The Ed Techie

The anti-social life of information

I was on campus at the OU yesterday. We have something of a parking crisis, which for a campus in the middle(ish) of nowhere, this is bad news. The response to this has been to outsource parking control to a firm who hand out £80 fines. Well, you can guess where this is going - I spent twenty minutes trying to park and eventually opted for a less than legitimate place as I had a meeting to make. When I returned less than an hour later I had a parking ticket. I was incandescent with rage (anyone who witnessed me discovering it might be tempted to add 'literally' in to that sentence).

What particularly aggravated me was that I had been in a meeting which was trying to find ways of saving the University lots of money by more efficient course production techniques (I favour use of RSS feeds). At the same time the University was busy raising some extra revenue (and the fee does seem vindictively high) by slapping a ticket on me.

It struck me that this is one of those relatively small things that have a disproportionate impact on staff relations. I certainly felt less devotion to the cause afterwards. As a keen e-worker it made me reflect that for all their evocation of the benefits of real social contact, Brown and Duguid should produce a sequel (they can have the title of this post if they want) which looks at some of the downsides, such as the tyranny of open plan offices, gossip, distractions. I want to set chapter 5 aside for parking...

What does HE provide exactly?

A few people (e.g. weblogg-ed) have blogged about the following demo of Zoho Notebook (which isn't released yet)

It does look very good and one can immediately see all sorts of possibilities for it in education, with students sharing and collaborating on content.

What it made me think was, as I posted a few days ago, increasingly I wonder why we bother to develop technologies in higher education. None of the stuff we develop is ever as agile, cool, usable or useful as this wealth of free commercial software out there now. Imagine you were employed to find the technology that would have the most significant impact on education in the next 5 to 10 years. Would you seriously look at what universities were doing to find the answer?

Partly this is cultural - the values that higher education holds dear are things like rigour, transparency and thoroughness. These are reflected in the software approaches it adopts with very sound stakeholder consultation, deeply studious problem analysis, measured and precise software specification, user testing, etc. By which time the product is irrelevant.

The pace of change is worrying too, my colleague Tony Hirst (who pointed me at this video) says he finds something every weekend that he thinks he could use in a course, and I don't doubt him. So even as it stands I want to say to developers 'can we just freeze everything for two years so we can catch up and start using this stuff?'

But the problem for higher education is even worse when you consider the wealth of content out there. Perhaps this is the sort of admission a professor shouldn't make, but I read more (and get more from) blogs now than I do from learned journals. And I would advise students to do the same. Add in podcasts, YouTube, Slideshare, open educational resources and the idea that the university or educator is the provider of the content looks decidedly shakey.

In essence we are all autodidacts now, but rather than being the oddball dilettante of Sartre's Nausea, autodidacts are now able to take any subject to a fine level of detail while maintaining a social life. Even worse, we are all autotechsupport now as well.

So, with the net providing the content and the technology I am reminded of the quote in Schindlers List when Itzhak Stern says to Schindler "Let me understand. They put up all the money. I do all the work. What, if you don't mind my asking, would you do?" I think increasingly this is a question that students will ask of HE, but more importantly which it should ask of itself.

Is which VLE even the question to ask?

I've been up in Inverness as part of a panel looking at UHI's VLE strategy for the past couple of days (I write this while delayed at Edinburgh airport - not the best place to spend your Friday night). A few things about the rather intense two day process - the first was how much it mirrored the debates we had gone through at the OU. You find yourself continually oscillating between options, which demonstrates that it is a hard decision. The second issue was the tension between what is needed or good now, and what is the better long term, strategic option. The third is the manner in which the decision making approach itself influences the outcome however much we might like to think it is a purely objective, rational process.

What was perhaps different was that with the advent of web 2.0 and portals was whether choosing a VLE was that important anymore. In the end I think getting that enterprise system in place is actually a vital step in then moving beyond it. Even if the technology was mature (which it isn't) an institution couldn't go straight to an open portal-based PLE type environment without first having gone through the centralised VLE stage. You have to suck everything in before you can breathe it all out.