Bryce Canyon National Park photo by Todd Petrie, licensed under CC BY 2.0.
Hoodoos are rock spires. Poking out of badlands and desserts, these tall and narrow rock formations have a striking shape. The thin pillar, formed from fragile rock layers, is safeguarded by a hard-rock ‘hat’ on top. Imposing appearance hides fragility and volatility. Winds, erosion and frost wedging continue to endlessly shape and reshape the hoodoos. To me, this resembles the perpetual shifts in the landscapes of teaching and learning at universities.
This blog presents my reflections on these shifts.
Originally the blog started as an assignment for a graduate course in university teaching. One of the elective units focused on online learning and various tools that can facilitate Community of Inquiry in online spaces. A blog as an assignment was an expression of Scholarship of Technology Enhanced Learning (SoTEL) and offered a space to engage in critical conversations about teaching, learning and technology in the academy. During this time, I worked as a learning designer and used the blog for experimentation with different technologies as potential learning tools as well as interrogating what I saw as barriers to good quality teaching (for example, the erosion of the research-teaching nexus).
Since then, I have returned to an academic role and decided to restart the blog. It made sense because besides teaching, my role combines curriculum design and research. And in this role, I choose to do research that directly informs my curriculum work as well as my own teaching. In my research, my data are often students and educators’ accounts of teaching and learning practice, including my own reflexive accounts of classroom practices. The future blogs will use these reflections to interrogate current questions in higher education.
In my old blog posts from 2022, I was sceptical of technology’s ability to revolutionise education; and I remain critical of technology as a silver-bullet solution to low student engagement and other classroom challenges. I am also critical of platformisation and surveillance imposed by educational technologies. However, as higher education is rocked by the emergence of Generative Artificial Intelligence, a revolution or an evolution of the sorts seems to be in the air. While educational technology hasn’t in my view revolutionised education, genAI is forcing education to change in fundamental ways. And in the face of this change, there is an opportunity to critically rethink how teaching and learning happens, in general, and in higher education, in particular. No less than ‘what’s education for?’ needs to be asked at this time. I am restarting the blog to ask this and other critical questions.
