The Ed Techie

Meta Edtech Journal - new issue

You may recall that prior to Christmas I set up the Meta EdTech Journal, using Google's Annotum. It is a meta journal, where I periodically trawl through open access educational technology journals (using George Veletsianos's list), and create an 'issue' which links to a selection of these. Each has a comment from me, setting out what I think is interesting about the article.

The second issue is now out, with, I think, a good range of articles. Please let me know if it's of any use whatsoever.

And remember - if you want to curate/edit a special edition, just let me know. You need to be able to find 6 or so open access articles in a particular subject area you are interested in. It's probably easiest if you just send me these, with a comment on each. And if you feel like it, add in an overview to the special edition. Sorry, this won't get you promotion or a REF status though, just a feelgood glow.

 

The vinyl lesson

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/fensterbme/102458936/>

There has been a bit of a buzz recently that the sales of vinyl records are on the increase, and what does this mean. This isn't a 'the joy of vinyl' post, but rather that the rise of vinyl has some interesting lessons for what happens to an industry or artefact after the arrival of the digital, networked version. I think there are three main lessons:

1) The arrival of digital highlights the real value in the analogue version - in this case the vinyl wasn't about being a music distribution platform, but rather a complete art object. Its physical presence was its value. People now say that they value the limitations vinyl puts on the listener, so you have to listen to a whole album and don't simply shuffle. These are qualities that are brought into focus by the presence of the digital alternative.

2) It is more complex than simply digital replaces analogue - let's make no mistake here, although vinyl is on the increase, it is dwarfed by digital downloads. The monopoly of the old system is nearly always overthrown by the arrival of the digital, networked version. But it oversimplifies matters to say "X is dead" now.

3) The analogue becomes a specialist, hobbyist pursuit - digital and networked nearly always trumps analogue in terms of convenience. But the new values we've come to appreciate in 1) mean the analogue version moves to becoming a monority interest, but of great value to that group. It increases in (maybe financial, but certainly emotional) value, but decreases in reach.

The same has happened with nearly all analogue artefacts where a digital, networked version has come into existence. Think paper and online newspapers, maps & GPS, digital and film photography, and so on - books are in a similar transformation process now.

What's perhaps more interesting is whether the same applies to activities as well as artefacts. Shopping has seen some of this, although not to the same extent - the activity of shopping has often moved online (see reports about the death of the high street), but it hasn't quite become a hobbyist pursuit. But the convenience of online shopping has meant it has lost its monopoly and people have become to realise what it is they like about 'real' shopping (for me, nothing by the way), which is the social side. So city centres have become a greater mix of coffee shops, restaurants alongside shops.

Now here's a couple of activities to consider in the light of the three vinyl lessons:

• Academic conferences
• Teaching

Maybe that's for another post...

The cost of good bad ideas

There's a horror film, which I've never seen, called The Human Centipede (if you've never heard of it, I apologise for bringing it to your attention). Now, I like a horror film, but I really don't want to see this one. But here's the thing: the mere existence of the idea that the film contains has given me disturbed nights. In some respects the director deserves credit for this - he has conceived of an idea and then put it into a film, which you don't even need to see to give you nightmares. That's the power of a bad idea.

I was thinking about this the other day in relation to Digital Natives. Of course, there's nothing horrific about the digital natives idea, but like that film, its has kind of infected a lot of educational thinking merely by its existence. 

If you haven't read the studies, most people now think the central ideas in digital natives are, in a word, bogus. There are no real differences between generations, attributable to technology. There are differences between how we used to do stuff and how we do it now. But digital natives (or if you prefer net gen) is largely a myth. In this book Marc Prensky says it was meant as a metaphor and people took it too seriously. Maybe. And maybe there's some back pedalling going on.

But here's a question: how much money has been spent on the idea of digital natives over the years? There have been innumerable keynotes from people proclaiming themselves experts in the area; schools, universities and companies have shelled out for consultants to advise them on how to deal with this strange new breed; we have yards of publications on the matter; then there are the research projects looking at whether it exists or not (for example, my colleague Chris Jones led a very good project in this area); and by no means least there are all those essays, theses and dissertations which take it almost as a given fact.

That's like a mini-industry centred around an idea that had a kind of fashionable appeal, but no real basis in evidence. And what of the opportunity costs? While we were fretting about whether they existed or not and what we should do about it, did we miss seeing what was really happening and the more interesting and subtle changes in society in general. And that's a shame because it's not a competely bad idea - many of us feel instinctively that our children are growing up in a different world than we were, but then we're operating in that world too. The age element made the argument attractive ("these kids are completely different!") whereas the interesting thing was how technology was making it different for everyone. Highlighting changes needed in the education system to deal with this new technology context were a good thing, but wrapping it up as a generational shift missed the point about the different groups and attitudes across all generations. 

My favourite Net Gen nonsense quote is from Oblinger and Oblinger who claimed 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.”

Are they comparing this with evidence of a preference for ambiguity and lack of structure in previous generations? That statement seems almost like a horoscope - vague enough to be true of anyone. 

I suppose critics of blogging and the like might point to the fact that the idea didn't generate from a peer-reviewed academic journal, which would have filtered out some of the claims. We could chalk one up for the peer-review system here, and note that popularity and linking is not evidence of rigour and value.

So beware the next good bad idea you come across in relation to ed tech (or horror films), a nice soundbite idea that seems to capture a feeling of the times can lead you off down false paths for years. 

 

Attack of the killer rhizomes

"Oh my God, it's full of stars"

Dave "the rhizome" Cormier posted the other day about uncertainty and rhizomatic learning. If you don't know what the latter is, Dave says it's

"A botanical metaphor, first posited by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus(1987), may offer a more flexible conception of knowledge for the information age: therhizome. A rhizomatic plant has no center and no defined boundary; rather, it is made up of a number of semi-independent nodes, each of which is capable of growing and spreading on its own, bounded only by the limits of its habitat (Cormier 2008)."

In Dave's post he talked about habituation and how when you learn something it becomes automatic, and the vocabulary you adopt reflects this. In the comments I mentioned some of the work done with experts, in particular pattern recognition in chess experts. For instance, chess experts will be able to reproduce a board they are shown much better than you or I (assuming you're not a chess expert that is). The reason is that they encode it as patterns linked to long term memory eg "the mid-game position in Kasparov vs Karpov 1984" whereas novices are encoding it as discrete elements eg white rook next to black pawn two spaces in".

Experts don't know they do this, but it's a by-product, or rather a means, of expertise. They don't set out to encode in this manner, but it is what they do as they gain expertise. Interestingly, if you show expert chess players random placement of figures, ie not real mid-game positions, then they fare the same as everyone else.

Over twitter Dave said that maybe what he was talking about wasn't expertise in the traditional sense. To which I responded that in a very general, maybe even trite, sense, all learning is a shift away from novice towards expert, even if you never reach the expert level. No-one learns something to know less about it.

But then on reflection, maybe Dave has a point. The kind of learning he is talking about is accidental, acquisitional. It's almost collateral damage learning. I was thinking about being a blogger as an example. I didn't take a formal course to become one, obviously (I'd want my money back if I did). And I don't think I ever articulated to myself the goal or ambition to 'learn to be a blogger'. But over time, reading others, and experimentation, I learnt a lot of things, such as the right voice (for me) to use in a blog, what subjects to blog about, how to connect with others, the use of certain technologies, etc. I also became enculturated and learnt or adopted the 'blog culture'.

I suppose in one sense, I am now an expert, or at least more expert than some, blogger. But this feels rather different from other things I might be considered an expert in (erm, I can't think of any now, but there must be some), which have been the result of very intentional, and directional learning.

And this to me gets to the heart of the good and the bad about rhizomatic (or if you prefer, networked) learning. It works, at least in the sense that I have learnt to be a better blogger than I was six years ago. But if it's unintentional, undirectional, informal and accidental then is there much we as educators can say about it other than 'that's interesting'? My point is if we can't foster it, direct it, start it, measure it, or even look at it then is there much we can do about it? It may happen, and be very useful, but as soon as you try and touch it, then it disappears. It's like stars you can only see in the periphery of your vision, as soon as you focus on them, they fade from view.

Why it's time for the rebirth of the university press

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A long time ago, well, before Simon Cowell was a household name anyway, universities used to run university presses. These would print journals and books. They didn't really make a profit, in fact they often made a loss. Their titles were esoteric, academic and occassionally odd. But they did it because that was the best, indeed the only route often, to sharing knowledge publicly. Other universities and libraries would buy these journals, sometimes the production was very professional, other times less so and the glue and string would show. 

Then gradually, universities began to realise they weren't in the print business, and that they couldn't really compete with the professional publishers in terms of marketing and distribution. So, one by one, they sold their titles to the publishers. For a while it was a mutually beneficial deal. Their publications had a wider distribution and they had access to centralised expertise in publishing, library contacts, copyediting, etc. In exchange the academics provided their content and their labour in editing and reviewing. 

But over time, the distance between the publishers and the academics increased, and it became less of a mutually beneficial arrangement. Libraries were locked into 'big deal' packages, and as academics continued to provide the majority of the labour, the profits earned by the big publishers increased. As Edwards and Shulenberger put it: "beginning in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, this gift exchange began to break down. A few commercial publishers recognized that research generated at public expense and given freely for publication by the authors represented a commercially exploitable commodity".

One of the problems previously was that printing and distributing paper journals was an alien business for universities to be in. It involved equipment, and logistics which were costly to maintain and seemed increasingly detached from the everyday business of the university. But I would suggest that the almost wholesale shift to online journals has now seen a realignment with university skills and functions. We do run websites and universities are the places people look to for information (or better, they do it through syndicated repositories). The experience the higher education sector has built up through OER, software development and website maintenance, now aligns nicely with the skills we've always had of editing, reviewing, writing and managing journals. Universities are the ideal place now for journals to reside.

I would argue then, that now is the time for the rebirth of the university press as a place that runs a set of open access, online journals. In times of financial stress in the sector, it may seem perverse to be proposing that universities take on a function that is not aimed at earning revenue, but here is my economic, and public good, argument.

Running journals on an ad hoc basis across universities is inefficient. By centralising resource you could support several journals. At a rough guess, based on my experience of editing JIME, I think one central, full time administrator could support 4 journals. The same, or maybe less time required, for technical support. That admin support may or may not do the copyediting also. The other main roles are those that are currently performed by academics for free anyway - reviewing, managing and editing the journal, organising special editions, reviewing, etc.

The same universities are currently paying a considerable sum to publishers through libraries. By withdrawing some of this spend and reallocating to internal publishing, then the university could cover costs. In addition the university gains kudos and recognition for its journals and the expertise and control is maintained within the university. Now, if enough universities do this, each publishing four or more journals, then the university presses now begin to cover the range of expertise required. And in times of financial crisis people will increasingly ask 'what is the university for?'. Being able to point to the wealth of knowledge that we generate and then share freely will be one part of an answer.

This is, of course, happening at many universities, but it's a piecemeal approach, often operating in the spare time of people with other jobs. One has only to look at the list of journals currently using OJS to see that it's an approach that is growing. I feel though that the time is now ripe for a more focused, concerted push to make the university press the home again of academic knowledge.