Jon Dron Presentation

 This post will be the fourth in my Field Experience Reflections series; if you want to read the three others you can find them by clicking on the three horizontal lines in the left-hand corner of your screen and then clicking the page entitled “Field Experience Reflections,” or you can just click this link. In case you need a refresher on what exactly this series of post entails here is the required context:  I will be using these posts to reflect on my field experience by taking the concepts I learned about in special guest presentations and then thinking about how I might apply them to my own teaching. Alright, now that that little introduction is out of the way, let’s get to the reflecting portion of tonight’s entertainment.

           While I am always excited to talk about my learning, the presentation and articles of this post’s titular guest lecturer, Professor Jon Dron, were so different from anything I had learned or read about before the actual writing of this reflection might, dare I say it, be relatively easy. ^[1] In lieu of a written introduction to Dron, I am pasting one the generic biographies that he helpfully provides on his website:  

Jon Dron is a full professor and former Chair of the School of Computing & Information Systems at Athabasca University, Canada, and an Honorary Faculty Fellow at the Centre for Learning & Teaching at the University of Brighton, UK. He is a UK National Teaching Fellow, and author of Teaching Crowds: Learning and Social Media (2014, with Terry Anderson), and Control & Constraint in E-Learning: Choosing When to Choose (2007). His personal website is at https://jondron.ca/

The two articles of his that we read, for those curious, are entitled “Soft is hard and hard is easy: learning technologies and social media” published in 2016, and “P-Learning’s Unwelcome Legacy” published in 2013. If you read those titles and found yourself borderline more confused than before, not to worry! I felt that way too, but they were both written in easily digestible language and had lots of helpful insights.

Briefly, the first article talked about “the nature of learning technologies, with a particular focus on social media” (32). The terms “hard” and “soft” are utilized as descriptors for technology, but since those concepts are further explained by Dron in his presentation, I’ll wait to go into that. The second article “is an exploration of the implications of the removal of physical boundaries to online pedagogies, many of which challenge our most cherished educational foundations and assumptions,” with “p-learning” the term for “learning physically collocated with others” (72-3). Basically, it’s both a critique of in-person learning institutions as well as a call-to-action vis a vie using online learning to break away from these prescriptions and restrictions.

 Getting back to the presentation, Dron starts off with an exercise meant to have us question our own perceptions of what makes an object “technology,” and more specifically, “educational technology.” This is reminiscent to how Dron begins the 2016 article we read—we later discovered that he had not known we read them prior to class and was quite [jokingly] excited that someone, as in our class, had finally read them—but it is also similar to how our professor began this course for us oh so long ago. ^[2] On the first day of our class, our professor asked us to look at various pictures (pencils, projectors, computers, etc) and find something that they all have in common. One of the main answers we reached was that they were all tools used (in the context of the picture) for learning and that the concept of “teaching with technology” is not simply about the tools (or the tech), but rather about those tools in relation to learning. I bring this up partially because Dron’s definition inadvertently builds off of our class definition, but also partially because, in general, Dron’s ideas and ways of thinking line up very smoothly with our professor’s which helped me get as much out of the presentation as I did.

Dron’s definition of technology similarly assumes that it is both a noun and a verb: technology is “the ways we organize stuff to do stuff,” or in the words of W. Brian Arthur, “the orchestration of phenomena to our use.”  Technology is something that we participate in and pedagogies, methods of teaching, are technologies that exist as a part of a larger assembly. I feel like I am not explaining this well, but the difference between hard and soft technology helped me understand it so I’ll just jump to that.

Hard technology refers to technology where human input is not needed as part of the technology’s orchestration; the technology is already complete and there is only one “right” way to use it. On the other hand, in soft technology humans are active orchestrators and allow for more creativity; there is an absence or gap in the technology that we have to fill in order for the technology to be functional which inherently means that there is not one correct or definitive way to use it. However, almost all technologies are assemblies of soft and hard technology because there needs to be some constraint (the hard) even as there is the possibility for creativity (the soft). Whether technologies are soft or hard can also depend upon your perspective, for instance, a test is soft(er) and malleable for teachers but hard(er) and rigid for students.  I found this paradigm to be really helpful when considering online learning (and learning in general) because it changes my thinking from one of “literally what technology will be helpful, engaging, and/or motivating to my students and their learning process” to one of “technology is a name for any number of tools and is often composed of multiple moving parts which can need more or less human input, thus only aiding the learning process ^[3] in specific ways.”

The rest of the presentation discussed the ways that an online learning environment interacts with learning. One of the points Dron made was that the online teaching environment is different than the online learning environment with the latter being larger and more distributed with multiple teachers outside of the “main” one in the virtual classroom. While it is certainly true, I had not previously conceptualized online teaching/learning in that way especially since Dron was including non-class-specific learning in this framework. ^[4] Relatedly, I appreciated how Dron explained that since prior learning becomes a part of the assembly of future learning, then we learn from our past and we teach into the future. Not only do I think it was a powerful way to state that idea, but I also think it is highly important to recursively look behind and in front of us as we go about learning/teaching throughout our lives. What we do, in our actions, in our thoughts, and in our speech, is always already informed by our past, but to never look to the future is condemning ourselves to be stuck in that past; and who wants to live in a world where we never change or better ourselves?

I don’t think a reflection on this presentation could be written without at least mentioning the riveting discussion between Dron and my fellow classmate, Monique, about the validity/existence of learning styles. Dron, and our professor for a short segment, stated that learning styles were really just being-taught habits because learning styles has no scientific basis. My classmate Monique argued that it is beneficial to the student to cater the teaching to the ways that they learn best. From what I understood, Dron agreed with Monique’s point, but he felt that we can learn to learn in new ways, and it is also important to attempt to expand a student’s way of learning. Personally, learning styles had always confused me a little because I felt that I feel into multiple categories of learning styles so Dron’s argument made sense, but Monique had a lot of valid points that I think are important to consider. Although, to be clear, I don’t think that Dron ever really disagreed with Monique per se so much as he just had a different take on the same core idea.

We are finally at the part of the post where I discuss how I could use this for my future teaching. Towards the end of the presentation, Dron mentioned that “bad” teaching, the kind that is more rigid and allows for minimal to no learner input often yields better results than “good” teaching that is more flexible and does let the learner have more control over the content because the latter necessitates leaves students feeling lost and unable to learn unless the teacher is highly skilled at guiding students. I bring this up because I want to have my teaching be more flexible and allow for a large degree of learner input, but given the point Dron made, I think it might be best to add student input into my teaching slowly as I gain more experience so that my students don’t end up feeling lost. The concepts of hard/soft technology, as I wrote above, help me understand technology as a broader concept that requires thought, intention, and participation on my part in order for it to successfully help students. This means that in my classroom, I will be able to see how various parts of my instruction are more hard/soft than others and how well, if at all, they work together for my students. I suppose I’m basically saying that this will help me more effectively observe and reflect on my teaching so that I can learn and grow as an educator.  The observations and points Dron made about online learning, as well as what he wrote in the articles we read, suggest to me that artificial boundaries and wholesale structures for the curriculum do not help students learn. Due to this, I will instead structure chunks of teaching/learning—which, incidentally, is how researchers advocate that you should teach writing—and embrace the lack of boundaries inherent to e-learning. The latter could be accomplished by making sure my content interdisciplinary and/or connecting it to the world and life outside of the virtual classroom.

Part of me feels like I’m not doing a good job of applying these concepts to my future teaching, as in I’m being too vague. However, I think that might be because I am a preservice teacher and I don’t have enough experience to add in more specific scenarios. Or maybe I’m inadvertently making excuses for myself, I can no longer tell.  If a certain professor decides that I should add more, please say so in the comments. As always, thank you for reading!

Well, this is certainly longer than I expected, which seems to happen often haha. I think this meme probably encapsulates what happens:

Me, who is notorious for writing a lot: Ok, this post is going to be a normal length, maybe about 1,000 words.

Me, later when the post is close to 2,000 words:

 ^[1] I was afraid that sentence might jinx me, and it totally jinxed me, this has not been a breeze to write but I’m keeping the sentence there for posterity.

 ^[2]  “Oh so long ago” = in the beginning of September.

 ^[3] Aiding the learning process, in this sentence, just means that it can increase learning, motivation, and/or engagement, but how much it aides depends on both the context of the physical or virtual learning space as well as the individual student.

 ^[4] Or at least, that’s what I understood from his presentation. Since my professor is awesome and has been promoting my blog for me on twitter haha, some of the presenters have actually read the posts I wrote about their presentations (crazy, I know :0); if Professor Dron happens to be reading this and (at any point) thinks, “that’s not what I meant lol,” then, whoops, my bad.