The Ed Techie

Open as to...

The OU's internal curriculum and technology conference ran over the last couple of days. As with all such events it is both inspiring and a bit deflating. Inspiring because you get to hear of all the good stuff going on and see the enthusiasm of your colleagues. Deflating because things you want to happen still seem a long way off, and some of the same old arguments keep coming up.

One of the thoughts that occurred to me (not for the first time) was that the OU now needs to establish a new definition of openness, and by extension, new identity for itself. The OU's mission statement is:

open to people, places, methods and ideas

Now these are all good, I don't want to do away with any (although I sometimes might question the how much the methods one is true), but I think we could extend this to open as to technology and content. Here's why: increasingly the tools people use as part of their everyday lives are far more sophisticated than universities can create and (more significantly) maintain. We're going to have to accept that people have these tools and don't want a separate (inferior) set for learning. The walled garden approach is becoming less and less viable. Similarly, the amount and quality of content available makes the creation of bespoke content a much less useful way of spending time for an academic. But obviously we need to do something, so what we do is offer some good quality content, we construct good learning activities and we offer support and guidance (as well as all that accreditation stuff).

The other aspect of openness that struck me was that, like all unis, our VLE requires authentication to access. As soon as you do this you are cut off from the connected world. You can't use cool tools like Gabbly (unless you install a university version), and you can't subscribe to feeds. This came home to me in a workshop Tony Hirst ran, and he has a good rant on how the OU is failing to grasp the significance of RSS. Now there are a lot of reasons why a VLE needs to be closed (rights, privacy, etc), but increasingly it looks like a high price to pay.

I gave a talk on the broadcast strategy, which looked at how things have changed and suggests some new models for how broadcast could be used in teaching. Slideshare file below:

Educator as DJ

James Cridland gave a good presentation today at the OU's internal curriculum and technology conference, talking about the Virgin radio site, and more significantly about the changing nature of broadcast. I'm presenting tomorrow on the broadcast strategy and so his talk had a lot of resonance with me. What struck me when listening to James was that radio now has to compete with the likes of LastFM, and indeed Virgin has a similar social networking site (which I must admit I was unaware of). Given that you can find the music you like and listen to a much greater range of stuff through the likes of LastFM, what makes people want to listen to broadcast radio? The answer is, I guess, the DJ. I wonder if there is an analogy between the tension between radio and LastFM and education and open educational resources here. Just as LastFM provides free content, but some people like a DJ to put context around it, so OER provides free educational content but the educator (or academic institution) puts it into context and provides guidance. So, educators are like DJs, but without so many annoying catchphrases.

Football commentators, elearning and the legitimacy deficit

There was much discussion last week about the BBC appointing its first female commentator on Match of the Day.  Rather predictably this assault on the last bastion of maleness caused some debate. The ant-argument seems to fall in to three camps:

i) She hasn't played the game and you need to have done so in order to be a good commentator. This is just plain wrong and like many fields confuses experience with critical prowess. Many good literary reviewers are not good authors and vice versa, the same goes for film, and most of the printed press in any sport. Indeed I have been rather disappointed with the rise of ex-players having a monopoly over punditry and analysis at the BBC. This is because a) they can't fight their way out of a cliche bag and b) they're often not removed enough from the sport to bring other insights. Sure, a commentator needs to be knowledgeable, but you can gain that from other means. After all, do most football fans think their own viewpoint is useless because they haven't played professionally?

ii) The female voice is not appropriate for football commentary. Hmmm, this one seems to have had too much of an airing, for example Irish-Le-Faux suggests "I don't think the female voice is equipped to commentate on football due to the high pitched nature of it". Now, obviously not all female voices are the same, but even if we accept there is general a higher pitch, this doesn't mean they are incapable of expressing excitement without screaming. I, like many footie fans, find the ranty-shouty type commentator pretty unbearable, for example Jonathan Pearce seems to reach a crescendo of excitement and volume while the team walk out of the tunnel and has nowhere left to go when things do exciting (not very likely with England playing, admittedly) without descending in to some guttural scream. Now maybe this gets at the primal appeal of sport for some people, and I accept people will have preferences, but to issue an edict against any female commentators seems ludicrous.

What all this reminded me of is the notion of a legitimacy deficit. Note that a legitimacy deficit doesn't have to be real (ie that female commentators are really not as good as men), but rather it just has to be perceived, either by the wider public or by the individual themselves (they think I'm not as good). Now legitimacy deficits are something I know about - I work for the Open University, which when it was founded had to overcome an enormous legitimacy deficit regarding the quality and validity of distance learning. I have been involved in the early adoption of e-learning, which again faced the same sorts of criticisms (indeed often the exact same ones, but with the words 'distance learning' replaced by 'e-learning' - and sometimes from distance educators!).  And I encounter the same sort of deficit with web 2.0 stuff now - e.g. it's not for education, it's just hype, what about the serious pedagogy?, etc.

One of the good things about a legitimacy deficit is that it often makes the person, group or organisation on the end of it work extra hard to overcome it. This has the result that their output is often better than the standard offering. For example, the OU's teaching quality is ranked in the top ten in the UK (although the downside is that having worked so hard to get this legitimacy it makes some people reluctant to risk it, and thus an element of risk aversion sets in). There are many examples of it in history - because of the rather dubious manner in which he inherited the title of emperor, Charlemagne suffered something of a legitimacy deficit which may have been the reason behind many of his cultural reforms, including the Carolingian Renaissance. Of course, the reaction to a legitimacy deficit can be negative also, particularly when it is to convince others of your legitimacy by strength (ahem, George Bush springs to mind).

In educational technology here is my 'legitimacy deficit' top ten:

1. Open educational resources - whether this approach is sustainable, desirable, viable, etc.
2. User generated content - need I say more? You know the arguments.
3. Social software - is this just for entertainment or serious education?
4. ePortfolios - an eportfolio based approach has enormous implications for institutions but whether it will be accepted by learners, universities and employers is up for debate.
5. Informal learning - communities of practice, open source activity, etc. How do we map this across and recognise it?
6. PLEs - I've covered this before.
7. VLEs - although pervasive you would have to say they haven't fully overcome the legitimacy deficit, and a lot of the criticism comes from e-learning advocates who feel they are just not up to the job.
8. e-learning - yes, it's still there, down four from last year.
9. Podcasts, wikis, blogs - okay, kind of covered user generated content but there is something about this group where the legitimacy deficit is about the validity of academic debate that takes place, and whether these are the new journals.
10. [Insert your own one here]

Being in the legitimacy deficit zone is a good place to be though - this is where the excitement is, so if you're involved in any of the above remember that such deficits can be overcome and the outcome is often all the better for having that struggle. And good luck Jaqui Oatley too!

New university model take 2

Stowe Boyd has given a more detailed account of our discussions than I did and Marc Eisenstadt has also blogged on it . I don't quite agree with Marc that elearning was/is "awful, dead, soul-destroying", and the elearning 2.0 stuff marks its death, for me this is a prime example of the succession model I drone on about in my book, and evolutionary change. The presence of 'traditional' (ah, how quickly things become traditional now) elearning, say through a VLE, creates the base layer of competence and familiarity and generates the questions and desires that makes the next stage possible. In short they alter the environment to make it favourable for the next wave of colonizers.

But that is rather by the by, back to the new social space learning - one thing Boyd's posting triggered was some thoughts on what the thing is. Is it a platform, a community, a new accreditation model? Answer - yes to all three I think. There was some discussion as to who the competitors might be for such a thing, and at the moment no big ones were identified. I suggested that in some ways, the individual was the competitor, because they could create this environment for themselves, for example with a bit of 43Things, some Facebook, a discussion list, etc. I was (rightly I think) disavowed of this belief, and I've been thinking about why the individual response is not the competitor. Here are some suggestions:

i) It's the community, stupid. Although you can locate communities for almost anything, the space would provide a natural home for them, so why not go there?

ii) Convenience. Although I can find my own content and tools, if the convenience factor is higher at one space, then I may as well use it.

iii) Specialised services. Things like accreditation and support which I can't get elsewhere.

iv) Quality and reliability. If the reputation is high, content is good and past experiences favourable then it'll be your first choice.

I think all of these reiterate the critical mass point I made in the earlier post - particularly i and ii - you only get these once the social networking becomes rich enough. There are ways of doing this, but it's not an exact science.

New university model

I was at a meeting yesterday hosted by the OU which was exploring new models for the OU, and by implication higher education in general. There were some big hitters there including Stephen Heppell, Stowe Boyd, Jamais Cascio and Stuart Sim.

The resulting suggestion was a social space, with the emphasis on helping others to learn. Such a space is populated by remixable, flexible content and also by learning narratives that guide learners and a range of social connections such as mentors, peers, experts, etc. None of this is particularly surprising given the people there - the solution wasn't going to be a physical campus with lectures now was it.

The critical mass issue was significant for me. Such a system is very long tail - it meets the needs of the few people who want to learn about Ukrainian knitting patterns, radio programmes of the 1950s, the novels of William Boyd and the influence of Krazy Kat cartoons on modern culture. This is good, because such needs aren't met in any current system, but it really needs a large mass to support. And this is where the Catch 22 is - if you have the critical mass the system works well, but the system doesn't function until you get the critical mass. Sites such as YouTube could afford to be a bit more experimental, and just let their system grow since the investment on the part of the user was small. They could also populate it reasonably quickly with a mass of music videos. Learning is more complex, and thus getting the good content and the right connections is more difficult to establish.

Also, although the social networking stuff is important, I think the significance of content is underplayed in such a vision (I even got to use my 'content may not be everything' jibe I mentioned yesterday). For a lot of social networking sites, such as LastFM people don't go there primarily for the social networking, what they go for is the content (ie to be able to listen to a good range of music). This is enhanced (and to some extent enabled) by the network effects. In short they go for the content and stay for the social networking.

Anyway, I noticed a strange thing happening during the meeting. Normally my role is to be web 2.0/elearning/new technology evangelist, but in a room where I was an amateur at the evangelism stuff, I took on the 'devils advocate' role. Sometimes to my horror I found myself offering obstacles to the realisation of such a system. Why does this happen? So just for the record, I do believe such a system is viable (I just have a list of 'buts').

Horizontal and vertical social software

I've been having some discussions about Second Life, and firstly wondered why I didn't get it, then noticed that something of a SL backlash was starting. Clay Shirky has a good piece on why we shouldn't get too excited about SL, including the suggestion that SL promotes the old content is king idea (thanks to Adam Joinson for pointing me at this).

I am one of those many people who have tried SL and not got beyond the training island. I wonder why this is so, since I'm not a technophobe. Here are some reasons:

• Time - this is the big one for me, SL like all immersive games just requires a lot of time to get any return on investment. I think I can spend that time more fruitfully.
• So whatism? Someone suggested the other day that we 'could have a meeting in second life'. Yes, we could, but why would we do that, rather than just using FlashMeeting, say. It will take longer to learn, and when we do, it'll be errm, just like real life.
• Nice shiny surface. I think there is a temptation in SL to concentrate on the surface, ie that you are in SL, rather than the content of the interaction. As with above, had we held our meeting in SL we would have spent the whole meeting talking about why X was a seven foot mauve cat and not whatever it was we were supposed to be talking about. Compare that with the very in-depth discussion you get in blogs or discussion forums.
• I just haven't earned it yet, baby (apologies to Smiths fans). It took me several attempts to become a blogger, so maybe I just haven't given SL enough of a try yet and if I stuck with it, I'd want to spend all my time there.
• I'm a grown up/snob. Take your pick, part of me does slightly recoil from the whole role-playing, sci-fi, dungeons and dragons whiff that surrounds it.

As was noted in the recent Oxford survey not that many students were using SL (or the even more fantasy World of Warcraft - I have no desire to be a Draenei alchemist, I am struggling to be a human educational technologist) . But I know some people do really like them, so my theory is that there are horizontal and vertical social software. Horizontal ones are those that have a relatively low threshold to engagement - Flickr, 43Things, Wikipedia, LastFM, delicious, etc are all excellent examples of these. Indeed that has been key to their success - they can utilise the benefits of the network without requiring intensive contributions from all individuals. Even browsing adds to the value of the network. That is not to say that some individuals don't spend a lot of time using them - there are many Flickr addicts out there I'm sure.

And then there are vertical social software, such as SL, WoW, and errrm, some more that I'm sure will come to me. These have a high threshold to participation, and users tend to spend a lot of time engaged with them. The consequence of this is that they need to meet a range of needs, hence SL can be used for work, socialising, shopping, etc. But it means they are unlikely to get the real critical mass required for mass networking seen in the horizontal social software tools. Put simply, I can explain Flickr, YouTube, etc to my dad - he will never get SecondLife.

No surprises for guessing what I think are the more interesting from an educational perspective. I think some very specific uses for SL may be found, in the same way Sim City has been used in some courses, but as a general tool, I'd take most of the horizontal ones any day.

FLOSS summer school

I spent Monday and Tuesday hosting a meeting of the FLOSScom project at Milton Keynes (I always have some sympathy for European partners - while Milton Keynes has its virtues, I'm sure it struggles to compare with Porto or Thessaloniki where our partners are). One of the deliverables (in EU project speak 'workpackages') is a summer school which both aims to demonstrate the principles of how learning in open source communities occurs and also to be about these communities, ie it is FLOSS in both subject and process.

One of the differences between FLOSS projects and much of education is that in FLOSS you have a definite project that you sign up for. In education you may not know what it is you want to work towards, because you don't know what you don't know. This is rather akin to Socrates Meno's paradox which goes something like 'how can I inquire about something which I don't know anything about?' In our form it is something like how can I sign up for a project when I don't know what it is I need to know.' Anyway, our proposal is that in the summer school the learners (who will ideally be both experienced FLOSS members and novices) will create a course, which is analagous to the software project in the open source world.

BBC Jam: Too successful for their own good

I spent yesterday in a meeting with the BBC where we were discussing changes to both the OU and the BBC brought about by the internet. It was very interesting, but also really challenging as there seem to be fundamental changes required to how both organisations operate.

And then today I hear that BBC Jam, an online educational service for 5- 16 year olds, has been suspended. It has been suspended not because it was a failure or through lack of interest, but because several commercial companies complained that it was harming their business. So rather than have to respond with a better product, they simply get the site shut down. Could newspapers get the BBC or Guardian online shut down because it harms their business? Could e-learning companies complain that OpenLearn damages their profits? The response should be 'well of course it harms your business, because your business is changing.'

This demonstrates two things: i) many commercial companies still don't get the new economics of the net and ii) the blurring of the 'broadcast' boundary will cause friction in other sectors. Trying to draw a maginot line that confines the activity of traditional broadcasters to just television is both pointless and damaging to them ie., about much use as the original Maginot line.

Some long tail in education thoughts

The Long Tail concept crops up in a few things I am working on, such as the broadcast strategy, and web 2.0 approaches to content, so here are some thoughts on what it means in education (primarily distance and e-learning).

• New course economics. If the blockbuster is dead (or at least not as significant as it was), then the Fordist model of distance education course production needs revising. There has been talk of a post-Fordist model for a long time, but I think we haven't really changed the model fundamentally. In a long tail world lots of small population courses might be the way to go, which means the economics of course production and presentation need to change, for example to a more flexible model built around aggregation.
• Specific is better than popular. If you use a site built on recommendations, data mining and networking, for example LastFM or Amazon, then the less popular searches generate much more useful connections. Popular titles don't generate hits that are relevant to you because the people who buy/rate them like a wide variety of stuff, and because the popular titles might not be that representative of your tastes. And so it would be in learning, for example 'Evolution' won't get you far as a search term, but 'language evolution' will be better, and 'language evolution in primates' might be better still. In education terms then the question is how the learner is helped/scaffolded to get to the stage when they can start finding valuable resources, and then the framework within which those resources make sense.
• It strengthens the case for personalisation. In a world where I have my own personal radio or TV station the expectation of having material that I select is raised. Being provided with one set of resources only which may not suit my needs or preferences will seem increasingly stifling. Although this will still need to address many of the issues around personalisation in education, such as what it does to the cohort and how do you assess it, but it's another nail in the one-size-fits-all coffin.
• Course design is about aggregation and activity. In a long tail world the educator can aggregate a wide variety of very specific content together easily enough. The content itself is only half the story though and what matters is the (dare I say it) learning design. Pre-long tail the content itself was more significant because it carried the information to everyone. So this is where the effort went, which meant that a lot of pedagogy didn't go much beyond 'read this - now discuss it.' But if you are drawing on a wide range of content then the effort goes in to creating, and supporting, activities around that content.
• Uniformity is not important, diversity is the norm. When creating courses there is often a temptation to write everything yourself, to provide a uniform voice. The idea is that it helps the student to have a consistent tone. But, building on the previous point, this consistency is provided by the support. In the long tail world the user is accustomed to a diversity of resources as they seek out ones that suit them rather than just accepting the popular choices.

Last.uni

I'm a big fan of LastFM, and whenever I find some technology I like, I think 'what would this be like in education?'. Let's play the technology determinist game for a while, and imagine what would education (or even just a course) be like if it was built around something like Last.fm, would it be a Last.uni?

Here's how it might work. Imagine educators don't create courses or give lectures but they create loads of resources: podcasts, articles, blog postings, animations, video clips, etc. Last.uni draws on all the databases where these resources are stored. In your Last.uni player you enter a subject you are interested in, lets say it's 'technological determinism' (to be all ironic about it). Now, what you get back is a stream of resources that are initially about technological determinism, but as you work through them they will be about related subjects. These connections will have been established by tagging and data mining. So after the first couple of resources on technological determinism there is a podcast on Marshall McLuhan. You rank this as something you are interested in, and the search is further refined.

Being Last.uni it is of course a social networking tool, so you can see who has also listened to the podcast, and if you feel so inclined, invite them in to a chat. As you continue to use the tool it generates a set of neighbours, that is people who have 'studied' similar resources as you. This in effect becomes your loosely defined student cohort, and you can use tools to arrange weekly discussion sessions.

As you continue to use the tool and you build up the list of resources you have liked it creates a set of recommendations for you, effectively building your course.

Now, there's a bit of a need for guidance in there, (how do you know to look for technological determinism) and I'm not sure where the educator fits in. Maybe they become redundant - thats why it's the Last Uni (gulp)? Accrediting the knowledge you get through Last.uni would probably require an eportfolio type approach (which would of course be built in to the tool).

So, any takers?