The Ed Techie

What can I take away from DS106?

I think we can say that Jim Groom's Digital Storytelling course has been very successful in generating an online buzz, and as a model of what you can do with an open, online course. The development of DS106Radio has been something to behold as it has taken on a life of its own. As D'Arcy has commented most of the technology for this has been around for a while, but it all seemed to coalesce into something quite magical. Jim has some thoughts on DS106 radio here, arguing that it "provides is a model for yet another platform for sharing, creating, and trying to foster conversation."

I've been thinking about DS106 recently because I'm part of George Siemens' MOOC later this year, and I'm scheduled to rewrite some of the OU's Masters in Online Education soon, so I've been thinking what can I learn from it.

I'm reading Bolano's 2666 at the moment, and Jonathan Lehman's NYT review claims that it is "a landmark in what’s possible for the novel as a form". If it's not too pretentious to say so, I'd suggest the same is true for DS106 and the online course.

It's important to realise what isn't transferable (or readily transferable anyway). I'm not Jim (you'll have noticed), and part of the success of the course is centred around Jim's own personality. There would be something very sad in educators pretending to be Jim in order to recapture the same sort of atmosphere. But in this there is the first lesson, which is that some element of the educator's personality in an online course is both possible and desirable. Social media tends to work precisely when there is that element on personal mix, and to strip that out makes it a less engaging experience. This may be difficult to implement in the OU distance education setting which has always worked hard in its written material to remove the individual and to strive for a neutral tone. 

Another element that may not transfer well is the use of radio. Again this has been partly driven by Jim's personality, plus the amazing contribution of people such as Grant Potter. I would hazard that if I attempted it, the airwaves would remain silent, because the audience for my Masters course is quite different. Plus I would never get it through the OU's course approval process because of copyright issues. But as with the point above, it is not the surface element that is important, but rather, what it demonstrates. In this case the radio and the course as a whole shows that, given the right platform, students can be real co-creators of the course as a whole and of great content.

My third element is that of experimentation. I worry that as students pay more for their study, they will become increasingly conservative, as will institutions.  DS106 demonstrates that you can still experiment, as long as you frame it for students, and that the experience students get as a result of that can be far richer than a carefully controlled course design process. Who knows, it may even be fun.

Lastly, the course highlights the benefits of openness. For the on campus students they get access to a wider range of learners and a broader experience than they would otherwise. Jim gets people who help with technical issues (such as Grant), and suggest activities and assignments (such as Tom Woodward). And Jim's institution, University of Mary Washington, gets some good publicity and reputation for free. Openness is therefore an effective and efficient approach for all concerned.

So, although I doubt I'll be in a position to do anything as radical as DS106, by looking beyond the immediate elements, there is more that is transferrable from it into everyday practice than you might think.

 

Eportfolios - J'accuse

This is a bit kicking a man when he's down as most people have turned away from eportfolio software now, but it still persists. It's also old hat - Jim was telling us this ain't your eportfolio mama, three years ago. But maybe now is a good time to reflect. I would like to one day do a series of posts about collective fantasies that grip educational technology, and why they don't turn out the way we envisage (learning objects anyone?).

This post was set in motion by an email from a colleague asking whether I thought blogs were better means of achieving portfolios than specific eportfolio systems. I answered yes, but it set me thinking as to why I've always had an aversion to eportfolios. They can be seen as a case study of how educational technology gets it wrong, for the reasons below.

A key characteristic of these ed tech mass hysterias is that they're based on a good idea - an eportfolio sounds great. It will be a place to store all the evidence you gather to exhibit learning, both formal and informal, it supports lifelong learning, career development, etc. Who wouldn't want one of those? Unfortunately, the idea is too seductive and all encompassing, it becomes a panacea for many ills. Which leads to the first main problem.

Over-complication – because we are developing software to suit a range of stakeholders, feature creep becomes inevitable. The question of ‘how simple can we make it’ is not one that is usually asked. So for eportfolios we find we need new standards to export and move between institutions, ways of locking down items so they can be verified, means of providing different views for different audiences, etc. In a blog the answers to these problems are: RSS; is it important?; and tags respectively.

Institutional, not user focus – a related point is that we end up developing solutions that are sold or selected by institutions (see also LMSs). An institution has a very different set of requirements to an individual. However, if you want eportfolios to work, then it’s individuals that need to like them and be motivated to use them. This emanates from an institutional tic, which is the need to own and control systems and data.

Focus on the tool, not the skills – having developed our overly complex, institutionally focused tool, it now requires a good deal of training for students to use it, since it isn’t very intuitive, and they didn’t know they wanted it anyway. So it becomes a tool that is focused around a particular course, often with credit attached to it. In short it becomes a tool used inside education only. There is little focus on the more general skills which are actually the main benefits: sharing content, gathering and annotating resources as you go, becoming part of a network, reflecting on work, commenting on others, etc. In short, the sort of skills that make for a good blogger.

Lack of social element – the eportfolio often becomes institutionally branded and focused, and because it is has been designed by educational technologists who are probably a bit sniffy about all this social software business, doesn’t allow for much of the easy social elements found elsewhere. This can be functional (eg is embedding easy), but more often it is cultural – the culture of blogging is one of openness and reciprocity, whereas eportfolios are tied into a more academic culture of individualism, plagiarism and copyright. In this environment the social element does not flourish. 

Educational arrogance – maybe arrogance is too strong a term, but eportfolios demonstrate a common mistake (in my view) in educational technology, which goes something like “Here’s some interesting software/tool/service which does most of what we want. But it’s not quite good enough for higher education, let’s develop our own version with features X and Y”. In adding features X and Y though they lose what was good about the initial tool, and take a long time. Blogs are good enough for eportfolios, if what you want from an eportfolio is for people to actually, you know, use them. 

10 things I learnt from Flickr Photo a day

This time last year I was feeling a bit down, and thought I needed a bit of a challenge to motivate myself. So I started the Flickr photo a day thing. If you haven't seen this, the clue is in the title - you aim to take a photo a day for a year. You don't have to upload one a day (I didn't always have connectivity), but you have to take one a day and you have to take it. That's all. 

So what did I learn from the process?

1) I'm not a very good photographer

2) I didn't really improve as a photographer much in terms of technical ability, but it forces you to start looking for photographs in the everyday objects and scenes, so I developed more of a photographer's mindset.

3) I need to get out more. Often I was either working at home or in the office in Milton Keynes. You soon run out of things to photograph in these settings. I would like to offer this up as a contender for 'Most Boring Photograph in the World'

On the other hand, I do quite like this one:

4) It introduces you to new tools and ideas. Just being around Flickr and other people (particularly good photographers such as Sarah Horrigan and Juliette Culver) makes you try new things. I played around with some iPhone apps and also used DailyShoot for inspiration.

5) Usage is unpredictable. Our old friend unpredicatbility raises its head again. I can't tell you why some images gained more views than others (the milk bottle one above was strangely popular, maybe as an example of boring photography). 

6) Creating your own presentation archive. I did a presentation recently using only images from my own Flickr set. It was interesting how I could put them to different uses, which I hadn't intended when I took them. This one I probably knew I would use in an OER talk:

But I didn't really have the changing nature of higher ed in mind when I took this:

7) It's the whole that counts. Individual photos are usually not up to much, but as I got past 200 I knew I'd have to finish it, just to have the set. This is not unlike running or studying. Then the overall set becomes a mildly interesting record of a year.

8) A little cheating is ok. Well, I'm not going to be kicked off the course am I? So I used one photo that my wife took:

And on a couple of occasions I took two photos in one day and used them across two. I'm sorry. Note: I'm not saying a little cheating is ok in other realms, here I'm only cheating myself, and only a little bit.

9) The best camera is the one you have with you. I started carrying my Olympus E-450 with me a lot, but even so many of my photos are done with the iPhone because that's what I had when I was out.

10) There is a relationship with formal learning. I like these semi-structured autonomous tasks. They provide a structure and commitment to doing something you are interested in. I've argued elsewhere (and in my forthcoming book) that higher ed shouldn't see itself as being in competition with informal learning. I think exploring and being open to these synergies will be a good model for higher education to follow.

That's it. Here's the photoset in all its glorious banality:

A pedagogy of abundance - the paper

I've given a couple of talks (and blogged) around a pedagogy of abundance. In these I was exploring what abundance in terms of content might mean for education, and whether we had appropriate pedagogies, when most of our learning theories have been built on an assumption of content-scarcity.

For my digital scholarship book I made this the chapter that looks at the teaching element of Boyer's scholarly functions. I have now redone that chapter and published it as an article in the Spanish Journal of Pedagogy

Note - the journal isn't open access, but I'm trying to explore the green, or self-archiving route of OA, so I got agreement to release it myself under a CC license. So you can download it from the OU repository.