Today’s Host
@tundeva, Dr Tünde Varga-Atkins, PhD, is a Senior Educational Developer at the Centre for Innovation in Education, University of Liverpool and Senior Fellow (HEA). Her specific areas of research encompass areas in curriculum design and evaluation, assessment and feedback, digital capabilities and organisational learning. Tünde has employed multimodal and creative methods in her research, such as working with drawings and diagrams for data elicitation, poems for data analysis, and combining existing methods, such as the nominal focus group to support curriculum evaluation. Tunde is the current North-West co-lead of ALT ELESIG, a special interest group sharing and building capacity about research and evaluation of learners’ experiences with technology. Tünde is an editor of Research in Learning Technology and associate editor of Developing Academic Practice journals.
Links: Google Scholar, @tundeva, LinkedIn
Introduction
During today’s 203rd #LTHEchat, we will mimic the format of Treasure Island Pedagogies podcast series by the Centre for Innovation in Education at the University of Liverpool, @LivUniCIE. We will ask you all share one of your (probably many!) lightbulb moments (when you felt your students were ‘getting it’), a teaching prop or pedagogy and one luxury item. You are also asked to barter with other educators in the #LTHEchat community.
Innovation and interdisciplinary dialogue
The main idea for the Treasure Island Pedagogies podcast series grew out of the first podcast on Remote Teaching (Part 1 and Part 2), when we discussed the most important aspects to keep and maintain for precious contact time with students and also what we could do in different ways. Acknowledging that educators also need to relax, soundtracks were shared. This led to the birth of the current podcast format, very much inspired by Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs.
Treasure Island Pedagogies is an interdisciplinary discussion between educators from different subject backgrounds, institutional or cultural contexts, facilitated by Tünde Varga-Atkins. The reason for this is that evidence shows that innovation spreads at the intersection of disciplinary boundaries (Warren, 2011). Colleagues from the same background working together will share numerous pedagogical approaches and strategies. In a network of educators, they are represented as nodes with close ties. However, for the spread of information or innovation, it is the links between more distant nodes that can be effective, which is what Granovetter calls “the strength of weak ties” (1973). One aspiration of facilitating this podcast series is exactly this: to act as a “Connector” (Gladwell, 2000; Barabási, 2014) and create new network links between our guests which had not existed before, thereby facilitating innovation spread.
In this #LTHchat we will invite you to share your own Treasure Islands with fellow educators. We hope that this Tweetchat will be hugely rewarding and powerful, allowing us agency to conjure up Treasure Islands as our own educational utopias.
Fancy taking part in a future podcast and/or the Treasure Island Pedagogies Festival’21?
If you are interested in becoming a guest on Treasure Island Pedagogies podcast, please complete this expression of interest form. Taking part is a great opportunity to increase your educational impact and reach beyond your immediate field, as well as being a fun discussion. Both external and internal (University of Liverpool) guests are welcome and very much encouraged!
We are also planning an interdisciplinary Treasure Island Festival in November 2021. Please register your interest via the same form.
Links
- Subscribe to the @LivUniCIE podcast series via Anchor fm
- LivUniCIE Podcast Series website (will be live by end of this week)
- Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3, Episode 4, Episode 5, Episode 6,
References
Barabási, A.-L. (2014). Linked: How everything is connected to everything else and what it means for business, science, and everyday life. Basic Books.
Gladwell, M. (2000). The tipping point: How little things can make a big difference (1st ed). Little, Brown.
Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380.
Tweets using the hashtag #LTHEchat (203) have been collated in this Wakelet. Something to enjoy when you are on your Treasure Island!
#LTHEchat 203 Questions:
Q1 – Describe your Treasure Islands: what is your teaching/role context and discipline?
Q2 – Please describe a lightbulb moment when you felt that your students, or learners, were ‘getting it’ and what made this happen?
Q3 – Your Treasure Island is where you spend precious contact time with students. What teaching prop or pedagogy would you take to your Island? (Feel free to post images also)
Q4 – Which one luxury item you would take to your Treasure Island to help you relax when off-duty from teaching?
Q5 – What item or idea would you want to barter from each other’s responses to use in your teaching? Please tag the person with whom you would like to barter.
Q6 – What would you need to implement your bartered idea?
#LTHEchat 203 Analytics
Dr Scott Turner (@scottturneruon) has very kindly gathered dataon #lthechat over last week via http://soviz.net @SocioViz and tweeted the following (11th May 2021) to share the most influential RT/Mentions & Top 5 Words:
https://twitter.com/scottturneruon/status/1392062867604754436?s=20
Most Influential RT/Mentions
Top 5 words
- island
- pedagogies
- treasure
- teaching
- wednesday
#LTHEchat 