The Ed Techie

NYT enters education market, and the changing nature of newspapers

The New York Times has announced an inititiative that will provide content and social networking to students and educators. They claim it is

"a new online initiative that pairs Times content with faculty course material for both credit-bearing and continuing education courses. Educators will now have the opportunity to select Times articles, archival content, graphics and multimedia content, including videos and Webcasts, gathered around specific subjects, and make them available to students online, along with other course materials"

Perhaps more interestingly they edge towards a 'Facebook for learning' when they propose

"In addition to enhanced course offerings for college students and lifelong learners, the Knowledge Network will serve as a global networking and professional and academic development resource for faculty, students and alumnae. Users will be able to share work with colleagues, create their own academic or professional ePortfolios (digital repositories of a person's work), invite peer review and establish professional contact with people around the globe based on common academic pursuits and research."

At the moment it is all based around their own system (they are partnering with Epsilen) so it feels like another publisher saying 'come to our system', so I'm not sure how open it is. For instance can you pull RSS feeds into your system, can you add applications to it, etc.

This is not particularly new - a number of publishers have done similar things. But it does further demonstrate the convergence of industries, and the increased erosion of the educational monopoly enjoyed by universities. At the moment they are selling it as a service that educators can use, but if we look at that second quote, it doesn't take a massive leap of imagination to see other providers offering accreditation and freelance tuition in such a marketplace.

The other reason people will find for dismissing it is the traditional divide between 'journalistic' and 'academic' content. While there is some truth in this, it is a division that is becoming less binary, and increasingly fuzzy. This is partly because being online removes many of the constraints that forced newspapers to produce journalistic material in the first place. These include:

• Space - in the physical format space is at a premium, thus any extended interview, analysis or commentary is usually cut to fit the page and allow for a last minute advert. This is one of the common complaints of both journalists and their interviewees. Online there is no such restriction, so you can have a brief, 'traditional' piece, but also a much longer version.
• Audience - a newspaper has to aim at a general audience, and thus is often accused of dumbing down. Again this need not be the case online, because you can reach a global audience, not a national or regional one. Therefore what would be a small interest piece in your printed version can have a sufficiently long tail with a global audience. And, if space doesn't cost, then why not publish it?
• Format - the newspaper is restricted to print and the odd photograph, although as noted, the exact size and quantity of both elements will be determined by its physical limitations. Online of course there is the freedom to have different media types: audio, video, animation. But perhaps more significantly there is the freedom to play around with the format of these media types - you can have blogs which have a different feel from an official article, or podcasts, or online debates, etc. This allows the format to suit the subject, not the subject to be manipulated to fit the confines of the format.
• The journalistic filter - when a newspaper was purely a physical object then the process of producing an article with all of the above limitations acted as a filter. It required specialist knowledge, which was embodied in the journalist. This person didn't have specialist knowledge of the subject area they were writing about (although they are often broad subject area specialists, e.g technology writers), but they did know about the process of creating newspaper copy. When the limitations are removed, so is the need for much of this expertise. We are all journalists now. This means that a lot of material doesn't need to go through the filter of the journalist, a process which is subject to misinterpretation, bias, editing, and mistakes, but instead can come from the expert themselves. Admittedly not all experts are good writers, but the process of disintermediation has commenced.

And in education the same process is happening in reverse. There the academic article was the unit of thought currency, but this was also largely determined by physical limitations. Online we are finding that the blog posting, and perhaps more significantly the distributed debate, is often more informative.

The upshot of all this is that those of us in education shouldn't be sniffy about journalistic content - it'll be knocking on your lecture hall door any time now.

(Thanks to Tony for the link)

Software sedimentation

I came across this term from Jaron Lanier (in an essay in the book The Next Fifty Years). He writes:

"Software sedimentation is a process whereby not only protocols, but the ideas embedded in them become mandatory. An example is the idea of the file.... Files are now taught to students as a fact of life as fundamental as a photon, even though they are a human invention."

I think there is truth in this, and I like the mental image of sediment building up within the concepts built in to software and technology. To expand the idea out somewhat, the same might be true of many educational practices. The lecture for example (stop groaning at the back), is mandatory because of the physical and cultural sedimentation embodied in university campuses, so that to many academics and students, it seems natural. But like files in software, there are other ways to approach the particular problem (how to move someone from a position of not knowing to knowing in this case). InLanier's example software is part of the problem, but for other examples, software and technology can be part of the solution - because by using new technologies it makes practitioners think about new ways of doing things. Sedimentation can be very hard, and costly, to remove, and potentially new technologies offer a means of achieving this.

This does however, argue for a more radical shift in our deployment of e-learning technologies than my succession model proposes. The danger of a slow change is that it allows sediment to build up - as an obvious example, VLEs that simply mirror the lecture practice.

The butterfly learner

As I mentioned in my previous post, I'm encouraging Patrick McAndrew to blog. His first proper post is a goodie - it sets out his concept of the Butterfly learner. This is an idea we have discussed over beer/coffee before, but he has never got around to publishing formally. Enter the blog and you have an immediate outlet.

Anyway, the idea is that small changes in the environment can have unforeseen effects on learners. As Patrick says, this may have significant implications for learning design work, since it may be that learning is just intrinsically chaotic. There are too many variables and the inter-relation between them is too complex to model effectively. I have seen something of this in practice - when I chaired the large first level course T171, we had around 12,000 students. We couldn't house them all on one server at the time, so we split them across two and replicated the forum structure on each. They were studying the same course material, had the same activities, and the same support structure. What emerged was two markedly different groups however. On one server they were very active, loved the course and engaged in all the activities, and on the other server the forums were dominated by complaints, arguments, calls for clarification, and not much activity around the actual course material.

This might not in itself demonstrate that learning is essentially chaotic - one of the influencing factors seemed to be the nature of the early dominant voices in the forums. If they were positive then the cohort tended to follow and if they were negative then we got a largely negative cohort. This is a well known phenomenon in group psychology, and you can see how it would happen. So it is a variable, and one I didn't control for, but that doesn't necessarily mean learning is chaotic - just complex.

But if there are enough such effects, then it may as well be chaotic as far as the average educator is concerned, because it becomes impossible to control for all such variables. Take the example above - even if I had thought about it beforehand it would have been difficult to control with such a large cohort. I could have split groups according to the outcomes of psychometric tests maybe, or planted some 'happy' stooges in each forum to get it going on the right note, but these all seem rather unlikely (not to mention dodgy from an ethical point of view). And that is assuming that a happy forum is best for learning anyway. What I didn't do (and regret now) is look at the results between the two sets of students. Did the nature of the dialogue have any effect on outcome? My guess is it probably didn't in the end.

Back to learning then, and maybe this is why the standard lecture has persevered for so long. Learning may be chaotic, so we should remove as many variables as possible. The lecture is a fairly stripped down educational experience. We also tend to know a good lecturer when we see one. The problem is that even if we wanted the lecture to continue unchanged (and I don't) the nature of learning has changed - when I am online I have access to people, resources, my own notes, tools, services, instantly. Learning becomes much more embedded in our everyday lives and not something we parcel out to a specific room. We are going to have to learn how to learn in this environment. And if it is chaotic, then we will need some ways of controlling that chaos (I'm mixing definitions of the term chaos in that sentence, but never mind for now).

Books, playlists and the granularity of ideas

I have mentioned this before, but thought I'd revisit it (hey it's the summer holidays, time for reruns all round). In Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger gives a nice analysis of how the digitisation of content has altered our perceptions of what we thought was the basic unit. In talking about music he says

"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."

Nick Carr disagrees with Weinberger, stating the artistic structure of the album, using Exile on Main Street as an example (wonder why he didn't choose a Steps album, say). Clay Shirky has a good refutation of Nick's claim saying that if the artistic integrity of Exile were as strong as he claims, then it would survive digitisation - it doesn't when you look on iTunes, most people download Tumbling Dice. I'm with Shirky/Weinberger on this, although I know what Nick Carr means, but the album didn't have an intrinsic artistic integrity, rather the economics as outlined by Weinberger came first, and then some artists began to explore the album as an integrated unit. If digitisation had come first then maybe they would have explored artistic avenues open to them through that means, but they would have been unlikely to come up with the album as the logical conclusion to musical output. It's atoms and economics that made this so.

I wonder if the same isn't true of books. They have a longer pedigree and greater cultural value than albums, but essentially they are containers for ideas. Their format, size and existence is largely a result of the economics of atoms. An individual could only be in one place at one time and speak to an audience of limited size. Therefore to get an idea across to a wider audience you need a format that is transportable, easily interpreted and has a low(ish, illiteracy still being a big problem) threshold to participation. This is something the church understood early on.

In the academic world we also have the article, which because of the economics of stuff, is bundled together with other articles in to a journal, ie a smallish book. So even though the article may be smaller in size, it still follows the economic route determined by the book (with the interesting addition that the publishers don't do any of the work involved in its production and take all the money). But with the digitisation of knowledge then it is free to follow its own path.

I don't doubt that the book will continue to exist, but it will not hold the monopoly on being the conduit for ideas. Just like Exile on Main St, some books have an integrity that justifies the format (ironically Weinberger's book is one such), but just like many albums used to be a couple of good singles plus filler, so many books seem to be a good idea stretched over 100,000 words. This isn't the author's fault necessarily, they had a good idea, and the book is the dominant means of getting it out.

But this need no longer be the case - an online essay, a blog, a podcast, a collection of video clips - all these are perfectly viable means for disseminating ideas. As well as the book losing its monopoly, so does text - audio and video can be used effectively. We only used text because it was transportable when ideas were tied in with physical objects. And if ideas become the equivalent of tracks, then perhaps the user creates the equivalent of a playlist by pulling these together around a subject of their choice.

Blogging the course design process - leftovers and sausages

I've mentioned this in passing before, but it deserves a full posting I think - my colleague James Aczel is keeping a blog as he chairs the production of a new course in our Masters in Online and Distance Education. The course is H809, "Practice-based research in educational technology", and the title was even voted on by readers and students. I would like to see more courses keeping blogs during the design phase, because a) it might help create a buzz around the course before it starts, b) it acts as a useful resource once the course has started and c) it probably aids the design process itself if you have to explain and reflect upon it.

There are two views on this. The first is that, like James, you should make the process open. Another colleague of mine has commented that the course production process sometimes feels like a big feast where we have all these great ideas and discussions, and then what we give students are the leftovers. While I think that's a bit of an extreme way of putting it. Most OU courses are not light on content, so if it is leftovers, it's a lot of leftovers, but he means intellectually I suppose. Keeping a blog is one way of inviting everyone to the feast.

The other view is that the design process is a filtering one. While we may have lots of great discussion, we also have a lot of needles digression also. What the final course represents is not some much leftovers but finally crafted perfection. Continuing our food analogy, course production is like making sausages - you can enjoy the end product but seeing how they're made would really put you off.

I'm going to take a middle route between these - part of what we do as educators is devise our best guess about what students will need and want. This is the finished course. But increasingly we are appreciating that one size doesn't fit all (education may be the last bastion of this approach), and exposing the process at least helps broaden your perspective. Keeping a blog represents a good middle route too I think - James is being open about the design process, but he will also filter what he blogs about (he's not going to write "X spent half an hour talking rubbish again today", for instance). I would hesitate to make blogging a compulsory part of producing a course, since then it just becomes a burden, but if it does turn out to help the process or recruitment, then I'd certainly encourage it. 

Is learning migrating away from universities?

Tony Hirst sent me this story from TechCrunch about Grockit securing venture capital to develop a  'Massive multiplayer online learning' system. The idea is that people learn best from each other and the system will use network effects to facilitate education. It's not actually true that people learn best from each all the time by the way, you don't necessarily learn quantum physics by hanging around with your mates down the pub (although you can get as far as Brownian motion by observing your pint) - sometimes experts, (whisper it) teachers are useful.

But putting aside their over-simplistic pedagogic spin, there is as I and others have been noting, something in the ability of social networking to engage users and create informal learning opportunities. What the Grockit story does indicate is that it may be commercial companies who learn how to harness this potential quicker and better than higher education institutions, with their glacial timescales and conservative approach. If Grockit don't succeed then someone else will.

In 2002 in my (now quaintly historic) book Delivering learning on the Net, I looked at the function of a campus degree. One of the functions it provides is the life experience, the good times which are a significant part of many people's lives. This should not be underestimated. I would guess it already constitutes a large part of the reason students go to university in the first place. We like to kid ourselves that continuing their education is the primary driver, but I think it's more a case of 'I went for the parties and some learning broke out.'

If (and it is by no means a small if), people can gain their education via other means, then would this social factor be a sufficient reason to still go to university. After all, you could have a similar rites of passage experience travelling round the world for a year. The key to this migration away from universities would be accreditation, or standardised recognition, of the learning that occurs via these other routes. If employers find a means of recognising this, then the higher education business model looks less attractive.

I appreciate the death of universities (or more modestly, the death of the lecture) has been foretold many times, and the reaction of many is a raise of the eyebrows, but if we value them as institutions, then it is worth taking seriously. Higher education is the last great complacent sector in the face of the massive changes that the internet has wrought - look at what has happened in health, retail, media, politics even and the changes made by HE look relatively minor. And yet, with the possible exception of broadcast media and newspapers, the internet goes to the heart of our sector more than any other. The net is about content, community and communication - these are the core components in the educational experience, surely, and yet bar some tinkering at the edges education is largely unaffected by the massive socio-technical changes we are seeing.

elearning 2.0 and Christensen

At a meeting yesterday I talked some bobbins around web 2.0 and education. My last slide provided a Christensen/Innovator's dilemma analysis (see below). I have some reservations about the disruptive technology theory, or rather its over-application to everything, but putting those to one side, I wanted to look at how we might use it to look at the web 2.0 versions of OU e-learning. So, I took a list of OU concepts and provided a Sustaining and Disruptive version. My set of concepts were:

So if we take the disruptive technologies model, then these appeal to a different audience, while the sustaining ones appeal to the existing audience. So from an educational perspective the key to the successful application of web 2.0 to education is to ask what audience would the right hand column appeal to? If we can answer this then perhaps we'll overcome my concern about education being intrinsically dull.

Lijit and connected learning

AJ pointed me at Ligit - it's a socially enhanced search engine. I've installed it on my blog, hanging around there on the left. When you sign up it asks you for your blog address, and then what name you commonly use for accounts and then searches for these, e.g. delicious, digg, flickr, twitter, etc. You can remove any, and edit it you have a different account name.

This part made me realise I'm not as connected as I should be - to my shame I hardly use delicious (just a habit thing), don't use digg at all, have a very old Flickr account, etc. The other data it uses for the search is your blog roll. I think this is quite interesting, you create a kind of network around you, and by implication you are saying these are people you trust.

Following on from my earlier post about a modern learning experience, one could see how a Ligit type tool would facilitate this. I may not be a good example (I really must update that blog roll), but take Stephen Downes for example, a Ligit search from him might find both content and people who would be useful. Not sure whether this application will actually work, but in theory you can see its potential for learning.

An everyday, modern learning experience

I had a modest, but telling, learning experience the other day. It isn't remarkable in any way, but it hints at what might be achievable and how learning will occur more often in the future.

John Connell is one of my Facebook friends, although we have never met face to face, but we read and comment on each other's blogs. I have added the virtual bookshelf application to my Facebook profile, and it displays Everything is Miscellaneous as the book I am currently reading. John saw this (I think this is what happened anyway), and posted a message on my wall suggesting I look at the David Weinberger/Andrew Keen face off at the conversation hub. I did this and found it very useful for crystallising some of the thoughts  I had been having around the RAE. I also watched the Clay Shirky video, and blogged about this.

An OU PhD student saw my post and contacted me about metaphor, we had an email exchange where I gave some references I had and they gave me some links too, with a paper in mind that I might write.

If you look back at that exchange there are lots of telling elements about this sequence, which I think will come to characterise much of how learning occurs:

i) It used a number of different technologies, which were of my choosing. Facebook (extended through my selection of apps), blogs, email - not a one size fits all system.

ii) It was largely informal, with hooks out to the formal.

iii) It involved people I trusted but who had never met.

iv) I didn't feel like a student or a teacher at any stage, it was a peer dialogue, through which learning occurred.

This is a fairly trivial example, and one might argue that it is not 'deep' learning (whatever that is anyway). This is true to an extent, but view this is in a context that isn't geared towards learning, and is still in its infancy. Imagine an environment (by which I mean a social environment, not a VLE), where the emphasis is much more on learning, where I am actively seeking knowledge rather than stumbling across it. The power of the network and these type of learning experiences then becomes much more substantial.

And the winner is ..... Facebook

About two months ago I had accounts in Facebook, Academici.net and LinkedIn. I didn't use any of them much and was waiting to see which one would be of interest, if any. My money was on LinkedIn, it was the one for professionals, whereas Facebook seemed to be for under 25s who wanted to gossip and date each other. Two months on and Facebook is the clear winner. It has reached the tipping point in my particular circle, with a friend request coming in once a day almost (okay, once a week, I'm not that popular).

The reason is that Facebook has won is that it has cracked stickability, or maybe we should term it returnability. This is key to the success of social networking sites, he who gets returnability shall be king. There are lots of hooks to pull you back in. I love seeing my friends status and regularly update mine, for example. It also really utilises the network effect, so I can see who is friends with who, what my friends are up to, and now what tools they've added and what they're doing with them. This last one, the opening up of Facebook has been the factor that has put it ahead of the others.

Now, like every other educator who has an account, one can't help wondering what a Facebook for learning would be like. A few educators I have spoken to have said they think it's all a bit superficial, but I think it's quite powerful. Let's imagine you flooded it with content, had lots of subject areas as groups and maybe added in a few educational widgets. The network effect then can really aid learning - seeing what others are doing and saying is not just serendipity, it's serendipity squared. For example, I see that John's status is 'struggling to understand how analogue to digital conversion works.' I see that Davina has added the analogue to digital conversion animation to her learning resources, so I recommend it to John. I look at Davina's learning resources and find a tutorial on Ajax, which I add to my own and I also post on her wall that I have used it. Peter has also posted on her wall, and invites me in to a chat, as he is using it too. And so on.

So, the point is not could Facebook (or a Facebook type site) be used for learning, as I think it obviously could, the key question is, would people use it? Is the intrinsic motivation for using Facebook the social element, and adding in education (particularly formal education) would just kill this stone dead?

Well, the web 2.0/social networking project is about to start at the OU, so I guess I'll find out.