The Ed Techie

A pedagogy of abundance

It has been said that previous economic models were based on scarcity. In a physical world one has to deal with the basic principle that once you give something away you no longer have it. Resources are finite. Making them, sharing them, moving them, storing them – it all eats up resource. But in a digital world these considerations disappear, or drop to near zero (there is still a cost in storing say, but nowhere near as much as a physical item if we compared a digital book with a real one for example). We thus need a new form of economics that accommodates this – an economy of abundance.

As an aside, this is why the attempts by Lily Allen and Peter Mandelson to control filesharing are fundamentally wrong – they are still grounded in the assumption of scarcity.

It strikes me that a similar argument could be made for pedagogy. We have developed pedagogies of scarcity – when resources were difficult to access and locate. These could be content in the form of books or articles (thus we carefully select these for the students), or in the form of an individual (thus we create the lecture system where people can get access to them in a physical space). But even more than this we know that collaboration is time consuming so we develop pedagogy around structuring this difficult task.

But in a digital world many of these assumptions again disappear. We have access to all the content we need and we can be part of an individual’s network without that taking extra time from them – if I start reading someone’s blog it doesn’t cost them anything for me to be added to the readership. And sharing has become a much simpler action, almost a by-product of just existing online. And while sharing is not the same as collaboration, it is also more than just working alone.

So what is the pedagogy of abundance? Resource based learning and Problem based learning are reasonable contenders since one could argue they set about providing a framework for interpreting and working with content. George Siemens connectivism is probably the main contender as it puts the emphasis on connections in the network. I also heard Rosemary Luckin talk recently about participatory science and the model they have developed at London Knowledge Labs. This again is a contender because it places the individual at the centre of a network of resources, environment and tools, with a set of filters inbetween.
But I still feel that we haven’t really developed a pedagogy that has some of the following basic assumptions:

• Content is free and abundant
• Sharing is frictionless
• Social interaction is key
• Complexity resides in the network
• Complexity arises because people don’t explicitly collaborate
• The filter is significant

So, I’d be interested to hear if you think there are other contenders for a pedagogy of abundance and also other characteristics it should embody.

Is the revolution justified?

Please see my previous post on the process behind this post. I have created a PDF version and below the blog post version, so you have the format of your choice.

[This is a draft version, the full version will be published in JIME.

September 2009]

Is the revolution justified?

Introduction

It is common for observers and bloggers (including myself) in educational technology to proclaim that current educational practice is, in some way, ‘broken’. It is seen as not delivering deep learning, or failing to meet the needs of students, and of potentially becoming irrelevant to a new generation of digital learners. For example, here I am arguing that the online learning environment can be seen as a metaphor for the change needed by universities:

“that the online learning environment is not peripheral, or merely a technological issue for universities and educators to resolve, but rather that it represents the means by which higher education comes to understand the requirements and changes in society, and thus the route by which it maintains its relevance to society.” (Weller 2009)

And here is John Seely-Brown (2006) making a compelling claim for the need for change in education:

“As the pace of change in the 21st century continues to increase, the world is becoming more interconnected and complex, and the knowledge economy is craving more intellectual property.”

And Marc Prensky’s (2001) opening statement for his digital natives article claims that students have changed radically:

"It is amazing to me how in all the hoopla and debate these days about the decline of education in the US we ignore the most fundamental of its causes. Our students have changed radically. Today’s students are no longer the people our educational system was designed to teach."

Carie Windham (2005) makes a claim about the irrelevance of higher education:

“In a world where technologies change daily and graduates armed with four-year degrees are entering the workforce in record numbers, there is an increasing fear among the Net Generation that a four-year degree will be neither relevant nor sufficient preparation when it becomes time to enter the work force.”

Given the abundance of new technologies it is tempting to make an argument based on the affordances of new technologies, and from a pedagogic perspective the manner in which existing pedagogy maps onto a physical, resource limited environment. However, the aim of this paper is to examine the empirical evidence for any change in higher educational practice, based on the behaviour of online learners.

I wanted to examine whether there was any real justification for such claims and predictions. So, I decided to take a similar approach to Descartes, which is to remove the opinions and values that I have formed so that I may start afresh and see if a solid basis can be found:

“as for the opinions which up to that time I had embraced, I thought that I could not do better than resolve at once to sweep them wholly away, that I might afterwards be in a position to admit either others more correct, or even perhaps the same when they had undergone the scrutiny of reason.”

The Net Generation

This isn’t a net generation essay, but that literature represents a good starting point, since many of the claims for educational reform are justified by reference to the net generation, or digital natives. I examined much of the literature to see when these claims were actually backed up by research. The following are potential areas where we could extrapolate a need to alter educational practice.

Context

In the spirit of Descartes, we need to start with some obvious, but basic foundations: The cogito ergo sum of educational technology. So first, let’s examine the evidence that students use computers and the internet at all in learning.
It seems a truism to say that current university students and younger have greater exposure to ICTs than previous generations. Marc Prensky (ibid) bases much of the digital natives argument on the fact that “today’s average college grads have spent less than 5,000 hours of their lives reading, but over 10,000 hours playing video games (not to mention 20,000 hours watching TV).” We know that accessing computers and the internet for learning is now so commonplace as to seem normal. The UK Children Go Online report (Livingstone and Bober 2005) states that “90% of 9-19 year olds who go online daily or weekly use the internet to do work for school or college and 94% use it to get information for other things.” And that “75% of 9-19 year olds have accessed the internet from a computer at home.”

Further to this we know that students value computers and the role they play in learning. In a study of higher education students in South Africa, Czerniewicz and Brown (2008) found that “72% of students were extremely positive about the role of computers in learning and have a high opinion of their own abilities/self efficacy.” They also found that students used computers for learning even when they were not
asked to do so, and they used computers informally. This was particularly evident in the case of communicative media where 55% of staff asked students to use communicative media as part of their courses, yet 75% of students reported using communicative media regularly for their learning.”

And this informal learning theme is continued by Oblinger and Oblinger (2005) who reference Grunwald (2003) “When teenagers are asked what they want from the Internet, the most common response is to get "new information." Close behind, at about 75 percent, is to "learn more or to learn better." The use of the Internet to learn is not limited to school work. Students are often informal learners, seeking information on a variety of topics, such as personal health.”

We therefore have a basis to go forward: that students do at least use technology, value it and go beyond what they are formally required to do. This in itself of course does not necessitate a revolution, so let us examine some further areas under the general Net Generation research.

Lack of relevance

Having established that students seem to value ICT we could ask the same of educators. Here the picture is less clear, Czerniewicz and Brown (ibid) found that unlike students, staff

“didn’t know whether or not their colleagues thought computers were important. When they did report knowing about their colleagues use and attitudes towards computers, they were divided about their opinions as to their colleagues’ values and use, indicating limited support networks and communities of practice.”

There are some differences in the use of technologies across generations, for example Oblinger and Oblinger (ibid) report that 74 percent of teenagers use IM as a major communication tool compared to 44 percent of online adults. Livingstone and Bober (ibid) have similar differences in ICT competence, “only 16% of weekly and daily user parents consider themselves advanced compared with 32% of children”

Hartman et al (2005) looked at reactions to online courses across three ‘generations’ and found that “The Net Gen respondents were disappointed; they perceived a lack of immediacy in their online courses and felt that faculty response times lagged behind their expectations.” The attitude towards online learning seems to change across the generations: “Baby Boomers preferred some face-to-face encounters with their instructors; Generation X students reported substantial, pointless interaction in class; and the Net Gen students felt that the interaction mechanisms designed by their instructors were much less adequate than their personal technologies.” This would suggest that the Net Generation do have a comparison to make around interactivity that may be relatively new.

Roberts (2005) reports the findings of a survey which suggest that for modern students “customization is central to the definition of technology for Net Geners. Technology is something that adapts to their needs, not something that requires them to change”

There may be proxies that we need to examine for the alleged irrelevance of education also, for instance truancy rates now at their highest levels in England (http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2008/feb/27/schools.uk1) and there is also an increase in the number of students suspended from school.
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/oct/25/truancy-school-suspensions). These figures themselves are subject to much interpretation, and what they signify is even more ambiguous. Of course, none of this necessarily points to problems with education, it could be a result of social pressures for instance, and even if it does relate to educational irrelevance, we don’t know that technology is necessarily the
solution.

In conclusion then we have some moderate evidence that there may be some differences in the expectations of net generation learners, and possibly an increase in dissatisfaction with education. There is a question whether these expectations are really unique to the net generation, which we will look at later.

Different attitudes

A Pew Internet report (Lenhart et al 2008) on teens and writing points at some differences in attitude between generations. Parents think teenagers do more ‘writing’ than they did, but the teenagers don’t see what they do as writing, they see it as communication or socialising. They separate academic writing from informal communication using technology.

They found some use of technology to improve writing:
“Teens who communicate frequently with friends, and teens who own more technology tools such as computers or cell phones do not write more for school or for themselves than less communicative and less gadget-rich teens. Teen bloggers, however, are prolific writers online and offline.

• 47% of teen bloggers write outside of school for personal reasons several times a week or more compared to 33% of teens without blogs.
• 65% of teen bloggers believe that writing is essential to later success in life; 53% of non-bloggers say the same.”

Of course this does not mean blogging causes them to write more, so making the nonbloggers keep blogs would not necessarily improve writing – those who like writing and have an aptitude for it are likely to keep blogs.

Another area where there may be a difference in attitude relates to ‘cut and paste’ or plagiarism, with younger people seeing less of a ‘crime’ in relation to copying: “Among 12-19 year olds who go online daily or weekly, 21% admit to having copied something from the internet for a school project and handed it in as their own.” (Livingstone and Bober), although we do not have comparison figures for previous generations who may have copied from text books.

Again the evidence is weak to absent that there is a major generational shift here, but there does seem to be some hints to subtle differences regarding standard educational practice and the way technology impacts upon this.

Overestimating skills

A common theme from a number of recent reports seems to be that far from being the tech-savvy, digitally immersed cyborgs portrayed in much of the literature, there are some relatively poor information skills amongst the net generation, and a good deal of variance.

For example Brown (2009) reports: “Recently, the Nielsen Norman Group study of teenagers using the web noted: “We measured a success rate of only 55 percent for the teenage users in this study, which is substantially lower than the 66 percent success rate we found for adult users.” The report added: “Teens’ poor performance is caused by three factors: insufficient reading skills, less sophisticated research strategies, and a dramatically lower patience level.”

The Google Generation report produced by the British Library (2008) also explored some of the myths and found that:

• young people have a poor understanding of their information needs and thus find it difficult to develop effective search strategies as a result, they exhibit a strong preference for expressing themselves in natural language rather than analysing which key words might be more effective
• faced with a long list of search hits, young people find it difficult to assess the relevance of the materials presented and often print off pages with no more than a perfunctory glance at them

And Livingstone and Bober state that:

"Many children and young people are not yet taking up the full potential of the internet, for example visiting a narrow range of sites or not interacting with sites… 38% of pupils aged 9-19 trust most of the information on the internet, and only 33% of 9-19 year olds daily and weekly users have been taught how to
judge the reliability of online information”

Bennett et al (2008) provide an excellent analysis of many of the claims around the Net generation and have found a similar pattern of overestimating the information skills of the young:

“These studies also found that emerging technologies were not commonly used, with only 21% of respondents maintaining a blog, 24% using social networking technologies, and 21.5% downloading podcasts.”

This leads me onto the next point about the net generation literature, which is that it makes claims of generational difference with little basis.

Seeing difference where there is none

Some of the net generation literature seems to make claims of supposed generational difference when none exists. For example, multi-tasking is often set forward as a new ‘skill’, but Bennett et al respond that “there is no evidence that multi-tasking is a new phenomenon exclusive to digital natives. The oft used example of a young person doing homework while engaged in other activities was also applied to earlier
generations doing homework in front of the television.”

And Oblinger and Oblinger (ibid) claim as one of the defining characteristics of the net generation that “they want parameters, rules, priorities, and procedures … they think of the world as scheduled and someone must have the agenda. As a result, the like to know what it will take to achieve a goal. Their preference is for structure rather than ambiguity.” Which begs the question, ‘was there evidence that previous generations had a stated preference for ambiguity and chaos in their learning?’

Mark Bullen makes a similar point about claims to the increased irrelevance of education to net geners “The relevance of education has been source of debate for as long as I have been in education. I remember, as a student, participating in a ‘walkout’ from my high school in 1970 over the perceived irrelevance of our education.”
(http://www.openeducation.net/2008/09/23/net-generation-nonsense-mark-bullendiscusses-teaching-and-learning/)

And while we may point to factors such as an increase in truancy to support the claim
that school is seen as irrelevant, similar angst was to be found about truancy rates in
1908 in New York (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9502E3D71738E033A2575BC0A9639C946897D6CF). One issue is that people are often making claims when we have no comparison to judge them against. We don’t know if students today are less satisfied with education than say, 40 years ago, and even if we did, assigning causality would be difficult – it could be the result of massive expansion in higher education, for example.

One of the conclusions we may reach is that differences within generations seem as great as those between them. For example compare responses of the young to the general population in this 2007 OCLC survey in which college students and members of the general public were asked the following question:
“How likely would you be to participate in each of the following activities on a social networking or community site if built by your library?”

The numbers are those who say they are extremely likely or very likely to do so (general public responses in brackets)

• self-publish creative work: 7% (6%)
• share ideas with about library services: 10% (7%)
• share your photos / videos: 7% (6%)
• participate in online discussion groups: 6% (6%)
• meet others with similar interests: 6% (7%)
• describe your own personal collections: 9% (6%)
• view others’ personal collections: 12% (6%)

(of course the students could be objecting to the ‘built by your library’ element of the question, not the tasks themselves, which they might happily perform in Facebook).

There are changes which we might attribute to the digital age that seem to be crossgenerational – for instance there seems to be a general decline in the amount of literature reading (http://www.nea.gov/news/news07/TRNR.html). This may have a greater impact on the younger generation, who may never develop reading skills, but it does not necessarily separate them out from other generations.

Overall, like Bennett et al I have found little strong evidence for the main claims of the net generation literature, which they summarise as

“1. Young people of the digital native generation possess sophisticated knowledge of and skills with information technologies.
2. As a result of their upbringing and experiences with technology, digital natives have particular learning preferences or styles that differ from earlier generations of students”

However, for education it may not matter if this a generational or a societal shift. If everybody is changing their behaviour then education still needs to respond. ‘Mature’ students now exceed those in the traditional age range of 18-22 in the US now. So in this respect the Net gen discussion is something of a red herring. What we need to be concerned about is the changes in the digital society.

People are learning in different ways

If we are less focused purely on the net generation, but with changes in society as a whole, then we need to look beyond students in formal education. Firstly, let us start with some broad statistics of internet usage, which may relate to learning. Let us look first at the behemoth of the internet: Google. Statistics vary, with one report stating that in August 2007, Google was “handling 1200 Million searches per day on average
worldwide. In June 2007, Wikipedia received an average of 55.6 Million referrals per day from Google.” (http://notes.jschutz.net/9/internet-search/google-searches-per-day)

Obviously these searches are not all related to learning, and when they are, it may be learning at a very cursory level. The 55.6 million referrals to Wikipedia hint at a greater depth of learning, at least to the sort of level of interest we see when people consult an encyclopedia. If we take Wikipedia as the exemplar for online information resource, then it has 2,725,998 pages, with the average user visiting around 4.5 pages
per day
(http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page)

If we take Facebook as our representative for social activity online then we have: over150 million active users; the average user has 120 friends; more than 15 million users update their statuses at least once each day; more than 850 million photos uploaded to the site each month; and more than 24 million pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) shared each month.
(http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics)

And lastly, YouTube as an example of new content creation: In June 2008, 91 million viewers watched 5 billion user-posted videos on YouTube, and 1-10% YouTube users are creators (http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2444)

This points to a scale of activity online that at least has some passing relevance to education. Of course, none of this tells us much about how, what, or if, people are learning. It is difficult when dealing with such global statistics to appreciate what they mean, and how far we should be guided by them. But we can at least conclude that there is significant activity online across a range of society, and the intersection of
these activities (socialising, sharing, content creation, information seeking) has a direct relevance to education.

Interpreting these statistics in terms of educational change is difficult – do they point to the need for total revolution, or merely highlight that a social network for students might be a useful addition to a VLE? We need to explore beyond the headline statistics, so let us look at some more specific examples.

Meeting unmet needs of learners

One claim often made is that higher education has a necessarily limited curriculum, and that in a digital society we will see a liberation of the topics people want to learn about. For instance, here I am (Weller and Dalziel 2009) making reference to the long tail:

“a distributed model of learning design production is the best way to attack the long tail (Anderson 2006) of possible learner interests. If a user wants to find small courses to formally accredit their understanding of highland knitting patterns, history of Sydney in the 1960s or anthropology amongst football fans,
then most current formal providers will not meet their requirements, but a sufficiently distributed pool of user generated designs might.”

Getting any general statistics to support this, beyond those in the previous section is difficult. But we can look at some examples, and make extrapolations, for example Griffiths (2008) details how YouTube is being used by graffiti artists to share techniques and also create social norms. This is not likely to be a subject or skill taught in any conventional sense, and yet the peer assessment, commenting and reflection shown by participants maps onto the types of behaviour we foster in formal education.

And similar examples can be found for almost any topic you could think of, ranging from knitting eg ravelry.com, knittingdaily.com, to running (runnersworld.com, fetcheverbody.com). Closer to formal education we have sites such PhysicsForums which is an informal space to talk about science, maths and physics, and has over 100,000 members.

Perhaps the most highly developed and relevant area of interest is that of open source (FLOSS) communities. From surveys of open source participants (Gosh et al 2002) we know that the desire to learn is a key motivational factor for participating in FLOSS projects. The manner in which FLOSS communities operate demonstrate many of the educational characteristics educators hope to foster, including mentorship, communities of practice, learning by doing and self-directed learning.

Participation in FLOSS activities is also an example of bridging the gap between formal education and informal learning. Gosh et al also report that four fifths of FLOSS community members are convinced that proven FLOSS experience can compensate for a lack of formal degrees, and three fifths consider the skills they learn within the FLOSS community as core skills for their professional career. Perhaps because they have been around for some time and have a robust reputation, we can also see from FLOSS some of the potential threat to formal education. In another survey, Gosh and Glott (2005) found that except for other forms of self-study, which is performed by 58% of the community members, the most common ways to
learn are those that provide the opportunity to either read or work on the code and that depend on Internet-based technologies. Participating in training courses is the learning approach with the lowest uptake.

Clearly there are a wide range of interests out there that are uncatered for in traditional HE, and while this may have always been the case, we can see that the internet is enabling communities to form which would have been previously limited by geographical factors, and the removal of these barriers has seen an unprecedented growth in communities for whom learning is a key function.

Open education

The area where these changes find greatest expression in education is that of the open education movement. This seeks to make educational content freely available to all, through the advent of Open Educational Resources (OERs) such as MIT’s OpenCourseWare and the Open University’s OpenLearn projects. There is also a move to make academic journals ‘open access’ so they are freely available. All of this can be seen as part of a broader trend and philosophy of the internet, which sees openness as a key to technical development and social acceptance. The use of open APIs in many so-called web 2.0 sites has allowed others to develop a range of software that interacts and builds on their core functionality, as seen with the
proliferation of Facebook and Twitter applications. The general philosophy of the blogosphere and those who spend significant time online is to be generally open in terms of disclosure and sharing content. Of the top ten sites in the world (as listed by Alexa.com Feb 2009) four are based around the public, or semi-public, sharing of personal content and information (YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and Wikipedia), the others being search or mail related. In this respect the open education movement can be seen as a response to, or at least as part of, a broader social change made possible by digital technologies.

The OER movement was begun in earnest by MIT’s OpenCourseWare project, launched in 2002, with the aim of making the whole of MIT’s curriculum freely available. The site has over 1 million visitors a month, the majority (41%) coming from North America, although there is global usage, and self-learners represent the biggest group of users (Carson 2006). These are respectable, if not spectacular figures, when compared against the global education population (132 million tertiary students worldwide in 2004).

The Open University’s experience with the OpenLearn project was that in the 2 years from the start of the project they had over 3 million unique visitors, were accessed by more people (69%) from outside the UK than within, 35% of visitors returned to the site and 50% of repeat visitors were ‘new to the OU’. The project did not seem to impact on core business, indeed there is some evidence that it helped recruit new students to formal courses with at least 7,000 people registering on OU courses in the same online session that they were on the OpenLearn site (McAndrew and Dos Santos 2008). They also reported some evidence that the concept of openness was difficult to get across, and many users didn’t believe (or appreciate) that this was free content.

The OER movement has grown quite rapidly from MIT’s first venture, in January 2007 the OECD identified over 3,000 open courseware courses available from over 300 universities worldwide (OECD 2007), although as the report recognises, the sustainability of these projects is still an issue.

While the movement from within education has met with some success, commercial sites for sharing have often been far more successful. For example, the site for sharing and embedding presentations, Slideshare.net, has considerably more traffic that the MIT OCW site (Compete.com Feb 2009)

The open education movement is still in its relative infancy, and so if it hasn’t seen the widespread disruption to higher education some had hoped for, we shouldn’t be too surprised. Education as we know it today has had several hundred years to develop the lecture based model, so to expect an open model to radically alter this in just a few years may be expecting too much. There are a number of habits that will take some time to alter, for instance educators are beginning to use a range of third party material in their lectures (Flickr pictures, YouTube videos, OERs, etc), and so the ‘market’ for reusable content is growing. But suggesting that change may come is different from arguing that there is an urgent demand which universities have to meet, or else cease to be relevant. In the OER movement it is probably fair to say that they are leading the thinking and development of concepts around free education, not responding to a social demand.

Lessons from other sectors

The digitisation of content and its distribution via the internet has seen a merging of previously distinct sectors, for instance we see a computer company (Apple) become the main music outlet (iTunes), broadcasters providing telecoms services (eg Sky) and vice versa (British Telecom), and newspapers hosting podcasts (Guardian Online). As higher education institutions seek to explore, and exploit, new technologies, some of this boundary confusion begins to be applicable in the education sector also. For instance, the Open University produces a podcast that features in the iTunes top ten
(http://www3.open.ac.uk/media/fullstory.aspx?id=11429), Kansas State University Professor Michael Wesch produces YouTube movies that are viewed by millions, and many bloggers having subscription rates to rival those of satellite TV channels (eg Stephen Downes has over 10,000 hits per day). All of these are outside of traditional academic outputs, ie courses, books and journal articles. The reverse is also true with
YouTube, Google, Sky, and the BBC all engaging in activity that has some bearing on education, and a number of smaller start-up companies (eg TeachThePeople, SchoolForEverything) offering services around informal learning.

The result is that boundaries between sectors are less clear cut, and more permeable than they once were. In addition there are many similarities between education and other sectors, and so one method of analysing the changes necessary, or inevitable in higher education is to look at the changes that have already been made in other sectors, and to gauge whether these are applicable in education. Two related sectors we will examine here are the music industry and newspapers.

The music industry has seen a dramatic impact from the move to digital, online content. Initially sales of CDs were impacted by download purchases, but in 2008 even the inclusion of downloads saw music sales at their lowest since 1985 (IFPI 2009 http://www.ifpi.org/content/library/DMR2009.pdf). Online digital sales now account for 20% of the global market, up from 15% in 2007. User behaviour is changing also, with single track downloads far more popular than whole albums. The move to online downloading has seen many record and DVD stores close (for example, the Zavvi chain in the UK). Piracy is the major threat to the music industry’s traditional business model, with the IFPI estimating unauthorised file-sharing at over
40 billion files in 2008 accounting for around 95 per cent of downloaded music tracks. Calls to make ISPs responsible for policing downloads have met with limited success.

In addition we have seen artists exploring business models which essentially disintermediate the record company, for example Radiohead offered their album In Rainbows, as a direct download from their website, and Madonna signed with a concert promoter rather than a record company.

However, although the underlying models may be changing, the overall relevance and desire for music has not changed (and may have increased with mobile devices). As Rolling Stone reports ‘people are listening to at least as much music as ever. Consumers have bought more than 100 million iPods since their November 2001 introduction, and the touring business is thriving, earning a record $437 million last
year.’
(http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/15137581/the_record_industrys_decline/3)

Newspapers are seeing a similar change wrought by the internet and digitisation of their business. They have been impacted on by two complementary factors (outside of the impact of the recession generally): loss of advertising revenue and decreasing circulation. The advertising revenue has been lost to many online sites, for example in the UK Trinity Mirror reported a 20.1% fall in underlying group advertising revenues
since the end of June 2008. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/nov/13/trinitymirror-advertising), the New York Times reported a similar drop (http://uk.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUKTRE4BN39Q20081224). Some of this can be attributed to the impact of the financial crisis, particularly on housing advertising, but it is part of a longer term trend. Papers have seen much of their advertising revenue move to specialised online sites, for example craigslist in the US, has well over double the traffic of New York Times, and considerably more than the Guardian Online, as this graph from Alexa.com illustrates:

What this illustrates is that newspapers are beginning to see an unbundling of their component elements. In addition the advent of the internet means that people now get their news from many different places, and much of it online. In the US the circulation of the top 25 newspapers has declined on average by 7.4% over the 2005- 2008 period (http://www.bizzyblog.com/2008/05/01/newspaper-industry-circ-downdoobie-doo-down-down-with-four-exceptions/).

Newspapers have failed to make paid-for subscription models work online for example the NYT closed it TimesSelect model in 2007 (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/business/media/18times.html?_r=2&hp=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1190632192-61ebx/UKcB7bCMSviuM2Jw) as readers can find the content free elsewhere, and have an expectation that it will be free.

Newspapers and the music business have essentially seen an unbundling of separate services previously contained within the physical product, including the production of content, adverts, packaging, distribution, and the filtering of information. However, before we accept these as direct corollaries for what will happen in education, there are some significant differences between education and these industries, as well as significant similarities.

There is no evidence as yet, that there is a similar expectation from learners that educational content should be free. This is partly because the common perception of education is the lecture, and this is not perceived as ‘content’ in the same sense that an MP3 is. The rapid unbundling of components we have seen in other industries has not been as apparent in education. This can, in part, be attributed to the award-bearing
powers being restricted by legislation, so it is not a free market in the same sense as other industries. There is also the relationship with the physical campus for many universities – purely distance education universities are still relatively rare and so there is a strong link with the physical model that is not found with the content industries.

One could view the components in these various industries as analogous to atoms in a molecule – the strength of the various bonds will vary, and for some molecules these can be easily broken under certain conditions, while others require more energy to break apart. As with chemistry we should not think that all sectors are equal, the ‘bonds’ in some sectors will be weaker than in others. The award-bearing powers,
social currency of universities, and the physical aspect means that the bonds in higher education can be regarded as stronger than in the music industry, but nevertheless they are not unbreakable. This bundling of services could be subject to change, for instance, if accreditation powers were unbundled from universities, and thus the bonds between the components could be weakened.

Conclusions from the evidence

In this paper several contributing factors to the claim that higher education needs to undergo a radical change have been examined. We can look at each of these and state the overall strength of each argument:

• A new generation is behaving fundamentally differently – there seems little real evidence beyond the rhetoric that the net generation is in some way different from its predecessors as a result of having been exposed to digital technologies. There is some moderate evidence that they may have different attitudes. Strength: Weak.
• There is a general change in society which has relevance for learning – certainly the overall context is an ICT rich one, and people are using the internet for a variety of learning related activities. Strength: Strong
• People are learning in different ways – although firm evidence of informal learning is difficult to gather, there is much by the way of proxy activity that indicates this is the case. Strength: Medium
• There is growing dissatisfaction with current practice in higher education – there seems little strong evidence for this. Probably more significant to the culture of education has been the shift to perceiving the student as a customer. There is certainly little evidence that the dissatisfaction is greater than it used to be, but what may be significant is that there are now viable alternatives for learners. Universities have lost their monopoly on learning, which reinforces the next point. Strength: Weak
• Higher education will undergo similar change to that in other sectors – there are some similarities between higher education and other sectors such as the newspaper and music industries, but the differences are probably more significant. However, the blurring of boundaries between sectors and the viability of self-directed, community based learning means that the competition is now more complex. Strength: Medium

It is possible, and at times tempting, to see these complementary factors as some kind of ‘perfect storm’ brewing for change in higher education. It is convenient for many of us who seek to implement change in higher education (for a variety of reasons) to portray it is an inevitable force that cannot be resisted. This may account for why the net generation literature has been so widely accepted – it creates a convenient backdrop against which to paint the need for radical change.Having reviewed the evidence the claims for a perfect storm seem to be exaggerated, but there is a gathering of significant trends, which higher education should seek to address.

Undoubtedly the proclamations of the imminent demise of higher education are overblown – even if it did nothing it would not see the rapid change in its practice that we have seen in other sectors. Rather we should see the response to these trends as having two main arguments:
Maintaining relevance – whilst the strong claims for the loss of relevance of higher education are not justified, we do see some significant factors above, and just as higher education responds to any significant cultural change, so it should respond to these.
Opportunities – rather than portraying the digital culture as an impending threat to higher education, the only option being to adapt or die, it is more fruitful I suggest to think of it as an unprecedented series of opportunities. The manner in which we have taught has often been restricted by physical factors,
and the removal of many of these should liberate both how and what we teach.

The appropriate response

One possible conclusion from this might be that we should be less enthusiastic in our promotion of new technology, until we have the firm evidence that it is required or necessary. I think this is to misinterpret the role of educators in general, and educational technologists in particular. The role of the educational technologist is to interpret these trends and frame opportunities.

There are several reasons why it is still important to engage with new technology, even if the urgent ‘survival of higher education isn’t one of them. The first is that there is lag between technology’s acceptance of a technology and then its adoption in higher education. Brown (ibid) suggests that in society the stages of technology diffusion can be defined as critical mass (ownership by 20–30% of the population), ubiquity (30–70%), and finally invisibility (more than 70%). If higher education were to wait for the invisibility stage to be reached before it engaged with a technology, then given the time it takes to implement policies and technology, it really will look outdated. For example, in 2007, those using social networks might have been in the minority, now they will be in the majority. This is the problem with waiting for data to determine decisions – if you made a decision based on 2007 data that social networks were largely unused, it would look out of date in 2009. What is significant is surely the direction of travel, not the absolute percentages at any given time.

Part of the role of education is to give students relevant skills and by using a range of technologies for academic (rather than purely social) purposes, it could be argued that it is fulfilling this remit for the graduates who will then enter the workplace.

The second reason why we need to continue to engage with technology relates to pedagogy. Part of the role of educators, and educational technologists in particular, is to assess which of these technologies will be significant, both in terms of students lives (therefore they represent a means of us reaching out) but also educationally, therefore providing a means of utilising technology to improve education. This is what many do already, for example the Horizon report (http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2009-Horizon-Report.pdf). The wiki is a good example, we shouldn’t be using wikis because we believe we have a Wikipedia generation and it will make us look relevant, but rather we because they allow us to achieve certain goals in teaching.

The next reason is that if technology isn’t itself the cause for revolution, it is the enabler for maintaining relevance in a competitive market. If we look at the reasons students select universities, we can see these are varied. When it comes to choosing a university, it seems that course suitability, academic reputation, job prospects, and teaching quality are the main factors influencing prospective students (Soutar &
Turner 2002). Non-academic factors also play an important part including proximity to their homes, availability of scholarships and teaching, the range of non-academic student services (Drewes and Michael 2006). Students from low-income families will be influenced by financial factors, such as cost of living in the university locality and employment prospects (Callender and Jackson 2008). It is notable that ‘technology usage’ is not listed amongst these. Students don’t choose a university based on the particular VLE it deploys, but the use of new technologies will have a direct impact on many of these other factors. For instance the range of courses and student satisfaction will be influenced by the deployment of innovative
technology by educators.

The final reason is that of exploration and professional reinvention. The reason educational technology seems more prevalent and indeed, urgent, now is that we live in an age when the quantity of tools that can be put to a pedagogic use is at an unprecedented level and the rate of release of these is increasing. Just as significantly, many of these tools are free and easy to use. Thus their adoption carries a much lower risk than with previous generations of technology. The opportunities for experimentation and finding new ways of teaching a subject are therefore much richer, and given the ease of use, greatly democratised. It is this technology-enhanced enthusiasm for exploring new methods of teaching that educational technologists
should be promoting.

Conclusion

After his meditations Descartes re-established his world view, but this time, he felt, on a much sounder basis. I have not returned to quite the same point that I started from, in that some of my beliefs that higher education needed to undergo radical change have been shifted. But, like Descartes, the beliefs I hold now seem more robust.

The evidence for radical and imminent revolution in higher education may not be as strong as I once liked to believe, but we shouldn’t ignore the fact also that there are some very significant trends which are founded in data and research and not just anecdote and rhetoric. These suggest very strongly that engagement with new technologies is a core practice for higher education. And more significantly, these trends indicate that we have a richer environment in which to explore changes in teaching and learning practice. We have a convergence of a base level of technological competence, an expectation of the use of ICTs in education, a range of easy to use tools, and models from other sectors to investigate. So while the absolute necessity for radical change is overstated, there are unprecedented opportunities for the use of technology in education. And as educators we shouldn’t need to wait until the case has been proven for each one to try it, because as the saying goes, it doesn’t take a whole day to recognise sunshine.

References

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Brown M (2009) The NetGens 2.0: Clouds on the Horizon. EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 44, no. 1 (January/February 2009): 66–67.
http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/TheNetGens20CloudsontheHo/47939

Callender, C & Jackson J (2008) ‘Does the fear of debt constrain choice of university and subject of study?’ Studies in Higher Education Vol 33 No 4

Carson S (2005) 2005 Program Evaluation Findings Report. MIT OpenCourseWare.
http://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/global/05_Prog_Eval_Report_Final.pdf

Czerniewicz, L. & Brown, C. (2008) ‘A Virtual Wheel of Fortune? Enablers and Constraints of ICTs in higher education in South Africa’, in: S. Marshall, W. Kinuthia & W. Taylor (Eds) Bridging the knowledge divide: Educational technology for development Information Age Publishing.

Descartes, R. (1641) Meditations on First Philosophy

Drewes T & Michael C (2006) ’How do students choose a university?: an analysis of applications to universities in Ontario, Canada’. Research in Higher Education. Vol 47 No 7

Ghosh R and Glott R (2005) FLOSSPOLS: Skills Survey Interim Report http://flosspols.org/deliverables/D10HTML/FLOSSPOLS-D10-skills%20survey_interim_report-revision-FINAL.html

Ghosh, R. A.; Glott, R.; Krieger, B.; Robles, G. (2002): Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Survey and Study. Part IV: Survey of Developers. Maastricht: International Institute of Infonomics / Merit.

Griffiths, M. (2008) ‘Changing Media Environments Are Providing an Alternative Space for Young People to Meet Up’ paper presented at ‘Creating Second Lives’ conference, Bangor, Wales.
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Grunwald, P (2003) "Key Technology Trends: Excerpts from New Survey Research Findings," Exploring the Digital Generation, Educational Technology, U.S. Department of Education, Washington, D.C., September 23-24, 2003.

Hartman, J., Moskal, P & Dziuban C (2005) ‘Preparing the Academy of Today for the Learner of Tomorrow’ In Educating the Net Generation. Oblinger, D & Oblinger J (eds) Educause.
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Lenhart, A., Arafeh, S., Smith, A. & MacGill (2008) Writing, Technology and Teens Pew Internet and American Life Project
http://pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_Writing_Report_FINAL3.pdf

Livingstone S and Bober M (2005) UK Children Go Online: Final Report. LSE
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/children-go-online/

McAndrew P and Dos Santos, A (2008) Learning from OpenLearn Research Report 2006-2008.

Oblinger D & Oblinger J (2005) Is it Age or IT: First Steps Towards Understanding the Net Generation. In Educating the Net Generation. Oblinger, D & Oblinger J (eds) Educause.
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OCLC (2007) Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World.  http://www.oclc.org/reports/sharing/default.htm

OECD (2007) Giving Knowledge for Free: The Emergence of Open Educational Resources. http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/35/7/38654317.pdf

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October 2001. http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf

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Soutar G.N. & Turner J.P. (2002) ‘Students' preferences for university: a conjoint analysis’ The International Journal of Educational Management, Vol 16, No 1, pp. 40-45

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On the Horizon, 17(3).

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The "Technology isn't important" argument

<No Technology in Brighton by Sammy0716 http://www.flickr.com/photos/28438258@N08/3005591006/>

Ten years ago I chaired the OU's first major online course (I may have mentioned this before :) and we had an onslaught of students who wanted to take it, precisely because it was online. I gave a talk about how we (John Naughton, Gary Alexander and myself) had shaped the course around the web. Our idea had been to fundamentally make technology the focus, and envisage a course that had the internet at the centre of it. At that talk one of the objections was 'technology is irrelevant, it's pedagogy that matters.'

I gave a woolly, conciliatory response then. I have been hearing the same argument in different forms for the past ten years now, and my response is less accommodating now. It came up again at ALT-C when I was there, and my reaction is now almost apoplectic. Because people don't want to be seen to be technological determinists, or just geeks, it's often met with sage nods and murmurs of agreement (hell, even applause). It comes in many different guises, so here are some of the ways it is worded:

• This discussion is about technology when we should be talking about learning
• Technology shouldn't be the focus, it should be people
• Why are we talking about technology , the emphasis should be on communication

Etc, you can substitute some of your own terms here as to what is more important than technology (society, process, fruit). Now there is some truth in these beliefs, technology often doesn't succeed because we ignore all the stuff around it - the administrative context it operates within, the time people have to use it, how it makes people feel about their jobs, etc. I know all this stuff, but what 'the technology isn't important' people often really mean is 'I want to ignore technology'. And that is surely the wrong way to go.

I'd go along with Clay Shirky's argument that technology becomes really interesting when it becomes invisible (eg the mobile phone became a powerful social force when it became ubiquitous). But in order for it to become invisible it first has to be visible. While it is surely true that ultimately what is interesting about twitter, say, is nothing to do with the technology of twitter itself, but the connections it fosters, the way it changes our social interactions, the global peer networks we form over it. And eventually we won't talk about twitter at all. But it is a necessary step on the journey to the 'bigger picture' to be interested in the technology. Ignoring the technology won't allow you to jump to the end point, it will prevent you getting there.

I guess it depends on where you are coming from. In his keynote Martin Bean (the OU's new VC) made the point that of technology, people and process, then technology is the least important. This has probably been true from his perspective and experience from working at Microsoft. As he said, he has sat down with education ministers who have been blinded by some new software or hardware and have completely failed to put into place any of the framework which will make them effective. If you are dealing with government ministers then getting across the 'technology won't solve your problems on its own' argument is paramount.

Alternatively, from my perspective the technology isn't important argument is used as a justification to disregard anything technologically driven and hopefully carry on as we've always done. In this context suggesting that technology isn't important is irresponsible. I'm sure plenty of journalists argued that technology wasn't important, it's quality reporting that counts. That didn't stop technology completely transforming their industry. And I'm sure post-Gutenberg we heard arguments that 'printing isn't important, it's what's in the Bible that counts'. And when Brunel was busy laying railway lines I'm sure horse-drawn carriage owners insisted that 'the railway isn't significant, it's staying in nice inns that we should focus on'.

So this is a warning - if you use a pseudo 'technology isn't important' argument when I am in the room, expect a long, painful scream.

Always-right-ism

A curmudgeon returns

Part 2 in my curmudgeon series (don't worry, after this, it's all utopia again). A couple of posts back I mused that "we have seen the demise of any sense of compulsion or quality. There is no more 'should' anymore. Everything is okay." I pondered whether this started with post-modernism and was reinforced by the internet as echo-chamber.

Ain't no echo chamber

I've been thinking more about it, largely thanks to the excellent comments on that post. On reflection I feel that the echo-chamber effect is probably overplayed. Certainly we tend to talk to like-minded people - this is human nature. Sometimes it is a result of preference: I don't need to talk to fascists to know I disagree with them. But it is also a fundamental aspect of what we term community: in academic circles, theoretical physicists don't advance their science by hanging around with people who they have to explain Newton's second law of motion to - they need to assume a base level of knowledge to be able to have the discussions they need.

Even so, my experience of being online is that my network is far more diverse than my face to face one. There is a great deal of variation in the people in my twitter network, without going to extremes. In this sense it is the opposite of an echo-chamber (a diversity chamber?) and almost every day something will come across my path that I wouldn't have encountered otherwise.

Always-right-ism

But I still feel that, particularly in relation to artistic tastes, the lack of compulsion I mentioned is prevalent in society. I could be wrong about this, and I have no empirical evidence (indeed, what form would such evidence take?). But humour me, and let's pretend I'm not just a grumpy old man, and there's something in it. If it isn't a result of the echo-chamber, maybe it is a result of what I shall, with a frightening lack of imagination, term 'always-right-ism'. We have had two mantras in recent years: The customer is always right, and more recently, the user is always right.

So, us internet users in particular are immersed in an environment where we are repeatedly told we are always right. If we don't get how to use a site immediately, give up, because it's the designer's fault. This is largely true, but coming on the back of the customer is always right attitude, it may start to pervade other areas of our lives.

In education we have seen the customer attitude tainting the student-staff relationship. The student cannot be always right (they wouldn't be a student then) and so the customer approach only works to an extent.

So my hypothesis is that a similar stance has begun to influence people's artistic choices. You struggled to read a book? It's the author's fault. Didn't like a piece of music? They should try and be more accessible. Didn't understand a piece of art? They are being wilfully obtuse. Think Lord of the Rings is the best thing written? That's fine, the rest of the country seems to agree.

But...

Brian Lamb posted a comment on my last piece, quoting Nick Hornby who was bemoaning the notion that reading should be hard:

"One of the problems, it seems to me, is that we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they’re hard work, they’re not doing us any good... If reading is to survive as a leisure activity…then we have to promote the joys of reading rather than the (dubious) benefits…please, if you’re reading a book that’s killing you, put it down and read something else"

I have a lot of sympathy with this view. As Nathaniel Hawthorne said 'easy reading is damn hard writing.' The curse of making things difficult to read runs through academia - I have supervised PhD students who feel that if it isn't verbose and almost impenetrable, then it isn't academic. I have spent a lot of my time trying to do the opposite (hence this blog) - trying to say interesting things in an accessible manner.

So I don't think books should necessarily be hard to read (often that's just a sign of poor writing), but you can stretch yourself in terms of the narrative style, subject matter, characterisation, structure, etc. Not every book you read has to be written simplistically, with a straightforward narrative. I recently read Jonathan Coe's excellent biography of the experimental novelist BS Johnson, and I have a lot of sympathy with Coe's stance: he likes books with plot and narrative (the Dickens tradition) but also admires those who experiment with the form. He says of Johnson, he wrote as though it mattered, and I think by extension, if we occasionally subject ourselves to art work that is created by people who thinks it matters, then maybe it matters to us a bit more too.

Of Course

George Siemens and I ran the Course to Discourse mini-conference the other week, to discuss the future of the course. The elluminate recordings are now up if you missed it. Here is the slideshare of my presentation:

Digital Implications for Universities

View more OpenOffice presentations from mweller.

I opened the conference and so I was trying to set the tone for what was to come by considering the impact of digitisation on education. I employed a rather reductionist strategy by considering higher education as being comprised of a number of components. I used the analogy of newspapers to consider how each of their components had been weakened by digitisation. I argued that we can think of these various components as being held together like atoms in a molecule. Not all all molecules are equal and neither are all industries - the strength of the bonds between the component atoms will vary. The question then is to what extent are these components in higher education weakened by digitisation and how strong are the overall bonds that make 'Higher Education' a valuable package?

As for the mini-conference overall, I thought it went well. Attendance was pretty good (at about 70 people), but I think we could have done better. I only blogged and tweeted it, but didn't make a real effort to put the call out in mailing lists, etc.

The line-up worked very well I think. George and I bandied a few names around by email, contacted them with a rough brief and put together a quick schedule, and yet I don't think the synergy and flow between them would have been better if we'd spent months planning it and coordinating in intricate detail.

The technology worked well, although I saw a few reports on twitter that some people couldn't get access. I want to run more open sessions like this, and Elluminate seems a reasonable lightweight choice, so I hope access isn't an issue.

The discussion in the sessions was lively, and there has been some continued debate in the Moodle forums that George set up, although I still think this continuation post-event is something we haven't quite cracked yet - how do you make the event the start, rather than the end?

Anyway, thanks to all those who presented (Josie Fraser, D'Arcy Norman, Grainne Conole, Alec Couros, Tony Hirst as well as George and myself) - I really encourage you to check out the recordings of at least some of these talks, as there is some great stuff here. Also thanks to all those who 'attended', and kudos to George for setting it up and sticking with my half-baked idea.

The Four Assumptions of the Publishing Apocalypse

<Image Apocalypse by New Man http://www.flickr.com/photos/rnewpol/310013754/>

I have pondered before that referencing in academic papers is an anachronistic practice in a digital age. This came home to me again recently, and my reaction was almost visceral this time. I wrote an article for a journal recently (I know! What was I thinking?), and it inevitably featured lots of online references. I thought I had conformed to the loathed APA referencing style, but was then asked for web pages to specify "(n.p.) when page number not known and (para 4) when the quote comes from a particular paragraph in an online article."

Let's look at those requests: a) it's an online reference so page numbers are rare and b) who ever counts the number of paragraphs on a web page to find a quote? I mean, seriously, come on, does search not exist in this world?

But it's not the absurdity of it that bothers me. Nor is it the pointless, soul-sucking nature of putting references into a very specific format (after all much of life is pointless and soul-sucking). It's the assumptions behind these requests that really antagonise me. Let's look at what I shall lightly term the Four Assumptions of the Publishing Apocalypse:

1) The assumption of power: This says 'yes it may be foolish and anachronistic, but we can demand what we like since we are the publishers and this is your only recognised outlet.'

2) The assumption of quality: This claims that not only are they the only outlet, but their method is the only one appropriate for academic discourse. Failure to use their correct format for referencing implies a lack of academic rigour.

3) The assumption of immutability: This feels there is no need to change. They have begrudgingly accommodated online references (although the assumption of quality emphasises these are to be viewed as substandard), but in their hearts they feel that the paper method is the purest form, and anything else should be a subset of that. Thus we have practices suited to paper transferred online.

4) The assumption of proprietary: If the assumption of power says we can make you do what we like, and the assumption of quality states that we are the custodians of reliability, then this last assumption asserts that thou shall have no other publishing model than us: we own publishing.

Now if you believe any of these assumptions hold true, I congratulate you. For the rest of us, I know it's only referencing, but think about what it says. I value acknowledgement and giving proper credit, but I want digital-friendly ways of doing this, not practices that have been reluctantly twisted to accommodate digital practice and who bear the scars of this transformation all too readily.

Course to Dis-course

As part of my Year of Future Learning thang (yes, you hoped it'd gone away), I've organised with George Siemens an online mini-conference called 'From Course to Dis-course', runs May 14th - 15th. The aim is to look at the future of the course in a digital world. I think that the course, as we know it, provides a nice tight focus, but at the same time it is the base unit of education - it's something we all understand. So using it as the means to explore the impact of digital technologies will provide a useful indication of changes in higher education overall.

And what a line-up we have for you, ladies and gentlemen: George, Grainne Conole, D'Arcy Norman, Josie Fraser, Tony Hirst, and, err, me. Plus a few more to come.

So, it's free, it's informative, it's fun - what more do you want? See you there.

BTW - hashtag is #course09

Organisations may have to live with 'Cisco fatty' moments

In case you've missed this one, there was another of those inevitable '[New technology of choice] gets person fired' stories. In this case a Cisco employee with the id theconnor tweeted

"Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work"

Inevitably, someone else picks up on it. The strange thing is that it then goes viral. There is something of a pack mentality then. Helen Popkin gives a good account of the unfolding story here. She describes how:

"Before the work day ended, Web sleuths revealed "theconnor's" true identity. "Theconnor" was lampooned in a popular YouTube meme. And thanks to Google Cache, the deleted content of "theconnor’s" homepage resurfaced on CiscoFatty.com, a Web site erected to commemorate this cautionary tale."

It's not clear if this has caused the individual to lose (or not start) their job. The incident raised a few issues for me. Firstly was the sad inevitability of it - Brian Kelly asked last May when we'd hear the first such story. I think people will gradually learn how to handle these types of online conversations, and develop an appropriate online persona, but we'll have these stories for the rest of our lives (except they'll be so commonplace no-one will report them).

But how bad was theconnor's crime? Most of the response has been barely disguised schadenfreude at how could someone be so stupid. But while most of us wouldn't tweet something so obviously compromising, if we want our tweets to have any interest then you have to add in some element of the personal. Simply tweeting a corporate message isn't going to be of interest to anyone. I don't think I've tweeted anything sackable (maybe saying I didn't like presenter Neil Oliver counts?), but equally I wouldn't want a communications officer to track through all my tweets and advise me on their suitability vis a vis my professional status.

Sure, it's a bit embarrassing for Cisco, and you might want to know if someone hated their job, but realistically, how many people have said similar things in a pub to a fellow worker? At least they're hiring someone who's engaged with new media.

What would worry me more was if one of the people who took such delight in outing theconnor was on my team. What does it say about them and their values that they'd want to reveal the person's identity and attempt to get them sacked? So, if we're going to play the 'the internet can get you sacked' card, then maybe that should include unpleasant and unprofessional behaviour too, not just indiscretions?

Learning to have perspective on these type of incidents, knowing what constitutes a serious offence, and most of all understanding the medium, is going to be a big challenge for all organisations. Personally I hope theconnor is fine, and has maybe learnt a bit of a lesson, but nothing more.

[Update: The woman in question has a very reasonable and balanced post on it here (thanks to John Connell). In the end she has come out of it looking quite good I think, she seems thoughtful, reflective, non-judgmental - all the qualities you'd want in an employee (she had decided not to take the Cisco post when she did the tweet, so it hasn't 'lost' her the job). On the other hand, those who pursued her with a kind of rabid ferocity have come out of it rather tarnished. So, there's a moral in this somewhere - beware the righteous meme.]

Why the future of journalism is interesting

Hamed Saber http://www.flickr.com/photos/hamed/512309138/>

John Naughton has an excellent post in which he reflects on some recent pieces on the future of journalism. One of these is Clay Shirky's article Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable, which if you haven't read already, I heartily recommend. Shirky has that rare ability to crystalize all the current debate and hype around a subject and get to the core of an argument (sort of the antithesis of what I do). He examines the economics of newspapers and argues this is why they are essentially rendered redundant by digital media. The point he makes is that we confuse function with form:

"Society doesn’t need newspapers. What we need is journalism. For a century, the imperatives to strengthen journalism and to strengthen newspapers have been so tightly wound as to be indistinguishable."

Andrew Keen, with his uncanny ability to miss the point, responds to Shirky's piece arguing that the 'let-it-happen' conclusion Shirky draws is not inevitable:

"how absolutely should we stand back and trust the free market to come up with a solution to the crisis of the news business? We certainly aren’t trusting this unfettered market to solve Wall Street’s financial crisis. ... So if we can agree that the news business, like healthcare and the financial sector, is too important to fail, then shouldn’t the government be taking a more active gardening/watering role in ensuring that at least one or two of today’s digital flowers fully bloom in the future?"

The difference here is that unlike some other industries that various Governments are stepping in to save, newspapers were in trouble long before the current financial crisis, and crucially, we are seeing a replacement of newspapers by natural means. There is no need to save it since it is in the process of evolving. This is not the case with the financial sector. If we are to preserve every industry that faces change because of the impact of digital technologies it will make the current intervention by Governments look like an exercise in laissez-faire economics.

John concludes:

"So here are some principles for thinking intelligently about our emerging media environment:

1. Think ecologically
2. Think long-term. What’s happening might be as profound as what happened after the emergence of print — and look how long it took for those effects to work their way through society.
3. Don’t confuse existing forms with the functions that they enable. It’s the functions that matter. Forms may be transient, the product of historical or technological circumstances."

Why is everyone so interested in the future of newspapers, you may wonder. Obviously they are significant social artifacts of our age and so their rapid change is interesting in itself. But more significantly they can be seen as a case study, or a warning from the future, about the impact of the internet on well established, often highly regarded, businesses. Unlike the music industry, which pretty much tried to close its eyes and wish the internet didn't exist, newspapers have been exploring a range of models to deal with the change. As Shirky puts it:

The problem newspapers face isn’t that they didn’t see the internet coming. They not only saw it miles off, they figured out early on that they needed a plan to deal with it, and during the early 90s they came up with not just one plan but several.

Most other industries haven't even worked through the range of models that newspapers have already used up. Watching what will happen next with newspapers as businesses and journalism as a practice will provide a rich source of models for others to adopt.

So, is education like newspapers minus five years or so? It's tempting to think so, and there are some parallels, but it's the differences that are significant also. Education isn't just a content industry most importantly, and has some relation to a physical institution often. But one lesson we should be examining in detail is John's third one. We shouldn't confuse education with the university system. The latter is a convenient financial and administrative method of achieving the former, but in a digital world there is something that was crucially missing previously: alternatives. That's what really killed newspapers - having alternatives.

What the Digital Britain report should have said

As most UK readers will be aware we have Lord Carter's Digital Britain report available which sets out the vision for the UK economy being one that embraces all things digital (after all, jam making aside, we've nothing else left). If you're not from the UK, don't worry, if you haven't got such a strategy already, you'll no doubt be getting one soon, as all countries see the potential of a digital economy to get us out of the hole we are currently in.

The report sets out some commendable aims, such as creating a digital infrastructure, ubiquitous broadband and all that. But where it comes unstuck is in stressing the importance of protecting copyright online and threatening to crack down on file-sharing. Admittedly they were never going to say 'forget copyright, we promote a free for all', but they seem to be limiting their view of the net to one of a consumer channel. Never mind that four out of the top ten websites in the world are based around people sharing and creating content (YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and Wikipedia).

Charles Leadbeater of We-Think fame has an excellent response, which I urge you to read. He sums it up when he says:

"plans to invest more in digital technologies will only pay off if they bring further disruption to economies that are already in turmoil"

And this is the key to the problem with the Digital Britain report. It is, at heart, a cowardly report. They have listened to the protectionist lobbying of the incumbent industries and sought to create a strategy that will serve their needs. Unfortunately, an internet used as a broadcast channel is a long-dead notion, so it will not serve the needs of a new economy. Their proposal to create a digital infrastructure while simultaneously enforcing more stringent copyright is rather like suggesting an investment in eco-friendly cars while listening to the petro-chemical companies and simultaneously slashing petrol prices.

Here is my alternative conclusion:

"It is obvious that success online is created by empowering users to become creators and sharers of content. We will seek to support this fundamental ethos. We appreciate that this does not directly correspond with the existing models of many media businesses and we will set out a support strategy to help these industries to migrate to new business models and working methods which embrace the possibilities of the digital age."

If you want to have your say, then Tony Hirst and Joss Winn have taken the report and chunked it down handily into paragraphs, which you can then comment on individually at WriteToReply. In other words they've done exactly what the report should be promoting, but seems a long way from understanding.