The Ed Techie

Peter Knight RIP

My boss, Peter Knight, passed away suddenly at the weekend. This has come as a shock to those of us in the Institute of Educational Technology. I liked Peter a lot, he was always supportive of me (it was his idea to take study leave to write the VLE book), and keen to engage with new technologies and ways of thinking. He was a reader of this blog and would often send me comments and thoughts on postings.

Open University bloggers

Following on from my previous post, I thought I would compile a list of current bloggers at the OU. Actually Tony Hirst had (as always) already done it, so the list below is mainly his. I've restricted it to blogs that have some life in them (a low threshold this one - one post this year is enough to qualify) and are by people working at the OU, ie not students (there is much more activity on the student front).

A couple of things strike me about the list: a) considering the size of the OU, it's not exactly big is it? b) most bloggers seem to be in the ed tech, programming, open learn side of things. My worry about this is that non ed techie people think that blogging isn't something relevant to them, and as they suspected all along, it's a nerd thing. I wonder how this list compares across other universities and what the differentiating factors might be? For instance does a top-down blogging initiative have any affect? Does the presence of one or two big name bloggers cause a trickle down? Does the institution's general attitude to technology influence uptake (for example, my guess would be that MIT has a stronger blog presence)?

Here is the list, I'd be happy to hear of any more:

Tony Hirst - http://ouseful.info

John Naughton - http://memex.naughtons.org/

Ray Corrigan - http://b2fxxx.blogspot.com/

Marc Eisenstadt http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/marc/

James Aczel http://h809.blogspot.com/

Doug Clow http://dougclow.wordpress.com

Patrick McAndrew - http://ochre.wordpress.com

Errm, me - http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/

Laura Dewis and Stuart Brown - http://conclave.open.ac.uk/openair

Alex Little - http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/alex

Steve Godwin - http://openlearn.blogspot.com/index.html

Niall Sclater - http://sclater.com/blog/

Juliette White - http://www.jvvw.com/index.php

Graphics blog - http://blogs.open.ac.uk/LTS/csn47/

Guy Carberry http://conclave.open.ac.uk/guycarberry/

Library - http://libraryissues.blogspot.com/index.html

Mikele Pasin - http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/mikele/blog

Peter Scott - http://sixfields.open.ac.uk/peterblog/index.html

Andrew Brasher - http://conclave.open.ac.uk/brasherblog/

Encouraging educators to blog

As part of the broadcast strategy review, I've been asked to produce a document that sets out how we can encourage more OU academics to engage with new technologies as part of their everyday practice (ie, not just for teaching purposes). I'm concentrating on blogging because I think it has a reasonable tradition (in the new definition of tradition which means anything older than 2 years) and is probably the most fruitful for academics. Most of my arguments will apply to the other technologies also, and I think you can use blogs as a springboard for a host of web 2.0 stuff.

Anyway, following on from my previous post I wanted to set out the motivations for educators to take up blogging. Here's what I've come up with so far, there is a bit of overlap between them:

• The economics of reputation – increasingly one’s reputation online is seen as a valuable commodity. This is partly because a good reputation is difficult to establish and also because in an environment where content is free and widely available then quality becomes a differentiating factor.
• Engagement with your subject area – in many subject areas the blogosphere is where much of the informed and detailed debate is occurring. If this is the case in your subject area then not to be part of it limits your expertise in the same manner as not publishing journal articles (perhaps even more so). If your subject area is not one widely engaged with blogging then this represents a good opportunity to establish yourself as one of the lead experts.
• Increased reflection – keeping a regular blog seems to encourage a degree of reflection and critical analysis as you comment on conferences, workshops, research, etc.
• Personal status and payback – being a recognised blogger in any field is likely to raise your profile and thus lead to increased requests for participation in projects, key note speeches, consultancy, invited papers, etc.
• Organisational status – as an institution the OU is not as prominent in the blogosphere as it should be. While company blogs tend to be rather bland, there is a positive image and potentially student recruitment effect for the institution if there are known to be a number of good bloggers in residence.
• Link to teaching – the type of content used in courses is increasingly diverse, and one model for including up to date information is to have feeds from a number of blogs incorporated in to teaching material.
• Eating our own dog food - increasingly students are encouraged to use blogs in courses, and so we should be demonstrating how they can be effective.

In a comment on my previous post Scott Leslie makes the good point that by being a blogger you build up a network of contacts, from people linking or commenting on your posts, plus the blogs you read and link to, which is invaluable in overcoming problems. Doug Clow also suggests that he had come to the stage where he couldn't do his job without blogging now.

Now, I know lots of people have blogged about this and must have run similar projects in their own universities, so I'd really appreciate any links or suggestions for further benefits for academics. It would also be kind of neat to say in the report that some of this report was produced through the benefits of blogging, demonstrating Scott's point.

Is blogging a good use of time?

Tony Karrer has been prompted by a couple of posts to consider whether use of web 2.0 technologies is viewed as wasting time by others. He asks:

Do people have enough time to use these tools? If so, does that mean that they are somehow not the people who are already "too busy" at their jobs? Are the only people who will use the tools exactly those people who the organization views as time wasters, tinkering about, etc.

Although he's talking about web 2.o technologies, I'll narrow it down to just blogging for some consideration. I have some sympathy with the people who think it is only for those with too much time on their hands, because I used to think the same.  Something along the lines of 'oh yes, it's fine for them to spend their whole day blogging, but I'm actually busy writing a course.' And I do still wonder how some people who have ten posts a day find time to do anything else. But of course I've come round in my thinking, even if I'm not the most prolific blogger on Technorati.

So, if you do think blogging is a waste of time, or you don't have enough time, let me try and convince you otherwise. Firstly, you should be prepared to put in some initial bootstrapping effort. Your blog won't be widely read overnight (if ever), and the paybacks I'm about to list need some critical mass of postings I think. It helps if you've got a project to specifically link to so you have some momentum behind it. For instance I was writing my VLE book when I started mine so I had lots of stuff in my head to get out.  There are lots of benefits in terms of reputation, marketing yourself, indirect payment (e.g. through consultancy) etc, but here I'm just going to concentrate on the ones relating to time.

i) You can direct people to your blog and save having to produce reports or documents. I often get in to conversations with people and they ask me to summarise things in an email and I simply send them to my blog, maybe with a specific tag e.g. 'look at the stuff I've written under the VLE tag'. It is probably still some way off, but in the future I would like to think that instead of producing a CV and letter of application for a job you could just send someone to your blog. That should give them a much better indication of whether they want to employ you.

ii) When you get in the habit it speeds up the process of recording your thoughts on events. I often sit in conferences or workshops thinking about the blog posting I will do (or sometimes actually doing it). This saves me having to write up notes afterwards and also helps me focus on what is important.

iii) It provides an easy dissemination point. For example I usually  put up my powerpoint on Slideshare and link it in my blog. A lot of people know this, so if they have missed a talk or want the slides from a talk they don't bother emailing me, they simply go to the blog.

iv) For the organisation it provides a knowledge transfer route. Now I'm not suggesting we do away with all workshops (biscuit suppliers need not fear for their trade), but an organisation that has a good set of regular bloggers has an efficient means of knowledge sharing which might be time consuming to realise in other ways.

So that's my reasons for how it repays the time spent on it, and that's not considering all the other benefits. I'm off to read my blog roll now...

OU Learning Design workshops

I ran four workshops this week for the OU Learning Design project. My colleague Grainne Conole had prepared the slides and done four the previous week, so I can't take any credit for the sessions being well structured. We have been using the Compendium tool develop by KMI as a means of eliciting and representing learning designs. We added in an LD icon set, with icons for activity, task, role, VLE tool, resource, output and assignment.

We got attendees to play with this tool, and I was surprised at how well received it was. There is always a danger when giving people a prototype tool that they get mired in small usability details and the bigger picture gets lost. But the reverse happened and people really got the point of a learning design approach by playing with the tool.

Here are some of the general responses from the workshops:

• Using the tool helped generate discussion and get consensus.
• It helped surface hidden complexity in some activities.
• It made users consider the whole range of support, tools and assets.
• It suggested using new technologies to some people.

There was general support for the project, and our next step is to build up the knowledge base, so that we can bridge the gap between pedagogy and technology. We have lots of case studies that we're going to populate it with.

Football commentators, elearning and the legitimacy deficit

There was much discussion last week about the BBC appointing its first female commentator on Match of the Day.  Rather predictably this assault on the last bastion of maleness caused some debate. The ant-argument seems to fall in to three camps:

i) She hasn't played the game and you need to have done so in order to be a good commentator. This is just plain wrong and like many fields confuses experience with critical prowess. Many good literary reviewers are not good authors and vice versa, the same goes for film, and most of the printed press in any sport. Indeed I have been rather disappointed with the rise of ex-players having a monopoly over punditry and analysis at the BBC. This is because a) they can't fight their way out of a cliche bag and b) they're often not removed enough from the sport to bring other insights. Sure, a commentator needs to be knowledgeable, but you can gain that from other means. After all, do most football fans think their own viewpoint is useless because they haven't played professionally?

ii) The female voice is not appropriate for football commentary. Hmmm, this one seems to have had too much of an airing, for example Irish-Le-Faux suggests "I don't think the female voice is equipped to commentate on football due to the high pitched nature of it". Now, obviously not all female voices are the same, but even if we accept there is general a higher pitch, this doesn't mean they are incapable of expressing excitement without screaming. I, like many footie fans, find the ranty-shouty type commentator pretty unbearable, for example Jonathan Pearce seems to reach a crescendo of excitement and volume while the team walk out of the tunnel and has nowhere left to go when things do exciting (not very likely with England playing, admittedly) without descending in to some guttural scream. Now maybe this gets at the primal appeal of sport for some people, and I accept people will have preferences, but to issue an edict against any female commentators seems ludicrous.

What all this reminded me of is the notion of a legitimacy deficit. Note that a legitimacy deficit doesn't have to be real (ie that female commentators are really not as good as men), but rather it just has to be perceived, either by the wider public or by the individual themselves (they think I'm not as good). Now legitimacy deficits are something I know about - I work for the Open University, which when it was founded had to overcome an enormous legitimacy deficit regarding the quality and validity of distance learning. I have been involved in the early adoption of e-learning, which again faced the same sorts of criticisms (indeed often the exact same ones, but with the words 'distance learning' replaced by 'e-learning' - and sometimes from distance educators!).  And I encounter the same sort of deficit with web 2.0 stuff now - e.g. it's not for education, it's just hype, what about the serious pedagogy?, etc.

One of the good things about a legitimacy deficit is that it often makes the person, group or organisation on the end of it work extra hard to overcome it. This has the result that their output is often better than the standard offering. For example, the OU's teaching quality is ranked in the top ten in the UK (although the downside is that having worked so hard to get this legitimacy it makes some people reluctant to risk it, and thus an element of risk aversion sets in). There are many examples of it in history - because of the rather dubious manner in which he inherited the title of emperor, Charlemagne suffered something of a legitimacy deficit which may have been the reason behind many of his cultural reforms, including the Carolingian Renaissance. Of course, the reaction to a legitimacy deficit can be negative also, particularly when it is to convince others of your legitimacy by strength (ahem, George Bush springs to mind).

In educational technology here is my 'legitimacy deficit' top ten:

1. Open educational resources - whether this approach is sustainable, desirable, viable, etc.
2. User generated content - need I say more? You know the arguments.
3. Social software - is this just for entertainment or serious education?
4. ePortfolios - an eportfolio based approach has enormous implications for institutions but whether it will be accepted by learners, universities and employers is up for debate.
5. Informal learning - communities of practice, open source activity, etc. How do we map this across and recognise it?
6. PLEs - I've covered this before.
7. VLEs - although pervasive you would have to say they haven't fully overcome the legitimacy deficit, and a lot of the criticism comes from e-learning advocates who feel they are just not up to the job.
8. e-learning - yes, it's still there, down four from last year.
9. Podcasts, wikis, blogs - okay, kind of covered user generated content but there is something about this group where the legitimacy deficit is about the validity of academic debate that takes place, and whether these are the new journals.
10. [Insert your own one here]

Being in the legitimacy deficit zone is a good place to be though - this is where the excitement is, so if you're involved in any of the above remember that such deficits can be overcome and the outcome is often all the better for having that struggle. And good luck Jaqui Oatley too!

New university model take 2

Stowe Boyd has given a more detailed account of our discussions than I did and Marc Eisenstadt has also blogged on it . I don't quite agree with Marc that elearning was/is "awful, dead, soul-destroying", and the elearning 2.0 stuff marks its death, for me this is a prime example of the succession model I drone on about in my book, and evolutionary change. The presence of 'traditional' (ah, how quickly things become traditional now) elearning, say through a VLE, creates the base layer of competence and familiarity and generates the questions and desires that makes the next stage possible. In short they alter the environment to make it favourable for the next wave of colonizers.

But that is rather by the by, back to the new social space learning - one thing Boyd's posting triggered was some thoughts on what the thing is. Is it a platform, a community, a new accreditation model? Answer - yes to all three I think. There was some discussion as to who the competitors might be for such a thing, and at the moment no big ones were identified. I suggested that in some ways, the individual was the competitor, because they could create this environment for themselves, for example with a bit of 43Things, some Facebook, a discussion list, etc. I was (rightly I think) disavowed of this belief, and I've been thinking about why the individual response is not the competitor. Here are some suggestions:

i) It's the community, stupid. Although you can locate communities for almost anything, the space would provide a natural home for them, so why not go there?

ii) Convenience. Although I can find my own content and tools, if the convenience factor is higher at one space, then I may as well use it.

iii) Specialised services. Things like accreditation and support which I can't get elsewhere.

iv) Quality and reliability. If the reputation is high, content is good and past experiences favourable then it'll be your first choice.

I think all of these reiterate the critical mass point I made in the earlier post - particularly i and ii - you only get these once the social networking becomes rich enough. There are ways of doing this, but it's not an exact science.

Technological enlightenment

or 'Help! I think I'm a technological determinist!'

As readers of this blog may know, I often have a feeling that the significance of technology is underplayed. This arises from a fear of technology determinism, and being accused of this is like, well, calling a runner a jogger (to reference a previous post). Technology determinism is bad because it ignores the role of people in how technology is used. But in order to avoid being accused of it, and thus being cast out of the academic community, the reaction is to suggest that technology isn't important at all. This is evidenced in oft-heard phrases such as 'we shouldn't place technology on a pedestal', 'there is nothing new in all this', 'pedagogy is important, not technology', etc.

I've blogged about this before, when I said we should love technology more, but it came back to me again with a minor example, namely Google's personalized maps, which many people have blogged on. Now, as soon as you see this as an educator, a number of possibilities come to mind - literature students mapping out the scenes in War and Peace, geography students sharing annotations of glacial features, language students adding in video clips from different locations, history students plotting the Lewis and Clark expedition, medical students showing the spread of disease, and so on.

Now all of the technology naysayers arguments apply here - particularly the 'there's nothing new here' one, since maps are not exactly the new kid on the block. But this really misses several points about Google maps, which means you won't take advantage of them. For a start, being able to share them with a dispersed and collaborative group adds great potential. Secondly, being able to embed different media formats makes them much richer. Thirdly, the quantity of freely accessible data (maps in this case) beats what you can do with a school library budget most times. And lastly they are operating in a context which many students find stimulating and familiar, ie working with the net. This last one is often dismissed too readily.

So, on to the technology determinism bit - when I heard Google was investing in maps technology a few years back I didn't get it. Sure I liked maps (I used to spend a lot of time poring over maps, like Marlow in Conrad's Heart of Darkness "when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there.") but I didn't see how they would be used. Let's face it, did any of us really get how much a part of our lives Google Earth would become? Partly this was because I hadn't appreciated the significance of the open API and what that meant for people taking them and doing what they liked with them.

But now when I see them, I can see all sorts of potential. It isn't technological determinism, since that would ignore just how inventive people have been, but neither is it technology irrelevantism (sorry). So, let's have another term which gives due recognition to the power of technology to awaken in us new ideas, which I'll call Technology Enlightenment. Now, is that something we can sign up to, without it becoming the academic equivalent of saying 'I think there's something in this phlogiston theory...'

New university model

I was at a meeting yesterday hosted by the OU which was exploring new models for the OU, and by implication higher education in general. There were some big hitters there including Stephen Heppell, Stowe Boyd, Jamais Cascio and Stuart Sim.

The resulting suggestion was a social space, with the emphasis on helping others to learn. Such a space is populated by remixable, flexible content and also by learning narratives that guide learners and a range of social connections such as mentors, peers, experts, etc. None of this is particularly surprising given the people there - the solution wasn't going to be a physical campus with lectures now was it.

The critical mass issue was significant for me. Such a system is very long tail - it meets the needs of the few people who want to learn about Ukrainian knitting patterns, radio programmes of the 1950s, the novels of William Boyd and the influence of Krazy Kat cartoons on modern culture. This is good, because such needs aren't met in any current system, but it really needs a large mass to support. And this is where the Catch 22 is - if you have the critical mass the system works well, but the system doesn't function until you get the critical mass. Sites such as YouTube could afford to be a bit more experimental, and just let their system grow since the investment on the part of the user was small. They could also populate it reasonably quickly with a mass of music videos. Learning is more complex, and thus getting the good content and the right connections is more difficult to establish.

Also, although the social networking stuff is important, I think the significance of content is underplayed in such a vision (I even got to use my 'content may not be everything' jibe I mentioned yesterday). For a lot of social networking sites, such as LastFM people don't go there primarily for the social networking, what they go for is the content (ie to be able to listen to a good range of music). This is enhanced (and to some extent enabled) by the network effects. In short they go for the content and stay for the social networking.

Anyway, I noticed a strange thing happening during the meeting. Normally my role is to be web 2.0/elearning/new technology evangelist, but in a room where I was an amateur at the evangelism stuff, I took on the 'devils advocate' role. Sometimes to my horror I found myself offering obstacles to the realisation of such a system. Why does this happen? So just for the record, I do believe such a system is viable (I just have a list of 'buts').

Road to Beijing

This is interesting (if you like running). Alexander Vero was a reasonable amateur marathon runner, but has set himself the target of qualifying for the next Olympics. He is a documentary maker, so his aim is to show just how tough it is. He knows he probably won't achieve it, but wants to document the effort it takes to get close. As a not very good runner, I find it inspiring, but what has been interesting is the criticism he has received from elite athletes. Far from underestimating the challenge or thinking anyone can do it, what he is illustrating is how hard you have to train and also the limits of natural ability. I don't know why elite athletes would find this insulting. He has even suffered the worse term of abuse for a runner and been called a 'jogger.' Ouch. Anyway, worth tracking his progress, he is aiming for 2hrs 30mins in the Paris marathon.