Welcome back after the Summer!

Our first #LTHEchat of the new academic year takes place on Wednesday 13th September at 8pm BST and is led by Simon Thomson (@digisim) and will look at staff and student digital development.

Simon asks: “As our environments become increasingly blurred between digital & physical space how should we approach the development of our academic staff in order to place critical digital pedagogy at the centre of curriculum design?”

This LTHEchat is part of a week long series of activities (physical and digital) running at Leeds Beckett University as part of our Developing Excellent Academic Practice programme of events. Embedding “digital” as part of a pedagogical process of curriculum design is a key activity at the University. As the quote below highlights, it’s not necessarily about staff being required to use digital tools but knowing when & how to use them effectively as part of their overall curriculum design.

“Digital Pedagogy is precisely not about using digital technologies for teaching and, rather, about approaching those tools from a critical pedagogical perspective. So, it is as much about using digital tools thoughtfully as it is about deciding when not to use digital tools, and about paying attention to the impact of digital tools on learning.” – What is Digital Pedagogy? (n.d.).

Retrieved from http://www.digitalpedagogylab.com/hybridped/digitalpedagogy/ 

Simon is a “flipped academic” (Bruton 2012). He is Head of Digital Pedagogy at Leeds Beckett University, an academic post in the Centre for Learning & Teaching. His current work includes the development of a conversational framework for technology use, with a focus on it’s ability to enable, enhance, enrich and empower learning & teaching.

He has led on a number of funded Learning & Teaching projects including a JISC/HEA funded Open Education project and a Leadership Foundation supported 1to1 tablet device implementation, examining the effects such deployment has on learning & teaching and learners and teachers. He has presented and published his work at a number of national and international conferences, predominantly in the areas of learning technology and open education.

Simon was awarded an HEA National Teaching Fellow (2014) and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, SEDA accredited in Embedding Learning Technologies and an Apple Distinguished Educator.

He tweets as @digisim and sporadically blogs here: http://blog.digis.im

The storify will be added here: https://storify.com/LTHEchat/lthe-chat-no-89

See you Wednesday 13th September, same time, same place. 8-9PM (BST) #LTHEchat

The LTHEchat team