Rationale and themes

General rationale

Further and Higher Education, in the UK and elsewhere, is dealing with a more diverse student population than ever before, bringing with them a rich but challenging range of needs and interests. Widening access is high on the agenda as a response to government directives, but also as a means of pro-actively responding to greater student diversity. There is also a growing recognition that education must be about more than subject-related knowledge and qualifications, and should ultimately help our students develop the independent and collaborative skills, and other attributes, that will stand them in good stead for the professional environment and for lifelong learning.

These challenges are being faced and compounded within a context of increasing globalisation, and the proliferation of networked technologies. One major effect of these intertwined phenomena is in making our institutions consider where their strengths lie in the emerging global education sector. Another is in the profound impact emerging technologies are having upon how people interact in their everyday lives. As evidenced by the empowering nature of what we can loosely refer to as 'web 2.0' technologies, individuals can now contribute directly to sharing and developing knowledge in ways that were never before possible, and with social networking tools allowing national and transnational groups to form around shared interests.

Our educational institutions have long been wise to the potential technology offers in terms of responding to some of the aforementioned challenges, as evidenced by the heavy investment in Virtual Learning Environments in recent years. In reality though, how many institutions have really grasped the full potential offered by technology to enhance the learning and teaching experience? To what extent are we rethinking our practices to ensure they are truly forward facing, and will allow our institutions to be pro-active in meeting the challenges outlined above, which includes the growing expectation of many students for good technology-enhanced education?

Focus for LICK 2008

In light of the above, and through the work of bodies like JISC and the Scottish Funding Council's e-learning transformation programme which included the TESEP project, the need to develop pedagogical approaches that are truly learner centred, and which are enriched by creative and appropriate use of emerging technologies to engage and empower learners, can perhaps be seen as the ultimate challenge.

Addressing how we can best tackle this challenge was the focus LICK 2008, which explored the impact and potential of learning and teaching that embraces current and emerging technologies through the following themes:

• Theme 1: Technology-supported collaborative peer-peer and peer-tutor learning within and across course boundaries and wider learning communities
• Theme 2: Providing technology-enhanced opportunities for negotiated learning and learning outcomes within individual and collaborative tasks
• Theme 3: Fostering the development of the individual as an autonomous learner, including digital literacy and employability skills
• Theme 4: Placing the responsibility for finding, scrutinising, and creating subject-related content with the learner themselves
• Theme 5: Harnessing technology to engage learners in helping support and tutor each other, and in blended or online contexts where the tutor assumes a co-learning role
• Theme 6: Engaging tutors and other educational professionals in learner-centred staff development experiences that are enabled by and involve exploring emerging technologies

Please see the Programme page for details of the papers and workshops that tackled these themes at LICK 2008, and for PDF copies of full papers and copies of presentations.

The rationale presented above is adapted from Smyth, K. (2008) Partnership, pedagogy and technology for transformational education. To be published in the proceedings of the International Conference on Learning and Teaching: Enhancing Learning and Teaching in Higher Education. TAR College, Malaysia, 4th-5th August 2008.