Designing Digital Learning Experiences

FRIDAY 26 June 2020

13:00-14:30 GMT+1          Online session via Microsoft Teams

What are the things that we do better in digital learning than in face-to-face learning? What do we need to consider  when designing digital learning experiences?

The COVID-19 pandemic has unceremoniously thrusted into the spotlight the value of digital technology – in preserving work, play, and learning – at a time when physical interactions are constrained.  The pandemic has rendered physical learning, in the form of face-to-face lessons, impossible for a period and made all teachers and students, prejudices aside, to design and participate in digital learning experiences.

Dr Fei Victor Lim from the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University will apply a multimodal social semiotic perspective for exploring the gains and losses of digital learning. He draws from Kress (2005: 21) who proposed a set of lenses to study “the question of gains and losses: focusing both on the material and/or semiotic mean, the modes, and the material communicational means, the media,… in the context”. The use of semiotic technologies (van Leeuwen, Djonov, & O’Halloran, 2013) for learning and teaching brings with it both possibilities and limitations in pedagogic meaning-making (Lim, 2021).

In this session, Dr Lim will discuss how the teacher, as a designer of learning, can exercise an awareness and recognition of the ‘gains and losses’ that specific semiotic technologies afford. He will also share his reflections from his recent experience in designing digital learning for his postgraduate students.

References

Kress, G. (2005). Gains and losses: New forms of texts, knowledge, and learning. Computers and Composition, 22(1), 5-22.

Lim, F. V. (2021). Designing Learning with Embodied Teaching: Perspectives from Multimodality. London, New York: Routledge.

van Leeuwen, T., Djonov, E., & O’Halloran, K. L. (2013). ‘David Byrne Really Does Love PowerPoint’: Art as Research on Semiotics and Semiotic Technology. Social Semiotics, 23(3), 409–423.

About the speaker

Dr Fei Victor Lim is Assistant Professor at the National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He researches and teaches on multiliteracies, multimodal discourse analysis, and digital learning. He serves as consultant for the World Bank on digital skills and is on the editorial team of Asia Pacific Journal of Education, Computers and Composition, and Designs for Learning.

https://www.nie.edu.sg/profile/LIM_Fei_Victor

Registration

Please use the google form for your registration:  https://forms.gle/ubU7hqwwqAThPadt9

The link to the online session on Microsoft teams is available upon registration. Please check that you have access to the group well in advance of the session. For any technical difficulties, please e-mail us at jiawei.ding.17@ucl.ac.uk