The Ed Techie

Is learning migrating away from universities?

Tony Hirst sent me this story from TechCrunch about Grockit securing venture capital to develop a  'Massive multiplayer online learning' system. The idea is that people learn best from each other and the system will use network effects to facilitate education. It's not actually true that people learn best from each all the time by the way, you don't necessarily learn quantum physics by hanging around with your mates down the pub (although you can get as far as Brownian motion by observing your pint) - sometimes experts, (whisper it) teachers are useful.

But putting aside their over-simplistic pedagogic spin, there is as I and others have been noting, something in the ability of social networking to engage users and create informal learning opportunities. What the Grockit story does indicate is that it may be commercial companies who learn how to harness this potential quicker and better than higher education institutions, with their glacial timescales and conservative approach. If Grockit don't succeed then someone else will.

In 2002 in my (now quaintly historic) book Delivering learning on the Net, I looked at the function of a campus degree. One of the functions it provides is the life experience, the good times which are a significant part of many people's lives. This should not be underestimated. I would guess it already constitutes a large part of the reason students go to university in the first place. We like to kid ourselves that continuing their education is the primary driver, but I think it's more a case of 'I went for the parties and some learning broke out.'

If (and it is by no means a small if), people can gain their education via other means, then would this social factor be a sufficient reason to still go to university. After all, you could have a similar rites of passage experience travelling round the world for a year. The key to this migration away from universities would be accreditation, or standardised recognition, of the learning that occurs via these other routes. If employers find a means of recognising this, then the higher education business model looks less attractive.

I appreciate the death of universities (or more modestly, the death of the lecture) has been foretold many times, and the reaction of many is a raise of the eyebrows, but if we value them as institutions, then it is worth taking seriously. Higher education is the last great complacent sector in the face of the massive changes that the internet has wrought - look at what has happened in health, retail, media, politics even and the changes made by HE look relatively minor. And yet, with the possible exception of broadcast media and newspapers, the internet goes to the heart of our sector more than any other. The net is about content, community and communication - these are the core components in the educational experience, surely, and yet bar some tinkering at the edges education is largely unaffected by the massive socio-technical changes we are seeing.

A technorati double life

I am not obsessed by my Technorati ranking (okay, maybe a little), but as I struggle to get my authority increased I was puzzled to see that this blog is listed twice. One I have claimed, but one unclaimed with a higher authority. It turns out this is a problem arising from how Typepad handles domain names. Sadly my authority is not the sum of these two. I can ask Technorati to combine them I think, but more simply I'll claim the later. In technorati now you have to create a blog post with some code in it. So here it is - I just couldn't bring myself to post nothing though: Technorati Profile

PS trying to increase authority is the story of my life - the other day I was lecturing my daughter on something and she smiled and said quite genuinely, 'dad, you're so funny.' And she's only five, what chance do I have when she's a teenager.

Is imperfect material better for encouraging participation?

In an earlier post I mentioned that people weren't adapting openlearn material much. Similarly, the FLOSScom summer university hasn't seen as much input as we'd like (you can still input, just go there, register and edit pages). There are a number of possible reasons for this, such as the ease of modification, the cultural attitude towards reuse in the audience, the size of audience, the motivation to adapt, etc.

One additional factor that occurred to me was that maybe blank or very incomplete resources are better if you want participation. The openlearn content is very good, and has been through extensive editing and review as part of the OU process. The user may well think 'there's no point changing this, I'll take it as it is.' The Flosscom site isn't as thorough, but we did seed the content, and maybe this gives the impression there is nothing to add. This may be a phenomenon peculiar to education, in much the same way as you can have a flourishing discussion in a forum and as soon as a tutor or the course team join in with an opinion, it kills it dead, as if that represents the final word.

So maybe for educational content you need to make it imperfect, empty or activity focused. Simply giving people content and expecting them to adapt it won't happen - they'll either reuse wholesale or ignore. This could be a cultural thing, people feel uncomfortable taking someone else's content and adapting it, probably because we've been so thoroughly schooled in avoiding plagiarism - thou shalt not mess with another educator's material.

elearning 2.0 and Christensen

At a meeting yesterday I talked some bobbins around web 2.0 and education. My last slide provided a Christensen/Innovator's dilemma analysis (see below). I have some reservations about the disruptive technology theory, or rather its over-application to everything, but putting those to one side, I wanted to look at how we might use it to look at the web 2.0 versions of OU e-learning. So, I took a list of OU concepts and provided a Sustaining and Disruptive version. My set of concepts were:

So if we take the disruptive technologies model, then these appeal to a different audience, while the sustaining ones appeal to the existing audience. So from an educational perspective the key to the successful application of web 2.0 to education is to ask what audience would the right hand column appeal to? If we can answer this then perhaps we'll overcome my concern about education being intrinsically dull.

Learning from Facebook

Susan Mernit has a nice post on 10 things we can learn from Facebook (and other fads). I particularly liked:

2. Local is a state of mind.

7. Forget Starbucks, the third place is digital. Got 5 minutes? Need a break? That place you like to go is probably right on your screen.

8. Passive versus active still matters--but you can drive behavior. Remember those rules about people who watched TV rather than posted in online forums? It's still that case that most people are reluctant to write, slow to put themselves out there, and cautious about privacy and sharing. BUT--smart networks like FB model behavior and get that lagging 80% to do more that they ever did before, raising the bar on all network/community activity.

I think that last point is particularly significant - one of the key success factors behind most web 2.0 applications is their low threshold to participation. You can easily sign up, and just by being there you are participating to an extent. Then it doesn't take much more to add a few friends, post happy birthday on someone's wall, add a shared application, etc. This is much less intimidating than posting to a forum on a VLE, say.

Girls hooked on DS

Tech Digest (via Ewan McIntosh) carries a report that 7 year old girls are 'addicted to' (ie prefer) Nintendo DSs over traditional toys such as Barbie. My (5 year old) daughter has one and this certainly rings true for her. Games such as Pet Hotel, Ponyz, Dogz and Absolutely Anything to do With Animalz (okay I made that last one up), are great fun, and as I've blogged before, they keep her entertained at restaurants.

But I've noticed something else recently, and that is since having a DS, she plays with her physical toys much more. She has never been that keen on playing with toys, but now spends hours engrossed in imaginative games. It's TV that has taken the hit in terms of attention. She doesn't bother with this much at all now (Spongebob Squarepants aside that is). Now this is a sample of one, and going on the basis of correlation, which every first year scientist knows doesn't imply causality (although sadly, no politician knows this), so is not likely to win me a research award. But here's a mini-theory - the interaction with the DS promotes the notion of interactivity as a whole. She then maps this onto her toys and finds that they offer a different, but equally engaging form of interaction. There is then a positive feedback loop between the Nintendo, where she gets to care for ponies and receive feedback, and her toys, where she plays with ponies in an imaginary world. The TV then looks a poor third amongst these. 

Is education intrinsically a bit dull?

This question has been bothering me lately. Like everyone and their (lol)cat I am much taken by the enthusiasm, community, user involvement and creativity found in social networking/web 2.0 sites, and look on them rather covetously for education purposes. I feel like I'm at a big dinner event and on the table next to mine everyone is laughing and having a great time, while on my table we are haveing very earnest discussions about the Iraq war. It's interesting, but after a while, you want to find an excuse to join the other table, or at least get some of them to swap on to your table.

We're in the process of a few web 2.0 initiatives at the OU, including a social networking type one. In addition we already have the excellent openlearn, which is giving away loads of great content free, and allowing people to take it and adapt it. Except they aren't. Well, not much anyway. They are looking at it, but there isn't as much reuse and adaptation happening as we'd hoped for. Now this could be because it's still fairly new, or that attitudes in higher education lag behind those in the online community so reuse is still frowned upon, or it could be something to do with our setup.

But if we are to really map any of this 2.0 stuff across to higher education, then it has to have the subtle motivational factors found in the successful sites, such as YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, wikipedia, etc, etc. What a lot of these sites have in common is that they offer quick gratification and feedback (as AJ suggest, it's all Skinnerian conditioning). I know that there is a lot of indepth debate and involvement in these sites e.g. the discussions around wikipedia articles, but they also offer instant returns - you can set up your Flickr site and upload some photos immediately. Then you get progressive returns, upload some more, maybe you get some comments, you find some you like, you comment, you join a community, and so on.

Education doesn't seem to work like this. I think education is one of the most rewarding activities you can undertake, but that's not the same as exciting, and excitement is what seems to drive a lot of the social sites, in that they are either exciting themselves, or they are about exciting things, eg. bands on MySpace. The key question for all us educators looking at web 2.0 for education then, is 'does it have to be this way?' Is there something in the DNA of education that means it has to be worthy, hard work, a little dull but ultimately rewarding, or could it be restructured so it has more of these quick hits and progressive involvement?

If I was a cynical man I'd say us educational technologists will spend the next 3 years not really answering this question and then move on to the next big thing. But I'm not.

Lijit and connected learning

AJ pointed me at Ligit - it's a socially enhanced search engine. I've installed it on my blog, hanging around there on the left. When you sign up it asks you for your blog address, and then what name you commonly use for accounts and then searches for these, e.g. delicious, digg, flickr, twitter, etc. You can remove any, and edit it you have a different account name.

This part made me realise I'm not as connected as I should be - to my shame I hardly use delicious (just a habit thing), don't use digg at all, have a very old Flickr account, etc. The other data it uses for the search is your blog roll. I think this is quite interesting, you create a kind of network around you, and by implication you are saying these are people you trust.

Following on from my earlier post about a modern learning experience, one could see how a Ligit type tool would facilitate this. I may not be a good example (I really must update that blog roll), but take Stephen Downes for example, a Ligit search from him might find both content and people who would be useful. Not sure whether this application will actually work, but in theory you can see its potential for learning.

Mo' Facebook

Richard Scoble has a good post on Why Facebook, why now? After noting some of the criticisms (and his follow on post about a lot of the apps simply not working in Facebook is right also, but we'll pretend they do for now), he argues that Facebook is successful over LinkedIn because it's personal. He also points to the quality of the people and the applications (if they worked).

AJ suggests that the reason Facebook has stickability is Skinnerian conditioning and Tony Hirst suggests ways in which a status like function could be mined to aid learning and networking.

I think Scoble is right about the social aspect of FB - LinkedIn just didn't feel right to me - it felt as though it was people looking for jobs, consultants or venture capital. The interesting thing for me is the way that I have built up my FB friends makes it a social/professional network. Most of the people in my network are professional peers who I'm friendly with, so although a lot of the interaction is social e.g. 'Martin is watching Spongebob Squarepants again', it occurs within a professional context. The key for me is that it doesn't feel as though my network is being exploited for commercial reasons, but rather it is facilitating social interaction between people who have similar professional interests. This is a subtle, but important distinction I think.

It'll be interesting to see how long the FB popularity surge lasts. I wonder if I'll still be using it in a year's time? As an experiment I've created a posting category for Facebook, I'll have to notice when I stop using it.

I do wonder that as it increases it will need to offer different levels of access. As I understand it currently I can control what people in different networks see, and some of the things posted as news, but friends see everything. What I would want is for different friends to see different things. For example, I might want to have one core identity so people can find me (ie I don't want to join multiple times with separate identities), but from this I would want to spawn some sub-identities, eg. Martin Work, and Martin Friends. I can then add people to one of these sub-identities and that is kept separate from the others. Thus in my Martin Work one I can post the status 'Martin is doing research with current technology' and in my Martin Friends one my status might read 'Martin is playing tennis on the Wii.' Friends in the Martin Work identity would only see those friends I had assigned to it, and not those in any other identity (they would be unaware of other identities in fact). This would get around some of the scalability issues.

Scoble says he has over 2000 friends and these are who's who in the tech world. He will add you as a friend if you want. Now, I might want to do this, but, since all of his friends would be able to see all of my friends (I have slightly fewer), I would be wary about exposing all of my friends to such a large group. It would feel like a slight betrayal of trust. If I had multiple identities though then 'Martin experimental' might well sign up.

The problem is would this kill the essence of Facebook? Like so many sites, popularity brings a lot of awkward questions. 

An everyday, modern learning experience

I had a modest, but telling, learning experience the other day. It isn't remarkable in any way, but it hints at what might be achievable and how learning will occur more often in the future.

John Connell is one of my Facebook friends, although we have never met face to face, but we read and comment on each other's blogs. I have added the virtual bookshelf application to my Facebook profile, and it displays Everything is Miscellaneous as the book I am currently reading. John saw this (I think this is what happened anyway), and posted a message on my wall suggesting I look at the David Weinberger/Andrew Keen face off at the conversation hub. I did this and found it very useful for crystallising some of the thoughts  I had been having around the RAE. I also watched the Clay Shirky video, and blogged about this.

An OU PhD student saw my post and contacted me about metaphor, we had an email exchange where I gave some references I had and they gave me some links too, with a paper in mind that I might write.

If you look back at that exchange there are lots of telling elements about this sequence, which I think will come to characterise much of how learning occurs:

i) It used a number of different technologies, which were of my choosing. Facebook (extended through my selection of apps), blogs, email - not a one size fits all system.

ii) It was largely informal, with hooks out to the formal.

iii) It involved people I trusted but who had never met.

iv) I didn't feel like a student or a teacher at any stage, it was a peer dialogue, through which learning occurred.

This is a fairly trivial example, and one might argue that it is not 'deep' learning (whatever that is anyway). This is true to an extent, but view this is in a context that isn't geared towards learning, and is still in its infancy. Imagine an environment (by which I mean a social environment, not a VLE), where the emphasis is much more on learning, where I am actively seeking knowledge rather than stumbling across it. The power of the network and these type of learning experiences then becomes much more substantial.