An Interview with Judy Mousley
“Int” refers to the interviewer and “JM” refers to Judy Mousley
Int:	I am speaking with Judy Mousley, Associate Dean for Teaching and Learning in the Faculty of Education. She is the unit Chair for EXE736 Knowledge Learning and Learners. Judy I wonder if you could tell us what your philosophical rationale is that underpins the unit?
JM:	The unit is undertaken by education students as an elective. It is in the Masters course and it focuses on the question of what knowledge is. Of course there is no definitive answer so we encourage the students to work together, reading and talking and finding out about the body of knowledge that underlies that question so that they engage with the topic. They are all interested in learning and what teachers do to promote learning so the main emphasis is on knowledge, learning and learners. We have developed the online resources so that they can learn about knowledge acquisition.
Int:	What influences have shaped your views on effective teaching and learning?
JM:	In most subject areas there is a body of knowledge that students need to become familiar with. Part of that might be professional knowledge but part of it too is the traditional knowledge of the society. In this case we focus mainly on western knowledge, but the students have also made contributions about other ways of thinking about knowledge, and particularly the students we have had from Asia and particularly South East Asia who bring a much more eastern view to the question. We see it as an opportunity for students to engage with difficult questions and engage with philosophy. What we tell them is not something that is to be learnt off by heart and repeated in an exam or an assignment, it is something that is open to analysis and critique and it is certainly open to their arguing about their own ideas.
Int:	Why did you become involved in developing digital media in your unit?
JM:	Well the philosophy of education can be a very boring topic. Nobody wants to hear about what Plato said and what Aristotle said and then later on through the years what different people think knowledge is or thought knowledge is. So they needed to meet this material in an interesting way. We certainly do not want boring content and so making what we call Living History was one way to put the content in front of them in ways that allows them to engage with it without being bored.
Int:	When you created your CD Living History, what were the design considerations?
JM:	The main thing is that we wanted to bring the history to life, that is why it is called Living History. We wanted to make it fun to watch so there is quite a bit of humour and the characters in it are people that the students can engage with as well. There is a huge amount of history that we tried to cover so that was another design consideration. We needed to select specific snippets that would encapsulate what the characters from the different years over the past centuries have said about knowledge and about learning. We had to decide what to put in and what to leave out and an important part of that consideration was how it would integrate with the reader. There were specific articles that we wanted the students to read, so one of the considerations in the Living History was thinking about those articles and the main points in them, and again try to bring them to life for the students. We chose CD because of the stability of delivery, students can use it even when they are not online and that was important because some of the text in there is what they would want to steal out of the CD for their assignments. They did not have to be online to use it but it was still integrated with the Deakin studies online facility.
Int:	How do you see the learning value of the different digital media used in the unit, the text, the audio and the video?
JM:	They are certainly integrated, I do not see audio and video as anything else than a way of enriching text. They are forms of text in themselves. So it was a matter of thinking about what needed to be in text, maybe key points that the students could use and refer back to, what is best in audio and how could sound effects be used to enrich the delivery of the audio messages and then the video of course was used when it is important to see things. Part of the text, the audio and the video were about engaging and entertaining the students, but mostly they were putting across some very serious messages about different ways of thinking about knowledge and learners.
Int:	What were your experiences with the web site and the CD and if you can speak about the teachers point of view and the students point of view?
JM:	For the lecturers the web site has been there in the background. It is for students use and the assignments are actually written in a way that students must visit the web site because they are asked to take for instance, some words or phrases from the web site and to explore those across the period of time. So they do need to engage with each section of the CD and also with the discussions that are on DSO. The CD and the DSO web site are very much integrated through assignments and that has proved effective for us. It has also been a positive experience for the students I think. They responded well in the student surveys, particularly in the question that is about online learning, and they participated in the DSO discussions at a very good level. That is in terms of the number of students who participated but also the depth of the discussions.
Int:	Was that mandatory or was it optional?
JM:	They did not get any marks for it, so in one sense it was optional but most of the students took it on themselves to participate.
Int:	But did the online discussion actually feed into the assignment?
JM:	Yes, we made it clear in the online discussion and in the unit guide that we would be expecting to see evidence of their participation in the discussions. Not necessarily as speakers, but certainly as readers of the discussions and we expected to see evidence of that in their written assignments.
Int:	Do you have a sense of what impact your teaching and use of digital media might have had on your students learning?
JM:	It is always hard to answer that, you know, how much did they engage with the readings compared with the digital media? It is a difficult question for anyone. Certainly there is evidence in the assignments that they did engage and that they have learnt from watching and listening to the Living History and also reading each others illuminations. One of the assignments asks them to interpret an aspect of their own work in the light of one of the philosophies presented in the Living History. So for instance they might be a nurse who looks at constructivism and interprets her practice in the light of constructivist learning, that is individual construction of learning. Another one might look at social constructivism, you might get an engineer who looks at learning in the light of the behaviourism and one of the students that we had looked at her work in the Tafe college in terms of behaviourist aspects but it was not about teaching students, it was actually about the interaction between the staff in planning their curriculum. We also had a group of five Indonesian students each of whom focussed on social constructivism and particularly the work of Vygotsky and how that seemed to relate very closely to their work in Indonesia. So it has been really interesting to see how the students have taken one of the forms of knowledge, one of the epistemologies to interpret their own specific situations to do with teaching and learning.
Int:	I believe you used these illuminations to build your course content. Can you just speak a bit about how you do that?
JM:	Yes. The students who put in particularly good illuminations, we asked them whether we can add them to the web site and it is just a matter of making a link, so the web site is growing from year to year with the students contributions.
Int:	Do future students essentially use them as exemplars or do they use them in other ways?
JM:	They can use them as exemplars because it is a strange word illuminations, that is one we made up. It is not as though there is a tradition. When you say write an essay, students have plenty of advice around them, plenty of models and most of them know in the first place what that means, but when you say create an illumination, that is a whole new world for them. What we wanted them to do was to throw some light which is where the word illumination came from, throw some light on their subject area and on the philosophy in an interactive way and to create a multimedia display of some sort, perhaps power point or perhaps a web site and there were some other options as well. One even wrote a very beautiful poem with a very detailed exigesis of the thoughts that lay behind the lines in the poem. So it was up to them to choose the way that they wanted to illuminate their topic in a way that would be interesting for other students. So yes they do serve as models, the ones that are online, but they also serve to illustrate what the students have learnt and to provide information for future students. For future students, that just becomes part of the resource that is available for them in this topic and they are free to quote those illuminations just like they would quote part of the reader or part of the CD that we created.
Int:	How would you like to develop your teaching and learning materials and your environments in the future?
JM:	I think with respect to this particular unit we are fairly happy to leave it churning along with the illuminations gradually building us up. One of the problems that we have is that the very last discussions that we have with students from year to year are not translated into the following year. We could save them I suppose but it's not much fun to read other peoples discussions. It's really engagement with the site as we have it at the moment. Where do we take it in the future? One of the areas that has become more popular in western thought anyway is activity theory, it is a neo-Vygotskian movement and there has been a lot of writing about activity theory in the last four or five years published, so that is an area for further development. The other thing is that we are very aware that the CD itself has western ideas, it privileges western philosophy. That is fair enough given my background and the background of the other staff and most of the students, but on the other hand there is a lot that comes out of the east that we really should be considering how to implement it.
Int:	As in eastern philosophers?
JM:	Yes and we have a seminar planned for two weeks time where that will be discussed, how to do that and which philosophers might we want to include and we have actually been engaging with the Indonesian students and a student in Malaysia about how best to do that. We will have a nice illumination too from this semester's work that we can add and that was written by one of the participants from Japan. It has been a good experience in learning how to work with multimedia in different ways and thinking about how to use multimedia to bring rather dead material to life, and also how to use comedy to get the students talking about particular aspects and get them noticing particular aspects of what we have seen.
Int:	Thank you
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