STEPHANIE HORSLEY
Stephanie Horsley joined the Centre for Teaching and Learning staff as an eLearning and Curriculum Associate in 2015 and is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Don Wright Faculty of Music at Western. She brings over ten years of course development and teaching at the postsecondary level (face-to-face, online, graduate, and undergraduate) to her role. Stephanie’s work is underpinned by her belief in the importance of student-centred learning, specifically the ways in which technology can be leveraged to connect the classroom to the world outside its walls to foster student motivation and self-directed, lifelong learning. She believes that teaching is a transformational act that impacts both students and instructors. Stephanie's current research focuses on ways in which social media has impacted teaching and learning in formal and informal contexts. Other research interests include the effects of regional, national, and international policy and economic models on local systems of education; scholarship of teaching and learning; the efficacy of teacher training programs; and comparative education.
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Technological Design and User Intention: Mediating our Expectations of Digital Tools in Music Education
The relationship between technological design and how technologies are used in the real world is not direct or linear. When we incorporate digital technologies, including social media, in our teaching, it prompts us to make decisions that are mediated by the affordances of those technologies. Sometimes these decisions relate to dilemmas that music educators have long wrestled with, while other decisions are embedded in new contexts or transformations of learning that are only possible because of the technologies themselves (Verbeek, 2007). This raises the questions: Are the affordances we find in new technologies a reflection of an object’s morality or of our own? Is the application of new technology extending previous opportunities and challenges or creating new ones? This session will begin with a short presentation that outlines one position on the morality of technological mediation and user adoption (LaTour, 2002; Verbeek, 2006), in part framed by the presenter-provocateur’s experience guiding a post-secondary institution through the rapid and unexpected adoption of digital teaching technologies during 2020—including associated extended and new opportunities and challenges and how they are amplified in the context of music education. Colloquium participants will then take part in a guided activity that explores their relationship with technology in their own music classrooms and communities. By the end of the session, participants will have engaged in a critical reflection on the intersection of technological mediation and user action that may be used as a model for framing future adoption and use of digital technologies in a variety of music education contexts.