The Ed Techie

In yer Facebook

A few people have blogged the Guardian report "Students tell universities: Get out of MySpace", based on the JISC project, in which the message from students seems to be that they want a separate space and don't want universities and educators invading it.

This will be all that many doubters need as justification to say that we shouldn't be bothering with all this social networking stuff. Here's why I think we should ignore that advice, or rather we should ignore it in a particular way.

Firstly, the use of networks changes - after the initial flurry of hitting people with a wet fish or becoming a vampire, people's use of a network settles down I think. So how students feel about FB a year from now will be different from how they feel now.

Secondly, we provide tools and services that help them learn, but don't direct their learning. We are not 'in' Facebook in the same way we are 'in' a VLE, where we monitor progress and contribution. Rather, universities can provide tools (like the FB ones we are developing) which help students learn between themselves.

Thirdly, if this is where they are spending a lot of their time, it is convenient to have some of their formal learning data in here - even if it's just notifications of updates from their VLE. It acts as a base camp then for other systems. This will be the key to why students will want some form of university input in their social network - convenience.

But I do agree that we shouldn't go barging in there and imposing formal systems - they'll only go someplace else. Going out to where students are rather than bringing them into our systems (or doing both more likely), has huge implications for what you design and  do. As soon as you start developing tools for this space, a whole range of applications occur to you that don't when you are inside the formal education space - they tend to be about facilitating connections, adding fun and being viral. Because your app has to survive in the social network ecosystem, this makes you develop ones that are perhaps better suited to the learner's needs than when you control the ecosystem.

The VLE/LMS is dead

(but we'll probably take five years to realise it). Scott Leslie has coined the term Loosely coupled teaching, for the assembly of a number of different, third party apps to do your teaching with. This differs from a PLE in that it is still the educator who provides the tools, they just bypass the institutional systems.  Scott's post set me thinking and I had something of an epiphany (okay, I know I'm slow) - whereas I have been using the odd application you could completely set up your course outside of the institution.

What might you want to use? For my course I could use the following:

• For content and discussion - wetpaint or wikispaces, upload the content, each page has its own forum, and students get to control the content. Or I could create a blog wherein each post is an activity, this has the advantage that students can subscribe. I'd probably go the wiki route though.
• Dialogue - I'd probably encourage everyone to sign up for Twitter or Jaiku, to create a low-level, non-intrusive dialogue between students. We might also need some ongoing discussion board.
• Virtual meetings - I'd use Flashmeeting and schedule regular sessions.
• News and updates - I'd use a blog and get students to subscribe.
• Quiz/informal assessment tools - there are a bunch of these around e.g. Blogquiz where you can embed them in your own page. There's a lot of commercial stuff too, so I think there is room for better free services in this area.

Apart from that I would use any tool as and when you needed it. The wikispace would be the hub, and hopefully you could hang these apps off it easily enough. An alternative would be a Netvibes/Pageflakes space.

Firstly, what are the issues in doing it this way:

• Authentication - this is quite a big one. Students are authenticated via the University database and this feeds through to the VLE and related systems. Single sign on is obviously a big plus here. For small courses you could manually enrol your students on your wiki (if you didn't want it to be open to all), but for some of our courses we have 1000+ students, so that isn't scaleable. Having said that, this is not a problem that is insurmountable. Authentication isn't really my subject area, but with openid, Shibboleth etc people are moving in this direction. What I want is to be able to apply the OU authentication to any site I want, so if I create a wiki I simply tell the OU authentication system to include that url. Maybe it can do this already? The issue of roles is more complicated, but again if we start on this now, it's not impossible to crack.
• Convenience - there is a degree of convenience for both academic and student in having all the tools packaged in the VLE. However, I think there is also an increasing frustration at being limited to these tools, and also an increased ability to cope with a range of tools.
• Support - if you have one centralised system then you can offer centralised support also. If every academic is using a different collection this becomes more difficult. However, these tools are all pretty easy to use, and one could easily have a collection of supported ones.
• Reliability - if we house the VLE then we can guarantee the server times and service level agreement. If it is housed on an external system you have no control if it goes down. This is true and something that keeps IT people awake at night, but this surrendering control is going to be one of those things we just have to get used to as we use more third party apps simply because they're better.
• Monitoring -  one of the tools that a VLE offers is the ability to monitor a student or cohort's progress. These can be useful tools in identifying problems and offering support. While a loosely coupled system wouldn't offer this at the individual level, there are an increasing number of sophisticated analytical tools available (as Tony Hirst repeatedly tries to get me to realise) which will provide much of this information.

That might seem like a big enough list to make you stick with your VLE, but wait, here come the benefits:

• Better quality tools - because offering each of these loosely coupled elements is what each company does, it is in their interest to make them really good. This means they stay up to date, have better features, and look better than most things produced in higher education.
• Modern look and feel - related to the above, these tools often look better, and also their use makes a course feel more modern to a user who is raised on these tools compared with the rather sterile, dull systems they encounter in higher ed.
• Appropriate tools - because they are loosely coupled the educator can choose whatever ones they want, rather than being restricted to the limited set in the VLE. This is one of the biggest draws I feel - as an academic if I want a particular tool I don't have to put a request in to IT and wait a year to get a reduced quality version, I just go ahead and use it.
• Cost - using a bunch of free tools has got to be cheaper hasn't it?
• Avoids software sedimentation - when you have institutional systems they tend to embody institutional practice which becomes increasingly difficult to break. Having loosely coupled system makes this easier, and also encourages people to think in different ways.
• Disintermediation happens - this isn't really a benefit, just an observation. If a services can be disintermediated then it will be. In this case the central VLE system is disintermediated as academics use a variety of freely available tools.

On balance then, I think this shift to loosely coupled, freely available third party systems will happen. It won't happen overnight, and it will follow a succession model, but I would place money on this being the direction things take. Thank goodness I haven't just published a book on VLEs eh? Doh!

Some quick opensocial thoughts

What with travelling back from Oz and catching up on work I've not had time to really look at Google's opensocial much. Not that there is much to look at currently, except some big announcements. If you don't know what it is, it is an open API approach from Google with a host of partners to allow users to easily create social tools which can be used in more than one location. So, here a week later than everyone else, are my thoughts on it.

Let's get the Facebook thing out of the way first - opensocial is the social networking technology equivalent of a politician waiting to see what their opponents propose and then suggesting the opposite as policy. So, whereas Facebook allows people to develop applications for Facebook, those applications are not easily portable anywhere else, and the data stays inside Facebook. It's classic walled garden stuff. This is the biggest complaint against FB, so naturally it's where Google should attack. Opensocial, in theory anyway, allows you to create tools which will port across to any platform or site that signs up to their API. This is smart - Google doesn't have to go and develop a social networking platform to compete with FB, it just makes the other networks suddenly seem more attractive to developers in particular. And if developers start creating cool opensocial apps, but don't bother with creating a bespoke FB one, then suddenly those other networks look more attractive to users too.

Ironically, FB being closed may be a good thing in the long run, because it forces Google to be open. Google have a decent record here with Google Maps (and the famous don't be evil motto), but without FB on the scene would they have gone for such an open approach? Maybe not.

From an elearning perspective, it has potential. We have been developing FB applications, but if we developed opensocial ones then users could port them wherever they like. The implication is that the PLE is a step nearer - we (the university) could create opensocial tools, for users to assemble in the platform of their choice. As RSS does for content, so might opensocial do for collaboration, and that's no bad thing.

I just need Tony Hirst to develop an app now...

Is academic referencing anachronistic?

One of the hallowed practices we teach students is how to properly reference sources. This is deeply entrenched in academic practice - we often give explicit marks for it in assessment, teach it as a key skill, give explicit methods to follow and demand it in publication. As such you could view it as a cornerstone of the enculturation process that is higher education - we are bringing people in to the culture of higher education and referencing is one means of exhibiting your membership of this club.

Let's think about why it's important. There are two main reasons that I can see:

1. To properly acknowledge the work of others. The act of referencing provides a clear framework for avoiding plagiarism since it positively encourages students to reference others and thus removes ignorance as an excuse.
2. To allow readers to locate any sources for themselves. This acts as both a check on the author (they can't make up references or misrepresent them), and also promotes knowledge sharing.

Reason 1 is still valid obviously, now more than ever perhaps. But reason 2? Isn't that a pre-Google motivation? The reason why I think it's worth raising it is that the necessity for strict referencing guidelines and their structure is determined by the need to locate physical objects in a library. Also there is an inherent bias in these guidelines towards a) text and b) traditional forms of publication. The attempts to incorporate online resources often seem clumsy.

So why do we need it anyway? If I quote from a paper, I can either link to it, or you can simply find it by Googling the quote. Search replaces memory - I don't need to remember where I saw something, just what I saw, since I can always find it again. While teaching people to properly acknowledge the work of others is essential (and here I think blogging provides a very useful example of good practice), increasingly I feel that the need to master the Harvard (or whatever) referencing method is anachronistic. We should teach the important of the process , ie that you must properly acknowledge work and make it easy for people to locate.

Learning design as aspirin for the web 2.0 headache

In the last couple of posts I talked about some of the ways being online, and web 2.0 in particular, challenges some of our assumptions of higher education. The whole web 2.0 thing represents something of a problem, or headache if you will, for higher ed. On the one hand we can see how enthusiastic people are for it, and how it genuinely creates user participation, community, and quality content. All things we'd like to have in higher ed. And on the other we cherish lots of aspects of higher ed that seem at odds with it, such as the quality assurance of content, careful support and structure, hierarchical structures, etc.

So, one of the things I've been working on at Macquarie is how we can bridge this gap. I've been focusing on learning design (in its broadest, not IMS sense), but I would see that as only one means of attacking the problem. I've written a paper for the LAMS conference on this with James Dalziel, so when I give that I'll post the slides and do slidecast, and I'll also work it up into a longer chapter.

For now though, here are some ways in which learning design could help ease the 2.0 headache:

• Meno’s paradox – or, the need for guidance if you prefer. Learners still often seek guidance and structure. For some subjects they are satisfied with creating this structure themselves, for example by finding resources such as blog postings, tutorials, articles, podcasts and video clips. For other subjects, particularly when the subject is itself complex, or the learner feels less confident in the subject area, then providing a scaffolding structure is essential to help the learner build concepts and skills in a robust manner.
• Granularity of learning – in the post on granularity, I argued that the size of educational unit we commonly recognise has been largely determined by physical factors. If learning designs were created and shared by a community of users, what might be thought of as a Flickr for learning designs, and these could be run by individuals, or by groups of interest, then many of the restrictions on size which derive from a hierarchical, centralised model disappear. I've used the the music industry as an analogy previously, but in education perhaps a more relevant model is that of blogging. Prior to the advent of blogs, the type of academic output was usually limited to books or journal articles. The granularity of these was partly driven by the economics of publishing, as Shirky argues:
  “Analog publishing generates per-unit costs -- each book or magazine requires a certain amount of paper and ink, and creates storage and transportation costs. Digital publishing doesn't. Once you have a computer and internet access, you can post one weblog entry or one hundred, for ten readers or ten thousand, without paying anything per post or per reader. In fact, dividing up front costs by the number of readers means that content gets cheaper as it gets more popular, the opposite of analog regimes."
  With the advent of blogging, academics (as well as many other bloggers) have found the format liberating, so that blog posts can vary in size from small links with comments to full essays.
• Topography of formality – as with granularity, a set of user generated learning designs allows users to bundle their recent experience together into a course which can be formally recorded more frequently. This would be possible not only because the monopoly of formality is removed from universities, but also because a distributed model of learning design production is the best way to attack the long tail of possible learner interests. If a user wants to find small courses to formally accredit their understanding of highland knitting patterns, history of Sydney in the 1960s or anthropology amongst football fans, then most current formal providers will not meet their requirements, but a sufficiently distributed pool of user generated designs might.
• Web 2.0 quality – much of the concern educators have around web 2.0 is of the quality, and how it can be assured. A set of user generated learning designs could go someway to addressing this by providing a pedagogical structure around resources, and those resources are then changeable. Users can see who has created any given learning design, so some designers may be trusted more than others, rather like sellers and buyers on eBay gain reputational status by recommendations from other users. Similarly, users will be able to comment on designs, thus providing information and context for other users. However, by allowing users to create and select learning sequences it is necessary to accept some of the bottom-up metrics mentioned previously, as the ‘filtering on the way in’ approach currently used in education is replaced by filtering on the way out. This is necessary to encourage participation.
• Personalisation – if a learning design pool reached a sufficient critical mass, then users will be able to select designs that are appropriate to them in a number of different ways: subject area, style of learning, level, range of resources, duration, assessment method, etc.

For these to be realisable we would need very easy means of generating and sharing learning designs, which is where tools such as LAMS and also the OU's Compendium (we have adapted a prototype of this for learning design, which I'll release soon).

Last in the series, gratuitous Home and Away daggy tourist photo:

 

The topography of formality

Just as we think of learning being bundled into a convenient course package (see last post) so we think of the formalisation of learning being grouped into large chunks. Informal learning is difficult to recognise and accredit, and is thus often overlooked in favour of formal education. There is an intrinsic paradox with informal learning – in order to reward and recognise it, then it needs to be formalised in some manner. So, even if we accept that informal (or if you prefer non-formal) learning will be brought in to the fold increasingly, it still needs to be formalised in some manner.

If we were to consider the formalisation of learning as a topography then currently it is a flat plain with a few high peaks, rather like skyscrapers in a desert, representing courses. The learner traverses this landscape over their lifetime, most of it spent on the flat plain, with no easy access to formal recognition, and is then requested to climb large peaks of formality, such as a postgraduate course.

This bears little resemblance to how they actually learn, which will have some peaks, but will be more evenly distributed.

In the online world however, this topography could be subject to considerable change. The peaks become shallower, but more frequent, so it is more akin to an archipelago. In this model, the digitisation of content and interaction allows users to gather evidence of informal learning on a daily basis. They may then choose to bundle this into a formally recognised event, for example by having their portfolio assessed, or engaging in a ‘micro-course’ which demonstrates their ability in a given area, or by creating a meta-document of their own, for example a reflective blog post that draws on the different pieces of evidence.

Ironically, this is actually how educators conduct their professional lives. An educator may engage in a research project and they will formalise this learning through conference presentations or journal articles. They will bundle together recent experience into published text books, or project reports. In this respect the academic profession has a number of recognised means of formalising learning. Many other professions and individuals do not have such readily available and acknowledged means of unifying recent learning and experience.

Oh, and why not - gratuituous Bondi tourist photo:

(Photos: Gavinsblog http://www.flickr.com/photos/gavinsblog/91871302/, Stefe http://www.flickr.com/photos/stefe/236802005/)

The granularity of education

(slight apology for repeating elements from previous posts, but worth gathering in one place).

One of the things I've been thinking about here in Sydney is how learning design can help bridge the gap between web 2.0 and higher education. I'm writing a paper on this which sets out the argument in detail, but I'll post elements of it here as I go along.

One issue I think web 2.0 raises for education is about the granularity of education. I've blogged before about the granularity of ideas, so this is extending that a little.

The digitisation of content and its frictionless distribution on a global scale is challenging many of the assumptions we have about the format of content and the underlying business models that support these. Often these are so ingrained in our view of the content and its related businesses that we do not even recognise them as assumptions.

Prior to digitisation, all content was bound up in its physical form. That is, you had to buy or obtain, the physical copy of a book, CD or DVD. The business models followed the demands of this physical form – CDs require production, packaging, storage, distribution and retail. The record company and record stores are thus a logical necessity in a market for music CDs. But with the digitisation of content many of these demands disappear. MP3s can be distributed freely online, they do not require production (in the physical format sense), or a distribution network.

What web 2.0 adds to this process is the removal of the filtering function performed by intermediaries, which were a necessary part of the model. Prior to the internet artists could make tapes or CDs of their own music and try and bypass the record companies, but they lacked the distribution network. With the advent of the internet they had access to a potential global distribution method, but they lacked the promotion and means of people finding their music. With web 2.0 content discovery is facilitated through services such as LastFM and iTunes, whereby users can find recommendations, see similar artists and people with similar tastes. Thus the filtering process of the record companies is also removed.

This leads to some profound implications for content industries, including newspapers, television, music, film, etc. For instance in the music industry, record companies are beginning to be disintermediated by artists, with artists (e.g. Radiohead) offering free downloads of their albums.

It also changes the nature of our relationship to content. Weinberger says of music

"For decades we've been buying albums. We thought it was for artistic reasons, but it was really because the economics of the physical world required it: Bundling songs into long-playing albums lowered the production, marketing, and distribution costs ... As soon as music went digital, we learned that the natural unit of music is the track.”

Education has some similarities with content industries, but also some significant differences. However, it is worth considering whether we hold similar assumptions about the granularity of education as we held about the granularity of music, which would be subject to change with digitisation of content and provision of online services. Higher education, as we normally conceive of it, is typified by the undergraduate degree course. This takes 3-4 years continuous study, comprises a number of modules, has regular exam and assessment sessions, is taught face to face, and students are assessed in terms of the knowledge they demonstrate of the taught modules. There are, of course, variations to each of these elements – study can occur at a distance, it can be part-time, assessment can be portfolio and continuous, there can be breaks in study, etc. But each of these adaptations is usually mapped on to the existing, standard model. They represent modifications to it, not replacements.

However, it may be that many of these assumptions are bound up in the economic models that have their roots in the physical aspects of education. For example, if you are requiring students to come to a physical campus, then it makes sense to bundle all their modules in to a short time span to minimise inconvenience and to manage staff time. If the assessment is then based on an exam, it similarly follows that you package this up into one event. These restrictions have then moulded what we deem to constitute a higher education experience, but like the album, perhaps this packaging is merely a product of the physical format, not a ‘natural’ means of structuring it. Even when courses have moved online, they have usually followed similar conventions in terms of length and assessment.

The digitisation of content, and perhaps more significantly, dialogue, means that the type of learning event we can include and assess now changes. It is not just the standard lecture, but can include video, blogs, podcasts, etc. It can also include discussions between learners, in the form of asynchronous text forums, recorded virtual meetings, instant messaging transcripts, etc. So the type of content we assess the student’s understanding of changes, which will inevitably have consequences for the way we assess it. The formal exam or multiple choice question bears little relationship to the student’s experience when connected to such a range of media.

Just as blogs allow us to have varying sizes in our academic writing, from single links and comments to full essays, so user generated learning designs might facilitate a wide range of 'course' sizes.

Oh, and a gratuitous whale watching picture taken by the boat camera we were on (sometimes a phone camera isn't up to the job):

How do I? video search

Tony Hirst has created a neat little search interface using Google's Coop customizable search engine. It searches a number of video archives to find instructional videos - he seeds it with the phrase 'How do I?'  He explains it here, so I won't bother, and thus save myself potential embarrassment by getting it wrong.

I will say it returned some very good results for me. I put in a search for How do I.. create a podcast. And the resources it came back with were great. Having just written a piece on podcasting for a course, this reinforces to me the point that increasingly there is little point in me writing guides or even finding resources - students can do much better themselves and find the ones they want. This doesn't make me totally redundant though (my mortgage lender will be pleased to hear), I think my role then is to place podcasts in an academic context by creating meaningful activities and perhaps producing other material which relates to pedagogy, broadcasting, or whatever - ie to make some links to material they might not get through such means. This is a good thing - educators should concentrate on what they do best, not writing how to guides or acting as a search engine.

Tony says he knocked it up in twenty minutes. This also demonstrates the difference in approach in the web 2.0 world 'out there' and the academic world. You just know if this was a university (any university) project it would have been funded for a year, they'd set up careful consultation, draw up a set of user specifications, run some workshops, produce a report, start coding, get to a demo stage that worked only on a very small subset of video, then disband.

Anyway, give it a go.

Listphile - a man thing?

(via Dan Taylor) I have had a play with Listphile a site that lets you (yes you've guessed it) create and share lists. Yes, that's it - it never ceases to amaze me how small some of the ideas behind these web 2.0 startups are. You create a list which you can pull different media in to and others can edit it.

Although it's a small idea, you can see how this might grow. Rather like the real world, in the online world there is an almost infinite variety of very small ecological niches that some company (organism) will exploit. Making and sharing lists won't change your life, but it is something we do a lot. I used to carry a  personal top ten films, novels, Spurs players lists in my head, which were often readjusted, as if I was going to be asked by a journalist for these at any moment. I think this is a man thing, men like making lists (readers of this blog will know I'm not averse to a list).

So, just to test it out, and not because I like making lists or anything, here's my Asian horror film list. Feel free to add to, or edit, it.

I was going to add in some potential educational uses here to justify my playing with it, but instead (in a smug, postmodern, self referential way) I've created a Listphile list - Educational uses of Listphile. Actually when you start doing this it does seem like a really useful tool - I've done this list with a formal education cohort of students in mind, but you could apply the same to a broader subject community. Some of these would be really useful I think - best research question and best resource in particular. So much so, I think I'll add them in to my course next year. I would really like you to add this list (the Asian horror one, less so).

Teach the people - would you sign up?

Teach the People is a social networking site with an emphasis on learning. It's not up and running yet, so I've registered for a beta invite. It has more of a content focus than a lot of the other sites, claiming that

"Instead of just messaging with other users like on traditional social networking services, users on Teach The People^SM are creating their own communities for fun, education, innovation; whatever! User can then fill those communities with as much content & media as they desire"

I hope it works, but I'm not sure myself, and this was based on my initial reaction - I didn't instantly get the point as one does with social networking sites where the emphasis is on casual interaction. This goes back to a point I made earlier about whether learning is intrinsically a bit dull? Maybe if you want a learning focus you have to do one of two things:

i) Start with an existing social networking community and introduce learning tools and services in to it. For example, help people use Facebook to aid their vocational tasks, informal learning or formal studies.

ii) Start with an existing learning community and provide it with social networking tools. Take the OU students and alumni for example and provide them with an environment that helps facilitate social interaction, and learning.

In short you need a critical mass starting either from the social or the learning camps. Teach the people may be trying to do both at once, which is too steep a curve to climb. Anyway, when I get my beta invite I'll be able to have a more thorough investigation.