The Ed Techie

Prospect theory & the panopticon of debt

Last night, after Nick Clegg's semi-apology over student loans (see comedy version with honesty subtitles below), I got involved with a twitter chat with an economist from Demos. He argued (very intelligently) that the loan scheme would actually save the tax-payer $2.5K per student, and that it should be viewed as a progressive tax, and not debt.

I don't know enough about economics to really counter his claim about the savings. It certainly appears that the Coalition were caught out by all universities charging the full fee, which would suggest it isn't being quite the financial success they had envisaged. But the fact/misleading rumour that it was unaffordable was only ever an extra insult/icing on the cake to what was generally perceived to be a damaging policy to higher education. "You've done all this damage, and it's worked out worse than the old scheme anyway" was the cry.

Let's accept for now then that it could theoretically save money in the long term. This doesn't mean it won't severely damage the higher education sector. And here I do feel on firmer ground, because economists (particularly free market ones) tend to ignore those pesky humans in the mix and assume a rational market.

I would like to propose two psychological factors that will come in to play, which I don't think have been modelled in any government plans.

Prospect theory - Tversky and Kahneman conducted a series of influential experiments in the 70s which demonstrated that people give loss more psychological weight than gain - put bluntly losing £20 has more significance than finding £20. People then adjust their behaviour accordingly - they are risk averse. 

In our case this means they will perceive the student loan as debt, and that debt will weigh more heavily than the potential gain of a good job, a rewarding time, or future earnings. They will thus behave appropriately, with two courses of action:

a) Risk aversion - they don't go to university in the first place and take on the debt. This harms the higher education sector.

b) Risk reduction - they act as if it is current debt and seek to pay it off. This harms society more broadly, for instance, they avoid taking on more debt in the form of a mortgage thus impacting the construction sector.

This won't affect all students, just as some people are more risk averse. Some will judge it a risk worth taking and study anyway. Tversky and Kahneman also talk about the 'Value function", whereby the difference in loss between £100 and £200 is seen as greater than the difference between £1100 and £1200. This would suggest that the impact will be felt most keenly for those from less well-off backgrounds as the potential debt is perceived as a larger part of current wealth, it is a bigger risk

It would take a big research project to estimate the impact of this factor on student behaviour, so for now let's take a figure of, say, 20% fewer students applying, given that is a strong psychological factor found in many instances.

The panopticon of debt - the second factor is that of the panopticon. Taken from Bentham's proposal for prison design and adapted as a metaphor for society by Foucault, the panopticon suggests that when all prisoners/citizens can potentially be observed all the time, they act as if they are. As Foucault puts it:

"He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection"

It doesn't matter that they aren't observed all the time, the knowledge that they could be makes them act as if they are. I would suggest future debt acts in a similar way. The knowledge that it could become debt and be paid off makes people act as if it is current debt, even if they never had to pay it off (because their earnings didn't reach a certain level). As with prospect theory the impact of this factor is likely to be felt more keenly in some sectors. Some prisoners in a panopticon prison will calculate the probability of being observed at any one time and overcome their fears, others won't.

This transfers the debt from a national one to an individual one, and at this level its impact is more toxic in the economy. The outcome will be the same as for prospect theory: a reduction in numbers applying and a reduction in spending from those coming out the other end.

Again, knowing the size of the impact of this factor would take more research than I can put into a blog post. But let's say it adds another 10% to our previous 20%, giving a total reduction in student numbers of 30%. Like the impact of these factors, it would not be evenly distributed, so Russell Group unis might see no decline at all, while others might see a drop by as much as 50%. This would surely send some under.

Now, it may be that we think a 30% decrease is desirable, that the higher education sector has become over-crowded. But it would be better to state this as an aim, and to work towards it (universities could do better planning then), rather than hope it occurs as the result of an unpredictable system. It would be interesting to know if any of these factors were considered when modelling the future of higher education? 

How to dismantle a sector, stage 2.

So last week, London Met university had their licence to act as a sponsor for overseas students revoked, so it can't teach its existing 2,600 non-EU students, or get new ones. This is unprecedented, and as well as being obviously distressing for those students, will send a loud message around the world about the UK's openness to overseas students.

I think there are three interpretations as to why it occurred:

LMUea culpa - it's all LMU's fault, they've been playing fast and loose with the immigration system and have been caught out. I'm sure there will be evidence of wrongdoing, indeed I would suggest the Government has been waiting for such a case where there is unarguable evidence, so it can take such action. But even if we accept that LMU are at fault, the reaction seems way out of proportion. A warning, a suspension, a fine would have all been reasonable - but revoking it and causing such distress seems a clearly targeted action to create publicity. Which brings me onto my next two options.

Sinister pressure - it was not the result of a direct order or intervention, but rather the outcome of pressure created by Government. As this piece points out, Teresa May is under pressure to hit targets for reducing migration, and student visas are perceived (incorrectly as I understand the process) to be an easy option. It is therefore part of playing to the home crowd Tories to be seen to be taking a firm stance. There is undoubtedly something in this, and combined with an element of dodgy behaviour at LMU it may be sufficient as an explanation. But I want to consider a third option also.

Conspiracy theory - John Naughton reminds us that "Whenever someone intelligent seems to be behaving oddly, the hypothesis has to be that they know what they’re doing and that you simply haven’t figured it out." Let's assume people in the coalition aren't stupid (yes, I'm not sure about Gove either, but let's go with it). On the face of it, the LMU decision is stupid. It is over the top, and will cause damage to the sector, when that sector is one of your primary exports. In times of financial crisis you would do everything possible to support such a sector, not undermine it wouldn't you? So, taking John's reasoning, this must mean we haven't figured out what they're doing.

Which heralds in the conspiracy theory. A while ago I blogged that higher education in the UK felt not just like any sector in a crisis, but one which was being deliberately targeted. In that post I was highlighting how the student loan scheme, combined with student number control would damage universities. If we give our conspiracy theory free rein, then having undermined the financial basis for the domestic market, the LMU debacle begins to look like the next stage in this plan, namely to undermine the overseas market. 

Why then would the Government deliberately seek to destabilise an industry? The answer would be that it seeks to gain from that destabilisation. Having seen the problems it encountered by trying to reform the health system through due process and passing legislation, it doesn't want a repeat of this protracted and damaging scenario. A better approach is one of stealth - by financially undermining the existing structures, many universities will go to the wall. This will leave room for the private universities, which they have already made warm noises about (and remember, student number control doesn't apply to these). 

By these commando tactics, the Government could achieve a radically different higher education model, with the high brand universities remaining intact, and the rest of the market provision from private universities, which fits better with a conservative free market model. And all without having a single debate in the House of Commons, or attracting any negative headlines.

Now, I'm not really one for conspiracy theories, and maybe it is a bit far-fetched. A combination of my first two explanations is more realistic. But, if the conspiracy theory is true, I'll make the following predictions:

1. We'll see more universities lose their sponsorship licence, or more likely, a 'toughening up' of the student visa process to continue to make the UK less attractive.
2. Student number control and capping of fees will be used strongly and undermine some universities
3. A piece of legislation favourable to private universities will be slipped through on the back of another bill.
4. Up to 10 unis will go to the wall and others will retract significantly.
5. Unis will be encouraged to partner with private providers.

Of course, if the conspiracy theory is true, then the stance universities & VCs take towards the Government, which has largely been one of cooperation, should change drastically. Just to emphasise, I don't say it is true, but if we see my five predictions above begin to come true, then we should be suspicious. Of course, by then it might be too late.

Innovating Pedagogy report

Here at IET in the OU, a bunch of us, led by Mike Sharples, were asked to produce an annual report on how changes in teaching and learning (related to technology) were changing the current landscape. The initial idea was to do this for senior OU management, but I'm pleased to say that everyone involved wanted to make it wider than that and create a publicly available report. Think of it as like a Horizon's report with more focus on pedagogy. We adopted the same methodology as the Horizon report also.

It does have a bit of an OU bias, but I think it's a very good read (and I should know as I had to read through it multiple times for editing) for anyone in higher ed (a lot of it is applicable across other sectors, but we're upfront in saying these are not our areas of expertise). It's meant to do so in a short, accessible format, so for instance the (inevitable) coverage of MOOCs probably won't add much to you if you've been following them in detail, but then again you may find the stuff on Personal Inquiry Learning is new to you.

It's billed as a "New report from the Open University on ten innovations in teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world". It covers ten such innovations, some of which won't be a surprise to readers of this blog. They are:

• Assessment for learning
• Badges to accredit learning
• Learning analytics
• MOOCs
• New pedagogy for e-books
• Personal inquiry learning
• Publisher led mini-courses
• Rebirth of academic publishing
• Rhizomatic learning
• Seamless learning

You can read the full, nicely formatted, pretty pictured, report here, and make comments on any of the topics on the accompanying blog.

The intention is that it is an annual report, so we'll revisit next year. In the meantime, I hope you find something useful in it, and it might be the type of thing you can leave lying around on the desk of a senior management type person.

 

How to dismantle a sector

I'm not an overtly political animal, unlike many of my colleagues, so maybe this post is misguided or misinformed, but increasingly working in Higher Ed in the UK feels like working in a beleagured sector. Many people will feel like this in the current crisis, so higher ed is no different in that respect, but it now feels like it is not only suffering the same fate as all sectors, but is actually the victim of an ongoing campaign. I sit in many meetings with colleagues, in this university and across the sector, where we end up shaking our heads and laughing with a mixture of amazement and hysteria at the next cumbersome plan that is being foisted upon us.

As I said, I'm not that political, so maybe I've got some of the following wrong, in which case, please correct me. But here is how I interpret the last few years, and some supposition about the next few:

• The student loan scheme is forced through, and the coalition seems to have not considered the scenario that most universities will charge the top rate of £9000.
• The scheme then turns out to be more costly to realise than the existing method.
• In a panic, the government then introduces Student Number Control, so that it can cap the number of loans it gives out and can ringfence that money.
• As I understand it, the situation with part-time students is too complex at the moment (when is a student studying, or in-between studies, what counts as a full time equivalent, etc), so they have avoided student number control at the moment. But it will probably come in to play for 2014.
• However, because it will look politically damaging to allow students to 'buy' their way on to courses, the student control figure will apply, regardless of whether the students are taking out loans or not. Universities could then find themselves in the position of turning away students who have the money to study and who they have the capacity to teach.
• The student control numbers however, do not apply to new private universities because they want to grow that sector.

WonkHE has a lot more insightful stuff on student number control if you want to dig down into it.

And this is avoiding looking at the situation with research. The higher education sector in the UK was a widely respected, profitable and functioning system. It was by no means perfect and certainly wasn't efficient, but it worked. I appreciate it worked because it was funded to an extent by the UK taxpayer, but even in hard economic terms, this shift from Government debt to private debt doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Not all debt is equal - Government debt can be long term and at low interest rates. Private debt creates a liquidity trap in times of economic crisis, because individuals seek to reduce their debt and thus don't contribute to growth, thereby creating more debt. And a nation's debt is best measured by combining Government debt, financial institutional debt, and personal debt. Shifting it to individuals then doesn't reduce the overall debt, it just increases the damage it does to your economic outlook.

Socially it's a poor idea too, in times of crisis society undergoes a seismic shift - people lose jobs in one sector, but retrain, re-educate and create a new one. But if they can't afford to study (or are put off by the austerity rhetoric) then this shift doesn't take place, or is at least limited. 

This may sound like special pleading - "we should be immune from the winds that batter the economy because we have nice beards" - but it isn't. Like many people in the sector, I expected and accepted that higher education would go through a period of increased accountability and efficiency. We weren't prepared though for this sustained assault, combined with a dangerous level of incompetence. 

And all this when you want to shift to being a knowledge economy - strange times indeed.

 

Comparing the value of education

I've signed up to study the OU's MA in History starting in September. My reasons for this are twofold: it's good to be a student every now and then to remember what it's like to be a 'real' student; and I have this notion that part of what I do on this blog and in my digital scholarship book is to act like a contempary historian. I am trying to document, predict, analyse, and generally make-it-up-as-I-go-along this particular period of change for scholarly practice, because I feel that it's a significant one. But I don't have the real theoretical or methodological underpinning from a historical perspective to do this. 

I'm lucky, I get my fees paid as an employee of the University (rather like the mythical island where everyone makes a living taking in their neighbour's washing, maybe the OU can just populate its courses with its own staff). But completing the fee waiver form made me think about the (purely financial) cost of studying, and how it compared. Now, I believe education should be free, it's a general benefit to society to have people studying, so this isn't a political post about education funding, instead just looking at how it compares with other family spends.

As a leisure activity it is at the higher end, but doesn't come out too bad. My course is £3120 for the first part (which lasts a whopping 16 months), and then £1560 for the second which lasts 9 months. So that's a good couple of years of high quality activity (it actually comes to 2.5 with a small break in between and some pre-course work).

Here are some other leisure costs for comparison over the same period:

• Full season ticket at Spurs: about £4000 (would be 2.5 seasons)
• Average family holiday: £7,800 (2 family holidays)
• Gardening: £700 

So it's definitely a luxury 'product' but not excessively so. It doesn't compete then on price as a luxury activity. What does it compete on? I'd suggest it has the following advantages:

• Longevity - a post or undergrad degree will teach you techniques and you'll gain knowledge that will stay with you forever. On the first day of my Psychology degree back in 1986 they told us "long after you've forgotten all the stuff we teach you, you'll remember how to be a scientist". And they were right. You may retain memories of a good holiday or football season, but the longevity of good education is hard to beat.
• Self-worth - I think an adventure holiday or growing a beautiful garden provide this too, but there is something about the objective value of a degree or masters qualification. You have achieved something that is broadly recognised and even for a Prof, that has a value to one's sense of self-worth. The sense of having been challenged and achieved something (much like running) gives a sense of purpose that is difficult to find elsewhere, outside of physical, sporting challenges.
• Identity - being a football fan can add a lot to a sense of identity and people often label themselves in such terms, but so does acquiring a degree. I don't know if I'll label myself a historian afterwards, but it will definitely be a component.
• Job prospects - this depends on the qualification, and increasingly is less significant than it used to be when everyone has a degree. It probably won't count much in my case, but who knows, it could lead to interesting career directions, research projects, etc. But certainly this is something holidays and footie tickets can't claim.
• Enjoyment - I can't say how much it compares with a good family holiday or a great footie season, or a carefully cultivated garden. All of these provide enjoyment, but that is their principle sales pitch. I feel the joy you find in becoming part of an academic community, of learning interesting stuff for its own sake is something we don't make enough of in education.

In making this comparison though I think I've highlighted the problem in making education a market commodity. If you look at that list above of the virtues education offers, aside from job prospects, it is almost impossible to value them in monetary terms. How much is improved self worth in cash terms? To ask the question is to see it as ridiculous.

 

 

 

The random REF

<Image from gringer http://www.flickr.com/photos/gringer/5096129532/>

As a senior member of staff (I know, how did that happen?), part of my duties currently include reading papers for the UK research assessment exercise, the REF. I've moaned about how this reinforces traditional publication models previously. This is a more general moan.

I think the REF has muddled objectives. It aims to make academics accountable to some extent, but primarily acts as a means of allocating research funds. It may have some secondary aims, or you could classify these as indirect consequences, such as reinforcing the position of the main publishers and maintaining the status of Russell Group universities.

When you have multiple objectives the resultant process is often unsatisfactory. So if we ignore the secondary aims (although I wish the Finch report had been brave enough to make clear reference to the REF in undermining the move to open access), then how might the first two be best served?

Let's assume for now that you want to go along with accountability drive. There are of course plenty of reasons why this may not be a good idea, but that's for a different post. As someone who has to read papers and try and judge them, the real problem with the REF is that it brings in quality judgements. I thought that educational technology was a special case in that it didn't fit well into a broader education category and so the people making assessments weren't sufficiently well acquainted with the subject area to make decent judgements. But I've spoken to people in other disciplines and everyone feels the same. The specialisation of research means that no categorisation can be fine enough to really capture it. And it's a fruitless task anyway, who can judge the impact or quality of a paper? I think you can spot a poor paper easily, and maybe a really excellent one, but 90% of the rest sit in the middle so judging whether something is a 2* or 3* is essentially a coin toss.

So, my suggestion (if you want to do the accountability thing) is to simplify it and just apply a simple gateway threshold. So, for example you could take the REF guidelines - in four years someone who has a research part to their contract should be expected to publish four refereed articles, have got one piece of research funding in and supervised one student. Against this simple criteria you can then have accepted trade-offs: running large university projects, digital scholarship equivalents, personal consultancy as funding, etc. But you remove the quality judgement, it's a simple measure that this is what a research active should be expected to deliver. I don't necessarily agree with it, but we'd all know what the rules were.

The next element is to allocate research funding. You could simply do away with direct funding and have it all come through research councils, as they do in some countries. Or you could distribute it evenly, or according to number of staff who've passed the threshold above. But I've got a more interesting suggestion - there was some maths research (from those crazy Italians) recently that argued that random selection of some, but not all, politicians would benefit democracy:

"the introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected independent legislators can increase the global efficiency of a Legislature, in terms of both the number of laws passed and the average social welfare obtained."

I wonder if the same might apply to research funding? So some is allocated according to worth (but using a simple system), but a percentage is allocated randomly, on the proviso it is used for research. This might well generate innovative research we wouldn't see otherwise. And it prevents a self-reinforcing group who get caught in version of group think. And it'd be more fun.

I know what you're thinking - why isn't he in charge of the next REF? We can only shake our heads.

Losing the glue of scholarship

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/kapungo/422491278/>

This thought has been bubbling away with me for a while, so I'll try and express it here, but it may be patchy (yes, yes, no change there).

The financial crisis and rising tuition fees (particularly in the UK, and Europe will probably follow given the state of their economies) has placed a number of pressures on higher education. One of the outcomes is that greater accountability and transparency is demanded. That's only to expected and is reasonable - if students are paying high fees which pay academics salaries then we need to demonstrate that those academics are engaged in meaningful work. And as employers struggle with less money, they will place more demands on their staff, so will ask them to account for their time to a much finer level of detail.

Many people outside of higher ed will shake their heads and think 'we've all had to do that for years anyway.' I have some sympathy with this view, academics have often had a cushy life and hidden behind vague work related tasks with little connection to outputs.

But as this begins to bite, it's surfacing a number of tasks which we have always performed as part of scholarly practice, but which are hard to link to a direct output or return on investment. Consider the following:

• Reading around your subject area - academics will read journal papers, books, blogs etc as part of their everyday practice, just to stay current in their field. This may not have a direct, or immediate link to teaching (ie you are not researching something in order to teach on a specific course) or be related to a specific research project. It's just part of what you do. 
• Peer review - I often get asked to review papers for journals. If they meet my open access test, then I usually say yes. But there is no direct return on this.
• Experimentation - in the field of educational technology in particular (but also in other disciplines I suspect), experimenting is essential. The key to this is that you don't know if it will be successful or what it will lead to. You trust your academic instincts that it's an interesting thing to do. Much of playing with new technology would come under this. So when I've played around with MOOCs for instance, giving talks or running a small one with George. A few years later, I'm now being asked to contribute to a strategic appraisal of MOOCs for the university. But I couldn't have predicted this, or stated it as an outcome.
• Giving presentations - on an almost weekly basis I get asked to give a presentation, usually at another university for a staff development day. I decline most of these because I am running a big internal project at the OU and have a number of other roles, so I'm nearly always in meetings. And even if I wasn't, I believe that I should prioritise doing work for the place that pays my wages. In order to do these talks now I have to take leave, and without wishing to sound mercenary, if I'm going to spend a day giving a talk instead of with my family, I'll only do that if I get paid. Many such staff development days don't have a budget, and operate on reciprocal good will.

This raises two very important questions for me with regards to how scholarship functions:

1. Are these kinds of tasks the unseen glue that binds scholarly activity together? So, if we lose, or at least drastically reduce, them does it fundamentally undermine the whole practice, or will we just find other ways of achieving them (for instance giving a talk remotely is a lot more efficient than travelling to the venue).
2. Does it demonstrate that they are tasks which should have an associated cost, and we've just been hiding that hitherto? If we value the tasks then maybe we should attach a cost to them, then we can properly account for that time. Or are they such nebulous tasks that this wouldn't work and we need to trust academics to spend a degree of their time doing 'scholarship type stuff'.

Many universities do have an allocation of staff time that covers most of the above, and is labelled something like 'personal research time'. But I think we'll see more of a squeeze on that time and a greater demand for identifiable outcomes from it. So I guess we'll find out how important this glue really is.

 

Education & the language of change

Occasionally a blog post comes along in your field which you feel is seminal, a must-read. Think Scott's just share or Jim's glass bees post. Last week it was George's turn, and his post on the commercial pressures and interests around education is thought provoking and honest as he wrestles with the issues. If you haven't read it already, then please do so.

One element I wanted to expand upon was the language of change that is employed by many both within higher ed, and in companies with an interest in it. The common phrase now is to declare that education is broken. I commented on George's post that this is really beginning to irritate me. I don't deny that there are issues in education that need addressing, but by labelling it as broken, the response then becomes obvious "well let's fix it". And I'd be surprised if the person telling you that education was broken didn't just happen to have a fix in their back pocket.

Mike Caulfield sums it up in the comments better than I did, by talking about a rhetoric of crisis and a rhetoric of opportunity. Our responses to these different uses of language can be profound:

"The rhetoric of opportunity is better than the rhetoric of crisis for a number of reasons. In a rhetoric of opportunity, things which are improvements move forward, things which are not do not. A rhetoric of opportunity doesn’t denigrate the people who are doing wonderful things now, and it doesn’t pretend that what we have now is any worse than what we grew up with."

I am not advocating a linguistic determinism here, but the way we talk about a subject has implication for our actions. For instance, in this study Thibodeau & Boroditsky found that the metaphors used to frame a problem influenced the solution that subjects proposed, so if crime was couched in terms of a virus or a beast like metaphor, would shape how people thought it should be handled. And interestingly, when asked to justify their solution they do so by using data and reasons that back up the original metaphor, even if they are unaware of the metaphor in the original text.

A similar pattern is happening with education - the metaphors and language we use is influencing the manner in which we progress. 

Like George, I have nothing against entrepreneurs, I feel that their agility can complement the rather slow nature of higher education. But I do resent companies or individuals trying to frame the problem so it places them in the powerful position of the new gods. There is one phrase anyone with a solution to a problem fears more than any other: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". In order to justify a cure, you have to convince people of the brokenness of the current situation. And again, this is not to suggest education doesn't have issues, but I prefer Mike's notion of a rhetoric of opportunity.

I don't have an easy solution, indeed I would suggest you avoid anyone who does claim to have a simple solution to the multi-varied, messy domain of education. But I feel very strongly that education is doing lots of things right, and it isn't a problem waiting to be fixed. It's a set of challenges and opportunities, which both those inside and outside of the current system can address.

For now, join me in this pledge - if anyone says education is broken, I will walk out of the room.

[Update - almost as if they were trying to prove my point, David Kernohan pointed me at degreed.com which is asking people to take a photo declaring "Education is broken. Someone should do something." That someone being them presumably with their shiny dot com]

 

The cost of good bad ideas

There's a horror film, which I've never seen, called The Human Centipede (if you've never heard of it, I apologise for bringing it to your attention). Now, I like a horror film, but I really don't want to see this one. But here's the thing: the mere existence of the idea that the film contains has given me disturbed nights. In some respects the director deserves credit for this - he has conceived of an idea and then put it into a film, which you don't even need to see to give you nightmares. That's the power of a bad idea.

I was thinking about this the other day in relation to Digital Natives. Of course, there's nothing horrific about the digital natives idea, but like that film, its has kind of infected a lot of educational thinking merely by its existence. 

If you haven't read the studies, most people now think the central ideas in digital natives are, in a word, bogus. There are no real differences between generations, attributable to technology. There are differences between how we used to do stuff and how we do it now. But digital natives (or if you prefer net gen) is largely a myth. In this book Marc Prensky says it was meant as a metaphor and people took it too seriously. Maybe. And maybe there's some back pedalling going on.

But here's a question: how much money has been spent on the idea of digital natives over the years? There have been innumerable keynotes from people proclaiming themselves experts in the area; schools, universities and companies have shelled out for consultants to advise them on how to deal with this strange new breed; we have yards of publications on the matter; then there are the research projects looking at whether it exists or not (for example, my colleague Chris Jones led a very good project in this area); and by no means least there are all those essays, theses and dissertations which take it almost as a given fact.

That's like a mini-industry centred around an idea that had a kind of fashionable appeal, but no real basis in evidence. And what of the opportunity costs? While we were fretting about whether they existed or not and what we should do about it, did we miss seeing what was really happening and the more interesting and subtle changes in society in general. And that's a shame because it's not a competely bad idea - many of us feel instinctively that our children are growing up in a different world than we were, but then we're operating in that world too. The age element made the argument attractive ("these kids are completely different!") whereas the interesting thing was how technology was making it different for everyone. Highlighting changes needed in the education system to deal with this new technology context were a good thing, but wrapping it up as a generational shift missed the point about the different groups and attitudes across all generations. 

My favourite Net Gen nonsense quote is from Oblinger and Oblinger who claimed as one of the defining characteristics of the net generation that “they want parameters, rules, priorities, and procedures … they think of the world as scheduled and someone must have the agenda. As a result, the like to know what it will take to achieve a goal. Their preference is for structure rather than ambiguity.”

Are they comparing this with evidence of a preference for ambiguity and lack of structure in previous generations? That statement seems almost like a horoscope - vague enough to be true of anyone. 

I suppose critics of blogging and the like might point to the fact that the idea didn't generate from a peer-reviewed academic journal, which would have filtered out some of the claims. We could chalk one up for the peer-review system here, and note that popularity and linking is not evidence of rigour and value.

So beware the next good bad idea you come across in relation to ed tech (or horror films), a nice soundbite idea that seems to capture a feeling of the times can lead you off down false paths for years. 

 

The issue of scale

Michael Feldstein has an interesting post on the issue of scale, inspired by Jim Groom's Open Ed keynote. Michael's post is very reflective and thoughtful and he admits he'd always sort of dismissed Jim and the edupunk stuff as interesting, but it doesn't scale, and scale was what he was concerned with. He concludes he was wrong to do so, and maybe Jim's approach does scale, but not in the conventional sense:

"But if we can create a world in which the average community college student asks her professors what their credentials are to teach their classes, then all else becomes possible in educational reform."

In his comments on the post Scott says:

"what I object to is an idea of “scaling” that works through what I call “massification,” e.g. find something that works and that either make that single instance bigger, or simply replicate that model holus bolus. I take this to be the industrial model of growth."

Now I work for an institution that has scale at its heart. It is all about delivering quality education at scale. I ran a course with 15,000 students on it. That's scale. And it isn't the kind of organic, network scale that Scott is talking about, it's the industrial type scale we traditionally think of. I've met plenty of OU students who will tell you enthusiastically that study with us has changed their lives (for the better). I occassionally bump into students who took my big course back in the early 2000s, and for whom it was a major event in changing the direction they took. So scale doesn't have to be dehumanising, it can still be designed with learners at the heart and every care taken to ensure that they have a personal, well structured learning experience. And delivering that at scale helps lots of people.

But the type of scale we're looking at with Jim, and which Scott refers to, is different. We've always known that an exciting lecturer will enthuse students, there's nothing new in  personality being a factor. But we do see a form of scaling when this is done online and in the open, which is new. In this TED talk Chris Anderson highlights the power of video to accelerate innovation:

I think his ingredients of a crowd, light and desire apply to how work like Jim's scales. I have pondered before about what I could take away from DS106, and the answer is not 'be Jim', but it might be 'have greater student involvement'.

Are the two forms of scale at odds? I don't think so, and I would urge Michael to keep worrying about scale - my experience is that it can work and when it does it has a real impact on people's lives. That's not something to be sniffed at. But the new form of scaling is significant too. Maybe through the former we encourage people to participate in the latter, and maybe the latter provides means of making the former more engaging and responsive. 

And the other thing I know about scale is this - it doesn't always matter. Sometimes you do something on a small course for example, which would never scale. But that's okay, it doesn't have to - it just works here and now.