Whereas we have so far looked at learning and pedagogy, and then the e-mature institution and architectures of participation in a post Web 2.0 world of technologies with participatory affordance, in this chapter we look at the changing practice of teaching in the ever-evolving digital world. Following on from some EMFFE funding to develop and fine tune the details of the proposed development framework, the work done by Geoff Rebbeck at Thanet College to develop staff, human resources, responses to digital work, encouraged us to research teachers subjective responses to using “technology in action”. This digital practitioner work presented here follows from Geoff’s original insight.
Background
Having been intimately involved in the commissioning of national surveys of the use of digital technologies in post-compulsory education from 2005 onwards to 2010, when the last of these surveys was published as Official Statistics by the Office for National Statistics, it looked as though further opportunities to explore how digital technologies were operated by providers and practitioners would not be possible. As luck would have it, one of us started work at LSIS (Learning and Skills Improvement Service) after the closure of Becta, at a point when a small amount of funding became available to support a small-scale research project at the end of the 2010-11 financial year and we were asked to initiate something that would carry on the work of the national surveys, but within a very restricted budget.
The take-up by providers of the Generator Tool, (referred to in Chapter 5), from its introduction, had been very limited and it was not producing the information expected by its originators. Thus, the tool could be best described as ‘languishing’ on its host servers as feedback from Jisc’s Regional Support Centres who were involved in supporting the use of the tool indicated that it was complicated to use and the outputs were not easy to share or generalise, putting potential users off. This feedback was confirmed, anecdotally, at national conferences by practitioners, managers and other sector agencies such as NIACE and the Association of Colleges who were struggling to use any of the aggregated outputs of Generator in their work or readily modify the proprietary code used to build it into more context sensitive functionality.
Given that the timescale for the LSIS survey was tight, we decided to try to explore how and why practitioners were using digital technologies and seek to understand how practitioners felt about digital technologies they were using and, in many cases, not using in their work. This focus was arrived at as a result of the learning from the EMFFE project and the management of the Becta national surveys. We had maintained a close contact with a number of the project participants who were continuing, despite the incentives to use Generator, to develop their work with digital technologies in generative frameworks developed from EMFFE e.g. Geoff Rebbeck at Thanet College, Simon Beard at City Lit and Graham Francis at Havering Sixth Form College. Geoff, was undertaking detailed studies of practitioner behaviour from his perspective within teacher education and professional development and, particularly, seeking to capture practitioner feelings towards digital technologies in their practice and to see whether these views could be used to create individual provider profiles and, ideally, whether these could be used to identify issues for action at local, regional and national levels e.g. training materials, policy development and funding priorities.
The authors had been holding a series of extensive conversations with Geoff to support his college work and the LSIS funding provided an opportunity to develop this work at a national level and try out a radically different survey method. This was the complex background to what we now call “the Digital Practitioner” survey, but it is important to emphasise that despite the unpromising nature of its genesis, the results proved to be surprising and fascinating (not a term we use very often!)