The Ed Techie

Is 'Flipping' a useful concept?

As part of the OER Research Hub my colleague Bea De Los Arcos has been working with the Flipped Learning network in the US. If you don't know what 'flipped learning' is the basic idea is that you use classroom time for peer interaction, discussion, interaction, and homework for instruction (often via online video). From the OER perspective it's an interesting group because open education is related to what they do, but it doesn't come from the open education world.

I've just written a section on Flipped Learning for this year's Innovating Pedagogy report, so I've been thinking about the whole approach. I've heard people dismiss it as 'that's just another name for blended learning'. Jonathan Rees doesn't like it at all, and thinks it puts too much onus on the learner. There is also something about the way the US system operates in that approaches like this become a brand to be promoted, which can seem quite odd outside of that context.

I would also say, that like OERs, hard evidence is often lacking of its benefits, but there are some persuasive case studies. And the people who take it up do seem genuinely converted and enthusiastic (96% of those who had flipped saying they would recommend it), which indicates there is something there. I have a feeling that those in educational technology (particularly in higher ed) can be a bit sniffy about such things: 'we've seen this before', 'where's the evidence?', 'what solid pedagogic theory are you basing it on?', etc. While Flipped Learning can certainly be seen as a form of blended learning, I've come to see it as a useful way of framing it for teachers. Blended learning can be a bit vague: use the best mix of media for pedagogic effect. That can leave you floundering, what media for what purpose? Flipping gives this more structure. What do you spend your time explaining that could be effectively delivered online? And what could I do in the classroom that's more engaging than simply delivering information.

One criticism of flipping is that it kind of assumes that all teachers are just standing there lecturing anyway, and this is far from the truth. So when you scratch the surface you'll find plenty of teachers have done elements of flipping, without even knowing the term. And there is also an emphasis on video, indeed some people seem to view it as being about online video, whereas the interactive element in the face to face session is the more important aspect.

Overall though I think it's a useful way of approaching the possibilities that the internet offers for education, while still recognising the value of the teacher and the human interaction. By asking the question "how could I flip my classroom?" it gives a way of thinking about the best affordances (klaxon!) of online and face to face. And that seems like a good thing.

(Here is a nice little sheet Bea produced for the Flipped Learning Network to help explain CC licences):

The ethics of digital scholarship

I was asked to give a presentation at the Higher Education Academy summit on ethics and teaching last week, from a digital scholarship perspective. Being a chap of low morals and vague ethics, it was interesting to consider digital scholarship purely from this angle. Like much of educational technology or open education, the tendency is often to promote it as an unqualified good, but, inevitably, it's a bit more complicated than that.

I started by asking the question "What is teaching?" As well as being about imparting knowledge, developing skills it is also a process of enculturation, particularly in higher education. That is why going to university is such a life-event, because you are often taken from one culture, and brought into another. This obviously has huge ethical implications anyway, but the question I wanted to explore was what if that culture has changed, but the enculturation process hasn't?

If we want to force students to engage with aspects of digital, or open, scholarship, there are a number of ethical considerations. Firstly, to what extent is it right to force people to operate in the open? As George Siemens reminds us, learning is a vulnerable process, so increasing that vulnerability has ethical considerations. While we like to look at the successful communities created by courses such as DS106, Phonar, Rhizo14, etc. there are many learners who these approaches don't work for, and who feel excluded from what seems like an online clique. 

Even things that seem straightforward ethically are complicated on closer examination. Open access can be argued to be a moral approach, partly because it is funded by Government money. But what about a lot of teaching research that is, in effect, funded by student fees? Similarly, should that content, paid for by students be released openly? And conversely, is it unethical not to use the best OERs around for a subject you are teaching and rely just on your own notes?

My overall argument was that there are ethical considerations if we want to push a more digital scholarly enriched curriculum, for example should undergraduates release their final year research data openly, and do they understand issues such as deanonymisation? But as importantly there are ethical considerations for NOT adopting such approaches, particularly if these are the types of skills and cultural values that students should be developing to be successful citizens, employees, researchers, or whatever. That has always been the argument of higher education, that skills such as critical thinking, analysis, reasoning etc are good to develop for the benefit of the individual and society more generally. There are digital, networked flavours of all these skills too.

You'll see, in typical ethics fashion, I didn't really come to an answer, just lots more questions. The slidedeck is below.

 

The Ethics of Digital Scholarship from Martin Weller

How long should a book be?

(My book will be considerably thinner, and less influential, than this)

I sent the manuscript for my Battle for Open book off to the publisher Ubiquity Press last Friday. I can't find the origin of the phrase "a book isn't finished, it's abandoned", but I was contemplating it last week, in trying to decide if the book was finished (or at least bar copyediting and review feedback). It came in at about 57,000 words. That's quite short for a book, and my initial reaction was "create another chapter or two to bring it up to 70,000 plus words". Having written three books previously, they've all been around 80K words. 

But then I caught myself and thought "why?" Convention dictates that books are around that length, but that convention is really the result of the economics of book publishing. It doesn't cost much more to print and distribute a 50K, 80K or 100K word book. So they are priced the same, but people tend to shy away from purchasing thinner books. The convention then settles on 80-100K words being the optimum. 

Now ask yourself, how many academic books (or even fiction) have you read that were really a 40K word idea stretched out over twice that length? Me, I'd say nearly all of them. This is a classic example of old conventions dictating the possibilities of the new. My book will be available freely under a CC licence as an epub and PDF version. There will be a physical copy available at a reasonable price, so the need to make the book 80K words in length diminishes. I had made the case I wanted to make, explored it in depth, and kept it reasonably concise. People might even read it.

How long should a book be? As long as it needs to be. Won't that be refreshing.

Awards, egos & shortcuts

I've never been one for awards really. My view has been that the people who get them tend to be the people who least deserve them, often because the people who deserve them are too busy doing the actual stuff to bother chasing awards.

But I've kind of softened that attitude recently. The Open CourseWare Consortium ran a Research Excellence Award, and I put in a case for our OER Research Hub, which I'm delighted to say we won. Why did I put a case in? Because I think it is excellent. But also because awards do three things:

1) They act as a shortcut - instead of explaining why something/someone is doing a good job you can just say 'award-winning'. 

2) It helps - we have researchers on the project and this may help get further funding to keep them, or enable them to get other jobs. Being sniffy about awards seems churlish then.

3) It felt nice - it's not all about the altruism I'll admit, it felt kinda nice to be given an award, even if I couldn't be there to collect it. Here is the team:

Having got the taste for this award malarkey, at the prompting of my Pro-Vice Chancellor Belinda Tynan and boss, Patrick McAndrew, I put a case in for the Honorary ICDE Chair in OER. And that was successful too. The same reasons apply as above, but I would also add, I'm really excited here because it links in with the UNESCO OER Chairs, so I'll be linking up with great people such as Wayne Mackintosh, Rory McGrath and Fred Mulder. 

And, in case you were wondering, just a slight bow or curtesy is appropriate on greeting me now.