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.

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.

Using learning environments as a metaphor for educational change

Last year I wrote a piece for a special edition of On the Horizon, which Michael Feldstein was editing. It has (finally) appeared in print. Michael gained permission for authors to publish their work online also (the journal isn't open - boooo!) so here is the PDF of mine, and below the article itself. I haven't revisited it since I wrote it, and may disagree with what I said now, but I am trying to ensure I put all my publications online as they come out.

[Published in On the Horizon 17(3) pp. 181-189]
________________________________________________

Using learning environments as a metaphor for educational change.

Martin Weller

Abstract:

Purpose: The central theme of this article is that the online learning environment can be seen as the means by which higher education can explores the challenges and opportunities raised by online and digital society.
Approach: The author argues that the online learning environment can be seen as a metaphor for how universities respond to the requirements and challenges of the digital age. Current learning management systems (LMSs) are examined, and compared with the values found in web 2.0 and social media. Current thinking on pedagogy for online learning is then examined. The SocialLearn project at the Open University in the UK is then explained, which seeks to create a disaggregated, decentralised, social system
for learners.
Findings: The conclusion from this analysis is that there is a conflict between the centralised learning management system (LMS) and the requirements of online pedagogy. The traditional LMS can be seen as embodying the wrong metaphor, that of the traditional classroom. The paper concludes by arguing that such learning environments will be more useful to higher education in coming to understand its response to many of the changes we are seeing in society, which are facilitated by the new technologies.
Value: The paper provides a framework for considering LMS and their relation to universities and pedagogy, and an argument for the promotion of more decentralised systems.

Learning environments as metaphor

In this paper I will argue 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.

It has often been noted that when a new technology arrives we tend to use it in old ways (eg Twigg 2001), before we begin to understand what it really offers. So, for example the television was initially treated as ‘radio with pictures’, before those working in television began to appreciate what could be done with the new medium. This is to be expected, as we search for new metaphors to understand the ways in
which the new technologies can be used.

A similar thought process can be seen with the first wave of commercial learning management systems (LMS) or Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs). In an attempt to move towards the possibilities offered by a completely digital, online world, they have started with the education model we are familiar with. They are, in effect, a virtual classroom, or course, with content (which map onto lectures) laid out in a linear sequence with discussion forums linked to this (mapping onto tutorials). In one LMS (the open source Bodington system, http://bodington.org) they even went as far as to make this mapping explicit by making the interface a building which you had to navigate to your lecture room.

This is a sensible way to proceed, since the uptake of technology is rarely a revolution, and more of an evolutionary approach. I have suggested (Weller 2005) the process is analogous to that of succession in plants:

“When there is a new environment, for example barren rock, a few pioneer species, such as lichens begin to grow. The acid from these decomposes some rock particles, and their own death creates a coarse soil. This is suitable for mosses, which require little soil, and in turn these decompose to enrich and deepen the soil, until it is suitable for some grasses to grow. The process ends with the establishment of a stable, climax community. In elearning terms, VLEs, and in particular commercial VLEs have acted as the pioneer species, moving in to the new environment and creating slight changes which make the habitat suitable for
secondary colonizers.”

However, this suggests that there will be a ‘natural’ progression towards other tools, other systems, other ways of thinking, when it comes to learning in a connected, digital world. This is not always the case, and indeed the representation of current approaches in software can act to reinforce these ways of working. For example, Heppell (2001) argues that “we continually make the error of subjugating technology to our present practice rather than allowing it to free us from the tyranny of past mistakes.” Lanier (2002) refers to ‘software sedimentation’, arguing that:

“Software sedimentation is a process whereby not only protocols, but the ideas embedded in them become mandatory. An example is the idea of the file.... Files are now taught to students as a fact of life as fundamental as a photon, even though they are a human invention.”

In elearning terms, current LMSs can be seen as the embodiment in code of the physical structures of learning. In Lanier’s phrase they are further sedimentation as to how education should be conducted. This is acceptable if we believe that the existing educational model is the best there can be, but there are many issues in education which the current model struggles to address. Amongst these are:
• Limited curricula – Anderson (2004) coined the term The Long Tail to refer to the niche strategy of businesses, such as Amazon, that sell a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities. In higher education, the demands of a physical campus and associated costs (staff, rooms, etc) mean that the long tail of interests are not met by higher education. If you have a very niche interest then it would be difficult to find enough people to attend the same university to make a course financially viable. And conventional elearning is costly to produce and deliver, so encounters many of the same problems. The
curricula that is available to study is thus confined only those subjects that can be accommodated economically within the existing system, and this is a small fraction of a much larger (possibly infinite) set of subjects.

• Personalisation – as well as learning the subject area you are interested in the choice as to how you learn and which tools you use is also largely predetermined. The (higher) education process is largely one of enculturation, whereby students learn how to become members of the higher education community. This is appropriate for many domains and careers, but not for all and while the inflexibility in the content may be addressed, the inflexibility of the process is not, because the process is itself embodied in physical structures. As it stands, higher education is rather akin to freeze dried coffee – regardless of the input, the output invariably tastes of the process. In her report to the UK Government setting out a vision for education in 2020, Christine Gilbert (2006) made personalisation the fundamental factor for change, claiming "Personalisation is a matter of moral purpose and social justice: pupils from the most disadvantaged groups are the least likely to achieve well and participate in higher levels of education or training. Personalisation also reflects wider changes in society, which are likely to continue at an increasing rate. Together, these present the education system with its most acute challenges."
• • Meeting changing demands – Daniel (1996) has argued that elearning is the only way to cope with expanding global demand for higher education, claiming that “a major university needs to be created each week” to meet the proposed demand. Even if this demand is not realised, the learning requirements of a global, knowledge economy are very different from those of a localised, industrial one. For instance, an e-skills report for the European Union (COM 2007) suggests that conventional higher education is failing to meet the needs of the workforce, stating National educational and professional training systems are facing a huge challenge to deliver the skills needed by our economy and society. Despite their efforts, they still find it difficult to cope with the situation, and lifelong learning is still far from being a reality. New forms of partnerships and flexible approaches (such as those based on e‐learning) need to be much more actively promoted.
• Informal learning – the learner sphere is much more complex than it ever has been before, with much greater choice for any individual learner. If an individual wants to learn about a subject there are many options available to them: they can search for information, they can join online communities, they can go to trusted content providers (e.g. the BBC), or they can seek formal study. If the previous point suggested that there was a greater demand from society for education, a top-down push, then this is the counter to that, a bottom-up pull. Many people engage in learning every day, often without realising it because new technologies have lowered the threshold to engagement. An individual doesn’t need to go to a physical library to find resources, they simply use Google now. The actual goal of learning is made less explicit, and thus to an extent, learning itself has become further democratised. Encouraging, recognising and supporting this informal learning process without necessitating learners to engage in formal study could be a key factor in sustaining knowledge economies.

If we view our online learning environments not as analogies of how we currently teach, but rather as a metaphor for how we engage with changes required for a digital society, then this provides us with some insight in to how to tackle the issues above (and others).

In order to think about what we might want from new learning environments it is useful to look at current theories of online learning, and how these can highlight differences between existing learning environments and the requirements of a digital, online society.

Online pedagogies

The advent of elearning has seen an exploration of new pedagogies, or at least the emphasis placed on different ones. Siemens (2008) argues that “Learning theories, such as constructivism, social constructivism, and more recently, connectivism, form the theoretical shift from instructor or institution controlled teaching to one of greater control by the learner.” In examining the current physical space Wesch (2008) asked students what a lecture hall ‘said’ about learning, in essence what were the affordances (Gibson 1979; Norman 1988) of the standard learning environment. They listed the following:

• To learn is to acquire information
• Information is scare and hard to find
• Trust authority for good information
• Authorized information is beyond discussion
• Obey the authority
• Follow along

These are obviously at odds with what most educators regard as key components in learning, such as dialogue, reflection, critical analysis, etc. They are also at distinct odds with the type of experience students have in the online world they inhabit regularly, particularly the social network, read/write web. These environments are characterised by

• User-generated content
• Power of the crowd
• Data on an epic scale
• Architecture of participation
• Network effects
• Openness

Given this conflict Heppell’s comment seems particularly relevant with regards to learning environments. Why would we seek to recreate the sort of learning affordances Wesch highlights in a virtual environment, when we are free to construct it however we wish? This is not through lack of pedagogic understanding, as Conole (2008) points out

“Recent thinking in learning theory has shifted to emphasise the benefit of social and situated learning as opposed to behaviourist, outcomes-based, individual learning. What is striking is that a mapping to the technologies shows that recent trends in the use of technologies, the shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 echoes this; Web 2.0 tools very much emphasise the collective and the network.”

But, she goes on to say that,

“Arguably then there has never been a better alignment of current thinking in terms of good pedagogy – i.e. emphasising the social and situated nature of learning, rather than a focus on knowledge recall with current practices in the use of technologies – i.e. user-generated content, user-added value and aggregated network effects. Despite this, the impact of Web 2.0 on education has been less dramatic than its impact on other spheres of society – use for social purposes, supporting niche communities, collective political action, amateur journalism and social commentary.”

In examining the changes that education needs to accommodate to be relevant to the digital society, Seely-Brown and Adler (2008) emphasise the shift to participation, arguing that in order to meet the growing demand for education, and the requirements of a rapidly changing workplace, the traditional model of supply-push needs to be replaced with one of demand-pull. Learners need to be able to learn throughout their lives and to be able to learn about very niche subjects (Anderson’s long tail). The only
way to accommodate these needs he argues is to move to a more participatory, socially constructed view of knowledge. They stress the significance of new technologies in realising this:

"Tools such as blogs, wikis, social networks, tagging systems, mashups, and content-sharing sites are examples of a new user-centric information infrastructure that emphasizes participation (e.g., creating, re-mixing) over presentation, that encourages focused conversation and short briefs (often written in a less technical, public vernacular) rather than traditional publication, and that facilitates innovative explorations, experimentations, and purposeful tinkerings that often form the basis of a situated understanding emerging from action, not passivity."

Centralisation and decentralisation

The technology lag Conole highlights can partly be accounted for by the conservatism of educational establishments. However, it also reveals a more fundamental difference. The sort of pedagogies that Siemens, Seely-Brown and Conole suggest are now coming to the fore as a response to the possibilities of digital technologies, all have one theme in common – they are essentially based on a decentralised model. Indeed, Siemens own pedagogic theory, connectivism (Siemens 2005) places decentralisation at the heart of learning:

"Learning is a process that occurs within nebulous environments of shifting core elements – not entirely under the control of the individual. Learning (defined as actionable knowledge) can reside outside of ourselves (within an organization or a database), is focused on connecting specialized information sets, and the connections that enable us to learn more are more important than our current state of knowing"

Decentralisation is at the heart of the success of web 2.0 also, both in a technical and social sense. Wikipedia succeeds by decentralising the authoring process, YouTube succeeds by both decentralising the broadcasting production process, but also by allowing embeds within blogs and other sites, thus decentralising the distribution process. By allowing users to take, embed, remix and share content the central control is decentralised, but the content is more widely distributed. Weinberger (2007) argues that there are three ‘orders of order’: the first is where information is bound up in the object itself (e.g. the product packaging); the second is when metadata is created, so that information about the object is separated but still paper bound (e.g. a catalogue); and the third is digital, wherein everything is metadata – the content itself, the title, descriptions, image, etc . With the third order comes significant change because many of the existing roles we have defined in society are to deal with information in the first two orders, as processing these is difficult and time-consuming. In essence, we require others to act as a filter for us. But in the third order, much of the need for this filtering is removed, since search and data mining provide it for us. He suggests that:

"We have entire industries built on the fact that the paper order severely limits how things can be organised. Museums, educational curricula, newspapers, the travel industry, and television schedules are all based on the assumption that in the 2nd order world we need experts to go through information, ideas, and knowledge and put them neatly away"

Centralisation is a consequence of this filtering process because information needs to flow to a central area of expertise. Decentralisation is a consequence of the removal of this filter, since it does not matter where the data resides, and knowledge is distributed in the network.

Higher education is largely a centralised practice. Originally, in a physically bound system, this was of necessity. In order to gain expertise in a field it was necessary to go to the location of the experts and receive their knowledge. It made sense then to group several such experts together so many people could come to one place, hence the university campus. This is a logical response to the ‘information is scarce’ world and as Wesch indicates, our physical learning environments are still structured in accordance with this response.

Nearly all of the modern attributes of a university flow from this centralised model: the authority of the professor, the filtering of knowledge through recognised outlets, the length, structure and subject matter of courses, the assessment procedures and the means through which knowledge is shared. It is thus no easy task to adopt a decentralised model, since it will require massive procedural, economic and professional change in higher education. However, higher education will face a challenge: when learners have been accustomed to very facilitative, usable, personalizable and adaptive tools both for learning and socialising,
why will they accept standardised, unintuitive, clumsy and out of date tools in formal education they are paying for? It won’t be a dramatic revolution (students accept lower physical accommodation standards when they leave home for university after all), but instead there will be a quiet migration. It is not just that the monolithic LMSs will be deserted, digital tumbleweed blowing down their forums and that students will
abandon these in favour of their tools, but rather that the very skills we teach in education begin to look redundant. The back channel will grow and it will be constituted from content and communication technologies that don’t require a training course to understand and that come with a ready made community.

Let us take a small, but revealing example, namely that of academic referencing. This is deeply entrenched in academic practice - we often give explicit marks for it in assessment, teach it as a key skill, provide explicit schemas such as the Harvard Reference scheme to follow and demand it in publication. As such you could view it as a cornerstone of the enculturation process in higher education - we are bringing people in to the culture of higher education and referencing is one means of exhibiting your membership of this club.

There are two elements to this practice: the proper acknowledgement of prior work and allowing others to find your sources. Hence the reference schemas are essentially information for finding physically located resources (they are a form of Weinberger’s second order of order). While the need to acknowledge the work of others is always relevant, the strict process by which we do it, the skill we teach students, is largely redundant, and anachronistic in a search-driven world, because it assumes a centralised model of information. Knowing how to link to and locate resources in databases and search engines is a skill for a decentralised information world. The result is that online references are forced into an existing scheme, which has an inherent preference for physical resources. The traditional reference is often provided in papers, when it is the online one that has actually been used because the referencing system is biased towards the paper version. This is an example of the small, but highly relevant changes that face higher education, and which the learning environment acts as metaphor. Knowing to reference is a persistent skill, but knowing how to reference is changeable.

To return to the theme of this paper then, the online learning environment can be seen as the means by which higher education explores the solution to this challenge, for it is not just one about technical preference, but rather more fundamentally about the relevance of universities to society in general.

The SocialLearn project

 At the Open University in the UK we are developing a social network oriented approach to learning, in a project called SocialLearn. It is predicated on a number of assumptions:

• There is a major shift in society and education driven by the possibilities new technologies create for creating and sharing content and for social networking.
• Higher education, to date, has not really addressed how to engage with these fundamental shifts and their impact on the core business model of higher education.
• There is educational value in the application of both the technologies seen in web 2.0 and the approaches they embody.
• The status quo is no longer feasible or advisable; we need to apply the best of our expertise and experience to address the necessary change.
• Competition in the learner sphere is ever more complex, multi-faceted and fragmented; If higher education doesn’t address the issues this raises someone else will

The concept is that learners have a central profile where they list their learning goals, contacts, resources, and tools. The system uses an open API (Application Program Interface), so any third party application can write to it. In essence this allows any application to become a learning tool.

This is one means of allowing users to create their own Personal Learning Environment (PLE). In fact, when you ask users what tools they use on a daily basis, you very quickly sketch a PLE, for instance the diagram below was constructed from a discussion with a group of Open University part-time tutors.

Figure 1: A typical personal learning environment constructed from many different tools
In each case it is not that an individual sets out to deliberately construct a PLE, but rather that one evolves over time as they accrue a number of sites and tools that they use on a regular basis. What is absent from such a collection of tools is any means of binding them together, they remain ‘dumb’ to what is happening in any other application. This binding substance (or rather data format) has been dubbed ‘eduglu’ (Norman 2008), and it is likely there will be many different ways of realising it, for instance a number of common data standards are beginning to appear such as OpenID, OAuth and OpenSocial which will facilitate the sharing of data between applications.

The SocialLearn open API could be one means also as it provides not only data integration, but perhaps more significantly, cognitive integration. If applications are writing to a user’s central profile in order to store resources, list actions or amend learning goals, then for the user they become more of a cohesive learning environment.

We are also developing a number of applications that we think will be useful for such learners. And who are ’such learners’? In one sense, the answer is ‘everybody’, because as soon as you conceive of learning as something that is in the control of the learner, rather than the institution, then ‘the curriculum’ becomes ‘whatever it is you’re interested in.’ That could be quantum physics, it could be the world of Harry Potter. By being part of a network, you create your own cohort, and pull in the resources that are relevant to you (which will be recommended by the network). You may want the structure and motivation a course offers, which could come from a recognised institution, or could be a user generated ‘course’ that is taken just for fun and run by an enthusiast. Initially however, it is likely that the project will focus on particular groups with particular needs, such as Alumni and professional development.

SocialLearn has been conceived as a deliberate attempt to discover how learners behave in this sphere, how to develop the appropriate technology and support structures, what pedagogies are required and what are the business models for education in a disaggregated educational market. The technology is the vehicle for how the institution learns about the changes it needs to make, and this could not have been realised through an existing LMS, because most LMSs are based on a centralisation philosophy. With SocialLearn the focus is not just for students in higher education, but for informal learners also. Once these boundaries blur for technology, it quickly follows that a similar disaggregation, and then reaggregation, of the various
parts of the education system follow: accreditation, support, expertise, teaching. So, in SocialLearn we have explicitly set out to consider not only the technical system required, but also the business, support and pedagogical frameworks that might follow. The key question the SocialLearn project seeks to answer is: “What does the OU look like as a disaggregated suite of learning services integrated via an open web platform competing in a learning marketplace?”

Conclusions

When it was necessary for education to be performed face to face, a number of services were bundled together. When it becomes digital and online, this may no longer be the case, as we have seen in most content industries, such as music and newspapers (education has some similarities with content and also some significant differences). The first round of learning tools replicated the centralised model, but as the tools have become easier to use, and the methods for integrating them simpler, so this centralised approach seems less applicable. Clay Shirky (2008) argues that the ‘cost’ of organising people has collapsed, which makes informal groupings more likely to occur and often more successful:

"By making it easier for groups to self-assemble and for individuals to contribute to group effort without requiring formal management, these tools have radically altered the old limits on the size, sophistication, and scope of unsupervised effort"

Part of the function of universities is to provide this organisation, for example by grouping individuals together to form a student cohort who are interested in the same subject. But as this grouping becomes easier to do online, it becomes less of a valued function of the university - ie you don’t need to go to a university to find like minded people. Education then faces the same challenges regarding the cost of organisation that, say, the Encyclopedia Brittanica faced from wikipedia. Returning to the theme of this paper, Shirky’s argument can also be applied to technology, namely that the ‘cost’ of integrating technology has drastically reduced, meaning it is now feasible for individuals to do this, thus alleviating the need for centrally provided pre-integrated solutions. For example, we could reword the above quote to read:

By making it easier for tools to (self) assemble and for applications to contribute to the environment without requiring integration, these approaches have radically altered the old limits on the size, sophistication, and scope of any individual to create their own environment

Projects such as SocialLearn, illustrate that the conceptualisation of a learning environment goes beyond technical, or even pedagogical considerations. In a digital society it comes to represent the institutional response to changes in the nature of knowledge creation, sharing, and participation, in short to the nature of education itself. Shirky argues that ‘when we change the way we communicate, we change society’, and the new socially based technologies we have today are doing this in fundamental ways. It is only by exploring their potential that universities can remain relevant to the society they are helping to shape.

References

Anderson, C. (2006) The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. Hyperion Books

COM (2007) ‘E-Skills for the Twenty First Century: Fostering Competiveness, Growth and Jobs’. Commission of the European Communities, Brussels, 7/9/2007
http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/ict/policy/ictskills/2007/COMM_PDF_COM_2007_0496_F_EN_ACTE.pdf

Conole, G. (2008) ‘New Schemas for Mapping Pedagogies and Technologies’. Ariadne, 56. July 2008 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue56/conole/

Daniel, J. (1996) Mega-universities and Knowledge Media: Technology Strategies for Higher Education, Routledge.

Gibson, J. J. (1979) The ecological approach to visual perception., Lawrence
Erlbaum.

Gilbert, C (2006) ‘2020 Vision: Report of the Teaching and Learning in 2020 Review Group’. DfES Publications.
http://publications.teachernet.gov.uk/eOrderingDownload/6856-DfESTeaching%
20and%20Learning.pdf

Heppell, S (2001) Preface in ICT, Pedagogy and the Curriculum: Subject to Change. Loveless, A, & Ellis, V. Routledge,
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=i8a0qAOsBiMC

Lanier J (2002) ‘The Complexity Ceiling’ in The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-first Century, Brockman, J (Ed). Vintage Press.

Norman, D (2008) On Eduglu Part 1 http://www.darcynorman.net/2008/02/16/oneduglu-part-1-background/

Norman, D. (1988) The psychology of everyday things. Basic Books

Seely-Brown, J & Adler P (2008) ‘Minds on Fire’ EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 43, no. 1 (January/February 2008): 16–32. http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/MindsonFireOpenEducationt/45823

Shirky, C (2008) Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Penguin. Siemens, G. (2008) New structures and spaces of learning: The systemic impact of connective knowledge, connectivism, and networked learning
http://elearnspace.org/Articles/systemic_impact.htm

Siemens, G. (2005) ‘Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age.’ International Journal of Instructional Technology, 2(1). http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Jan_05/article01.htm

Twigg, C. (2001) ‘Innovations in Online Learning: Moving Beyond No Significant Difference’ The Pew Symposia in Learning and Technology 2001. Center for Academic Transformation at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY. http://www.widernet.org/decisionmakers/TechTour03/Presentations/Webs/InnovationsOnlineLearning.htm

Weinberger, D. (2007) Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder. Henry Holt & Company

Weller, M. (2005) Virtual Learning Environments: Using, Choosing and Developing Your VLE. Routledge

Wesch, M (2008) A portal on media literacy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4yApagnr0s

Celebrity, blogging and the role of the academic

A couple of articles recently have provoked some thought on academics, blogging and the relationship of these to journalism.

The first was an article in the Times Higher, "I'm a celebrity academic ... in the blogosphere", which suggested UK academics should attempt to become 'celebrity academics' via blogs:

"There has always been a culture of the celebrity academic in North America," ...A particular academic can make a big difference. They are encouraged to get their name out there, and in many cases shamelessly self-promote. The blog provides an excellent vehicle to do that."

This isn't the first time I've heard the celebrity argument, but I think it misunderstands the aim, or benefits of blogging. It assumes that becoming a celebrity is the only goal for an academic blogger. This seems to me to exhibit a lack of imagination and makes a straightforward analogy of print journalism to blogging. Sure, there are some good academic bloggers who perform the role of interpreting events for the general public, but there are many more who write about their subject in detail, where the intended audience is that of their peers or community. If have a very specialised area of expertise, medieval dance (say), then it's not about becoming a celebrity by blogging about this, but rather having influence and being recognised within your (probably quite small) community.

The article continues to make the same blogging = journalism confusion, when John Kay says:

"I don't think academics want or need the pressure to say things every day, and I don't think people like me should pass instant comment on everything that happens in the world," he said.

"I think academics do have a responsibility to write for the public and to avoid charlatans filling the gap, but the way one does that is to avoid becoming a charlatan oneself," he said. "If I'm expressing opinions on everything every day, including things about which I may have opinions but very little knowledge, I'm in danger of becoming like them."

Bloggers don't feel the need to say things every day and comment on everything. That is the point of blogging, it is as flexible as you want both in terms of frequency and content. For instance, I didn't blog for a month and then did three in one day recently. And Tony might comment on things like MPs expenses from a data-visualisation perspective, but most of the time he is sharing experiments, ideas, half-thoughts, etc. This certainly isn't pressure to 'pass instant comment on everything that happens in the world.'

The second article that raised questions about academics and blogging was an excellent blog post by fellow Cardiffian Anne-Marie Cunningham. She had seen the BBC article that 'tech addiction harms learning' which was based on research from Cranfield University, and had decided to dig deeper. This involved actually having to purchase the report for 24.99. 

She gives a good analysis of the poor research (not wanting to give them an extra 24.99 I must confess I haven't read the research - make it open and I will), and in particular the lack of any evidence to back up the main headline. Here are some quotes from her post to give a flavour, but it's worth reading the whole thing:

"With regards to 'tech addiction' this seems to have been a self-assessment based on response to the question: How addicted are you to the internet or your mobile phone? The proportions given in the BBC report are those who stated they were 'quite' or 'very' addicted. Of course, we don't know what the students meant by 'addicted'."

with regards to plagiarism the authors state that "A high proportion of students (84.3%) openly admitted that they inserted information from the Internet into their homework or projects on a number of occasions." The tone of this sentence reflects some of the bias which is found throughout the work. The authors don't seem to be aware that if referenced it is acceptable to insert information from the internet into work, so the students would have no reason to be ashamed and fear 'openly admitting' this."

With regards to this addiction harming learning, there is no analysis relating the perception of being addicted to outcomes in learning. In fact very few of the questions are related in any way to learning."

This raised several issues to me: Firstly, it demonstrates once again, that not only does the blogosphere compare favourably with traditional journalism, in fact it is superior in terms of the quality of debate and analysis that takes place. Traditional media don't allow for sufficient analysis or depth of conversation - it is nearly always superficial to reach the widest audience, whereas blogs (and other new media), don't care about audience figures particularly, and are thus liberated from this concern.

Secondly, I have a concern that the researchers deliberately produced a report aimed at titillating the media to get the type of headlines they thought the media would like. This is surely antithetical to the purpose of being an academic. If higher education is to retain any currency in the information society then it is by providing an alternative to the increasing shallowness of broadcast media and offer intelligent, unbiased analysis.

Thirdly, having the article only available for purchase increases one's suspicion that the research has been deliberately geared towards creating headlines and therefore, sales. This once again reinforces the point about openness being a key principle for higher education. For a start it would have allowed a proper discussion around this research and maybe exposed some of its flaws. Wiley makes the point in the slideshow below that openness is the means by which higher ed retains its relevance in a digital society.

The Disaggregation of Higher Education

View more documents from David Wiley.

In conclusion then I'd say we need to move away from the idea that celebrity is some kind of desirable goal. As Baroness Greenfield and many others amply demonstrate, the mix of academic, celebrity and traditional media nearly always produces an unholy mess. Blogging (and other similar types of activities) are not a means to realising this, but a thankful alternative.

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

Bennett, S., Maton, K. & Kervin, L. (2008) The ‘digital natives’ debate: A critical review of the evidence, British Journal of Educational Technology. Vol 39 No 5 2008
775–786

British Library (2008) Information behaviour of the researcher of the future.
http://www.bl.uk/news/pdf/googlegen.pdf

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.
http://nieci.bangor.ac.uk/conf/?q=en/content/changing_media_environments_are_providing_an_alternative_space_for_young_people_to_meet_up_m

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.
http://www.educause.edu/Resources/EducatingtheNetGeneratio/PreparingtheAcademyofTodayfort/6062

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.
http://www.educause.edu/Resources/EducatingtheNetGeneration/IsItAgeorITFirstStepsTowardUnd/6058

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

Prensky, M (2001) Digital natives, digital immigrants. On the Horizon Vol. 9 No. 5,
October 2001. http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf

Roberts, G (2005) Technology and Learning Expectations of the Net Generation. In Educating the Net Generation. Oblinger, D & Oblinger J (eds) Educause.
http://www.educause.edu/Resources/EducatingtheNetGeneration/TechnologyandLearningExpectati/6056

Seely-Brown, J "New Learning Environments in the 21st Century: Exploring the Edge," Forum Futures 2006 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Forum for the Future of Higher Education, 2006). http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ff0604S.pdf

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

Weller M (2009) Using learning environments as a metaphor for educational change.
On the Horizon, 17(3).

Weller, M and Dalziel J (2009) ‘Bridging the gap between web 2.0 and higher education’ in Handbook of Research on Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies. Hatzipanagos, S & Warburton, S (eds) IGI Global.

Windham, C (2005) ‘The Student’s Perspective’. In Educating the Net Generation. Oblinger, D & Oblinger J (eds) Educause. http://www.educause.edu/6061&bhcp=1

Exploring the publishing process

At the beginning of the year I wrote a paper provisionally titled 'Is the revolution justified?'. My aim in the paper was to question the base assumption many of us have (myself included) that a technologically driven revolution is coming to higher education. It's an interesting journey and my conclusion was 'not really', but more importantly, framing the adoption of technology as an imperative to save us from the oncoming doom is the wrong way to view it. Rather we should look upon digital technology as an unprecedented opportunity.

Anyway, I submitted the artile to JIME, because it was relevant, and is open. We batted it around a while, and Doug suggested posting it simultaneously here and in the journal. We've decided to go one further and to see if publishing it here first can be made to count as the peer review process. Having a peer review process you can clearly indicate and track is one of the requirements for a journal to be counted as a proper journal for things like the RAE. I'm interested in exploring new ways of realising traditional requirements, so here is the plan:

• I publish the article here (and a PDF version too).
• After a set period I'll collate all the comments (yes all 1 of them!) and make ammendments as necessary.
• This article with attached comments will be passed over to the journal (which is having a make-over so this may take some time).
• We try and establish a repeatable process from this.

So, any comments on the article would be appreciated.

Reflections on openness

As part of the EVOLVE/Educamp series I gave a talk online last Monday about openness in education. You can access the recording of the Elluminate session here, and below are my slides:

Reflection in openness

View more presentations from mweller.

Some of the slides may be familiar to you. I set out how the Open University had been founded around the mission of being open to people, places, methods and ideas. I emphasised that the founders had shown great foresight, or got lucky, with the choice of name. Imagine how dated The University of the Airwaves (or some similar name) would sound now. But 'open' is a term that has both evolved, and gained in currency in education. If I were setting up a university now and i wanted to portray it as leading edge in terms of pedagogy, technology, and approach then 'Open' would be my term of choice.

I then went on to talk about openness in scholarly practice, referencing Gideon Burton's use of the term 'open scholar.' The thrust of my talk here was a familiar one - that sharing is the key action that both defines the digital/open scholar and is also the fuel which drives the reciprocity economy.

The question session afterwards was really variations on one question - how do you practice being open if your institution doesn't encourage it/reward it/puts obstacles in the way?

I think there are several answers to this, which those of us who promote open education could take as a challenge for research over the next few years:

1. Make the economic case - there are of course lots of other reasons why you might want to be open as an academic, but I believe if we could make some economic case, it would go a long way to easing the fears of decision makers. This type of case would be multi-layered: for example, an individual can have efficiency savings by having access to a network for support; courses can be produced quicker by using open access material; reputation can be enhanced by participating in global networks without the need for costly travel and time away; etc. I am not arguing that the economic case is the only, or most important, one, but the proprietary approach has an easy way of measuring economic factors (eg sales of items), and this is less clear with openness, so adding clarity would be a good start.
2. Create robust reward schemes - in my work on digital scholarship, I've talked about how we might adjust promotion criteria to recognise open type of outputs. As I've mused before, metrics might form part of this too.
3. Set out the benefits - a lot of work has been done here, but by carefully explaining and demonstrating the benefits to an individual academic of being open, and allaying some of their doubts, then we increase the bottom-up drivers.
4. Provide easy routes in - this gets easier all the time, but providing different ways of engaging with new technologies and therefore experiencing the benefits of a largely open approach is again part of our responsibility.

I've set up a discussion area in Cloudworks, so if you'd like to continue this discussion, add content, call me a moron, then that's the place to do it (you can do the last one here too).

Living in a twitter world

(The last in my trilogy of ALT-C related posts)

Two things brought home to me that we live in a twitter world (whether David Cameron or John Humphrys like it or not, and indeed, all the better that they don't).

The first was that I attended the ALT-C for the first time post the development of twitter. I have been to this conference (it's the UK's main ed tech conference) three times before. Usually my approach was to hang around on my own in a corner, maybe find a couple of OU people and stick with them, or stand on the edge of a group and hope someone notices me. But this time I went feeling that I knew nearly everyone there because we follow each other on twitter. Here is a list of people I know well on twitter who I actually got to say hello to face to face for the first time (and I've probably missed a load off, sorry):

Brian Kelly, Alan Cann, Josie Fraser, Graham Attwell, Steve Wheeler, James Clay, Stu Johnson, Sue Folley, Theo Kuechel, Haydn Blackley.

And then there were the people I have met only a few times but keep in contact with via twitter. I was practically high-fiving my way down corridors. Well, maybe not, but it was a distinctly different real-life social experience because of twitter (and blogs).

Given this it struck me that I need to work on some new social skills. What is the appropriate type of conversation when you are pre-introduced via social networks? I had a few good discussions, but often I would shake hands with someone and we'd both go 'good to finally meet you. Errrm...' So one upshot of living in a twitter world is that we need to tweak our social interactions to have a mode that is somewhere inbetween being introduced for the first time and being old friends.

The second twitter related moment was watching TV last night. I was watching something else when someone on my twitter stream said they were about to watch the Derren Brown 'event' on Channel 4. In this he 'predicted' the national lottery numbers live, see this clip:

I'm not particularly interested in how he did it (it's TV, he can make it look anyway he wants), but rather what it reveals about the changing nature of television. Last year I mentioned that for TV creating events that appealed to twitter users (or any network, obviously not limited to twitter)  and allowed them"to share the experience online may be the the thing that saves scheduling". This seems to me an example of a broadcaster attempting to do this. There are two key ingredients:

1) It is a live event so participation at the moment is crucial

2) It provokes discussion - the acid test is does it get to be a trending event in twitter? The answer for last night was yes:

 

I'm not arguing that it makes good television, merely indicating that this can be seen as an example of the impact of social networks on an existing broadcast behaviour.

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.

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.