The Ed Techie

What is the learner responsibility in open education?

I gave a presentation for George Siemens last night as part of CCK11 on, you've guessed it, digital scholarship. It was a bit rambling, but generally well received. I noticed a couple of comments on Twitter along the lines of 'how does this relate to the course content?'

Having done a few such sessions this isn't the first time I've seen such queries. I don't mean to dismiss these, I think they raise an interesting issue for open education.  

Firstly, if a student is getting a course for free do they demand the same type of QA as one they've paid for? I really mean this, if MOOCs are serious then maybe they need to be offering the same quality levels of traditional courses. On the other hand, I haven't been following CCK, I'm willing to do a free presentation, but if I have to link it to course objectives, then I'm less likely to do so.

Secondly, in an open, connected world of abundant content, perhaps the key skill is to learn how to make the connections between a wide range of free content and core principles. This is also a reflection on the changing nature of the educator - the role of the 'lecturer' is not to deliver the content but to find it, structure it and help interpret it.

Lastly, I wonder if, even in this more advanced set of learners, it demonstrates that old learning habits die hard. We are accustomed to signing up for a course, and whether it's free or not, being directed through it very explicitly. If so, then the applicability of the MOOC to all subject areas and levels may be rather limited. Which brings me onto my bigger point - if you are signing up to a MOOC as a learner is there some implicit contract you are agreeing to?

Out of the total numbers of educators there are very few who have run an open course, (I can think of 10 maybe), and there is a slightly larger number of people who have presented on them, but still not many - in my university there are probably only a handful of us. So it's worth sharing our experiences of them as we go, as I expect it will become more common. Generally I like doing them. I think the open aspect means I can explore ideas, and use these sessions as a bit of a test-bed. After all, I'm doing it for free, so I may as well get something from it. I've developed ideas from these sessions and particularly the feedback you get into published work. They also help connect you with good people, and expand your network. The sessions are usually more interactive and encouraging than face to face ones I find. And, perhaps most importantly, I can do them from my home, while having a glass of beer (shhh, don't tell anyone).

So I'd encourage people to have a go at them, but participants should also be aware that these sessions aren't devised specifically for the course in question.

It's all about me

A quick round-up of some open stuff I'm doing.

Firstly, a special edition of RUSC, edited by George Siemens and myself is available, which focuses on social networks in education. There is an intro from George and me, and then some articles that are actually worth reading (unless you speak Spanish, you'll need to change the language to English in the box over on the right).

That Siemens character works you hard once you're in his network, so on Wednesday 26th Jan, I'm giving a talk on digital scholarship as part of his CCK11 course, at 7.30pm UK time. It'll be in Elluminate.

Lastly, if you want to listen to two middle-aged men reminisce about their youth and in particular, 80s b-movies and their love of VHS, then Jim Groom and I plan to do a LIVE internet radio show for ds106 next Thursday 3rd Feb at 9pm UK time. Details to follow (ie once Grant tells us how to do it). Expect rambling, incoherence, maybe a little swearing and the word 'remember' to feature strongly. After the rabid success of ds106 radio, someone has to try the live stuff, and it's better to start with someone who has no reputation to lose.

Just in passing - none of these are done in work time or form part of my official work plan. Interesting, probably.

The year of the backlash

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/frippy/1419020309/ by Frippy>

This is hardly a marvel of prophecy, but bear with me...

The signs are that this year will be one marked by something of a backlash against social media/ web 2.0/ any internet stuff. I don't mean from the traditional media, who've always been suspicious, but from people who know what they're talking about and have been advocates. In other words, increasingly 'us lot' will be declaring that this stuff is peripheral, uncool, over- rated, etc.

I think this will often been focused on a particular technology, and Twitter will be the main candidate this year. I've already seen several people I know abandon it. But increasingly it reflects a disappointment that technology hasn't delivered on its promises, and that as it becomes incorporated into everyday life it begins to look like all the stuff it was meant to replace. Hey, e-mail was revolutionary once. This cycle of attitudes towards technology is neatly captured in the Gartner Hype cycle, which, while not founded in deep research, captures instinctively what many of us feel about technology.

The other thing to bear in mind is that as technology matures, so does the criticism that goes along with it. This moves from the tabloid 'it's evil' attitude to a more reasoned approach. I disagree with a lot of what Lanier says in You Are Not A Gadget (that's another post), but I agree when he says technology criticism should not be left to Luddites (and neither should technology engagement be left to the evangelists). So part of what we will see growing this year is smart people bringing their intellectual capacity to bear on their experience with technology.

I would caution though that many of us who are prone to technology enthusiasm are also guilty of excessive criticism (I include myself in this). Maybe it's a personality thing for early adopters. My point is we should be wary of going to extremes. To return to my earlier example, the fact that Twitter won't be the tool that brings down totalitarian regimes, or that you found yourself using it too much, or that it is often trivial does not mean it is therefore useless. I think we should avoid these kind of binary distinctions: it's a revolutionary force or it's pointless. I know that, for instance, my use of Twitter has changed from a compulsion to tweet at all times, to a much more regulated, measured use. I'll go days without using it, but on other days will dip in continuously and find it entertaining, useful, engaging. And that's the same for all of it - we tend to over-indulge and then find their real value as they settle into our daily lives.

I think a healthy caution has crept into our reaction to technology now: Buzz, Ping, Wave, Quora - all of these have been met with an appropriate questioning attitude and not a blind acceptance of the next big thing. But we should also not become adverse to what can be done using tools with a little imagination - ds106 radio is a recent example of this. The technology isn't particularly complex (well, it would be beyond me, but for someone like Grant it's probably not too complex), but when you make it easy enough and get the right mix of people together, magic happens.

So I'm starting the backlash against the backlash early - YouTube, Flickr, Wikipedia, Twitter - these things are amazing. They're just not as amazing as we first thought, or rather, we're just beginning to find the ways in which they will be amazing.

Higher Ed - room for disruption?

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/annetta/1954945479/ by Annetta)

(Another excerpt from my Digital Scholarship book):

In other posts I have looked at some of the impacts new technology has had in other industries and what we might learn from this in higher ed. While the lessons these sectors offer are instructive, it also provides a basis for considering in what ways higher education differs, and thus may not be subject to the same influences. The major difference is that higher education is not purely a content industry. I argued in this talk that HE produces a considerable amount of content, which could be distributed and shared digitally, but its revenue is not predicated on selling this content, unlike music or newspapers.

It is undoubtedly the case that the vast amount of online content means that people now conduct a lot of their learning informally, using free resources. Combined with financial pressures, this creates a pressure, or an alternative competition for learning that is new to higher education. Anya Kamenetz details the convergence of these two factors in her book DIY U, arguing that “Do-It-Yourself University means the expansion of education beyond classroom walls: free, open-source, vocational, experiential, and self-directed learning.” This certainly represents a challenge to the monopoly on learning that universities and colleges have held for centuries, and one they should take seriously (through, I would argue, engagement with the technology and approaches).

However, even in times of financial crisis higher education has a certain resilience for two reasons: the social value of formal education is often increased in times of financial hardship; learning is not a zero sum game. It is this latter reason that I think is of real long-term significance to higher education. Even if people are learning much of what they require via open, online resources mediated through their social network, that in itself can generate the desire for further learning, and itself foster interest in formal education. Competition with informal learning is true to an extent, but it presupposes a set amount of learning by an individual, as if they have a limited number of cognitive learning tokens to be used up in a lifetime. But it is more often the case that learning begets learning. In this respect open, informal education is complementary to formal education, indeed something of a gift, rather than a threat. In a world that generates vast amounts of niche content which people are increasingly engaged with, either by generating their own, sharing or discussing, then the outcome is a larger population of active learners.

The challenge for universities then is to remain relevant to these learners. This means developing an appropriate curriculum, having flexible course options, using technology effectively and generating interest. An example of this symbiotic relationship would be between a photo-sharing service such as Flickr and university courses on digital photography. A great deal of informal learning occurs through the communities on Flickr, which can focus around themes or techniques, or the Daily Shoot site which gives photographers a daily task to perform (http://dailyshoot.com/). At some stage though many photographers want to further their understanding, or have a more structured approach and sign up for a course on digital photography. The Open University’s short course in this area has been one of its most popular, which since 2007 has run two presentations a year of 1000-1500 students on each cohort. 

More radically Jim Groom's open course on digital storytelling (http://ds106.us/), which combines 32 campus based student who are studying for credit, with learners from a global community studying for their own interest. The combination of the two groups is mutually beneficial. Participants are required to create digital artefacts and to share these on their own blogs and sites, which are aggregated together on this course blog. The course is fluid, with participants suggesting assignments, and distributed across many sites, using the hashtag #ds106 to group content.

These two examples demonstrate how the open, informal learning which many people partake in online is not necessarily a threat to the existence of higher education, and, given some adjustments by universities, can be a benefit.

There are two messages that higher education can take from this: the first is that it needs to engage in the sort of experimentation Jim's course represents if it is to turn the digital, networked and open approaches of learners to its advantage; the second is that it has the capacity to do so.

It is this second message that marks another difference with the sectors so often used as a comparison. Many of those industries did not have the revenue streams which come from accreditation and research funding to counter any loss of revenue from consumers finding alternative content freely available online. Higher education is in a position where not only does it need to disrupt its own practice, but it can afford to. It has sufficient resilience to do so because unlike content industries, that disruption does not completely undermine its current model. Higher education can be viewed as a long tail content production system, and with little effort much of what it produces could be shared as open, digital resources. Higher education can afford to do this, because their ‘customers’ (if we use that term by way of analogy with other sectors) are not purchasing that content directly – they are instead students who are paying for a learning experience which comprises that content along with the other elements, most notably support, guidance and accreditation. Other customers include research councils, commercial partners, media, charities and governmental agencies. Again these customers are not directly paying for content, and with the exception of cases of commercial sensitivity and privacy issues, they often have much to gain from openness and wide dissemination.

Some of the concerns relating to the impact of new technologies in other sectors then do not apply in scholarship, or their impact is reduced. The concerns regarding how artistic endeavour is to be rewarded in a world where all content can be easily distributed for free are very real if you are a musician, for example. These concerns are not the same for academics however, who are usually employed and so are not deriving their income from content in the same manner. This is not to underestimate the impact and challenges that face higher education, but to highlight that disruption by new technologically driven approaches is not as threatening to core practice as it has been in other sectors. This may account for why the innovation and adoption of such approaches has been less prevalent in higher education, since the urgency to respond is not as great. 

 

My edtech life in 3 gifts

This is the digital version of putting an apple on teacher's desk...

This isn't an assignment for Jim Groom's Digital Storytelling course, but I had this idea last night, and spent this afternoon playing with it. Inspired by the excellent Radio 4 series, "A History of the World in 100 objects", my idea was to take three objects and use these to tell my life, or career, in educational technology. I was going to use any object, but decided to limit myself to gifts I've been given. The result is below. It didn't turn out that great, I really need more images and it needs to be snappier, but I thought I'd share it because I like the concept more than the product. One of these days, I hope to put some time to one of these and come up with something as good as Grant Potter's great story. Until then I may as well share the half-baked ideas I have, because someone may do something better with them.

Learning Analytics 2011 is the place to be

(This man wants your data)

I'm pleased to say I've managed to get some funding to attend the first conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK 2011), organised by George Siemens and the good folk at Athabasca. It's in Banff, Canada, Feb 27th to March 1st. Look at some of the people on the steering committee:

• Erik Duval, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium
• David Wiley, Brigham Young University, US
• Dave Cormier, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada
• Tony Hirst, Open University, UK
• Grainne Conole, Open University, UK
• Dragan Gasevic, CSIS, Athabasca University, Canada
• Simon Buckingham Shum, Knowledge Media Institute, UK
• Caroline Haythornthwaite, University of British Columbia, Canada

I think this first conference will be quite small, but like the Sex Pistols gig at the 100 Club, in years to come more people will have claimed to have been here than it can physically accommodate. I think the interesting thing about Learning Analytics is it's one of those areas we think will be important, but we're not quite sure what it is yet, so there's room to explore. I'm not presenting at the conference, because I don't think I know enough about it, so hoping to learn more. The call for papers is closed, but if like me, you just want to find out what's going on, registration for attendance is still open.

While I'm broadcasting stuff, there are still fellowships available at the OU under the OLNET scheme for research relating to OERs, closing date is 14th Feb, if you feel this is your bag.

PS - it's bermuda shorts weather in Banff in March, right?

 

I ain't no surfer

For Jim's digital storytelling course we have to tell a story about something that happened to us recently. I have chosen to make a quick vid about how I went surfing on Christmas Eve at Watergate Bay in Cornwall. It was good fun, but I completely failed to stand on the board, and realised that mental images I may have had of riding big tubes would not be realised. I think a basic lack of balance may be a factor. It was just an experiment in telling a story with a few images, and some music (I did it in Picasa).

 

PS - if you're not interested in Jim's course, you may get a bit fed up of these posts, I'm wary of using my main blog for the course also, so we'll see how it goes.

Games & education - a contrarian view

These are not scripts or courses in waiting...

<image http://www.flickr.com/photos/durka/4879338779/ by Thomas Durka>

It is almost a truism to say that games represent a bold new future for education. The Chancellor of the OU, and one of the wisest people around, Lord Puttnam, has often said as much: "The video game is probably the most powerful learning tool that's ever been created, and if we can only get the software right, as it were 'connect up the pieces', we could create something utterly remarkable." 

And the linkages seem irresistible - games create a structured environment where the player has to learn certain procedures to progress. They are given tips, have the opportunity to practice and have regular rewards. Most attractively, they are highly motivating and engaging, with players devoting hours to solving the problems presented to them. The player learns through trial and experimentation, sometimes collaborating with others, in a structured, scaffolded manner. If that doesn't scream 'Education!' at you then you're not paying attention. And, there has been some success in applying game based approaches to learning.

But whenever the logic seems irrefutable, and everyone is lining up to testify how great it is, then a contrarian tick kicks in for me. It's probably because I've read too much Hitchens, but I want to take an opposing view, just to see how it pans out.

So here are my reservations about games as the future of education:

Discipline suitability - although there are open games, such as World of Warcraft, many games have a very definite structure. You have to follow the narrative, and this may work well for some well structured disciplines, but not for more discursive ones.

Creepy treehouse - games are fun and motivating precisely because they are about imaginary worlds where the player is an elven wizard, or a Miami based drug dealer, or a premiership football manager. Making games about the actual stuff we need to learn about removes all of this, and is an example of creepy treehouse syndrome. When my daughter was young we used to occasionally watch Clifford the Big Red Dog, which always ended with Clifford being read a story, at the end of which the girl would pontificate 'Reading is fun!'. Even as a three year old, my daughter could spot this as a sledgehammer message. I think 'let's play a game about quantum physics' would set off similar alarm bells in any savvy 20 year old.

Inappropriate pedagogy - I think this one is less convincing, as you can have constructivist or collaborative approaches in games, but many of the conventional game engines are based around a fairly Skinnerian reinforcement principle. We would need to be wary about adopting this wholesale.

A misleading metaphor - my main concern though is that the seeming similarities between education and gaming mask more fundamental differences. My argument for this lies in observing another industry that has been seduced by the apparent similarities with games, namely the film industry. Adapting games has proven irresistible for the film industry and the logic again seems sound: games have an existing fan base; they have an easy narrative which can be adapted; they are highly visual; much of the design, look, feel, and characterisation has been done already; they're modern and sexy.

Yet, almost without fail, game adaptations have been disasters, artistically speaking. I don't know if they've returned a profit, and if they have, few have gone onto be the real blockbusters the producers would have hoped. Yet they persist because of that damn irresistible logic. Tomb Raider, Doom, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Street Fighter, Prince of Persia - none of these have blazed standards for cinematic achievement. Look at this list of games that have been made into films and tell me of one that you'd bother to see a second time (or even a first).

The danger is that this reliance on games (and comic books, but that's another argument), creates a laziness in film making and a loss of their own creativity. Hollywood (and it is almost exclusively Hollywood that is obsessed with games) has, I would argue, made a mapping error and transferred the wrong elements across from games, and missed what is fundamentally different about films.

Games require less characterisation than films because the player participates in the game. In a movie this participation needs to be achieved through engagement and empathy with the characters. When you transfer a game to a film this lack of character creates a fundamental weakness.

In addition they operate over different time frames - a game that only lasted two hours would be considered light, and a film that endured for forty hours would be a tough sell. In games this prolonged engagement allows the player to become involved, to invest in the game. In a film this has to be compressed so all you are left with is the surface story and action.

Lastly they underestimate the discrimination of their customers. People who play Tomb Raider are quite capable of seeing romcoms or dramas. What they want from movies and what they want from games are quite different.

I wonder if the same misapplication of gaming is happening in education as it has in film. There are interesting things being done with games, letting town planners play with Sim City seems a great thing to do, and I'm sure people can point me at lots of great examples. But I think it's worth noting these reservations and thinking of games as useful in some contexts, not the great educational utopia they are often proclaimed to be.

Digital resilience

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/revdancatt/449142212/ by Rev Dan Catt>

Reading some of the posts and papers from Joss Winn and Richard Hall brought the concept of resilience to my attention. I'm probably deviating from their intended use of the concept, but it has been a useful way of thinking about how academia responds to the impact of digital, networked and open technologies and approaches. I was also struck by Joss' comment at Open Ed: "Resilience does not mean withstanding" (Scott Leslie also liked this). This is a useful way of thinking about how new technologies (and more importantly the approaches they facilitate) can influence scholarship, as often the reaction is to think about what we will lose and set about resisting, or withstanding, change. The argument I have been making in my book is that engagement with technology is the key to maintaining ownership of scholarship.  I have used it in one section of the concluding chapter of my book, so thought I'd share this here.

In his 1973 paper on the stability of ecological systems, Holling defined resilience as “a measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables.” It is a perspective that has been evolved beyond the ecosystems Holling applied it to, and has found particular relevance to sustainable development and climate change. Hall and Winn (2010) have applied the concept of resilience to education, and open education in particular. Walker et al (2004) propose four aspects of resilience:

1. Latitude: the maximum amount a system can be changed before losing its ability to recover
2. Resistance: the ease or difficulty of changing the system; how “resistant” it is to being changed
3. Precariousness: how close the current state of the system is to a limit or “threshold.” 
4. Panarchy:  the influences of external forces at scales above and below. For example, external oppressive politics, invasions, market shifts, or global  climate change can trigger local surprises and  regime shifts.

This is a useful means of considering the response of academia to the potential impact of new technologies. This applies across four levels where digital scholarship is relevant:

• Governmental, national agency, research councils
• Discipline
• Institutional
• Individual

Taking these four levels and the four aspects of resilience gives us a ‘digital scholarship resilience matrix’ as shown below. Completing this is an exercise you might like to attempt for your own discipline and institution, and a relevant research council or agency. For each box enter the degree to which that example meets resilience factor, for example if you work in a very traditional discipline, such as law, you may decide that it is very resistant to change.

	National agency	Discipline	Institution	Individual
Latitude
Resistance
Precariousness
Panarchy

How you complete each entry will vary considerably depending on discipline (medical research for instance is arguably less precarious than historical research) geographical location (venture capital funding for technology research will be easier to come by in San Francisco), institution (Cambridge University is likely to be more resistant to change than a modern one) and recent events (universities in Ireland and Greece for example will be subject to the panarchic influence of recent years).

Building on Holling’s work resilience is now often defined as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganise while undergoing change, so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks” (eg Hopkins 2009).

It is this focus on retaining function and identity that is relevant to scholarship I would argue. To return to the point above, this does not equate to resistance. Indeed, a high resistance, is not necessarily a benefit to an ecosystem, as Holling observed some insect populations fluctuate wildly depending on environmental factors, but overall they are resilient.

In terms of scholarship resilience is about utilising technology to change practices where this is desirable, but to retain the underlying function and identity which the existing practices represent. It is a mistake to think of the practices themselves as being core scholarship, rather that they are the methods through which we realise them, and these methods can change. Peer review for example, is a method of ensuring quality, objectivity and reliability. But it may not be the only way of realising this, or at least its current incarnation may be subject to change. A resilience perspective would seek to ensure these core functions were protected, and not just resist at the level of the method.