In an old blog post, I wrote about the importance of facilitation/teaching presence in the context of the pandemic and people teaching on video calls from their homes. In there, I refer to one article that refers to lots of older sources, and I think now I finally read one of those…
Somehow there is often talk about educational ecosystems and everybody seems to have an intuitive idea of what that means. I decided I needed to find some references that actually provide definitions or at least more context, and that wasn’t as easy as I had thought! I am summarizing two papers below, though.
Together with my colleagues Steven Curtis and Terese Thoni, I ran a workshop at the Lund University Teaching and Learning conference 2024 — and now the proceedings have been published!
I was very intrigued when I came across a chapter by Cambridge, Wenger-Trayner, et al. (2024) on “Theoretical and practical principles for generative AI in communities of practice and social learning”. They tell the story of how a contribution by ChatGPT — despite being prompted by a participant in a group conversation, and read out […]
You might associate the name “Wenger” with Communities of Practice, as do I. So then it’s very interesting to read Wenger et al. (2011), where they distinguish between a community (of practice — a learning partnership in a specific domain with a shared identity and commitment to learning together) and a network (which is about […]
Teaching about sustainability is teaching about a (or many) wicked problem(s), and that is a challenge for teachers for many reasons. We need to, for example, teach how to work with wicked problems in general (although there is some helpful literature out there that we can start from). But when doing this, we need to […]
There are different ways to approach academic development: courses are very common with different lengths and amounts of collaboration built in, as loose collection of seminars or with progression over several courses, as are inspirational presentations, or individual seeking of informations in podcasts or blogs. Those approaches depend both on what individuals seek out, and […]
Implementing education for sustainability throughout an institution is a huge challenge, so I am currently reading up on what we might be able to learn from other places. Högfeldt et al. (2023) report on how since 2011, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, has gradually implemented sustainable development in their programs and culture.
For a couple of months now I have been skating dangerously close to where workload becomes unhealthy, but I recently had a really good experience planning out work (i.e. generating TONS of great ideas of what we definitely want to do) and negotiating priorities (i.e. cutting ideas back to what is realistic(ish)) for both myself […]
Kirsty sent me this super interesting text with a vision of Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) being a collective enterprise, rather than a mostly individual one. I love the vision and am excited to repost below!
This week, I gave a presentation on “supporting teachers at LTH to teach about sustainability” to an EU project with partners from universities in lots of different countries, and in the beginning I had to explain what my role of “academic developer” even entails, since this kind of job doesn’t exist at many universities. And […]
If I had to pick one book that has influenced my current thinking about teaching and learning the most, I would pick Wenger’s 1998 “Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity” (link to my summary of the book and some later work on CoPs). What I find really helpful to think about in the CoP […]
We recently ran a round-table discussion on “How to teach students who are not “mini-me”s (and don’t want to be)” at the Lund University Teaching and Learning conference last year, and now I am trying to write a conference paper on what we discussed there. So naturally, I am starting out by re-reading the literature […]
Summarising my reading on “communities of practice”, and my views on how this framework might be useful for thinking about change in our context, for our iEarth/BioCEED-led course on “leading educational change”… Communities of practice are often used as a model for “learning through participation”, describing how culture influences how knowledge within organisations is built […]
One question came up after I had written up my one-pager on the iEarth “teaching conversation”: Why “cognitive apprenticeship”? Over the years, I made a couple of observations across several universities in three countries: Students learn a lot of factual, conceptual and formalized procedural knowledge, working mainly on textbook data and problems. They often have […]
iEarth is currently establishing the new-to-me format of “teaching conversations”, where two or more people meet to discuss specific aspects of one person’s teaching in a “critical friend” setting. Obviously I volunteered to be grilled, and despite me trying to suggest other topics, too (like the active lunch break and the “nerd topic” intro in a […]
