CRAFT OF E-TEACHING; LESSONS FROM THE DIGITAL PRACTITIONER RESEARCH

In discussing e-learning at ELSE 2013 the question was asked; "shouldn't we be researching e-teaching?" The authors have spent some years doing this, through their Craft of Teaching work (Garnett, Ecclesfield 2011) and the Digital Practitioner Research (Ecclesfield, Rebbeck, Garnett, 2011-13). The Craft of Teaching work came about when the authors were challenged at the iPED 2009 conference on Pedagogies as to what the role of the teacher would be if Web 2.0 tools allowed learners to generate their own learning contexts, as we argued. We answered this at iPED 2010 with "The Open Context Model of Learning and the Craft of Teaching," This was built around the PAH Continuum (Pedagogy, Andragogy, Heutagogy) which argued that teachers needed to develop learner's ability to manage their own learning using their professional and pedagogical understanding of the educational benefits of self-directed learning. The subsequent Digital Practitioner research for the UK skills development agency LSIS both used an original survey methodology, focused on how lecturers felt about the technologies they were using, and also evaluated the answers against professional critical thinking skills. This survey of 1000 college lecturers surprisingly revealed the importance of the personal development of the use of technologies in social contexts as a key part of the development of professional e-teaching skills in educational institutions, and also that a co-creation model of learning (Garnett, Ecclesfield 2012) around "artfully-crafted, student-centred, learning experiences" was possible. The conclusion would be that e-teaching is best developed by a mix of personal, professional and staff development, both within and outside educational institutions, allied with a deeper understanding of how pedagogies are being changed post-Web 2.0, by new learning and social technologies. The paper will show how we reached these conclusions and how institutions might develop new eteaching strategies for themselves.