Here are the slides from my keynote at Thompson Rivers University’s Teaching Practices Colloquium this morning. I quite like the mediaeval theme (thanks ChatGPT), which I created to provide a constant reminder that the problems we have to solve are the direct result of decisions made 1000 years ago. There was a lot of stuff from my last book in the talk, framed in terms of Faustian Bargains, intrinsic motivation, counter technologies, and adjacent possibles. This was the abstract:
Why is it that educators feel it is necessary to motivate students to learn when love of learning is a defining characteristic of our species? Why do students disengage from education? Why do so many cheat? How can we be better teachers? What does “good teaching” even mean? And what role does technology play in all of this? Drawing on ideas, theories, and models from his book, How Education Works: Teaching, Technology, and Technique, Jon Dron will provide some answers to these and many more questions through a tale that straddles most of a millennium, during which you may encounter a mutilated monk, a man who lost a war, a robot named Claude, part of a monkey, and an unsuccessful Swiss farmer who made a Faustian bargain and changed education forever. Along the way you will learn why most educational science is pointless, why the best teaching methods fail, why the worst succeed, and why you should learn to love learning technologies. There may be singing.
I had a lot of fun – there was indeed singing, a silicone gorilla hand that turned out to be really useful, and some fun activities from which I learned stuff. I think it worked fine as a hybrid event. It was a sympathetic audience, online and in-person. TRU has a really interesting (and tension-filled, in good and bad ways) mix of online and in-person teaching practices, and I’ve met and listened to some really smart, thoughtful, reflective practitioners today. Almost all cross disciplinary boundaries – who knew you could combine culinary science and nursing? – so there’s a lot of invention going on. Unexpectedly, and far more than from a lot of bigger International conferences, I’m going to go home armed with a whole bunch of of new ideas.
