Findings from Educause’s 2009 Top Ten IT Issues Survey

It is a job and a half being in an educational institution’s IT Services these days. Rationing is acute, and technological obsolescence endemic.

The US not-for-profit organisation Educause has published findings from its Top Ten IT Issues Survey of institutional ‘Chief Information Officer” (in the US I believe this is a board level head of information technology). I’ll reproduce the issue on Learning and Teaching with Technology:

“Teaching and Learning with Technology — formerly E-Learning / Distributed Teaching and Learning — ranked #5 this year, moving up from #9 in the 2008 survey. With the increasing availability of technology-based learning tools both internal and external to the institution, the role of the CIO and other IT leaders is expanding to encompass many teaching and learning domains. The trend toward augmenting instruction with technology creates opportunities and substantial challenges for those who must respond to increasingly diverse and fluid instructional environments. CIOs have become crucial to instructional units because they provide leadership in evaluating and supporting the teaching technologies that underlie multiple forms of distributed learning.

A growing proportion of learning takes place outside the traditional boundaries of the classroom, facilitated by applications such as social networks and technologies that support a culture in which everyone creates and shares. In the current economic environment, IT leaders must make decisions about whether or not to accommodate these miscellaneous technologies. Further, they are being asked to provide technological direction for cultural transformations — such as information fluency — that involve library faculty, department faculty, technology specialists, and students as co-creators of knowledge. Finding the proper balance between systemic and ad hoc technologies will be fundamental for IT leaders as they respond to a student generation that prefers less passive and more agile learning. These instructional modalities will foster transformational innovations such as the need for e-portfolios in a reflective, contextual, authentic, and active learning environment.

All of these developments play out in a landscape where IT leaders bear responsibility for systems that support institutional functionality, that protect the privacy and security of faculty members, students, administrators, and staff, that safeguard information and intellectual property, that respond to the data and information needs of the institution, and that provide effective means of communication. This responsibility forces IT leaders to function in a mediated environment — one in which they must manage dwindling resources, increasing demands, and the necessity for a collaborative establishment of effective priorities with administrative and academic constituencies.

Critical questions for Teaching and Learning with Technology include the following:

• To what extent are IT leaders involved in active communities of practice, sharing ideas that facilitate consensus for information and instructional technology?
• What mechanisms are used to provide information about the effectiveness and possible reformulation of institutional technology? Are evaluation results shared on an institution-wide basis with opportunities for reflection?
• How are IT leaders taking an active role in informing key stakeholders about the necessary policy realignments caused by emerging technologies?
• What mechanisms are in place for faculty development? How are faculty members involved in the process?
• What system is in place to examine and reevaluate institutional structures for campus technology on a regular basis?”

The war between awareness and memory

This, via the estimable George Siemens, begins:

“About a month ago Robert Scoble blogged about abandoning Twitter and Friendfeed. He said that he thought “real-time systems” like these and other micro-blogging tools were hurting long term knowledge. Turns out that he’s mostly worked up about the lack of archiving and quality of search.

On April 19th, 2009 I asked about Mountain Bikes once on Twitter. Hundreds of people answered on both Twitter and FriendFeed. On Twitter? Try to bundle up all the answers and post them here in my comments. You can’t. They are effectively gone forever. All that knowledge is inaccessible. Yes, the FriendFeed thread remains, but it only contains answers that were done on FriendFeed and in that thread. There were others, but those other answers are now gone and can’t be found.

This is not exactly the same idea as the theme in this post, because a lot of what bothers him can be solved technically. But there is evidence that faster, easier, access to current awareness broadens our absorption of the present and thins out our access to the past. Simply put, too much of now means less and less memory.

This was quite dramatically illustrated about a year ago by sociologist of science James Evans, who published a paper in the journal Science entitled “Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship”. Evans analysed citation activity across several large databases of journals (including arts and humanities) through their evolving history, because he wanted to see what would happen with how scientists and scholars responded to the increasing availability of back files going back in time, as journals were retroactively digitised. How would online access influence knowledge discovery and use? One of his hypotheses was that “online provision increases the distinct number of articles cited and decreases the citation concentration for recent articles, but hastens convergence to canonical classics in the more distant past.”

In fact, the opposite effect was observed.

As deeper backfiles became available, more recent articles were referenced; as more articles became available, fewer were cited and citations became more concentrated within fewer articles. These changes likely mean that the shift from browsing in print to searching online facilitates avoidance of older and less relevant literature. Moreover, hyperlinking through an online archive puts experts in touch with consensus about what is the most important prior work—what work is broadly discussed and referenced. … If online researchers can more easily find prevailing opinion, they are more likely to follow it, leading to more citations referencing fewer articles. … By enabling scientists to quickly reach and converge with prevailing opinion, electronic journals hasten scientific consensus. But haste may cost more than the subscription to an online archive: Findings and ideas that do not become consensus quickly will be forgotten quickly.”

Read on.

The MP3 Experiment

This, via Museum 2.0, about the evolved flashmobs staged by the participatory public art group Improv Everywhere (“we cause scenes”) is quite lovely!

“I particularly like the MP3 experiments, events at which Improv Everywhere  distribute an audio file to people for free as a podcast. Participants gather in a physical venue with their own digital audio players, and everyone hits “play” at the same time. For about half an hour, hundreds of people play together, silently, as directed by disembodied voices inside their headphones. The MP3 experiment is a model for how a typically isolating experience—listening to headphones in public—can become the basis for a powerful interpersonal experience with strangers. In this way, the MP3 experiment is an example of the ways that technological barriers can become benefits by mediating otherwise uncomfortable interactions.

The MP3 experiment is an exercise in following instructions. The voice tells you what to do –stand up, shake hands, play Twister, make silly shapes—and you do it. Over the years, the experiment has grown in popularity (recently, thanks to this NYT article), and the participants have a sense that they will be asked to do something a little unusual in the context of the event. But it’s still impressive how quickly the recording sets a supportive tone in the face of absurdity. And I think there are lessons in the details of the recording for anyone interested in encouraging visitors/users/participants to step outside their comfort zones and try something new.”

Making presentations about e-learning – the rhetoric and the reality

Returned from holiday to see there was a new Routledge book out, Giving a Lecture: From Presenting to Teaching, 2nd Edition by Kate Exley and Reg Dennick “addressing a number of rapid developments that have occurred since its first publication in 2004”. From this I deduce it’s more tooled up. On a similar theme, I also started reading Kay and LeSage’s recent paper Examining the benefits and challenges of using audience response systems: A review of the literature (Computers & Education;53(3):819-827), which includes the section Challenges to using ARS (we call this ‘Personal Response Systems’ or ‘clickers’).

How can different technologies improve the existing lecture or presentation format towards a better learning experience? And – given that not everything that works is good – are the improvements consonant with a better teaching experience?

Before my holiday, I’d posted (at his request) a question I asked keynote speaker John Connell at Brunel’s e-Learning 2.0 conference earlier in July.

“The vision of your presentation is far reaching and yet here we all are, sitting in rows facing the authority figure at the front, silent for an hour. It’s like the photo of the 1960s primary school in one of your slides. The difference between rhetoric and reality is stark. So my question is this. If all the constraints (about which we are all aware and understanding) were removed, would you change this presentation? If so, how? Is there anything you would try to preserve, and why?”

John paraphrased the question as “how do we square the rhetoric of ‘Learning 2.0′ with the ‘industrial-age’ pedagogy that is still the basic format of so many such events?” and solicited responses from his readers, which you can read below his post.

I wasn’t trying to make a point with the question – I found John Connell’s keynote pertinent and engaging and, in fact, all a keynote should be. When he asked me at lunchtime what I would have changed, I basically replied “Nothing”.

I agreed with the third commenter Greg Cruey when he wrote:

“…while it shouldn’t be the only tool you have, I really don’t feel badly about standing in front of a group of mature, skillful, willing, self-motivated learners and talking to them – especially with the help of a good slide presentation, especially if some discussion is allowed. This is particularly true if my goal is change the way they think about something or to persuade them of something. It is less true if I’m trying to impart a skill.”

But while I agree with John (different John) when he says (#7):

“Your audience will have come up through ‘industrial-age’ pedagogy successfully. They may be more comfortable with this than ‘learning 2.0′ experience.”

On the other hand, commenter Ruby:

“I often get “accused” of wanting to change everything to bring in new technology, but in fact I don’t have a problem with re-assessing what we already do and then deciding what is the best way, given the huge variety of possibilities now available.”

Other pointers – commenter Michelle Selinger links to the AACE online conference Spaces of Interaction which was about transforming the way conferences are run. See the conference archive for audio, slides and the archived (fossilised!) real-time discussion in text-chat form.

The best a presenter can achieve is to create the circumstances under which their audience can do the work of testing the logic of their arguments and thinking through the implications – “How does this fit with what I know already?” and “If that is the case then what else is true?” This is one perspective from which to evaluate potentially transformative technologies.

As a learning technologist with a practical as well as scholarly remit, the least I can do is try out promising new types of experience, shine a light on them and attempt to persuade colleagues to do the same.

It seems to me to follow from this that it would be helpful if e-learning conferences were supported to be experimental events, for the following reasons:

• The organisers can be pretty confident that the audience comprises enthusiasts who will be understanding about cock-ups.
• The presenters are sufficiently educationally aware to safeguard the learning experience of their audience, to avoid them being overwhelmed
• I think it’s important – for the sake of empathy and (self-)credibility – that those of us who urge or welcome experimentation become proof of concept by experimenting ourselves in higher-stakes settings, with all the aptitudes, contingency design and potential pratfalls this implies.
• We’d see new tools showcased by people invited for their vision and ideas, and it would be dynamite
• We’d appreciate the barriers between how presenters do things now and how they might do things if we were unrestricted; it’s helpful to reveal the ducks legs paddling furiously.

I’m far from the first person to have formed this opinion, but again the reality is very different. Certainly, conservative expectations discourage experimentation, as John Connell implied in a further post triggered by an account, by another keynote speaker, of how he somewhat aggravated his audience by addressing them from the seating area instead of the stage.

There’s more to that but time’s up for me so I have to leave it dangling.

Funding from the HEA for a review project on academics’ engagement in professional development

The Higher Education Academy (HEA) have funded an extension of my review of the literature on academic engagement in professional activities. The review aims for a better understanding of the successes and informative failures experienced by academic developers working with academic teaching staff to kindle an appreciation of the potential of technologies, and to support practices which express educational values.

It identifies a number of practices which emerged as helpful to academic developers, discusses the limitations of the work, and concludes by posing a number of questions to the sector.

You can have a look at the groundwork in the form of:

• A digest of research papers and reports (March 09, on which the proposal was based)
• A presentation (March 09)
• Update: the report is now published on the HEA’s EvidenceNet.

I reproduce the rationale for the project below:

“Ground-breaking technology-enhanced learning (TEL) exists, but often contained within pockets of expertise.

There was a period of intense research interest in academic development for TEL in the early years of this decade, followed by a lull – perhaps evidence of a fatalistic institutional outlook which regards reluctance as a function of seniority and, ignoring the unwillingness of the junior conscripts to professional development courses, assumes that younger academics will emerge with good instincts about TEL.

But engagement is not comprehended by attendance, or even by technology use. Engagement is better thought of as what is done that is intrinsically, rather than extrinsically, motivated, or what is done with enthusiasm under circumstances of coercion, and how ideas about learning permeate what is done. Most development is informal.

Independent and disruptive as it is, Web 2.0 is intriguing here. The meaning-making potential of ‘Google Generation’ learners requires nurturing (Rowlands, 2008) as always. Academics are or aren’t experimenting with Web 2.0 – my opportunistic mini-questionnaire on Goldsmiths’ VLE after the snow closures suggests mostly not. There are few systems in place to acquaint central departments – whose major role is dissemination – either way.

This independence from the centre may be cherished. Academic allegiance – Wenger’s (2003) community of practice – is principally disciplinary rather than institutional. Frequently, national agendas interpreted locally meet resistance. McWilliam (2001) identified ‘Machiavellian’ subversion of local initiatives for their paucity of academically-engaging qualities such as rigour, evidence, scepticism, theory and intellectual stimulation, and (Beetham, 2001) the opportunity to critique the initiative itself. When departmental heads appease the centre and their department by diverting their TEL through a single champion, learners may be (superficially) satisfied but the expertise can be easily lost and the practices, undefended.

However, the centre – management and support departments – is valued as bridging between academics in different departments, for interpreting national initiatives and developments, and for actualising ideas. Without cross-fertilisation, challenge, and external interest, local communities of practice can become parochial. It is the role of central departments to organise and scaffold occasions for reflection.

I began a review of the literature on engaging academics in professional development for TEL (Vogel, 2009a, 2009b), focusing hitherto on peer-reviewed literature. This work has uncovered some gaps.

The academic perspective is faint – few academics who experience development interventions have the confidence, methodologies or discourses to reflect on their practice or to write for educational publications (Shephard, 2004).

Development interventions tend to be reported from the perspective of the professional developer. Often engagement is glossed in the reports, which tend to be concerned with the process of designing and running the intervention, and conceptualise engagement as, for example, voluntary attendance. Since professional developers tend to work primarily with academics, the impact of the intervention tends to be viewed from the academics’ perspective – even where learners are involved (Salmon, 2008).

In summary, there is a need to search the peer-reviewed and ‘gray’ literature for a better understanding of academic engagement in professional development for TEL today.”

This is great for us learning technologists, won’t take us out of our way, and will help us in pursuing the aims and objectives of our department.

References

All web pages accessed 29 March 2009.

Masterman L and Vogel M (2007). Practices and processes of design for learning. In: Beetham H and Sharpe R (2007). Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age. London: Routledge.

McWilliam E (2000). Against professional development. Educational Philosophy and Theory;34(3);289-299

Rowlands I, Nicholas D, Huntingdon P, et al (2008). The information behaviour of the researcher of the future. Available: http://tinyurl.com/2zd26a

Salmon G, Jones S and Armellini A (2008) Building institutional capability in e-learning design. Alt-J;16(2)95-109

Shephard K (2004). The role of educational developers in the expansion of educational technology. International Journal for Academic Development;9(1):67-83

Vogel (2004) Documents for ePBL project, including review of ePBL literature. Available: http://tinyurl.com/cht55q

Vogel M (2009a). A review of literature on the engagement of academics in professional development activities for e-learning. Available: http://tinyurl.com/cy4j9y

Vogel M (2009b). The engagement of academics in professional development for e-learning. Presentation to the M25 Learning Technologists meet-up, 27 March 2009. Available: http://tinyurl.com/ckuqbr

Vogel M and Oliver M (2006). Design for learning in Virtual Learning Environments – insider perspectives. Available from: http://tinyurl.com/d2n978

Wenger, E (2003) Communities of Practice and Social Learning Systems. In: Nicolini, D, Gherardi S, Yanow D (2003) Knowing in organizations: a practice-based approach. M.E. Sharpe, 2003
ISBN 0765609118, 9780765609113 (Google Book)

Weasel Televisual Enterprises presents A Librarian’s Guide to Understanding Academic Copyright

Weasel Televisual Enterprises presents A Librarian’s Guide to Understanding Academic Copyright

See too:

• Directory of Open Access Journals
• Wikipedia on the Open Access Movement
• Read James Boyle’s 2008 book Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (normal kinds of price for hard copy but free download)
• Something critical on the RAE 2008 and its consolidation of closed access
• Open Access increases downloads, citations and impact – a bibliography maintained by Steve Hitchcock
• Declaration and statement of principles of the World Summit on the Information Society

Hat tip: Bekky

UNESCO World Conference on Higher Education 2009, and the University of the People

UNESCO’s World Conference on Higher Education 2009 being webcast.

An overview can be found at Inside Higher Ed, including reference to a new 22-page report, Trends in Global Higher Education – Tracking and Academic Revolution.

Incidentally, one of the authors, Philip Altbach, has raised good questions about the marvellously ambitious, free, global online university, the University of the People, which launched this year with a fanfare from the UN and is currently accepting enrolments for September 2009 and seeking volunteers.

The courses offered at this early stage fall within three programmes, and are modular. Study is technology-dependent, but technology use is modest, drawing on established tools like facilitated discussion forums and email.

This is an exciting and potentially cataclysmic development. UoPeople is run on an altruistic, technology-dependent and technology-enhanced, peer-learning model, with no tuition. If it works it will be proof of concept of these ideas in higher education.

I’m not sure what you think of the promotion so far, but I am missing an ethos (apart from the obvious and admirable one that education should be free and available to all). Learning is not solely about grasping facts – in order to make use of them you need certain attitudes and values, for example creativity and a critical, unprejudiced mindset. Currently these kinds of concerns are absent from the UoPeople’s identity.

The first hurdle for UoPeople, however, is gaining accreditation. Quality is not a concern which comes through strongly on the site. You’d imagine confidence, expressed as accreditation, would sink or float the initiative. Clearly, with learners shaping their own experiences and with no way, currently, to verify that the student who is assessed is the student who claims the credit (a long-standing problem for distance learning which is also true for established forms of learning), the idea of accreditation will need a rethink. But because I know little about accreditation I’ll stop there. I am rooting for UoPeople and hope it becomes a superb learning institution.

UoPeople blogs (mostly community-building and not related to learning), tweets (more relevant to the matter university learning), and YouTubes. The Facebook area is active with ‘fans’ from all over the globe.

P.S. Dispiriting that there are no women on the advisory board. I also hoped for more in the way of educational theory, given the huge departure from established university models. But in fact, despite widespread concern with metacognitive skills, established universities give little away about this either and I wouldn’t want to set a higher standard. Better watch the vids.

Update – relatedly, get your brains round this: The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age, a freely available report from the Massachussettes Institute of Technology. I thought it was visionary – the part which most stood out was on Wikipedia:

“To ban sources such as Wikipedia is to miss the importance of a collaborative, knowledge-making impulse in humans who are willing to contribute, correct, and collect information without remuneration: by definition, this is education. To miss how much such collaborative, participatory learning underscores the foundations of learning is defeatist, unimaginative, even self-destructive.”

DIY video – Steve Hull at DIVERSE 09

Kris Rogers, learning technologist at LSE (I think of LSE as a kind of nature reserve for learning technologists – they are supported, enabled to experiment, and they get a lot done) blogged his experience at the 9th annual DIVERSE conference in Aberystwyth last month.

Lots of links out and – naturally – on the conference site you can get video, audio and slides for any of the presentations captured, with questions, via the Echo360 system, including a screen-reader version.

Kris recommends:

“… today’s most entertaining presentation was by Steve Hull from JISC Digital Media who gave a talk on the basics of producing good quality films using basic equipment, such as a Flip camera.”

Hull’s talk was titled ‘Improving the quality of visual media in education, or anyone can make a movie‘. Aided by some amusing examples of not-so-great practice (these aren’t quite optimised for Echo), he deals with technical, practical and theoretical aspects of DIY video, including: making the speaker stand out against the background; a bit of mise en scène, techniques for steadying the camera without a tripod); interviewing techniques, eg eradicating the ‘barnyard sounds’ of the interviewer through the development of non-verbal acknowledgement e.g. smiling and nodding; simple editing on freely-available software or, at a pinch, in-camera .

(Tangentially, this is DIY but is it edupunk? I can’t imagine a self-respecting punk would have been caught dead in a discussion about developing the quality of their self-expression. Maybe I’m too literal…)

JISC Digital Media is an advisory service and well worth a look – it’s FREE, FREE, FREE (and there is consultancy, with a view to embedding skills, which you can submit a proposal to get).

eLearning 2.0 – a conference at Brunel, 6-7 July 2009

There was a huge amount of interest to see and hear at this convivial, well-organised, and generous conference. Below I (in this order)

• list some specific things (stuff I highlighted in my notes at the time)
  
• dump the typed notes I took (can’t guarantee that they are complete or accurate, although I tried) and the mostly-unasked questions which occurred to me. Perhaps this will encourage the odd reader to visit the conference web site and download the audio and/or slides from the presentations.
  
• summarise some general thoughts the conference threw up on the implications for teachers, learners and institutions, and some issues with identity management. Mostly issues and questions, but I will try to post some ideas at a later date.
  

The conference web site, incidentally, is an online community using the free service Ning; at time of writing participants are on there talking to each other and feeding back.

Specific and unrelated things

Next comes the small practical I excerpted from my notes to do or to pass on to various people where I work. The notes are below that.

• There is a discrepancy between what staff think students do with feedback (i.e. little or nothing) and what students say they do with feedback (i.e. pore over it and incorporate it into their work).
• What to call things. Students prefer the word ‘learning journal’ to blog. They also prefer ‘collaborative workspace’ or ‘project space’ or ‘research community’ rather than ‘wiki’. Not only is this a preference – using these terms reduces requests for technical support. Students were much more likely to attend ‘review sessions’ than ‘office hours’
  
• US Educational Opportunity Act 2008 requires demonstration that the student taking the distance assessment is actually the student getting the credit. Every student must be validated.
• A politely tech-skeptical artist-in-residence at the V&A Museum became a reluctant blogger (at their request), excited enormous interest in her work, and managed to get herself on the A Level syllabus and attract 600 uploads to her Global Beach (or is it ‘Wild Beach’) project.
• In early 2008 blog usage declined, but Twitter came and people began blogging again.
• Careerbuilder.com
• Look out for Andrew Middleton’s A Word in your Ear’ conference on audio feedback – how is the digital voice used to support students particularly in terms of feedback.
• Read David H Jonassen’s book Meaningful Learning With Technology
• Web conferencing – dimdim.com – free vid conferencing, you can record, and there is also the opportunity to dial in. Brought into Moodle and everything else with dimdim’s widgets. Posted everywhere to remind students that the meeting was imminent or ongoing. Can download recording and transcript from chat.
• Reminding me why we work with enthusiasts: Everett Rogers’ theory of innovation and dissemination – you work with the enthusiasts, the innovators, first because they are resilient about wrinkles and pitfalls. The early adopters can recognise a good thing once it has been refined and honed – once they have seen proof of concept.
• Paul and Elder’s (2008) work on cultivating thinking – “much of our thinking is biased, distorted, uninformed or down-right prejudiced when left to itself.“ You have to systematically cultivate your thinking.
• Sound decision-making – the Exploratree at future lab. Wow – a repository of thinking guides.
• Www.gapminder.org – “Unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view.”
• The Teaching and Learning Strategy at Manchester mentions inspiring both learner and teacher. Goals are for highly employable students and students who are prized in research.
• On Web 2.0, read Ullrich 2008 and revisit Franklin and Van Harmelen, 2007.
• Read Michael Eraut on informal learning.
• FlightPaths, the collaboratively-authored novel
• Andrew Middleton on choosing a digital audio recorder – Creative Zen £40. M-audio can sample noises for music. You can put it in your pockets. Costs £200.
• Go and mine John Connell’s presentation for theorists to read
  

My notes

Keynote – Good eLearning and Bad eLearning – John Connell

Blogged the question solicited responses. Pretending ‘e’ doesn’t exist – to reassure. Joe Nutt (cynic, Shakespearian) drop the ‘e’, learning not as a participle, not as a process, but as a goal. Martin Weller @ OU: drop the ‘e’ and the ‘learning’ and the question is still the same (telling good from bad); draw up an archetype.

So, back to first principles, identify an archetype.

Bad e-learning – creepy treehouse syndrome – Chris Lott’s definition, followed by Jared Stein. A mimicking, luring, but actually repressive and repulsive environment; infringement on the sanctity of their peer groups. Objections to influence of the institution. You can’t build a community, you can only grow one.

A VLE?

GLOW – SSDN – a broadband netwk to link schools in Scotland. Browser-based national intranet. Boundary-busting. At first, teachers wanted content. So they got a VLE, as a sop to pull them in. Nobody said they wanted to collaborate, but they got collaborative tools anyway, and they have proved most useful. GLOW groups; esp video conferencing.

First principles – the purpose of learning. Ivan Illich’s (‘De-Schooling Society’ and ‘Tools for Conviviality’) vision on empowering, peer, lifelong, challenging learning; learning webs (then with cassettes, now come of age). James Ralph Darling’s ‘The Education of a Civilized Man’, education which avoids the production of ‘instructed barbarians’.

First principles – intelligence. Gilbert Harcrow. Intelligence as literacy, imagination, creativity.

First principles – conviviality. Illich’s notion of autonomous and creative intercourse; individ freedom realised in personal interdependence. The transformation of learning to education – having your learning planned by others – paralyses ability to endow world with personal meaning.

First principles – pedagogy. Jerome Bruner’s necessity of being self-consciously cultural, ideological and political. Freire’s desire for a critical focus.

Pundits’ principles. George Siemens. Diversity of opinions. The capacity to know more in more critical than what is currently known (learning as a process or a skill, or ability). Nurturing (aha! Is this a role for a teacher?). Polsani’s displacement of learning outside the institution and onto the network; education as preparedness for change.

The non-neutrality of technological instruments. Educ and tech has often been about maintaining status quo, render people passive, rather than to affirm transformation.

Web 2.0 is a shifting context. Individual production, epic amounts of data; crowd power ; complex participation; network effects; openness (Paul Anderson’s JISC report what is Web 2.0)

Great segmented oval – present to workshop participants blank.

Jay Cross’ learnscape. New network values. Unlearning of secrecy, control, role clarity, specialisation, hoarding, walling off. Speed.

Stuart Brown video. Serious criminals missed play in their early lives. Derek Robertson’s Scottish Centre for Games and Learning – Consolarium. Nintendogs as a great motivator for learning arithmetic – young kids who should be counted up to 20 understanding hundreds of thousands.

Institutional v. networked learning. Students are the biggest competition to institutions; doing it for themselves. “This will be the last generation in which education is the practice of authority”. A gradual, reluctant decline.

My questions

This is post-colonial, broadly. The teacher has disappeared. But this is a very empowering presentation for anybody in a learning role. It also has ambitions for society.

He missed out the cognitive psychology – how easy is it for us to learn to unlearn? What about Susan Greenfield’s worries?

Why the resistance and suspicion?

How would he have changed the paradigm of his keynote speech today.

Being illiterate in any medium leaves one at the mercy of those who control it (Joe Nutt?)

Questions –

Q – access to inforamtion was limited today there is no need to go to the library for information teacher no longer the fount of all knowledge. The job of a teacher should be harder today than it was back then. (Didn’t answer the question – clearly there is a difference between the rhetoric and the reality – he attributes this to the conservative impulses of our institutions and the slowness of change).

Q – the cynic’s problem with learning as process rather than goals – false dichotomy. There is no end to knowledge; you need a sense of where you are going. Process of maturation, depends on prior knowledge, judgement.

Q – desire to learn: how can this be developed?

Q – isn’t there something very different we can do now with the tools we have which requires new pedagogies. We must no drop the ‘e’ or we will drop the challenge. JC: it can be a form of cowardice (I’d love to see the response of academics in my institution to a comment like that).

Q – how can training prepare people for surprises and pitfalls?

Verity Aitkin (Keele) – blogging

Need for a faculty provision to become more visible

The blog grew and the bloggers emerged after early writers block; humsslearningspace.blogger

A blog is like a house, because it can home an entire provision; ability to brand. It sits outside the VLE.

Feedback – Google analytics account. Felt it important to take it out of Google search. Student feedback has been positive.

New features eg Digital Study Tool of the Month.

Questions

Q – did the institutions have concerns about security, PR etc?

My questions

Comments?

What are the stats like?

How much time do you spend? Do you confer with colleagues? Is it acknowledged as part of your working day?

How have you surfaced it?

Did anybody from e.g. IT Services query the use of blogger?

How did they manage the folksonomy of blogging together?

What was positive about the positive feedback?

Making assessment count – integrating Web 2.0 to support student assessment and reflection

Not Gunter Saunders, Uni of Westminster

JISC project with origins in bio-sciences Year 1 level 4.

Easy to get lost in gadgetry. Need to return to first principles.

The degree is compartmentalised. The ideal is that all tutors know what each other is doing and can integrate. Silo behaviour.

What holds a degree together? Motivation to learn. Supportive staff. Feedback, supposed to hold degree together, but actually equally compartmentalised. Personal tutoring.

Personal tutoring depends on reflection on assessment and feedback.

Discrepancies between what staff think students do with feedback and what students say they do with feedback.

E-reflect project – JISC.

Theory: Feedback to strategy to action to reflection.

Model: tripartite subject, operational and strategic model of feedback. Submit work. Complete a v simple questionnaire (Google). When students get their subject-specific grade they are asked to write a short reflective blog post, for their personal tutor. No extra effort for staff, but a record of feedback and reflection.

Students prefer the word ‘learning journal’ to blog.

Mobile technologies.

Q – examples of strategies for learning

Personal tutor now has a record of student performance.

Q – is it mandatory?

Stick and carrot thing. Pilot achieved 50% response rate.

Q – have the exam marks improved? e.g. FASST project which measured changes in performance. Being able to plot performance in relation to engagement.

My questions

Anticipate any barriers to rolling it out into say the humanities and arts?

Blended approach is where technology is most valued.

How will knowing yourself help you to choose a good course or a good institution when institutions are trying to get as many enrolments as possible?

Isn’t part of learning learning to fit in with the styles, personalities and intelligences of others?

Keep it simple – Milena Bobeva, Bournemouth

Towards i-learning and we-learning.

Including audio-feedback and podcasting.

Blogging – depended on carrots – optional blogging didn’t work.

Howard Gardner’s dominant intelligences. Honey and Mumford’s Learning Styles. Myers’ Briggs Personality Tests

Hole in the wall project demonstrated that motivation is a powerful factor in un-taught learning.

Savin Baden’s framework of 3 learning stances: personal; pedagogical; interactional.

E-learning stakeholders

Again, replace wiki with ‘project space or research community or project portfolio and blog with reflective diary or project diary – then requests for support go down drastically.

Politics around facebook and the institutional VLE.

Q How much do your undergrads exhibiting the Gen Y characteristics. A: they’re always connected – MB spent 12 hours with them in the labs.

Q re Gen Y and employment. The answer acquiesces to a very technologically-driven future.

Q – maybe a museum should be more like a website.

My questions

May have switched off, but not sure how Milena used the Web 2.0 tools.

Why not Google for university resources?

If students are leaving blogging late, then is it feasible to ask for drafts. Just like asking for drafts helps prevent last-minute panic plagiarism

MB puts her finger on it at the end. How do we move from I learning to We Learning? Well, particularly if you are caught up in your own learning styles, own intelligences, own personality. This is the old question about valuing and nurturing individuals within learning or practice communities. It is also a question of valuing and revisioning the concept of accommodation in highly individualistic times.

Afshin Mansour (Brunel) on impact of blogs on student learning

Project as part of PG Cert.

15 Operations Managements Pgs.

Examining effectiveness of blog as additional contact hour in place of face-to-face seminars.

AM’s blogs as more of a notebook.

Learning styles – AM chose Fleming’s 2001 VARK model. Classifies visual, auditory, reading/writing and kinaesthetic learners

One hour slot a week for AM to interact with students (i.e. Not anytime, but the opportunity for instant feedback from everybody). Interesting notion of blogging at the same time and commenting in a given time slot.

Then he interviewed and conducted a VARK questionnaire.

First blogs were poorly received but activity and commenting grew.

The more participants, the greater the perceived advantage of participating.

Barriers – time, typing, language, technical hitches.

Mild aural learning prefence (radar diagram) for students who participated in sessions. They wanted to interact a lot. (?) But no patterns among the rest. He induced the hypothesis that the strong presence of kinaesthetic element in the non-participants compared to the weak in the participants suggested that the participants hoped to learn what they needed to learn from blogs.

My questions

Another contradiction emerging in the day. To what extent should institutions – as places which encourage unlearning, and learning how to change – be accommodating of individual learning approaches? Isn’t this quite conservative?

Were there any media in the blogs?

How much activity took place outside the hour?

Yair Levy – effectiveness 2.0 or security breach 2.0

User satisfaction measures don’t measure what is valuable for the learner.

Satisfaction post-experience does not equal effectiveness.

Efficiency trying to do things with less v. effectiveness trying to do things right.

Missing a theoretical piece called ‘value’ – level of importances users attribute to a given aspect of the experience, or to the ‘system’. (This is, unsurprisingly, a very systems-oriented event.

Effectiveness as a multiplication of value * satisfaction.

Quadrant – what if there’s high satisfaction but low value? Useful to see what is unimportant AND unsatisfactory – then an institution can stop investing in it. You learn a lot about where you can improve.

Learners’ Value Index of Satisfaction.

Moving onto Learning 2.0.

Security worries with Facebook and other Web 2.0.

US Educational Opportunity Act 2008 requires demonstration that the student taking the distance assessment is actually the student getting the credit. Every student must be validated.

Http://CeLSR.nova.edu Centre for e-Learning Security Research.

Some other US institutions are doing biometric validation for all assessments.

Lastly, we are comparing e-learning to an existing benchmark – trad learning, where any student can take an exam, and we don’t place such high demands on accuracy and efficiency.

Q – but don’t you know your student?

Not really – one time somebody’s cousin took the exam. The video is one-way.

Q – what about the valuing of the social interaction aspect?

Q – what about difference in perception of value?

My questions

What about time?

What about controversial areas – differences in perceived importance.

How did he arrive at the curves?

How does one frame a question about value?

Trevor Barker Group Working in 3D worlds

Second Life campus of >500 students. £500k investment from university.

Usability issues; different disadvantages.

More help students received to perform tasks, the less they remembered things about the world. More usability equals more constraints.

Set up a project, threw everything at setting up a course in second life, for computing students. Even so, it took a lot of students.

Attendance in Second Life isn’t great.

Built something in Second Life allowing the tutor to analyse the attention, action and interaction of the virtual students.

Names in Second Life are a problem.

Student evaluation: nobody liked the virtual lectures – preferred Trevor in real life. Also hard on the lecturer. Group meetings were well received cf phone or Skype, but f2f preferred. Some were still using it socially after the course.

Tutor evaluation – robustness; usability; question marks about pedagogical benefit (some evidence of benefit in small group work); training necessary; freedom.

Second Life is not accessible.

Natalie Ticheler (London Met) Using a VLE for Blended Learning

Open Language Programme; Japanese students; how are they using a VLE and what do they think?

Divided cohort by sex. Low uptake. Higher uptake of flashcards.

Simon Tindall – Desire To Learn – VLE replacement, complement or shouldn’t be used at all?

VLE supplier’s thoughts on the Web 2.0 turn.

A scale from No Web 2.0 to Only Web 2.0 (i.e. No VLE).

Security, data protection of record of achievement, respect, longevity.

With which tools should a VLE choose to integrate? This is the same question as an institution has.

My questions

Open ID?

Gail Durbin V&A – Web 2 as task not technology

A politely tech-skeptical artist-in-residence reluctant blogger managed to get herself on the A Level syllabus and attract 600 uploads to her Global Beach (or is it ‘Wild Beach’) project (Drupal).

You have to phrase the instructions carefully.

People want to be part of the site.

V&A’s knitting collection, with work and patterns. Using technorati they found out who was using the patterns.

Invited people to submit non-garment knitting.

Anxiety about “dumbing down” and poor quality at the museum.

Another project on body art with the arrival of 1500 to be photographed by photographers who are more used to static art. Tattoo is a very common search term.

Christine Keeler’s chair, and visitors sitting in the replica.

Extending the museum experience.

1960s fashion show.

Sometimes set projects on Flickr.

1 million objects online in Sep when the collections information system goes live.

Twitter.com/gail_durbin. g.durbin@vam.ac.uk

Reynol Junco – Translating social media research into academically relevant practicies

rey.junco@gmail.com

will post references and slides.

Student use stats; adoption by faculty; digital divide; positive fx; academically-relevant usage of technology based on research (there isn’t much)

Student tech uses

Pew phone survey

Students use things more than people in other generations. Focus on Twitter and Facebook.

When you categorise, you miss a lot – there is more diversity within groups – but:

Silent generation -1925-42 – events wars, New Deal, Depression

Baby boomers – 43-60 – competitive, individualistic. Reagan recession, Vietnam, Watergate

Gen X – 61 – 81 – latchkey kids, working parents – skeptical, nihilistic – grunge

Millenials, Gen Y 2000-now– special, sheltered, confident, optimistic – Oklohoma and 9/11, and Obama election

Same Pew patterns of social networking use in general and Twitter specifically.

Typically older generations are not as likely to take up newer technologies.

Nielsen March 09 report

Global reach of social networking sites is bigger than email.

Facebook audience becoming older since 2007.

Digital divide

Not all students are fantastic with technology.

Reynol’s reseearch.

Less likely to own mob phone: African American poorer men. More likely to talk on cell phones: African American men and Latino/Hispanic men. African American wealthier men spent more time texting.

Multitasking (IM and study at same time) and women and Latinos more likely to report that multitasking had a negative effect on academic work.

Facebook penetration on college campuses – 99% of U of Michigan students in 2008. Twitter’s change is over 1200% in a year, although use is relatively low.

Blogs and microblogs

In early 2008 blog usage declined, but Twitter came and people began blogging again.

Blog use in classroom.

Engagement and retention: Aston’s (?) work on student engagement – the more involved, the more successful. What are the variables? National Survey of Student Engagement (quasi commercial survey) in and outside class. Research on Facebook and student engagement. Higher Ed Research Institution (2007) and Heiberger (2008) correlation studies, survey based, looking at undifferentiated Fb use, high and low users. High users were more engaged on campus on some engagement variables – eg connections to the institution, friends, extracurricular organisations.

Attitudes – social networking is private, but low awareness of privacy statements.

Somebody called people stupid for not creating a second profile. It’s not stupid, it’s unaware and trusting, and normal.

Careerbuilder.com (2008)

22% of hiring managers used social netowrking websites to search. 33% reported finding information to disqualify an employee.

Research-based strategies.

Pre-enrolment orientation efforts; learning about faculties and staff. Values of the institution. Connections with graduates. Mazer, Murphy and Simonds (2007) research on Facebook – yes students do like to learn about a professor’s personality. But will faculty spy on them?

Facebook apps

Courses 2.0 – students can connect to course you post without having to be your friend. You can post assignments, a book, syllabus, schedule, in advance. You can share notes, connect with other students.

Twitter and student engagement

Good for connecting outliers to the campus. No research on the effects of Twitter but Reynol is going to start experimental research in the autumn to see if Twitter has an effect on grades.

My questions

Addiction to social networking?

Does this kind of engagement translate to academic success, or has the soft skills agenda eclipsed this.

Identity management is hugely important.

Maureen Kendal, London Met, Feed forward, feedback, going global (podcasting and second life)

The aim of Maureen’s course is to acquaint students with technical and complex vocabulary.

Podcasting for feedback. Making assessment formative i.e. Feeding forward; staff able to capture video files with capture software, compress and upload for students. Timely, in-depth, private. Simple, no editing – or no time to edit, post-production – needs to be timely.

The question is how to make these unedited sessions work.

Two tutors and four students, captured, discussing the needs.

London Met pod generator. Considerations included firewalls (security and privacy) and integration with the VLE (here, Blackboard) e.g. Vanderbilt and iTunes U.

Hidden costs: equipment – is mobile phone video good enough? (Maybe)

RADSE framework is used for the teaching of design and development. Creative, technical, business and production issues (CTBP).

Findings (findings from what – I must have missed it):

• screen caputre is best with other forms of feedback
• humour, wit and spontaneity is valued
• logic, reasoning and imaginative thinking comes through

Business strategy

Weighing up iTunes U with institutional software. Fears about enabling an unstable capitalist system, but London Met probably will use it – it is free and there are good protections.

Student engagement

Critique of podcast education. Are they disposable or dispensable?

Maureen has developed a scaffolding model.

Andrew Middleton (Sheffield Hallam) educational podcasting, a learner-centred, collaborative opportunity

Snr Lecturer in Creative Development – teaches disruptive technology in Journalism; interested in using digital audio. Book: Creative Voices. Organising ‘A Word in your Ear’ conference on audio feedback – how is the digital voice used to support students particularly in terms of feedback.

Yes, emphatically, we should drop the ‘e’. The ‘e’ is useful to an extent but our focus is how we can innovate with new and emerging tech,

McLuhan and Fiore 67, when faced with a totally new sit we tend to always attach ourselves to the flavor of the most recent past.

What can we usefully do now that we couldn’t before.

Jonassen et al 03. intentional, authentic, collaborative: effective tech-enhanced apps. i.e. Meaningful.

Historically, audio has been very much about transmission. A-learning (audio learning) is more active than passive. Some comparisons between Web 2.0 and a-learning 2.0.

We don’t need hi-tech and expert intervention. Welcome and celebrate the lo-fi with a simple red button. Rich user experience – meaningful, diverse, social and wide-reaching.

Read the Jonassen book.

With his large cohort of 230 broadcast journalism students, they made conversational summaries, captured seminar discussion groups, expert voices, feedback, cognitive challenges.

Activity – we each asked the person on our left a question from a sheet, passing round the m-audio microtrack recordings.

Distance learning – MyChingo, embedded in the VLE. VoiceThread too.

My Questions

Reckon I missed something, but if the aims of the course was just vocabulary, couldn’t assessment and feedback have been automated?

You couldn’t use iTunes U for individual feedback (could you)? Can you fine grain the access settings to an individual level like that?

Podcasts do not “offer a superficial understanding”. Like lectures they demand that you listen with questions. Unlike lectures, they give their audience time to develop these questions.

Begona Perez Mira Sychronous and asynchronous tools for online course delivery (business stats course, Louisiana state)

Video lectures – 3 parts

Recorded teacher in the classroom – real classrooms

Get her slides and annotated on tablet.

So, audio, slides and video, integrated with Camtasia studio recorder.

If you have good technical people, Moodle is highly customisable.

Aplia for external homework – pool of assignments, ungraded or graded,

Web conferencing – dimdim.com – free vid conferencing, you can record, and there is also the opportunity to dial in. Brought into Moodle and everything else with dimdim’s widgets. Posted everywhere to remind students that the meeting was imminent or ongoing. Can download recording and transcript from chat.

Called ‘office hours’ ‘review sessions’ and students were much more likely to attend.

Instructors used audio+video, remote students used just audio feed. (ie one-way audio).

Louisiana offered multiple ways of learning – a wide range for them to select from. Begona was not very interested in who was using the video, who the audio.

Lessons learnt: get a smart-phone – you can be available for your distance learning students anywhere.

My Questions

Begona is fortunate her institution did not oblige her to produce stats that the video was valued by students. I asked this – turns out the students used to be campused based, and the institution is delighted that Begona has managed to cut costs – no electricity used on campus. The only cost is Begona’s salary.

Is it sustainable? (I am not sure it is).

What happens if the start-up company providing the free service fails? Begona is confident that there will be a replacement. This is interesting, and in some ways true to the principle that it is not the technology that matters, but the teacher’s commitment to the process

Heather Serdar – University of East London – audio podcasting as a supplement to lectures

Heather teaches a double credit core module, the UG dissertation module.

Rationale – non-trad students. Expectations of students. Students don’t like to read.

My Questions

Tangential, but shouldn’t an institution with students who object to reading, foster that kind of literacy? Reading is so important for avoid disempowerment and exclusion.

Roger Boston, Houston, M-Learning

They give away iPhone 3G but the students didn’t know in advance. They were extremely happy, and they received them during the session and got to know each other well through exploring them.

Then the next generation iPod Touch.

Chancellors innovation grant.

Smart phones – no point thinking of them as disruptive presence. Harness them.

Asked students to gather anecdotal data of feasibility of building the smartphones into institutional provision.

Pilot picked up a further $100k for extension. Roger had to provide server and delivery platform. His team had a lot of technical work for converting media, doing password protection schemes.

They ended up preloading devices.

They have created a platform which accommodates over 100 different phones. Software figures out the device and automatically resizes the pages, panels etc.

My Questions

What about contextualised annotation? You still need pencil and paper because data entry in iPod Touch is so poor. Doesn’t this interfere with students interacting with their materials? Roger says you can type 40 wpm. I guess you still have a laptop? And this is mostly about learning objective facts in the physical and biological sciences.

Keynote – Marylin Leask, Education Faculty @ Brunel – Knowledge Management for the public sector

Staff expected to demonstrate that they were managing the knowledge of the organisation.

So, tools are needed and created. Cochrane. Best Evidence Medical Education. Map of Medicine subscription service – funnels doctors to the level of information they need via a flow chart approach.

Web 2 environments are not secure. It would not be appropriate for professionals to contribute to a local government site (why?)

Local government – 700+ services: streetlights, roadkill, refuse, community cohesion, care, gypsy and traveller issues. They all have communities.

14% staff turnover (retention issue = knowledge retention issue). Sharing and repurposing saves time by avoiding wheel reinvention.

CoPs – as well as the obvious they wanted to address recruitment and retention. People-finding. Boundary-busting connections. New and cheap forms of consultation.

The CoP web 2 site communities.idea.gov.uk – you can’t just barge in. It would be “like going into somebody’s house without knocking” (c.f. John Connell’s vision of transparency). Communities have gatekeepers. But they are immensely useful to researchers, and any of us can apply to go in. Policy and Performance community are open to all.

Everett Rogers’ theory of innovation and dissemination – you work with the enthusiasts, the innovators, first because they are resilient about wrinkles and pitfalls. The early adopters can recognise a good thing once it has been refined and honed – once they have seen proof of concept.

Some people don’t like sharing. We are not all the same.

Linking tools with staff jobs and priorities. Behaviours. Concerns.

Second presenter – Roberta

Roberta tells of brutal cuts in her institution. Faculty were asked to teach a class with no pay.

Paul and Elder’s (2008) work on cultivating thinking – “much of our thinking is biased, distorted, uninformed or down-right prejudiced when left to itself.“ You have to systematically cultivate your thinking.

Third presenter, the bloke.

Web 2.0 coined in 99 by Darcy DiNucci. Tim Berners Lee called it jargon.

The jargon omits that everything is speeding up exponentially, and that there is mitotic splitting up and reconstitution. Autopoiesis – self-creation – joining and leaving groups until a fit is found. Synergistic components – whole bigger than sum of parts.

Across the board needs: ubiquitous support i.e. With a social component.

Sound decision-making – the exploratree at future lab. He uses it with his undergrads.

VUCA world – volatile, complex, uncertain and ambiguous.

Simple tools for tame problems – well-defined, classifiable, stable, you know when the solution is reached, a right or wrong solution

Wicked problem. Not the above. Non-linear.

Www.gapminder.org

My Questions

This is one for Matt.

Rare and welcome values-based second presentation despite the slightly bizarre Elluminate setup with slides operated from the US. Then a connection was formed, but the bloke was basically blind and deaf to us. He did very well. The pace was good, but almost no examples; just disembodied theory.

Susan Brown – perceptions of Web 2.0 among academics at the university of Mcr

U of Mcr is good on research but poor on satisfaction with the learning process.

The Teaching and Learning Strategy at Manchester mentions inspiring both learner and teacher. Goals are for highly employable students and students who are prized in research.

The strategy implies a big role for Web 2.0. But nobody uses the Confluence embedded in Blackboard (we have similar issues with Confluence).

Research study to explore perceptions of the potential of Web 2 among staff.

Questionnaire to identify familiarity and extent of use of web 2 across faculties. In retrospect it might have been better to use Web 2 tools themselves to canvas opinion, but then again, it wasn’t clear whether staff would or could engage this way.

There is individual use, but little discussion. Most of the intiatives relate to Blackboard.

No real sense among academics that students are or will or should influence the way they work.

Interviews of those with negative and positive perceptions of web 2

Read Ullrich 2008 on Web 2 and revisit Franklin and Van Harmelen, 2007.

Susan’s research – interview responses often boiled down to Not Appropriate and No Added Value. e.g. No connection made between apprehension of facts as unegotiable objective facts and then what one does with the facts, the creative thinking, the cognitive breakthroughs, the possibilities, the understanding. Where there is an idea of learning as “one answer” then it was sometimes difficult to see the point of discursive, participative environments of Web 2.

Users of Web 2 in research eg the ‘splat technology’ of wikis did not necessarily take these practices to their students.

The positive attitudes to Web 2 were consonant with a view of learning as active student engagement. Inquiry as kernel to what they are doing.

Different ideas of student agency beyond simple posting stuff to fora. What about creating playlists or aggregating feeds.

Questions – Juncol – resistance to the democratisation of knowledge e.g. Wikipedia. Trad encyclopaedias have somebody who is motivated to write it for money. Wikipedia has authors who are motivated for intrinsic reasons. Susan: critical literacies.

My questions

Whose space is being colonised by whom? If we’re going to divide institutional roles up this way then maybe it is also legitimate to ask questions about academic spaces being colonised by student values?

If Web 2 necessitates profound changes, how can we dump the ‘e’, or be unselfconscious about the ‘e’.

Get Susan’s slides and notes.

Bruce Nightingale, Nottingham Trent. Trainee teacher professional voice and identity: social networks in initial teacher training

QTA standards – attributes, kg and understanding, skills. Trainees tend to interpret standards in the context of their school placement. Will your skillset transfer to inner-city Manchester?

Bruce wanted to back off from being thought of as the authority voice. More like the host of a party.

Schools are like a walled garden preventing students from doing the things they do online outside schools. At home it’s like the wild west “anything can happen”, “threat perceptions”. Want to make it “a little bit more of a tamed society”.

The research of Rebecca Einon and others at the Oxford Internet Institute.

Going into class can be emotional, and student teachers often want to comment on their experiences.

He moved from Elgg (read benve(e)rt’s blog) to Ning for sustaining his peer community of practice.

Martin Rich, Cass Business School Blending Web 1 and Web 2

The fictitious town of Millcaster – some attributes. A brewery. Large number of dysfunctional charities. It exists to help develop the people who work in the voluntary and community sector.

Education through dialogue, through stories, through fiction (if your case studies are fictional you can work in the different things you want to illustrate).

e.g. “A laptop goes missing. What systems should be in place and how can you avoid allocating blame?” “Low-level bullying – is a manager being unnecessarily aggressive in attempting to motivate her team?”

3 year project with funding from the Big Lottery Fund.

Website developed by Centre for Charity Effectiveness (at CASS) and Text Matters – a full time team.

Michael Eraut (Sussex?) – work on informal learning.

KnowHowNonProfit

Web 1 – professionallyauthored instructional material. Comments boxes (classified as Web 1 because no new knowledge is being created. They aid building a critical mass.

Web 2 – site functioning as a sharing and creating community.

Content Management System – wanted something they could rapidly prototype in, adapt and experiment with. So, open source – but not to save money. Chose PLONE, but concerns about scalability. Went for agile development. Important to put constraints on reactive changes which can drive out more measured developments or distract from the main purpose.

Stages of involvement in the system: browser to informal learner to activist.

Influences included FlightPaths the novel and The Archers which was originally conceived as an educational service for farmers.

An element of fun can be very valuable.

It was very hard to get these people involved in communities of practice; working together.

My questions

Comments boxes as Web 1? Very surprised. I bookmark comments threads in their own right. The response to this question when I asked it made perfect sense: there wasn’t enough controversy in the comments; they were very assertive (he referred to Action Statement theory? Searle?) and didn’t pick up sufficiently on each other’s contribution to create anything new. It was not really dialogue. Susan Brown commented that it was the difference between “Web 1 and Web 2 discourse”.

General thoughts

Academic teachers have been very concerned that technology can and will replace them. There will certainly be battles about protecting contact time, already whittled away to almost nothing in some disciplines. However, this conference would reassure academics on that count.

Everything I heard over the two days of the conference implies the professionalisation of academic teachers, rather than their extinction. Over the course of the conference I had academic teachers in mind, and what the future was likely to look like for them. Here are some of the academic teaching skills and attributes (and I ignore skills with technology here, because I think these are the most straightforward to acquire) implied by the presentations. They can roughly be summarised as Vygotsky and Bruner’s notion of ‘scaffolding’:

• Excellent subject knowledge, as a requirement to excellent, incisive facilitation. This includes factual knowledge, awareness of and sensitivity to areas of controversy. If visions for learning go beyond student-centred to student-led, tutors will need to identify and highlight gaps, inaccuracies and misapprehensions leading to false premises and errors of reasoning.
• Speed and depth of processing (is that a computing metaphor I catch myself using?) to integrate student submissions and student contributions into an overall impression of a student e.g. Forum posts, twitter contributions – this is a requirement of individualising the feedback to each students. It is also a constraint – how many minutes per student in an academic’s day?
• Excellent knowledge of individual learner needs – how to support a student’s progress from their current performance to achieve the improvements they need to be to succeed or, ideally, surpass themselves. The University of Westminster presentation on its £200k project to individualise feedback to students was the most specific in addressing this.
• A repertoire of teaching approaches beyond the didactic, in larger and smaller group settings. Ability to facilitate students’ identification of their own learning needs, and the discovery of the best questions, problems or tasks to stimulate learning.
• Excellent communication skills. Articulacy, succinctness, diplomacy, tact, sensitivity, faciliation, encouragement. And, wherever there is a presentation, performance skills.
• Quick-wittedness and judgement – new forms of student involvement implies contingent teaching and the ability of the tutor to depart from his or her planned script. Inexperienced tutors will require excellent support.
• Lastly, and not a scaffolding thing – time. If academic teachers are supposed to be formatively assessing progress in different ways – mostly, in this conference, by looking at students’ work online – then tutors need to critically evaluate new amounts of resources students are working with and creating. How will this be possible, given the current time/£ constraints?

• An openness to endemic change while maintaining a sense of identity (their own, their discipline’s) and integrity (values).

In reality, I know a lot of people with these skills and attributes.

At the same time, I found it difficult to balance the pragmatism and the vision in this conference. It is important not to treat a conference as if it were a message, but often I felt there was an over-accommodation of market forces and assumed student characteristics, at the expense (pun intended, I guess) of considering what academic institutions are for – what is the difference between businesses with degree awarding powers and universities? What is the difference between a student and a customer? A university student, and a learner? What is the difference – apart from the degree awarding powers and other forms of accreditation – between what universities do and open courseware initiatives? These considerations were largely absent from the presentations I went to. Totally absent was any consideration about what it means, in times of realisation about the role of consumerism in the environmental, waste and energy crises on the one hand and concerns about consumerism impinging on learning on the other, when we use Web 2.0 tools which are almost exclusively funded by advertising (I went to a presentation by Ed Mayo last night).

The devolution of costs from the institution to students at a US university, by making a formerly face-to-face or blended course into a distance course, was particularly dispiriting – notwithstanding the obvious commitment and resourcefulness of the tutor involved. I found it pretty grim that cash-strapped institutions should suddenly overcome their reservations and not only permit but encourage the uptake of free software from Web 2.0 start-up companies which could become the next casualty of the financial crisis, and devolving responsibility for “the show must go on” onto individual academic course convenors.

If the aim of the university is to be a force for good in society (the critical pedagogies of Freire and – more polemical – Giroux) it was difficult to see this coming out of these mostly pragmatic presentations. John Connell, interspersing a host of Marxist theorists with examples of practice with technologies in the here and now, was one exception. How well the examples live up to the theory is a question for the audience to ask. Another exception was the third speaker of last keynote, a disembodied, nameless academic from the states (interestingly rendered spontaneously blind and deaf to us by the technology and obliged to rely on the assistance of his colleague in the room; accessibility and exclusion insights elude me although I bet there are some).

I have no criticisms about putting forward a vision in the absence of a roadmap but the gap between rhetoric and reality seemed to widen, if anything. And, given the uncontested vision of participation, the irony of sitting there in a large group facing the front, listening to a single speaker standing in front of their visuals, was hard to ignore.

I was also worried about accommodation of students, as if they were customers. There is nothing an academic or an institution can sell a student except perhaps juice and gym membership. Andrew Middleton reminded me about BECTA’s and DEMOS’s work raising big questions about learning styles and learning approaches as valid constructs on which to base pedagogical decisions. I like the University of Leicester’s message: Nobody Said It Was Going To Be Easy. Isn’t one important ‘soft skill’ / life skills agenda the ability of students with – of course – different learning approaches, styles, different personalities to, in turn, cope with different constraints not to mention intellectual discomfort? I also found it hard to fit in what I was hearing about learning styles with other factors such as peer learning (are learners supposed to accommodate each others’ learning styles?), teaching (what about the teacher’s individual style – do we also respect this or do they forfeit it as employees rather than customers?).

This is not to espouse neglect or gratuitous placement of obstacles to learning, but isn’t it a responsibility which lies somewhere within an HE institution to challenge a student? Don’t students agree – isn’t this why they come? At the moment (and I write this as somebody who is supposed to be some kind of herald or envoy of change) it seems as if it’s only tutors who we talk about wreaking change upon – it’s almost as if the students are a force of nature.

Lastly, my heart rolled over at the conversation about online social networking, which was consonant with everything else I’ve been hearing on the subject. I blog and I read an immense amount of ‘user-generated content’ – ideas, entire online arguments, artworks – but must I Facebook under my actual name to be a viable bet for my next employer?  Do we have to wear our lives on our sleeves online, or risk seeming one-dimensional? Is there any room for individuals to be friendly, civil, responsible, cooperative, without demonstrating it in a social network? Can we keep ourselves to ourselves if we want to, or will we discover that we have excluded ourselves because the rules have changed? Disturbed by the idea that I might have to come out behind all my social software aliases, and perform some career-oriented identities. This is not my idea of authentic. I don’t want to use my friends and colleagues as my foil. And what about the personal and professional parts of my digital identity – should I give in to the forces which are pushing them into each other? It reminds me of a commission by the Soviet constructivist artist Rodchenko, a worker’s recreation centre. You could busy yourself in a vast variety of pursuits as long as you weren’t doing them alone. On that slightly melodramatic note I will stop.

Thanks again to Chris Evans and Ray Hackey at Brunel for provoking all these thoughts.

PS My word the vegan food was good. The best I have ever been served at a conference – I nearly wept. Little cocktail sausages impaled between an olive and a sun-dried tomatoes. Home-made mushroom pate in the sandwiches. So many flavours. Things can get very bad for vegans, and my morale tends to dip after lunch at conferences. But Executive Catering kept me buoyant.