The Ed Techie

The VLE is to teaching as Powerpoint is to presentation

The title says it all really, but just to unpack it a bit more. As Sarah Horrigan commented recently, people find VLEs very dull. This is partly because they are made to use – if you banned VLEs it’d be a sure way to make them interesting. But I think what the VLE and Powerpoint have in common is that they are in the first wave of digital democratization tools.

Such tools can’t be too far removed from traditional practice, otherwise people simple won’t use them. So they provide a useful stepping stone onto a more digitally enhanced future (where it’s always sunny and everyone loves each other).

The danger with both of them is that they represent not a potential stage on a journey for many, but the endpoint. Their ease of use and similarity to existing practice is seductive in this sense, you don’t really have to change what you do much.

Thus we have boring courses in VLEs and boring, bullet pointed presentations in Powerpoint. There is nothing intrinsic in the tools that means boring is the only outcome – good presenters will have excellent Powerpoint presentations and good teachers will have excellent VLE courses. But nevertheless there is something about their proximity to standard practice that means boring is all too often the end result. I suspect this is a ‘churn’ problem – we used to have learn a new approach or technology once every ten years (or lifetime). Now it’s every year (at least) and it takes time to appreciate that there is no end.

The journey needn’t necessarily be onto another technology, it can be making better use of the existing one. But realizing that your practice with these technologies is always evolving is the key I suspect, and that completing the training course is not the end point.

The long-awaited 'education as fruit' metaphor

I have just returned from the ALT-C conference in Manchester, where I held a workshop with Brian Kelly called 'Realising Dreams, Avoiding Nightmares, Accepting Responsibilities'. My role was to present the future, and then for us to discuss what the obstacles were to realising it, and the related issues for educators, learners and IT services. Here is my presentation:

Dreams of future learning

View more presentations from mweller.

In my talk I decided to use an extended (tortuous some might say) fruit based metaphor. It begins to get rather pained towards the end, but stick with it, I think it comes to fruition (ahem). It goes something like this:

Current higher education is about selling apples (the basic undergrad course). We have different types of apples, and they vary slightly in size, colour and taste. But it is still just apples.

If what we do is sell apples, then our current concerns are: Better apple packaging (the VLE may or may not be dead, but it's really just better marketing for apples); the costs of growing, distributing and selling apples; the quality of our apples; growing new varieties of shiny apples (someone is trying to grow a blue apple to appeal to kids). But it is still just apples.

Now if we consider the future of education, the key word is variety. It is not about perfecting one's apples, but accepting the whole range of possible fruits. With this comes a set of issues:

• It comes in different sizes - not just the slight variation we have around apples (eg tweaking a three year undergrad course to be two years or four years), but the whole range of sizes ranging from the tiny Wolffia angusta to over-sized pumpkins, so we need to recognise and facilitate learning that takes ten minutes or involves extended participation in a community over a number of years.
• It has many different types - obviously we're not dealing with just apples now, but kumquats, kiwi fruits, oranges, melons, etc. So this means recognising different types of learning and different content. We no longer determine the curriculum but it is now varied and open. It also has blurred boundaries, instead of the very definite ones we have now - the classic 'tomato, fruit or vegetable?' argument could also apply to learning. Is hanging around in a forum learning? Is game playing learning? The key is that we accept that the boundaries are now blurred and we seek to recognise different types of learning.
• Any time - we don't just sell our apples during opening hours, but offer home delivery any time of day. The old dream of 'just in time' learning was something that was touted around when learning objects were new, and SCORM was being pushed. The difference this time around is that then it was based on automatically assembly of content, but now it is based on a human network. And it's not just a dream - any of us who have put a call out on twitter know how quickly you can get a response. But this could be extended further - access to a marketplace of accredited mentors for example.
• Assembled/mixed/aggregate how you want - now we don't have just apples, we can all mix our own fruit salads, and with the full range to choose from, few salads will ever be the same. As a party host I can create my own fruit offering, just as an educator I can create a 'course' on any subject I want by mixing together resources, tools and adding in my own elements. Or as a learner I may have a core set of resources (a base fruit bowl) and can then add in from a wide range of selected content to create a partially personalised course.
• Based around easy sharing - we all have access to so much free fruit now, we share it easily and without question. Sharing is now the default action online - we share jokes, content, links, views, activities, ideas. Any vision of future learning should have sharing as the basic action and build from that. I would go as far as to say that teaching our students how to be good sharers within their subject community is the number one aim for education.
• Range of tools - we're not limited to tools that only apply to apples now, we can have the full range of tools and cutlery available. Whether we believe the VLE is a stepping stone to a world of wide-ranging tools, or should be abandoned now, surely any dream of future learning would embrace the growing panoply of tools.

So there you have it? I'm sure you'll tell me where the metaphor breaks down, but what I really want is examples of how we can extend it to a ludicrous degree. Metaphors are only fun when you really stretch them.

VLE vs PLE fight club

<Image Pirate Test by Danksy http://www.flickr.com/photos/petedanks/2770208173/>

I did a debate with Niall Sclater for the upcoming OU course Technology enhanced learning around PLEs and VLEs, 'refereed' by John Pettit. We pitched it as me being the PLE guy and Niall the VLE man, for the sake of discussion, but we're probably closer in agreement than this would suggest.

You can listen to the audio here (including jazzy intro and fade-out music). [Update, jazzy music is courtesy of http://www.oliverledbury.co.uk/]

For a one take shot, I think it comes out reasonably well, although I am the least coherent of the three.

Technology as metaphor (or I'm on e-Literate)

I was really pleased to be asked to contribute an article to the edition of On The Horizon that Michael Feldstein is editing. As part of the procedure all the authors are writing a guest blog post on e-Literate. It feels kind of like getting the opening slot on the Parkinson show (US readers - substitute with Leno).

My piece is up now, called SocialLearn: Bridging the Gap Between Higher Education and Web 2 (surprise choice of topic, I know!). As well as talking about SocialLearn I wanted to make the argument that the technology we (individuals and institutions) use is a metaphor, or at least an artefact, for how we engage with the social issues. My argument then is that the conventional LMS is the wrong metaphor, not just the wrong technology, for engaging with some of the changes we are seeing that we might cluster under the web 2.0 banner. I am in the position of being able to quote myself, so I'll let M Weller sum it up:

I would suggest that the reason the centralised LMS is not the answer to the ‘web 2.0 problem’ for education is because in its software DNA it embodies the wrong metaphor. It seeks to realise the principles of hierarchy, control and centralisation – the traditional classroom made virtual. This approach won’t help educators understand the new challenges and opportunities they are now facing.

A PLE - VLE continuum

There's been a bit of a PLE flurry of posts, generated by some Twitter discussion. Chris Lott posted that he couldn't see why people think you can't teach PLEs, or about PLEs. Scott Leslie argues that some don't like the acronym:

It’s personal, not monolithic” complaint with the term, which I get and agree with. My response is not to defend the “PLE” acronym but instead just say if it bothers you, come up with a different one, or don’t use a moniker at all, but more importantly, model model model it for the 95% of learners (and teachers) who are drowning in the tsunami of information and choosing to turn their backs rather than learning to surf

Meanwhile D'Arcy Norman maintains (with the aid of some cool diagrams) that one person's PLE will differ from another's, and it is the people that are important:

the exact technologies that are in use at any particular point in time don’t matter as much as the fact that it is people being connected through them. Tools come and go constantly, and the only constant is that the people are the important part of the equation.

The debate on twitter seems to have been about whether one can usefully talk about PLEs since, by their nature, everyone's is different. There is no The PLE.

I'd like to argue that the term is okay, it has context (that of VLE), and also there is some benefit in 'teaching' PLEs. But maybe we need to nuance the term a bit, as we may be lumping things together. If in doubt about an acronym, let's create some more! So we have:

• VLE/LMS - a centralised system that gives a consistent user experience to everyone
• TLE - Teacher learner environment. This is along the lines of Scott Leslie's loosely coupled teaching applications. Less centralised than a VLE, the educator determines the range of tools, e.g. a blog with specific widgets, but all students use the same.
• DPLE - Default PLE. In this novice users (could be educators, students, employees, etc), are given a default set of applications to constitute their PLE, but they have the freedom to switch them out over time. A minor example might be my recent conversion to iGoogle from the standard Outlook provided services. Except the option and ease of switching would be stressed more. Imagine a default Netvibes page, which people would soon customise.
• PLE - the type of thing we ed techies have accrued over time, and continues to evolve. Work might be required on getting these apps to talk to each other, but really the people who operate at this end don't need much help.

This gives us a continuum of personalisation:

One thing to appreciate here is that there is no value judgement attached by the placing on the diagram - being further to the right isn't 'better'. These different approaches to technology will be suited to different contexts  and audiences. That is probably obvious to everyone, but was something of a mild epiphany for me - PLEs and VLEs are NOT in competition necessarily.

[Update - that last sentence originally had the 'not' missing (such a small word). I've added it in, but now I'm not sure - which is truer for you - they are in competition or they aren't?]

Run me through the Blackboard business model again

So Blackboard has won the initial ruling in Texas, with Desire2Learn ordered to pay $3.1 million compensation. Obviously a stupid and dangerous ruling, but as the excellent Michael Feldstein points out, who's made money out of it anyway?

It strikes me there are three ways to be the market leader in an industry:

i) Have such cool products it doesn't matter how you behave (cf. Apple)

ii) Have an average product and bully everyone else out of the market so the customer has no choice (cf. Microsoft)

iii) Work with your customers to develop your product and get good will (cf. nearly every other tech company).

I don't have an MBA, but it strikes me that option i) is damn hard to pull off and happens to only one or two products in a decade. Option ii) is so old school, industrial type thinking that even Microsoft are shying away from it now. This is particularly true in a sector like education. Unlike, washing machines say, people really care about education. You can't bully them, treat them with contempt and work against the community and expect to have the market. People are too smart and will work around you. Which leaves option iii) as your only sensible option. And the BB patent is about as far as you can get from this as is imaginable.

So when universities find ways to deliver, support, facilitate learning online (for instance using a set of third party apps held together by eduglu), are BB going to sue them? And will they sue every application in the pack? Google Calendar when used in a loosely coupled learning suite is now in infringement of copyright?

You have to say that when it comes to misunderstanding your market, the BB patent will be a classic case study. Until we have the opportunity to look back and laugh however, we should make sure we do everything to boycott them.

Blog as educational platform, VLE even

(http://flickr.com/photos/jbird/19650368/ JBrd)

This is really an re. loads of other people post, but I wanted to pull them together for my sake anyway.

There have been a few experiments recently in taking open content and putting it in a blog. Not mindbendingly innovative and yet very powerful when you see it.

I remember Tony showing me something like this around the early 19th century which he had knocked together using a penny farthing, carrots and a chimney sweep (Update: it was Nov 06), and he comments on the recent stuff. Then recently David Wiley took some of his open education course and republished it in WordPress. It looks really neat, enticing, well structured. Looks a damn site more inviting than, say, a Blackboard version of the course might.

Then Jim Groom took the OU's openlearn Goya stuff and put it in Wordpress. Guess what? It looks better than the original.

Brian Lamb (who easily has the best titles for blog posts around) sums it all up nicely and points to a session Jim Groom and D'Arcy Norman are doing at Northern Voice entitled  'Don't call it a blog, call it an educational publishing platform'. Which sums it up really.

There are several things of interest here for us ed techies. The first is that presentation matters. I like the look of these blog courses, and that would make me more inclined to participate in them, make me feel well disposed towards them and make me feel as though the people running them were vaguely modern and knew what they were doing. The aesthetics of the interface is something we pay scant attention to in education.

The second thing is that you may be thinking it's just a blog, it doesn't have tool X or Y that my VLE might have. Well maybe, but I think we're in disruptive technology territory here. Disruptive technology doesn't do the same things better for the same audience, it is often worse on some things, but it offers some new features for a different audience. The new features I would argue here are:

1. Ease of publishing - whether it's your own content or others, getting in to blogs is fairly straightforward
2. Ease of extendability - adding widgets and tools to blogs is just a click away, since blogs have become the universal platform across the web.
3. Openness - you can pull content and tools in from anywhere
4. Ease of navigation - blogs come with an inbuilt navigational structure that is easily co-opted for course structure.

I wonder if this isn't another example of how we in education create complex solutions to complex problems, whereas simple solutions often work better.

The tension between out there and in here

Following on from the Facebook post, the work we have done has raised some interesting tensions between developing for a third party platform and those services provided by the institution, such as the VLE. These will be issues that many universities will have to face in the coming years, so I'll list the ones I think are important here. I don't have any answers to them, I just know they're things we can't ignore. I'll use Facebook as an example to illustrate the points, but they can apply across nearly any third party application which isn't directly integrated into the formal learning experience.

1. Does having interaction across multiple platforms dilute the overall effect? For example, if a subset of students start collaborating in Facebook does this have a negative impact on the dialogue and learning experience for the whole cohort in the VLE?
2. Even if 1 is true, can we do anything about it? Many students are connecting and communicating via Facebook before they even start their courses. It would be unrealistic to expect, or to mandate, that they stop using whatever system they like for communicating. For example, someone else had already created an OU courses profile application in Facebook, so maybe it's better if we deliver these tools.
3. What are the privacy issues and responsibilities? If a university develops applications for a platform is it implicitly endorsing that platform? For example, in Facebook when you join a network the default setting is that everyone in that network can see your full profile. Imagine some unsavoury student X starts bothering student A through this. Student A only joined Facebook because her university had developed some tools for it and seemed to be encouraging it. Where does the responsibility lie in this case?   With the student (for not controlling their settings)? With Facebook? With the university?
4. What are the support issues? For instance on the Open University Facebook page some students have started raising tech support queries. Sometimes they get a response, sometimes they don't, since this isn't an officially recognised support mechanism. Logistically handling queries across multiple platforms will soon become unmanageable. Is this problem exacerbated if the university has a semi-official presence on the platform in question?
5. What are the real benefits? Maybe none, but I think there will be some subtle ones, which research will dig up over the next few years. Will they relate to educational performance, ie those students connected through Facebook tend to do better because they have better quality peer support and find a range of alternative resources. Or will they relate to motivation? Maybe those students in Facebook tend to drop out less because they have peer support and pressure. Or will it influence satisfaction? Students in Facebook tend to rate the course better because they felt better connected to the cohort. Or maybe none of these.

I think the natural instinct of universities (and particularly senior management) when faced with issues such as these is to think 'more control'. As readers of this blog will know, I tend to favour less control, but that doesn't mean it will be a smooth ride. There are some potentially very difficult issues, and a few legal cases, to be addressed as we blur the boundaries between out there and in here.

Do you need to love a tool for it to be useful?

A recent survey over at the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies (via John Dale) had responses from elearning professionals, asking them their favourite tools for learning.

Can you guess the top 5? Here they are:

1. Firefox
2. Delicious
3. Skype
4. Google
5. Powerpoint

Now, given our recent VLE debates, on to the interesting bit. Where do you think Moodle came? Answer, a respectable 12th. And Blackboard? It didn't make the top 100.

Now, there are several things to consider here. Firstly, these were e-learning professionals that were surveyed, and their responses may well be different from the vast majority of other educators. The point being that Blackboard isn't aimed at elearning professionals necessarily, it's aimed at the 'average' (I know there's no such thing) educator who doesn't want to think about elearning. Just as Windows isn't really aimed at IT professionals, it's for the big market that occupies the centre of the distribution curve.

Secondly, the tools mentioned are useful for the individual, but that doesn't mean they solve some of the institutional issues that may be involved, such as authentication.

Okay, I've done my even handed part, now let's look at what it might also tell us. What a lot of the top 100 have in common is that they are customisable, adaptable and personal. Which brings me on to the title of this post - a lot of these tools are ones people really love, usually for one or more of the following reasons:

i) They do one job really well

ii) They are customisable/personal

iii) They have an easy social dimension

Now if you are the purveyor of, say a commercial VLE, or any commercial elearning software, you should ask yourself if your product really hits any of those targets.

The alternative view is that although individuals may love some tools that doesn't really matter - it's senior management who buy enterprise systems and 'loved by users' is not usually on their specification list. Shame.

Loosely coupled vs integrated again

Continuing our debate around VLEs (which I'm enjoying anyway), Niall Sclater posts that one of the dangers of the small pieces approach is that we have no control over external sites, and he uses (my favourite web 2.0 site) Slideshare being down as an example.

Tony responds rather cheekily (he tags the post 'baiting') showing the OU site was down, to demonstrate that internally hosted systems are not immune from such dangers.

I would suggest that in a loosely coupled system your risk is spread from a user perspective - if Slideshare was down, that's fine I'll do the wiki activity, or look at the YouTube clips, or read the RSS feeds in Google Reader. There is an alternative activity I can be doing, but if your VLE goes down, you are stuffed since everything is in one place.

In general though, Niall is right, this is a concern (and one I mentioned in my original post). But it gets at something deeper I think than just about choice of hosting services - it's about philosophies and attitudes. The almost universal reaction in all higher education institutions is to control things - be it systems, content, dialogue, roles, etc. And there is a good reason for doing this - universities have a duty of care, both pastoral and educational, to their students, and the best way to deliver on this is to control the environment.

Hence we have educational versions of tools, closed systems, selected readings, etc. And then we have web 2.0 which lets anyone do anything and then puts metrics and filters in place to help you find the good stuff. In order to engage in this world there is going to have to be a good deal of letting go of control - not only will that be hard to do, but it may have serious implications for students (and maybe, legally for universities - what if someone has a bad experience on an externally hosted site which you have sent them to - are you responsible?). I'm not arguing that letting go of control is necessarily better - I just think more and more of it will happen anyway, so we need to be able to handle it. I don't think trying to control things more is a valid response though. This tension between control (and thus being able to assure education) and freedom (where bad things may happen) will be one of the key questions higher education faces in the next few years, and it's far more complex than control= bad, freedom = good.