The Ed Techie

Meme: Passion Quilt

The Web is Agreement by PSD http://flickr.com/photos/psd/1805709102/in/set-72157602805227511/

I'd like to begin this post with the obligatory sentence for starting any posting on a meme, which goes something like 'I don't usually respond to memes, but I thought I'd do this one.' Except this is the first time I've ever been memed, (by John Connell), so I can't.

In the passion quilt you are meant to state what you are passionate about teaching I think. I work at the Open University, and back in 1998 I developed their first fully online course, called You, your computer and the Net. It was an introduction to how computers and the internet worked and also what you could do with them. It was at level 1, which means that anyone should be able to take it. We made the course entirely online, got students to create web pages as assignments, engage in collaborative activities in discussion forums, etc. We were repeatedly told that it wouldn't work at level 1, and that no-one would want to take it. Of course, the demand was unprecedented, with nearly 15,000 students in its first year. Some hated it to be honest, but for many it was a life-changing experience. They found that not only could they understand this technology, but they loved it. And furthermore they loved studying this way. As one student put it, 'I would study You, your garden and your allotment' if it was online. '

So that is what I am passionate about in teaching - taking technologies, removing the fear from them and getting people to see their potential. I run a Masters level course now, so the life changing moment isn't as common, but I still like to try and get students enthused about the potential of technology in education (you won't be surprised that it's Twitter this year).

I chose this web is agreement poster from Paul Downey because it acts as a reminder to me that the easy path is always to the right. The harder path is to go to the left, but the overall goal is greater if one does

As I understand it, I have to now tag five others to carry this on. I'm going to opt for Open University folk, just to give my go a particular flavour.

Tony Hirst

Grainne Conole

Patrick McAndrew

Doug Clow

Ray Corrigan

Here are the rules:

1. Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students.
2. Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
3. Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to Miguel Guhlin’s original blog entry.
4. Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or blogroll or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce.

 

Blog as educational platform, VLE even

(http://flickr.com/photos/jbird/19650368/ JBrd)

This is really an re. loads of other people post, but I wanted to pull them together for my sake anyway.

There have been a few experiments recently in taking open content and putting it in a blog. Not mindbendingly innovative and yet very powerful when you see it.

I remember Tony showing me something like this around the early 19th century which he had knocked together using a penny farthing, carrots and a chimney sweep (Update: it was Nov 06), and he comments on the recent stuff. Then recently David Wiley took some of his open education course and republished it in WordPress. It looks really neat, enticing, well structured. Looks a damn site more inviting than, say, a Blackboard version of the course might.

Then Jim Groom took the OU's openlearn Goya stuff and put it in Wordpress. Guess what? It looks better than the original.

Brian Lamb (who easily has the best titles for blog posts around) sums it all up nicely and points to a session Jim Groom and D'Arcy Norman are doing at Northern Voice entitled  'Don't call it a blog, call it an educational publishing platform'. Which sums it up really.

There are several things of interest here for us ed techies. The first is that presentation matters. I like the look of these blog courses, and that would make me more inclined to participate in them, make me feel well disposed towards them and make me feel as though the people running them were vaguely modern and knew what they were doing. The aesthetics of the interface is something we pay scant attention to in education.

The second thing is that you may be thinking it's just a blog, it doesn't have tool X or Y that my VLE might have. Well maybe, but I think we're in disruptive technology territory here. Disruptive technology doesn't do the same things better for the same audience, it is often worse on some things, but it offers some new features for a different audience. The new features I would argue here are:

1. Ease of publishing - whether it's your own content or others, getting in to blogs is fairly straightforward
2. Ease of extendability - adding widgets and tools to blogs is just a click away, since blogs have become the universal platform across the web.
3. Openness - you can pull content and tools in from anywhere
4. Ease of navigation - blogs come with an inbuilt navigational structure that is easily co-opted for course structure.

I wonder if this isn't another example of how we in education create complex solutions to complex problems, whereas simple solutions often work better.

Pity the Google generation

(RadioFlyer007 - http://flickr.com/photos/radioflyer007/402409100/ )

First they're told they are the cut and paste generation, then they're told they don't exist.

John amongst others points to the British Library research looking at people's use of virtual libraries. The headlines of the report are that:

i) For some habits there is little evidence that youngsters use the internet particularly differently to others, we all have bad habits

ii) The behaviours people exhibit are: Horizontal information seeking, lots of time navigating, view rather than read, squirreling (ie downloading for later use), quickly assess authority for themselves.

iii) Young people do not find library sites intuitive and prefer Google

iv) Children make narrow relevance judgements e.g. 'does it contain the exact phrase I searched for?' and thus miss relevant documents.

There is a good section towards the end where they take a number of myths about the Google generation and assess whether they are true, giving a confidence on their verdict. For example, they prefer visual over text (Yes), They are expert searchers (No).

A lot of people (e.g. Nicholas Carr) have jumped on this as saying the Google generation a) doesn't exist and b) if it does exist has dumbed down. I think the report is more nuanced than that, some of the Google generation myths are borne out, others less so. This doesn't mean it is a myth overall - they are a generation that has grown up with Google, and that has influenced their behaviour.

Another point to note is that this is about the use of virtual libraries. This paragraph was interesting:

Many librarians have started to experiment with social software in an attempt to get closer to their users. They have a problem. Although research libraries spend millions of pounds providing seamless desktop access to expensive copyrighted electronic content: journals, books and monographs, much of this is news to their users. Either they do not know that the library provides this material, or they get to it, possibly via Google, and assume it’s `free’. Libraries are increasingly between a rock and a hard place: the publisher or search engine gets the credit, they just pick up the tab.

This gets us back to the whole future of content stuff, and fame vs fortune. I think a lot of users simply don't want to know about resources that don't make themselves available. When I'm searching Flickr for photos to use in presentations, I only search for those that have a Creative Commons licence. If you don't have this, you won't even get seen. The same often applies when I'm researching - if I come across a reference that is in a database I can't get access to, or hilariously, expects me to pay to read it, I don't bother (usually). I'll find the same sort of information elsewhere.

So the take away for me would be that the Google generation expect their resources to be freely available, and accessible via Google. Expecting them to go off to walled gardens with obscure search mechanisms is rather insisting they conform to our modes of behaviour, and then deriding them for not doing so seems churlish.

(stefanlucut - http://flickr.com/photos/stefanlucut/710279326/)

On the cut and paste generation report, to me this says 'children are given such crappy unengaging assessment that they can get away with cutting and pasting'. Isn't this relatively good behaviour on their part? They are doing what human beings do best, satisficing. They get away with the minimal effort required to complete the assessment, because it doesn't interest them, and because they can. If we devised better forms of assessment that were more imune to plagiarism and more interesting then you turn these cut and paste habits into research ones. Which brings us full circle - we're failing the Google generation by allowing them to have bad habits. John Connell has a good response on this too.

The Economist debate - my 2p worth

As most people have blogged, there is a debate on social networking in higher education over at the Economist. Ewan Macintosh takes the pro side.

For what it's worth here was the comment I posted:

In some ways the argument is irrelevant - it's like asking 'is alcohol beneficial to study?' You could argue either way, but regardless of what we think students are going to use it anyway.

But, that aside, let's look at what SNS offer - a sense of community, peer support, enthusiastic users, engagement with technology, resource sharing, democratic participation - hmm, these are all things we've been desperate to have in higher education for years. We've largely failed in many of these (as anyone who uses a VLE can attest), so why wouldn't we look at what happens in SNs? It would be remiss of us not to do so.

However, there are some big cultural issues that higher ed will need to get over - in particular HE is based on a very hierarchical model, and is often obsessed with controlling the student experience. In a social network you have to let go. In short you have to accept bottom up over top down - and that will be tough, as it goes against 3000 years of educational instinct.

So, my conclusion - of course higher education should try and adopt principles of social networks and 2.0, but the question is whether it can.

Social objects in education

There's been lots of talk about social objects over the past year. A social object is something (it can be real or virtual) that facilitate conversation, and thus social interaction (Hugh MacLeod gives a good overview of them). Hugh argues that social networks are built around social objects, not vice versa. This may not be true of ego-centric networks, but certainly is for task-centric ones such as Flickr. Hugh's take on them is from a marketing perspective, but as someone who's interested in applying web 2.0 to education, the question I'd want to answer is 'what would a social object be in education?'

On campus that's probably pretty obvious - it can be the lecture or workshop, a book or an article. Online I guess the answer is 'content'. This may seem obvious, but it's significant because poor old content is often shoved to one side in the unseemly scramble to praise dialogue, interaction, community and collaboration. If we take the social object line however, content isn't a nice add-on, it's the starting point for any successful social network (or read community if you prefer).

So this reinstates some of the significance of content, but content-producers shouldn't feel smug because there are a host of implications to this. For a start, it suggests that content only matters to the extent that it acts as a social object. This means that your content has to be good social content - this is not necessarily the same as what we usually think of as good academic content. For instance, content that may be imperfect is often good for encouraging others to participate, or content that is contentious may be better at stimulating debate. The very hard lesson for academics here is that the educational value is not in the content itself but the social interaction it begets.

It also means that content has to exist within a framework of appropriate tools which have the right affordances for the type of social interaction, and within a network of users who use the social objects as nodes.

So, to summarise we need three things for a social object driven mode of education:

1. Content that acts as a social object
2. Tools that facilitate social interaction around these objects
3. A community of learners who find the social objects engaging

Getting that mix right won't be easy, but my guess is that if you do, it'll take off.

The tension between out there and in here

Following on from the Facebook post, the work we have done has raised some interesting tensions between developing for a third party platform and those services provided by the institution, such as the VLE. These will be issues that many universities will have to face in the coming years, so I'll list the ones I think are important here. I don't have any answers to them, I just know they're things we can't ignore. I'll use Facebook as an example to illustrate the points, but they can apply across nearly any third party application which isn't directly integrated into the formal learning experience.

1. Does having interaction across multiple platforms dilute the overall effect? For example, if a subset of students start collaborating in Facebook does this have a negative impact on the dialogue and learning experience for the whole cohort in the VLE?
2. Even if 1 is true, can we do anything about it? Many students are connecting and communicating via Facebook before they even start their courses. It would be unrealistic to expect, or to mandate, that they stop using whatever system they like for communicating. For example, someone else had already created an OU courses profile application in Facebook, so maybe it's better if we deliver these tools.
3. What are the privacy issues and responsibilities? If a university develops applications for a platform is it implicitly endorsing that platform? For example, in Facebook when you join a network the default setting is that everyone in that network can see your full profile. Imagine some unsavoury student X starts bothering student A through this. Student A only joined Facebook because her university had developed some tools for it and seemed to be encouraging it. Where does the responsibility lie in this case?   With the student (for not controlling their settings)? With Facebook? With the university?
4. What are the support issues? For instance on the Open University Facebook page some students have started raising tech support queries. Sometimes they get a response, sometimes they don't, since this isn't an officially recognised support mechanism. Logistically handling queries across multiple platforms will soon become unmanageable. Is this problem exacerbated if the university has a semi-official presence on the platform in question?
5. What are the real benefits? Maybe none, but I think there will be some subtle ones, which research will dig up over the next few years. Will they relate to educational performance, ie those students connected through Facebook tend to do better because they have better quality peer support and find a range of alternative resources. Or will they relate to motivation? Maybe those students in Facebook tend to drop out less because they have peer support and pressure. Or will it influence satisfaction? Students in Facebook tend to rate the course better because they felt better connected to the cohort. Or maybe none of these.

I think the natural instinct of universities (and particularly senior management) when faced with issues such as these is to think 'more control'. As readers of this blog will know, I tend to favour less control, but that doesn't mean it will be a smooth ride. There are some potentially very difficult issues, and a few legal cases, to be addressed as we blur the boundaries between out there and in here.

The Cape Town declaration - some thoughts and suggestions

A group of experts, charities, commercial organisations and interested parties got together in Cape Town to look at the issue of openness in education. The output is this declaration. Before coming on to criticism of it, here are some of the key points:

Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge.

We could argue that, but they're right to bring attention to the growing OER movement.

They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go.

Hooray! Good to see pedagogy get a mention, ie it's not all content. Indeed you could argue that all of the OER effort has been a bit disappointing thus far in its impact on higher education. Maybe that's because the pedagogy angle isn't there.

It then goes a bit content-centric again:

These resources include openly licensed course materials, lesson plans, textbooks, games, software and other materials that support teaching and learning.

But you feel some on the committee argued strongly for the next point:

However, open education is not limited to just open educational resources. It also draws upon open technologies that facilitate collaborative, flexible learning and the open sharing of teaching practices that empower educators to benefit from the best ideas of their colleagues. It may also grow to include new approaches to assessment, accreditation and collaborative learning.

This is at least as, if not more, important than the content. Having technologies that shape the way we communicate and collaborate will have an influence back into education. And as for assessment and accreditation - these are absolutely key to changes in educational practice.

They then propose three strategies:

1. Educators and learners - get involved, so a bottom up drive.
2. Open educational resources - individuals and institutions to release their content. I'm all for this, but again it's a bit content-centric for my liking - 'release the content and they will come' hasn't been shown to be a particularly effective strategy.
3. Open educational policy - governments, school boards etc should make open education a high priority, so the top down balance to 1)

I wouldn't argue with any of these necessarily, although I would have worded the declaration differently. In a thoughtful piece Stephen Downes is very critical. His main point is that it is a closed document, rather foisted on the rest of us from a group of experts. This is hardly in keeping with the spirit of the venture. He puts it thus:

I find myself at odds with the declaration written by a group of mostly American academics and advocates invited by a foundation to a private meeting in South Africa to author a "fixed and final" declaration on open educational resources...

I do not believe that a panel of hand-picked representatives representating overwhelmingly a certain commercial perspective is qualified or able to speak on behalf of the rest of us. The very people they name - "learners, educators, trainers, authors, schools, colleges, universities, publishers, unions, professional societies, policymakers, governments, foundations and others" - are mostly nowhere present in these deliberations.

As he says, why not put it in a wiki?

He also goes on to argue that it is rooted in the education system, and there is little about empowering self-learning, or peer learning. I'd agree with him here. I'm not sure that was their intention, they mention collaborative learning, so maybe they'd argue it is implicit in their statement. But I would have foregrounded it more, something along the lines of

New technologies, open content and an opening up of opportunities to participate means that radically new models of learning are now possible. These can be based around rich content discovery, social networks, informal learning, commons based peer production, loosely coupled systems, democratic communities and a long tail of interests. Addressing these challenges will require new models of pedagogy, accreditation, guidance, support, licensing and content production.

So will I sign up for it? Yes, there are more people aligned against open education than behind it, so the last thing we need to do is factionalise within our own camp. But, next time, let's eat our own dog food eh? 

Do you need to love a tool for it to be useful?

A recent survey over at the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies (via John Dale) had responses from elearning professionals, asking them their favourite tools for learning.

Can you guess the top 5? Here they are:

1. Firefox
2. Delicious
3. Skype
4. Google
5. Powerpoint

Now, given our recent VLE debates, on to the interesting bit. Where do you think Moodle came? Answer, a respectable 12th. And Blackboard? It didn't make the top 100.

Now, there are several things to consider here. Firstly, these were e-learning professionals that were surveyed, and their responses may well be different from the vast majority of other educators. The point being that Blackboard isn't aimed at elearning professionals necessarily, it's aimed at the 'average' (I know there's no such thing) educator who doesn't want to think about elearning. Just as Windows isn't really aimed at IT professionals, it's for the big market that occupies the centre of the distribution curve.

Secondly, the tools mentioned are useful for the individual, but that doesn't mean they solve some of the institutional issues that may be involved, such as authentication.

Okay, I've done my even handed part, now let's look at what it might also tell us. What a lot of the top 100 have in common is that they are customisable, adaptable and personal. Which brings me on to the title of this post - a lot of these tools are ones people really love, usually for one or more of the following reasons:

i) They do one job really well

ii) They are customisable/personal

iii) They have an easy social dimension

Now if you are the purveyor of, say a commercial VLE, or any commercial elearning software, you should ask yourself if your product really hits any of those targets.

The alternative view is that although individuals may love some tools that doesn't really matter - it's senior management who buy enterprise systems and 'loved by users' is not usually on their specification list. Shame.

Wealth of Networks session

On Friday John Naughton ran an interesting session around Benkler's Wealth of Networks. It was particularly welcome as I feel rather guilty that I've never actually finished Benkler's magnum opus.

John first set the context for the book, talking about the semiotics of the title and borrowed Castell's term about informed bewilderment to describe our current state when we look at the changes around us. That is, we have no shortage of data about what's happening, but we are still unsure as to what it all means. Benkler's book can be seen as an attempt to cast a scholarly light on this state of bewilderment.

Part of the reason for this bewilderment is that our analytical tools are not as useful as they once were (which is not to say they are completely useless). As John put it economics can be categorised as the analysis of scarcity, whereas what we have in a digital world is abundance. The scarce resource now is attention, and here the competition is now greatly increased from the days of TV dominance.

John also talked about the 'convergence fantasies' of many industries which always boil down to 'converge on to my device'. He argued that convergence happened long ago - onto the net.

He summarised Benkler's book as having six main arguments:

• Until recently we had a highly industrialised info economy
• This marginalised non market cultural production (“social production”)
• ICT has reduced the cost of production and publication
• Greatly enhanced power and potential of social production
• This has major implications for economic, social cultural and political life
• There will be a struggle between old world and new world.

We then went on to discuss three issues:

1. How plausible is Benkler's analysis?
2. What might it mean for education (and the OU)?
3. What might it mean for society?

In terms of 1) I made the point that to an extent it was empirically true - that in open source communities, wikipedia, flickr, etc social production was already a major economic force. So even though critics (Carr, Gorman, Keen et al) may argue against it, the best response is 'yes but look at the facts'. I was reminded of Clay Shirky's memorable phrase regarding AT & T programmers when they first saw open source support in action:

"They didn't care that they'd seen it work in practice, because they already knew it couldn't work in theory."

John set up a wiki for the session which has further references. 

LAMS presentation as slidecast

The world's least engaging voice returns with another slidecast. This is the presentation I gave to the LAMS conference (via Skype). It looks at the differences between web 2.0 and higher ed and how learning design can help bridge the gap. I've covered this in previous posts, but just in case you want the semi-live version.

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