In association with
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Speaker BiographyProf Josie Taylor, The Open University, UK
Her own research focuses on understanding the ways in which people learn from complex media (traditional and digital) and how best to design those media to support learning. This spans system design, interface design, interaction design, user requirements, and evaluation, and entails understanding user psychology, the nature of, and the contexts of, learning. She is a member of the Council of Professors and Heads of Computing in UK Universities, and member of the Association for Learning Technology Research Committee. Learning in Digital Worlds: What are we talking about? The complexity of interactions between learners, educational settings and technologies (now often mobile) challenges the conventional view of education as imparting knowledge in fixed locations, inviting a more expansive possibility of ubiquitous learning supported by personal media communicators. How can we realise, utilise and benefit from such innovation? Technology tends to bedazzle and bemuse, a characteristic that sometimes leads us away from focusing on the really important aspects of learning, which remain fundamentally human, based around our capacity to communicate and engage in conversations. The complexities of learning with technology are difficult to capture within existing theoretical accounts, and, with reference to empirical studies I have conducted over the past 20 years, I will illustrate how leverage on intractable situations was gained through the introduction of interdisciplinary perspectives and methods. My conclusion is that educational technology needs a more thoroughgoing engagement with interdisciplinary collaboration as the way forward to a future where learning in digital worlds is a simple, well understood, fact of life. ‘The greatest challenge for those involved in the communication revolution is not technology, but communication between people’ |
Location: Brighton, UK
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Josie Taylor is Professor of Learning Technologies, and Director of the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University. Prof Taylor is internationally acknowledged for her expertise in e-learning. In 2005 she was commissioned by the EPSRC to run a UK-wide consultation of universities, to develop the UK e-learning research agenda, advising the research councils on priorities for funding in this area. This work was overseen by EPSRC, ESRC, e-Science, Becta, HEFCE and the then DfES. In 2006-07, this activity led to the ESRC/EPSRC Technology Enhanced Learning funding initiative, a programme of 2 calls of £6m each. As Acting Associate Director for e-Learning in the ESRC Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP), Prof Taylor helped administer this funding. Prof Taylor is also the convenor, and chair, of the UK Computing Research Committee’s and the British Computer Society’s Grand Challenges in Computing No.8, Learning for Life.