Elfgren's teaching blog

The five stage-model (Salmon, 2020) does not work directly in my courses since none of them have an important social component. Of course there is a social aspect to all learning, but the social part in physics is sort of in the back seat. However, I agree with the first two parts. It's important to clearly present to the students how the course is structured; where they can find the information and what is expected of them. This is something that I always go through during the first lecture and it's even more important to do so in a digital context. For example, I always walk them through the Canvas-room (Canvas is our learning platform). I show them where everything is and I open the documents so they have seen them as well. The socialising part is generally not necessary in my courses since the students generally know each other since they are in the same study program. Also in the bigger courses, the students are generally divided in groups with respect to their program so ...

PLN means Personal/Professional/Passionate Learning Network (Oddone, 2019). For me Professional makes the most sense since this is a professional activity, though I can also see the merits of Personal since it's me as a person how is engaged in this. Every discussion about pedagogy is really simultaneously a collaborative learning and part of a PLN. Most of my PLN is local and face to face. I discuss pedagogy with my colleagues in physics at the department, Nils, Magnus, Andreas and Corina. At the division level I talk to Marcus, Lars, Mikael and Petter. At the department level I discuss a lot with Niklas and as a PL (Pedagogical Leader at LTU), I discuss with Oskar, Janne, Malin, Karin, the other PL's: Olle, Inger, Susanne, Diana, Björn and Andreas. These networks are somewhere betwen communities and networks. We share common goals but we still work largely individually. Then there are also pedagogy conferences, both internal at LTU and external. I am currently following two o...

The video about creative licences was informative (Process Arts, 2011) to sort out how to make sure that my online material won't be used in a manner that I didn't intend. However, I'm not so concerned about getting credit so I'd probably just the CC0 licence (Creative Commons, 2020). If anyone use my material, it's nice, but they don't need to attribute it to me, unless it'd be something that I make money on myself. Of course, I can also use the creative licences for my own teaching, for example by using Flickr (2020). I disagree with Wiley (2010) who insinuates that selfishness is the reason why teachers don't share more than they do. At the very least, it isn't personal selfishness. We teachers have a responsibility towards both our universities and the creators of textbooks that we use. I agree with him that expertise and expression of expertise can be freely shared but that seems quite obvious to me. I have lived almost my whole life in a digita...

I thought of myself as a digital native but after reading Prensky 2001, I realised that I'm a mix between the old and the new. I've lived with digital content all my life, I generally prefer it to hardware content, but I do not have the social networking, nor the love of videos of the digital natives. This became very clear to me when I chose to read the article, rather than watching the videos as my first way of learning about this. First of all, I do not believe that the students are so fundamentally different today than some 30 years ago. There are two differences that I've seen, both related to reading. The first is the reluctance to read the course literature. Many students prefer to learn by following a tutorial instead of reading the book. The second concerns a laboratory instruction that I’ve worked quite a lot on and that I believe to be quite clear. Recently, however, I’ve had many questions regarding this. At first I thought that the students had simply been too ...

I've had a computer since 1989. First it was all about playing but after a few year I got interested in programming. First I wrote my own games, though to be fair, they were never that great. However, I learnt the basics of programming, which would prove quite useful later. When I started university I learnt about Linux and I started scripting different tools, and setting up my own web page . A couple of years later I set up my own web and mail server on my Linux computer. I also coded my own photo server and an information server for storing notes, links, files, contacts and mails online. Since I became lecturer at Luleå University of Technology  in 2008, my focus has been on making the teaching, and administration thereof, more efficient. I'm examiner of a course, Physics 3 , with about 500 students each year so automation is clearly desirable. Our learning platform at the time was Fronter but there was no good tool in Fronter for online exercises of engineering problems, so...

Here is my map of my online presence as described by White (2014a): I didn't get so much directly out of this exercise. I use quite a lot of online applications and I'm not so much a producer of content or comments, which I already knew. I found it a bit unclear if the x -axis was about visibility or interactivity  or if it's public or all of it. However, it made me reflect on the purpose of online exercises and the distinction, which was nice. Does the exercise give me any new insights about myself? Do I feel inspired? Have I learned anything new? Can I use this? How? In education, we can move more towards engaging students digitally, which is something they are used to. This is especially interesting how with Covid-19 and all the digital education we have. This can be done through gamification, which I have used in my system of Bonus Assignments, Pettersson & Bolldén (2020, p 167). Another way is to use online collaboration tools such as Google docs, Mural, Padlet or ...