Webinar: Tensions concerning personal open designs and closed artefacts in HE

We begin our #firstWednesdayofeverymonth webinar series in 2018 hosting one of our awesome PhD researchers, Caroline Kuhn. Here is a brief abstract of her talk.

A consideration of tensions concerning personal open designs and institutional closed artefacts in a Higher Education Institution

Our knowledge only captures a small part of a deeper and vaster reality, a reality that exists independently of our knowledge of it. How can we look beyond what we cannot see? Can the invisible be made visible? Critical Realism comes to the rescue providing the lens to do so!  Join me in this webinar where I will share my PhD journey so far and how my rather messy trajectory and organic research process has led me to highly engaging and relevant findings that shed light into the difficulties that some young people have to construct more sophisticated open digital practices. I also want to share the key role that the GO-GN network has had in my research journey up to date.

 Caroline Kuhn is doing her PhD at Bath Spa University (UK). Her initial steps into educational technology coincided with her move to teaching mathematics in HE. She was part of the mathematics development team for a bridging course for high school students from deprived neighbourhoods (favelas) in Caracas who didn’t have access to quality education and struggled to go to university. Her interest in both empowering students and educational technology became the theme of her master thesis: designing a website with cognitive tools to support socially disadvantaged students in their mathematical learning.

She is passionate about critical and open education, student voice and New Literacy Studies, an approach that offers an explicit challenge to the dominant ‘skills’ paradigm towards literacy and proposes digital literacy as social practice problematising agency and structure in completely new ways.

This event took place on Thursday, February 8th at 20.00 GMT. You can catch a recording on GO-GN’s YouTube channel.

Featured image by davide ragusa on Unsplash.