Roy Trevor Williams- Ph.D.
- Honorary Reseaerch Fellow at University of Portsmouth
Roy Trevor Williams
- Ph.D.
- Honorary Reseaerch Fellow at University of Portsmouth
About
62
Publications
28,417
Reads
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1,218
Citations
Introduction
Research:
Emergent Learning, including MOOCs and other learning spaces - over 40 presentations and publications over the past five years on MOOC and related topics.
Synaesthesia, particularly cross-modality, and modality-free learning.
Benchmarking and Mastery within hybrid formative/summative assessment.
Narratives of personal development and learning.
Tacit understanding, reflection and knowledge managment, and how these can be explored, articulated and (with permission) shared.
Current institution
Additional affiliations
September 1998 - August 2001
Position
- Honorary Professor in Education
Description
- Teaching and supervising graduate courses and theses on education and international development
January 2011 - present
Position
- Benchmarking and Mastery in Mathematics
Description
- We developed a new hybrid form of formative/summative assessment for the first year course in Mathematics, changing assessment into benchmarking and mastery. See: http://www.slideshare.net/dustcube/benchmarking-1
January 2007 - December 2008
Position
- Affordances for Learning
Description
- HEA Funded Project: developed participant centred reflection on professional development, 'nested narratives',and applied it across the University. See: http://learning-affordances.wikispaces.com/Project+Report
Publications
Publications (62)
This is a revised, and hopefully more reader-friendly version of the synaesthesia paper. It has slightly less jargon in it, a few more examples, and a bit more discussion.
This paper is an exploration of the contribution that ecological theory and ecologically informed research can make to learning theory and research. It builds on the contributions of Gibson and the many researchers who have subsequently critiqued and developed his ideas in ecological psychology, and it build on work in semiotics, applied linguistic...
How do students make connections between their learning as individual actors and as part of academic and professional communities of practice?
And how can this be expressed and articulated by the students, so their voice is represented to themselves, to researchers, and to others with minimal bias from the research process? The Affordances for Lea...
The problem of terrorism is both an immediate threat and a long-term issue of safety and social cohesion, locally and globally. An immediate threat requires relatively straightforward interventions. But our public debates seem to be focusing too much on 'fire-fighting' crisis management, and congratulating ourselves on instant emotional displays of...
Agency and presence are key features of the internet and social media. They are built upon several cycles of development of semiotics - i.e. the capability to forge relationships between experience and communicative action, and let it loose upon the world. This brief document outlines the many paradoxes that are involved in our current affordances...
Much has been written about complexity and complex-adaptive systems, and the need for complexity to be taken into account in the way we create, manage and distribute knowledge. However, the knowledge society was built on the shoulders of the industrialised society, which was not based on unpredictable, complex knowledge, but rather on predictive, p...
In an integrated view of perception and action, learning involves all the senses, their interaction and cross-modality, rather than multi-modality alone. This can be referred to as synaesthetic enactive perception, which forms the basis for more abstract, modality-free knowledge and a potential underpinning for innovative learning design. The autho...
MOOCs have captured the attention of large numbers of learners (and a few venture capitalists). Clearly something exciting and different is happening which is transforming how people learn, what people learn, as well as how learning events are designed and valued. This chapter attempts to understand these transformations, using a visualization tool...
This paper is situated within the paradigm of open, emergent learning, which exploits the full range of social and interactive media, and enables independent initiative and creativity. Open, emergent environments change the way we experience learning, and this has implica-tions for the way we design and manage learning spaces, and describe and anal...
Note: Missing page
This version has p716 included, which was omitted from the previous upload. Apologies.
This also seems to have (other) pages misssing!!! Between the two versions, it's complete.
What is Emergent Learning? Why is it relevant?
Recording of 19th November webinar available at:
https://sas.elluminate.com/p.jnlp?psid=2013-11-19.1005.M.AC456DEF2B5841109A2E4E2783A336.vcr&sid=727
The recoding for the webinar of the 26th (on Drawing Footprints) is available here:
https://sas.elluminate.com/site/external/jwsdetect/playback.jnlp?p...
MOOCs can be seen as either an opportunity or a threat. Before we decide, we need to think through the issues, and for that, we need to decide where to start: the numbers of students, the money, or active learning? Ideally we should consider all three, but if we have to choose, we should start with enhancing active learning, and that is the focus o...
We review our experience at the University of Portsmouth over the past academic year, following a shift from home-grown to mass-produced electronic resources from an educational publisher, WileyPLUS. We present the results of a survey on the way mathematics students taking calculus units in their 1st and 2nd year viewed the shift towards WileyPLUS,...
This presentation raises some questions about assessment, about the use of technology in teaching and learning, and about how all of these may be integrated, within an approach that shifts away from traditional ‘assessment’ towards ‘benchmarking and mastery’. It also provides a rather basic, but open and interactive strategy and design template for...
This paper describes the authors’ journeys from traditionally closed to open research. Using a narrative approach, the authors draw on their recent research experience to explore the influences on this shift and how it aligns with their increasing work in emergent learning. The shift has itself been an emergent process. Changes in the both open res...
It is ironic that the management of education has become more closed while learning has become more open, particularly over the past 10-20 years. The curriculum has become more instrumental, predictive, standardized, and micro-managed in the belief that this supports employability as well as the management of educational processes, resources, and v...
Education is built on the foundations of peer reviewed knowledge, first formalised in the Royal Society many years ago, so networking is nothing new. What is new is the facility for networking across the internet. It is now so much easier to ‘explore tools, information, resources and points of view from other disciplines that can elucidate and even...
The theory of affordances has been around for many years, and is the foundation of the growing field of ecological psychology. What makes it more relevant, and more widely relevant today is that the way we perceive, act and interact in the internet society has changed, opened up and become dynamic on a global scale.
(See also the wiki, http://res...
This presentation explores the relationship between involuntary synaesthetic perception, and creative synaesthetic ability, analysing the examples of the Montessori preschool, and the MEDIATE interactive installation for young people on the Autistic Spectrum. It links this to notions of embodied learning, and to some tentative ideas on 'intuitve',...
This paper explores the intersections between private and public settings of narratives and narration: the way that individuals narrate ‘the self’, and the way narratives are created and used. Drawing on critical theory and complexity theory, we analyse the relationship between narrators and facilitators. Empirical evidence is drawn from case studi...
This paper describes emergent learning and situates it within learning networks and systems and the broader learning ecology of Web 2.0. It describes the nature of emergence and emergent learning and the conditions that enable emergent, self-organised learning to occur and to flourish. Specifically, it explores whether emergent learning can be vali...
This paper describes emergent learning and situates it within learning networks and systems and the broader learning ecology of Web 2.0. It describes the nature of emergence and emergent learning and the conditions that enable emergent, self-organised learning to occur and to flourish. Specifically, it explores whether emergent learning can be vali...
This presentation presents some ideas about assessment, the use of technology in teaching and learning, and how they can be integrated into a new approach that moves away from traditional 'formative' and 'summative' assessment into a new hybrid, 'benchmarking and mastery'. It also provides a basic, open, strategy and design template which can be us...
Complex Adaptive Systems, for our purposes, are social systems that that evolve and display new, emergent properties, and self-organizing behavior of their components; they are based on a reasonably stable infrastructure, on the satisfaction of the most basic needs, and flexible, frequent, and open communication and interaction. Complex Adaptive Sy...
.
.IntroductIon
Knowledge is defined in many different ways in different cultures (Nonaka, 1994, Burrows et al., 2005), and the question is whether knowledge should be seen: as an object or as meaning, an object or a process, subjective or objective, tacit or explicit, positivist or interpretivist, representationalist or constructivist. The answer...
'CCK08' was a unique event on Connectivism and Connective Knowledge within a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) in 2008. It was a course and a network about the emergent practices and the theory of Connectivism, proposed by George Siemens as a new learning theory for a digital age. It was convened and led by Stephen Downes and George Siemens through...
This paper presents the findings of research carried out into the use of blogs and forums as communication and learning tools in Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (CCK08), a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) that was run between September and December 2008. The course was unique in many ways: it included a small credit-bearing course within a n...
'CCK08' was a unique event on Connectivism and Connective Knowledge within a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) in 2008. It was a course and a network about the emergent practices and the theory of Connectivism, proposed by George Siemens as a new learning theory for a digital age. It was convened and led by Stephen Downes and George Siemens through...
This paper presents the findings of research carried out into the use of blogs and forums as communication and learning tools in Connectivism and Connective Knowledge (CCK08), a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) that was run between September and December 2008. The course was unique in many ways: it included a small credit-bearing course within a n...
We review our experience at the University of Portsmouth over the past academic year, following a shift from home-grown to mass-produced electronic resources from an educational publisher, WileyPLUS. We present the results of a survey on the way mathematics students taking calculus units in their 1st and 2nd year viewed the shift towards WileyPLUS,...
This article describes the development of a research method used to investigate how students make sense of their own learning in Foundation Degrees taught both online and on campus. This method uses 'nested narratives' to capture the students' own voice (both literally and metaphorically), as they make sense of their learning experience and strateg...
.
.Executive Summary
(see also the Affordances wiki, here: http://learning-affordances.wikispaces.com/ )
The Approach
The Affordances for Learning research project developed an approach to researching student experience in which the theoretical framework, the methodology, the analysis and the project management are all based on ecological psycho...
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to critique current epistemologies of knowledge and intellectual capital, and provide a way forward within an integrated framework.
Design/methodology/approach – The principles of linguistic philosophy and semiotics provide the basis for a rigorous analysis of the production of signs and of knowled...
This paper explores ways in which people can engage with the play, Macbeth, by mapping or charting the layers of relationships between the contesting, and resonating, elements in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. The chart is a flexible structure, and in the Piagetian sense it is a holistic structure – means to explore the ‘whole’ of the play.
In hindsight,...
The University of Portsmouth has provided successful B.Sc. (Hons) courses in Engineering for many years. Recently we have started to develop more flexible learning opportunities for our students. The first phase was to develop a learning design and architecture for online learning, and apply it to courses in Computing and Mathematics. The second ph...
Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this article is to revisit the key terms in knowledge management (KM), particularly tacit and explicit, to develop a better framework for a theoretical and practical understanding of KM.
Design/methodology/approach – With the help of concepts like articulation and discourse, borrowed from applied linguistics, the...
Knowledge management is still a developing field and much of its terminology, its basic building blocks, are still unsettled. One of the key terms in KM, and in many books and publications on the subject, is Capital - particularly Intellectual Capital, but also a variety of other kinds of capital: social capital, human capital, etc. The paper will...
Abstract. This paper is a response to debates on Foucault’s articulations of power and regimes of truth, particularly in the recent work of Derek
Hook. It is also a response to the specific issue of Latour’s ‘crisis of
objectivity’. It deals with the issues of objectivity, subjectivity, subjects,
discourses and communities of practice, and develops...
Purpose
The purpose of this article is to revisit the key terms in knowledge management (KM), particularly tacit and explicit, to develop a better framework for a theoretical and practical understanding of KM.
Design/methodology/approach
With the help of concepts like articulation and discourse, borrowed from applied linguistics, the relationships...
This paper engages with one of the central dilemmas of Knowledge Management: how do we share contextual knowledge? This approaches Knowledge Management differently from the traditional distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge, although it aims to take that discussion forward. It is based in unstructured data management applications and rese...
This paper addresses some key design issues in e -learning, and its integration with knowledge management. The underlying premise is that the purpose of e-learning is useful knowledge, and that the design of e-learning should therefore be integrated with the design of related knowledge management - particularly personal knowledge management. e-lear...
This review, and this book, deals with the problems of the South African transition from Apartheid, specifically in Education and Training. The mechanism for the transition (a government of national unity at all costs) effectively compromised the work that had been done prior to 1994 in the education and training sector/s, and 'inclusivity' ended u...
The combination of the Mansell and Wehn footprints, and the Connections for Learning
maps should enable countries, institutions, educators and even learners to develop strategies
and policies based on an analysis of the learning opportunities they want to develop, and
their relationship to possible developments in a variety of alternative systems....
SACHED Trust has been involved in the most substantial curriculum development process in adult education in the country. This has taken place over the past four years, with major donor support from international donors. The curriculum, called A Secondary Education Curriculum for Adults (ASECA), for adults at junior high school and senior high schoo...
In many developing countries people and livestock suffer from preventable or curable diseases, and their agriculture is vulnerable to natural disasters. A considerable amount of technical aid is directed at alleviating these problems using modern science and technology, and yet most of these efforts either fail or even leave peasants and pastoralis...
In the previous chapter the more traditional quantitative methods of mass communication research that form the bulk of research in this field, were discussed. However, qualitative research methods offer very stimulating ideas and innovative ways of looking at mass media. One such method is discourse analysis, which is discussed here by way of an in...
This paper examines education in terms of a semiotic analysis of texts and discourses. Educational texts and their relation to experience are formally outlined. Detailed attention is given to the question of agency in the relation of texts to discourses.
Complexity in Sign Systems: Very high levels of complexity have been reached in the social sign systems used in the late 20th Century. Because of this complexity, the systems are very difficult to alter, and they tend to take on a life of their own. The have been termed "pseudo-codes" (Williams 1976) because they seem to take on the characteristics...
The South African Videotex scene has been characterized by the exclusion of a very sophisticated videotex-type service, INFO, from operation ‘parallel’ to the Post Office service, BELTEL. There are profound policy implications for BELTEL and for videotex as a whole in South Africa. [This was effectively the arbitrary banning of the first national e...
This paper is about one of the central dilemmas of e-Learning: can we separate content and context, and how should we manage the relationship between the two? Or to put it another way, are Learning Objects just commoditised learning? With the growth of e-Learning over the past few years, learning objects have come into their own. They are the compo...
Thesis (MA)--University of Stellenbosch. Includes bibliographical references.
Questions
Questions (2)
Jay Lemke builds on Mihai Nadin's play on the 'civilisation of illiteracy' in this article (on "Beyond litercies"), and sets out a framework for understanding how we 'reconstruct the social' in our everyday lives (to use Latour's model - a bit too modernist a metaphor, but there it is) - reconstitute or 'reconfigure' (Scot Lasch's term, a while back) might be more useful. Karin Knorr-Cetina also has lots to say on 'lightness' and how lightness enables Al-Quaeda and the financial markets to reconfigure the texture, the micro-global structures, of the new social.
Jay cites Nadin's (Peircian) 'pragmatic scheme' (schema?) of the 'next society' (Drucker's term) which might turn out to be a perpetually 'next' society - as a society in which we move beyond "smaller-scale communities, slower rates of change, ... predictable proportionality between cause and effect, unquestioned definiteness of categories, and ideals of social homogeneity and cultural universals".
So, the question is: where do we move to/wards? Paul Cilliers mapped out 'complexity' in some detail, our research group works with a key component of complexity, 'emergence', and Knorr-Cetina works with "micro-global structures".
Any thoughts?
I want to set up a social media site for people to write short reviews, to tag, and to add 'like' recommendations, etc, on MOOCs that they have attended. What's the best platform to use? I would like to do it here, but it needs more space - a 'researchgate'/wiki would be good, no? Each MOOC would need a separate discussion.
