Rachel Berkson
I worked for 20 years in cell biology, and then moved into education. I work as an education developer at Anglia Ruskin University.
Location England, UK
Activity
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Rachel Berkson replied to Rachel Berkson
@AnaCristinaPratas Oh, absolutely, I don't think blogs are inherently worse than academic articles. Just that these particular blog posts aren't really presenting evidence for the educational use of Storify. I was looking at the articles in the context of evaluating research, so I don't think they meet the bar. But in terms of finding useful ideas for...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
On a less negative note, I have recently learned some exciting stuff about Blended Synchronous Learning, where face to face students and distance learners interact at the same time in the same classroom. This uses virtual worlds and avatars (not Second Life, but similar products designed more specifically for education) rather than videoconferencing. The...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
For me, the only video that worked at all well was the David White video in section 4.6. Of course, that is professionally produced and probably took a lot more effort / resources than the other course videos.
For both the Second Life videos and the recorded Skype conversations, I found the sound quality to be poor. In SL I also found the unnatural face...
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Rachel Berkson replied to Rachel Berkson
Perhaps an even bigger issue is fraud on the part of education providers. There are already quite a few fake universities out there, and it's probably easier to scam people out of money for non-existent online education than to fake a bricks-and-mortar university. This kind of scam is only going to get more...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
I think I'm having a pessimistic day: my prediction is that the biggest growth area in the future is going to be dealing with cheating. At all levels; the education sector is worried about essay mills and contract cheating, but it's much broader than that. Microcredentialling is definitely part of the way forward, but there's going to be a huge challenge to...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
As often seems to happen with this course, I'm in the biggest group of poll respondents. So no, I'm not surprised. For me Twitter is most valuable professionally because real humans bring worthwhile stuff to my attention. Academic articles in my field, and especially in my former field, life sciences, allowing me to keep in touch with developments now...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
That's a really dense and interesting article. I'm going to sit with it for a bit and probably re-read it a few times. There's not much that's completely new to me but it's all drawn together and theorized in a really insightful way.
For me, one of the key points was the expanded discussion of 'secondary orality'. I had some inkling that Twitter is...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
I resemble this! I use Twitter for most of the purposes listed: building networks, professional development (I learned of this very MOOC through Twitter, in fact), TweetChats including #LTHEChat, amplification and remote participation in conferences, the lot.
I have observed Twitter being used effectively for teaching but haven't tried it myself, because...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
There are some technologies I had to map in two locations, eg I have a personal Twitter and a professional Twitter, different accounts, different usage patterns. And I'm 100% a resident of email which I use across the whole range from totally personal (love letters) to totally professional (emails about work-related admin). I also realized there's quite a lot...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
A key thing about the visitors/residents paradigm is that it's fluid. Internet users aren't, fundamentally, just one thing. Most people are somewhere in between, but not only that, even those who are residents in some spaces aren't "digital residents" for absolutely everything that involves technology. Like, I'm a resident in terms of various old-fashioned...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
The first time I heard White and Le Cornu's digital visitors and residents model it really resonated with me. Partly because I'm from that really quite narrow semi-generation just before the Millennials, those of us who were brought up without much access to the digital world, but came of age on the internet. The 'digital natives' concept alienated me by...
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There isn't much about protecting and supporting people who have to post on social media as part of their job role. But I have seen innovative use of online tools getting praised and recognized, both in teaching and in public engagement. I think the problem at this particular institution is more that people who don't feel comfortable having a public online...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
My institution, Anglia Ruskin in the UK, starts out quite positive: the university "recognises and encourages the use of and participation in social media as a key communication tool for remaining active, aware and fully engaged with both our prospective and current students, staff and communities." As you read further it becomes clear they're a lot more...
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I try to be quite authentic in the classroom and my students do get to know me to an extent. But it's a professional relationship, even if a relatively informal and ideally friendly one.
There are topics I would at least hesitate to talk about in a classroom context which I might be happy discoursing about via pseudonymous or private social media. Partly...
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I put my twitter handle @RGBerkson in my slides when I teach, as I do when I give a conference presentation. But I don't do that because I particularly want my students to get to know me as an individual or because I directly use social media for teaching.
I do it to role-model how academics use Twitter, for example as a supplementary channel for...
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I identify with many of the approaches to Twitter listed by Veletsianos. They're almost all cases of using Twitter for *scholarship*, but not for education. I don't and probably wouldn't ask my students to carry out tasks which require them to create accounts on social media sites. And I don't publish my research via Twitter (though I might use Twitter to...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
Thanks for the thought-provoking intro to the week. I think some of the negatives are out of date; in 2009, yes, universities would have been reluctant for staff to have a visible social media presence associated with their professional identity. 10 years on a lot of universities encourage (or even coerce) staff to use social media to raise the profile of the...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
I found week 3 a little thin compared to week 2. I'm already fairly familiar with designing research questions and considering ethical issues in research. That said, there were some useful resources provided and I'm grateful for those.
Reflecting on my learning, I'm now much more confident that I will be able to complete this MOOC (even if I'm a few days...
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One aspect I would add is the distinction between individual comments or conversations and "big data" approaches. Someone might have a conversation in a public place and not mind if random strangers happen to overhear. But most people would be pretty upset if public places were routinely bugged and someone assembled and analysed a database of all the...
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Interesting discussion. I'm really appreciating the honesty of presenting examples of ethical dilemmas from reflections on the presenters' own research. Thanks for the links to lots of different examples of ethical guidelines from different disciplines, too.
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@HenryRobinson Thanks so much for these links, Henry. I was particularly interested in the one about using Twitter posts, as that is directly relevant to my own research practices.
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
I came across an interesting briefing paper by Czerniewicz and Walji from the University of Cape Town about the different relationships between universities and commercial providers of services related to online education:
https://open.uct.ac.za/bitstream/handle/11427/29813/Czerniewicz_Walji2019.pdf -
Rachel Berkson made a comment
I have conducted a small analysis of a TweetChat (education) focused Twitter conversation without asking for explicit consent from the participants. I feel a MOOC is a bit different, because of different expectations about privacy. By commenting to a Twitter hashtag, you expect your words to be available to the general public; indeed news outlets frequently...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
Question: What barriers are experienced by students with disabilities affecting communication, when they learn with Team-Based Learning at my institution?
What I really want to know is what adaptations we can bring in to remove these barriers, but I'm fairly sure I need to find out more detail about what the issues are first.
Research approach:...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
I'm coming to the end of a project that has been a mix of action research (asking about barriers to adoption of a new teaching method / coming up with solutions in consultation with stakeholders / trying out the solutions / asking again to see whether the solutions are working / reflecting and refining solutions; and evaluation research, looking at various...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
For me, the move from testing a hypothesis to answering a research question has been a pretty big challenge in transitioning from natural sciences to education research. So I very much appreciate this advice for how to formulate a good RQ.
Mine at the moment is something like: what adaptations are needed in the Team-Based Learning classroom to make this...
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Indigenous communities where? That sounds like a really interesting topic, and exactly the sort of thing where the video would recommend focusing the question to a particular country or at least region.
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That's a great question, I'd be really interested to know the answer! I am thinking you probably need something a bit more specific than just "in organisations", but still, it's about time someone measured whether all that compulsory training is actually effective.
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Thank you, I found this a really interesting article, especially the reflection on personal experiences of innovative research methods.
I feel that what's going on here is partly a conflation between research rigour and gatekeeping. You see this in a lot of different disciplines, not just education. There's quite a lot of disruption going on in natural...
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Rachel Berkson replied to Rachel Berkson
I would be reluctant to use Storify in my teaching, even if it still existed. I don't think it's good practice to ask students to create accounts on commercial sites, even if it's free in the money sense. This seems a case where the aphorism applies that if you're not paying for a social media site, you're not the customer, you're the product. We don't know...
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Rachel Berkson replied to Rachel Berkson
Neither article is what I would call a research report. They're not really making knowledge claims, just describing something they have done in the classroom. Masterman provides some quotes from Bjola's students, but there is no methodology about how these quotes were obtained. Other than that, there's no real evidence for impact here.
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
The Gelms article is more informally written and takes the form of hints and tips for teaching. Although Masterman takes a more academic tone, I found her article less persuasive because there isn't really any evidence presented, just an anecdotal, descriptive account of a teacher who used Facebook and Storify. Another reason why I found Gelms more persusasive...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
These are the sort of standards I would apply to any research, whether in my own discipline (biological sciences) or in education. I do sometimes skim research digests like Science Daily but I'm aware they may not report all the important details of the study being discussed.
The article about Syrian refugees playing digital games is flawed in a number of...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
This hasn't been my experience very much. It's not that I, as an educator, see some grandiose "knowledge claim" about ed tech and rush out to buy the latest software or gadget. Rather, everything has to go through a cumbersome institutional purchasing process, because the kind of money involved is way beyond any individual's teaching budget.
This does...
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For my own teaching: my institution is pushing to update all our materials in line with the new EU accessbility requirements, so there's a lot of buzz about captioning videos. There's a real concern about capacity, and a worry that some of our existing material might have to be taken down altogether, if we can't meet standards in time.
I am not sure how I...
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I would definitely need more training in actually creating captions and integrating them into videos. I felt that the DO-IT guideliness were a little negative towards making things accessible for visually impaired students, almost fatalistic, it's just too hard, you have to outsource it to trained professionals.
There are many different guidelines because...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
I read the DO-IT guidelines about making multimedia accessible to people with sensory impairments.
I think guidelines are likely to work because ideally, they provide a kind of recipe which people creating educational content can follow. I don't suppose following guidelines will magically make everything accessible. Using guidelines better than doing...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
It's a potential problem with creating personas: certainly Leona shouldn't spend lots of time and effort making the course accessible to a *fictional* learner. I was imagining that a course team would come up with several different personas and use that exercise as a way to think as broadly as possible about inclusivity.
So no, she shouldn't employ a live...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
I can't believe I didn't notice that Miray is deaf when we were dicussing her earlier in the course! I was thinking about her cultural background, her time commitments, her academic knowledge, her aims and goals for the course, but completely missed this really important accessibility issue.
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I wouldn't make a global statement that accessibility is costly. But education institutions tend to have a mindset where we only notice the investment (of money and time) in a new thing. Making courses accessible when they previously weren't is a visible cost. The staff time currently spent providing ad-hoc support to students with disabilities, the cost of...
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@NokuthulaVilakati Here's a recent article I came across about 3D video preparing medical students for ward rounds:
https://altc.alt.ac.uk/blog/2019/02/learning-about-hospital-ward-rounds-with-360-degree-video/ -
Rachel Berkson made a comment
I tend to favour UDL. I am aware of the issue of conflicting access needs, but in my experience, providing alternative resources means:
-Wait for students to ask for the alternative resources they need.
-This creates an additional burden on students with disabilities, even on top of the barriers they are already encountering.
-Few students actually ask for... -
@AnnabelCharles That's helpful, thank you. I like the framing of shifting away from a task-led approach to concentrate on learning.
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This seems almost a no-brainer. Innovative technology can be made accessible from the start, whereas changing old sites and software to meet accessibility standards is a nightmare. And lots of people have given examples of how the need for accessibility can drive innovation. Everybody benefits from sites that are clear and easy to navigate in multiple...
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Rachel Berkson replied to Rachel Berkson
For me, having a lot of content in video format presents a small barrier. One I can usually overcome, but it is a barrier. I read fast, and I find a 10 minute video frustratingly slow because I could have absorbed the information in 2 minutes, and retained it better, if it were presented as text. Any longer than that and it's really hard to find a continuous...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
I haven't really tried much online learning, and I can't think of a situation where I've been excluded. Some less positive experiences were: an online course organized around Adobe Connect seminars run on weekday evenings. Having to show up at a particulatime for synchronous learning was ok for four weeks, but I couldn't have guaranteed to be free at that time...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
I haven't done much online learning before now, but I'm probably the ideal student. I have reasonable amounts of leisure time, and own a modern computer and a good internet connection at home, and I don't have any disabilities. I'm highly computer literate and have a strong academic background. So it's hard to imagine what might exclude me from online...
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@NokuthulaVilakati I haven't worked with 3D videos personally, it's just something I've come across. This is an example from education, I'm not sure if there's anything published in health but I know they're using similar approaches:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0742051X18303871#bib8 -
Rachel Berkson replied to Rachel Berkson
Reflecting on my own experience as a student: this is my first MOOC, and I was really unsure about whether it would work for me. The discussion threads seem really good, I'm learning a lot from other participants. I thought that might not work in an asynchronous environment.
I needed a lot more than the stated 4 hours to complete week 1, and even now I...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
Reflection on week 1: at first I was a bit skeptical because the video at the start seemed falsely enthusiastic, as if we were being sold a product. I was really pleased that so much of week 1 focused on criticizing simplistic ideas of technology fixing all problems, and I came away with a much more nuanced understanding.
I enjoyed making a persona and...
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Thanks, Evan, that framework does look really useful. I am not very familiar with Instructional Design approaches and your linked ADDIE framework helps me to get my head round how I might plan a learning activity in that mode. I really like the focus on ongoing and summative evaluation, and the way it's built in to the approach rather than just being tacked on.
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
More up-to-date technologies and tools: I might replace "blog as reflective journal" with asking students to record a video diary on their phones for the purposes of reflection.
For collaborative document building, students often use Google Docs or more rarely Microsoft's collaboration tools. A dedicated wiki system is important if you really need to see...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
I found this section quite hard going - I've never used a framework like this, and while I can imagine placing different learning technologies on the axes, I can't quite envisage what I would then do with that analysis, how it would help me to align my tools to my learning outcomes.
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That's great, Paul. I also taught medical students using PBL for many years. Can you say a bit more about how you're working with PBL for online learning? I'm really interested in how to adapt approaches that are genuinely social / collaborative, where the learning is all about the peer interaction, for the online context.
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
So I'm currently working as an education developer specializing in Team-Based Learning. Which is not exactly "cutting edge", it's been around a few decades as a method, but it incorporates a lot of recent developments, such as flipped classroom, active learning, student-centred and transformative approaches, and so on. So I'm quite immersed in and contributing...
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Rachel Berkson replied to Joel Mills
What a vivid portrait you've created of Alpha! I really feel like I know them.
It sounds to me like they're really going to struggle with the conversational learning side of the MOOC. I feel it would be really hard for instructors to notice that Alpha has trouble with expressing opinions in public - they would come across as just not engaging with the...
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I think the biggest learning design issue for someone like Karl is going to be helping him to make the transition from engineering and commerce to education. It's a very different academic discipline, and he's highly competent and probably used to excelling as a student. But he may find some of the more social science elements of an education course...
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@RobinDahling Thanks for this, really interesting persona here. Plenty of obvious accommodations for learners who aren't fluent in English or educational jargon, but the censorship issue is one I hadn't thought of. I wonder if it would be possible to accommodate Peter by providing course materials such as texts and videos in a downloadable format. Then, if he...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
My persona is Cady, a visually impaired mature student with caring responsibilities, who never completed their first degree:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1f-ZLBPTeiU6hmAjkR1Dg-aYFSlntMKnMOifyf0S6cLk/edit?usp=sharingIn order to accommodate Cady's needs, I need to make sure all course information is available in a plain text format, and that the text...
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Rachel Berkson replied to Rachel Berkson
@LesleyMcGrath Many thanks! I will check the citations in the end of week summaries.
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
I guess the idea behind creating a specific persona is to promote empathy in learning design. Thinking about generic diverse learning needs might not be enough to prompt an educator to come up with specific features.
In the case of Miray, she has many characteristics that would be fairly typical for a MOOC student: she has good but not native English, she...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
@Lesley McGrath Thanks for your help in facilitating this course. I am confused about a small thing: where can we find the bibliography for the articles? There are some comments with a citation such as "Learning design has been defined by Mor and Craft (2012)" (from section 1.8), but I can't expand that to a full reference. Where should we be looking if we...
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@ChristopherCrossley Fascinating example! My brother teaches in a PRU and he's definitely seen some of the kids thriving both academically and personally in a more supportive environment than a mainstream school. In the end it's not their "characteristics" or even their behaviours that excluded them, the school made the choice to exclude them, out of all the...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
One educational use I've seen is making 3D vidoes of real professional environments, like say a nursing home for students in health disciplines. Then students can virtually move and look around the space, see how different patients and health care workers interact, and reflect on the experience of being a kind of "fly on the wall" in a real place of work. That...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
My impression is that any kind of online environment, whether simple or sophisticated, turns into a chat room. The ancient Talker programs, MUDs and MOOs and similar, which were text only, turned into chat rooms. MMORPGs like World of Warcraft turn into chat rooms, albeit with much fancier graphics. Minecraft: chat room. Fortnite: chat room.
I think there's...
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What's the threat to education that we're being saved from, here? From my UK perspective, I see the threat as primarily political. Rich, Westernized countries are turning away from regarding education as a public good, and are turning it into a consumer luxury. A consumer luxury that is available online, and that can potentially be purchased in other ways than...
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I don't think education, as an abstract concept, needs saving. Much less a singular saviour, a Christian-sounding metaphor I've never been comfortable with, (talking of apocalypse imagery).
Distance learning gives some people opportunities to learn that would otherwise be closed to them. Online learning overcomes some of the practical barriers to making...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
I like the idea of expanding the meaning of a "credential" and I can see the sector moving in that direction. Students being able to demonstrate skills competencies using a range of artefacts, I think that's plausible and also a good thing.
I'm skeptical about students being able to own and control their own data and their own education, though. I mean,...
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Rachel Berkson made a comment
The video seems very optimistic to me. There are ways that online education can be more accessible than face-to-face education, but in practice, the same patterns of advantage and exclusion seem to play out. I'm thinking particularly of disabled and economically disadvantaged students.
Yes, it may be easier for a particular student such as a wheelchair...
