 10 times already for 10 other teachers. I think that's a valid point. And one of the advantages of living in the times we do is that technology keeps shifting and that gives us some advantages. But also, I also think that there is a need not to overuse them, as you say. And sometimes, you know, you've got to choose your moment, your direction and why you're doing it. I had some very specific purposes in mind for doing this. And I really wanted to see evidence of change over time. So what you don't see in those environments that I showed you is all the work that was done in terms of providing feedback, both from me and from the peers, because you can write on the wall and actually give that kind of process. And as my first student said, it was suddenly not about the product at the end, it was about the process of getting to the product. And I think if you can do that, then you can maintain that interest and engagement. And the students used a lot of Web 2 tools, particularly things like Bubblus and MindMeister for collaboratively mind mapping and all that sort of stuff and doing their designs. They also formed their own groups which they had control over within the Mahara environment. And I think that's a very powerful tool because it takes away this issue of me having to do it all the time and me having to manage the process and actually giving them an opportunity to be flexible and interesting. I agree with your comment, but we have to sort of keep up with trying these things. And the previous class, that's a class of 250 run by one person. It's very successful. Okay. The final question over here. Just to tell you a little bit about the University. Thank you, David. But just focusing on the podcast example that you showed us, that it was one of the most successful students for obvious demonstration purposes. But can you tell us what failure looks like? The students that aren't doing so well, is there kind of just a graceful degradation across the class population of people who are more or less getting it, but some do it better than others? Or are there actual discontinuities here where some students really struggle with something conceptual in making that shift from the social media to learning and teaching media? I can honestly say that not all the students love you for they just want to write the essay. Okay. They all produce a product. The product varies enormously and standard. If you think about the example I gave, you think about what he had to do in terms of literacies. We were using Audacity, so that's free software, so that's okay. That's pretty easy. But he used his mobile phone which he got off the mobile phone about the fake conversation. He got one of the girls in the class to play Mum, and then he incorporated it, and he got the music which he embedded himself in the process, and then he had to do the research. So the difference in terms of assessment was actually really easy from my perspective. Because, and A, the whole presentation in terms of what the students are showing you, in terms of the information they're providing, the voice they present, not just the podcast, but the actual intellectual voice, makes actually assessment very, very easy in terms of my time. And what you tend to happen is the students who are less successful simply show less levels of creativity, shorter efforts. The grammar may in fact be wrong, which is a very interesting experience. And the entire presentation process changed. And what we found was, what I found was that by over a period of time, by letting people know what was successful, what does an A look like? That in fact you shift the majority of students further up. So it brings into the whole question about norm referencing, when you're actually moving to an outcomes base and you've got criteria in referencing. So that becomes an issue for the faculty. Not for the teaching and learning, you know, to distribute your grades. But it can be done. And what you end up with is the students who are not particularly successful do rather trivial things. They can all use the tools, but they don't necessarily use them well. Okay, unfortunately we've run out of time. So I'd like to ask you to join me again in thanking David and our other speaker. Thank you.