Call for Proposals: TEL, the Crisis and the Response
The Alpine Rendez-Vous
The Alpine Rendez-Vous (ARV) is an established but unusual
scientific event focused on Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). The ARV series of events are promoted
by TELEARC and EATEL associations. These took up the legacy of the FP6 NoE Kaleidoscope and
Prolearn, and the FP7 NoE Stellar, which sustained them along past years. The
goal of the Alpine Rendez-Vous is to bring together researchers from the
different scientific communities doing research on Technology-Enhanced
Learning, in a largely informal setting, away from their workplace routines.
Although originating in Europe, the ARV is open to other continents’
researchers and proposals. ARV is structured as a set of independent parallel
workshops located at the same time in the same place. Workshops may last two to
three days each, half of the workshops taking place in the first part of the
week and the other half in the second part, possibly with a “common day” in the
middle. The Alpine Rendez-Vous of 2013 will take place from January 28th to February
1st, in Villard-de-Lans, a village in the middle of Vercors. Breaks and meals
are organized in a way that promotes informal encounters between participants
from the different workshops.
An informal group concerned about the relationships between
TEL research and change, discontinuity and dislocation in the wider world have
had a workshop proposal accepted and are now calling for proposals and
participation.
Background
The TEL research community has undoubtedly been successful
over the last fifteen or twenty years in extending, enriching and even
challenging the practices and theories of education within its professions and
within its institutions, and through them has engaged in turn with the
institutions and professions of industry and government. These have however
been largely inward-looking discourses best suited perhaps to a world
characterised by stability, progress and growth. These are all now problematic
and uncertain, and call for new discourses within the TEL research community
and across its borders. The world is now increasingly characterised by challenges,
disturbances and discontinuities that threaten these dominant notions of
stability, progress and growth. These represent the grand challenges to the TEL research community, challenges to the
community to stay relevant, responsive, rigorous and useful.
Earlier discussions (eg purpos/ed,
http://purposed.org.uk/ & e4c, education-for-crisis, http://educationforthecrisis.wikispaces.com/) had outlined the emergent
crisis in broad terms and identified different perspectives and components,
including
- economic and resource
crises, including long-term radical increases in economic inequality
within nations; youth unemployment across Europe, the polarisation of employment
and the decline in growth; sovereign debt defaults and banking failures; mineral
and energy constraints;.
- environmental and
demographic crises, in particular, the implications of declining land viability
for migration patterns; refugee rights and military occupations; nation-state
population growth and its implications for agriculture, infrastructure and
transport
- the crisis of accountability,
expressed in the failure of traditional representative democracy systems especially
in the context of global markets, the growth of computerised
share-dealing; the emergence of new private sector actors in public
services; the growth of new mass participatory movements and the rise of
unelected extremist minorities both challenging the legitimacy of the
nation-state and its institutions
- socio-technical
disruptions and instability, exaggerated by a reliance on non-human intelligence
and large-scale systems of systems in finance, logistics and healthcare, and
by the development of a data-rich culture;
the increasing concentration and centralisation of internet
discourse in the walled gardens of social networks; the proliferation and
complexity of digital divides; the dependency of our
educational institutions on computer systems for research, teaching,
study, and knowledge transfer
- the dehumanisation crisis,
expressed in the production of fear between people, the replacement of
human flourishing with consumption, the replacement of the idea of the
person with the idea of the system, the replacement of human contact with
mediated exchange, the commodification of the person, education and the
arts
and specifically,
in relation to TEL;
- TEL and the industrialisation of education; marginal communities and the globalization and corporatisation of learning; futures thinking as a way to explore TEL in relation to resilience; the political economy of technology in higher education and technological responses to the crisis of capitalism; the role of openness as a driver for innovation, equity and access; digital literacies and their capacity to shift TEL beyond skills and employability in an increasingly turbulent future; connectedness and mobility as seemingly the defining characteristics of our societies; the role and responsibility of research and of higher education as these crises unfold, the complicity or ambiguity of TEL in their development; is the current TEL ecosystem and environment sustainable, is it sufficiently responsive and resilient, how extent does TEL research question, support, stimulate, challenge and provoke its host higher education sector?
TEL is at the intersection of technology and learning and encapsulates
many of the ideals, problems and potential of both. Education and technology permeate all of the
perspectives outlined above, some more than others. It is possible however that
they could ameliorate some of their consequences or amplify and exaggerate
others. TEL has been a project and a community nurtured within the institutions
and organisations of formal education in the recent decades of relative
stability and prosperity in the developed nations of Asia-Pacific, North
America and Western Europe. Some of the critical challenges directly relate to
the perceived missions of the TEL project and its community. Contemporary
formal education in schools, colleges and universities is increasingly reliant
on TEL. The TEL community is however currently poorly equipped either to resist
the progress of these crises today or to enable individuals and communities to
flourish despite their consequences tomorrow. The transition movement, the open
movement and the occupy movement are
all parts of wider responses to differing perceptions and perspectives of the
underlying malaise.
The Call
The proposed workshop will enrich conversations by bringing
in new perspectives and will explore how the different communities can learn
from each other, perhaps bringing about more open, participative and fluid
models of education. It brings together researchers seeking to articulate these
concerns and responses, and develop a shared understanding that will engage and
inform the TEL community. It is timely, necessary and unique, and will
contribute to a clearer and more worthwhile formulation of the Grand Challenges
for TEL in the coming years.
One of the
outputs of the workshop will be a special edition of a peer-reviewed journal;
other options, such as an open access journal, a book or a website, are
possible if there is a consensus.
Please submit an individual or collective two-page position
paper, or propose a structured discussion or debate on the role and place of
TEL in the light of our analysis. Contributions will be selected by the
organisers on the basis of individual quality of the papers and the overall
balance and coherence of the programme.
Deadline
Submission by 17 August 2012
Organisers
· Doug Belshaw, Researcher, Mozilla
Foundation
· Helen Beetham, Consultant, JISC
· Hamish Cunningham, Professor,
University of Sheffield
· Keri Facer, Professor, University of
Bristol
· Richard Hall, Reader, De Montfort University
· Marcus Specht, Professor, Open
University, Netherlands
· John Traxler, Professor, University
of Wolverhampton, john.traxler@wlv.ac.uk (corresponding organiser)
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