The Ed Techie

For-profits - the revenge of teaching?

<Image by Kaptain Kobold http://www.flickr.com/photos/kaptainkobold/98688066/>

There is some anxiety in the UK at the moment at the threat posed from for-profit universities. The concern is that with high student fees, cost becomes an issue, and so the market is ripe for commercial providers to enter and undercut the incumbents.

We can all think why this might be detrimental to higher education and society in general. Courses would be stripped back to only the profitable elements, other functions of universities might disappear, it increases the notion of education as commodity, etc.

I wouldn't disagree with any of these concerns, and this should not be read as a defence of for-profits. But there is also a part of me that wonders if this isn't a result of universities and academics undervaluing teaching as a scholarly function. When Boyer performed his analysis of scholarly practice in 1990, it was partly to combat the perception that research was more highly valued. He argued that all four functions were of equal value. He stated then that

"Almost all colleges pay lip service to the triology of research, teaching and service, but... the three rarely are assigned equal merit.
Today, when we speak of being scholarly, it usually means having academic rank in a college or university and being engaged in research and publication."

However not much has changed. When it comes to promotion it is still research that is seen as carrying the most weight. As Harley et al put it put it:

"Tenure is a three-legged stool: service,teaching, and research, and the latter leg of the stool is much thicker and stronger than the other two." (pg 222)

But the income of teaching usually far outweighs that of research to a university - even a research intensive university. So in some respects the arrival of purely teaching focused universities and providers on these shores can be interpreted as an act of revenge after years of neglect. The trouble is the unis who really have prioritised teaching over the past 20 years may well be the ones most affected by the arrival of the for-profits, and the research focused Russell group unis will probably carry on regardless.

But maybe the moral is hell hath no fury like a scholarly function scorned.

Ed tech & the new academic reality

In my last post I tried to set out some new(ish) realities for academics in the UK. In this post I want to think about what these might mean for educational technology. I am not going to discuss the broader implications for higher education and research as a whole, as there has been lots written about that. Again, I am going to attempt a neutral tone, my aim in this post is not to bemoan the state of affairs (I do that enough in other posts), but to think through what it means to operate in this context.

So in terms of ed tech, here are some thoughts:

Less time for play - if greater accountability is key, and there is a focus on cost and return, then exploring technology is likely to need greater justification. That isn't to say it will be cut (see next point, it may even increase), but rather that it will need to be set out in clear terms. So for example, taking some study time to develop a blog will be justified because once established it will eliminate the need to conduct face to face update briefings, or it will meet the public engagement profile of a unit. But exploring technology with no direct, or clear goal, is likely to be frowned upon.

Technology as efficiency driver - one of the strong justifications for the adoption of technology is likely to be around efficiency. When a case can be made that adoption of technology will lead to greater efficiency, then it is likely to meet with approval. This can be fairly cynical, but it may also be fruitful, for example if learning analytics leads to intervention which helps keep a student on a course then it's beneficial for both the university and the student.

Technology to replace campus expansion - in DIY-U Anya Kamanetz sets out a good case of how tuition fees have increased to rise in the US, often to fund the building of more extravagent campus facilities to attract more students. A kind of arms race has been created, except with sports facilities and cafeterias instead of nuclear weapons. A possible impact of the new academic context is that the online status, reputation and facilities of a university become significant, particularly as estate enhancement becomes prohibitively expensive. This may not mean building your own social platform, but it may mean making sure you have a good Facebook presence with people monitoring it, have actively engaged online academic staff, create online content for people other than students, etc.

Interest in cheap or free technology - higher education has often set about creating its own versions of technology, or buying in enterprise versions to be run in-house. As course and IT budgets get slashed, then encouraging staff to adopt existing third party tools is likely to be seen as a means of keeping courses vibrant.

Research as hobby - I've argued elsewhere that the granularity of research can be seen to be shifting. As data becomes open, free tools become available and dissemination routes democratised, much of the research that used to require a project fund can be performed by the individual now. As more of the day job focuses on managed work, academics will find the type of online environment the best place to conduct their discourse and research, extending into their personal lives.

Rise of online versions - it is likely that online conferences, remote participation, virtual project meetings, online open journals, etc all become more prevalent as the costs associated with travel, time away, and physical artefacts place pressure on the traditional formats.

Increased significance of online identity - if academics are travelling to fewer conferences, and doing less of the general scholarly activity that brings them into contact with others in their field, then establishing an online identity and cultivating an online network of peers will become increasingly significant. This will be if not the main route, then a very significant one, through which they share ideas, find collaborators for research projects, and establish reputation in their field. This may link back to the efficiency argument.

Lack of new blood & reliance on outsourcing - the increasingly commercial-like atmosphere in higher education may mean that many smart young people (particularly in the ed tech area) who might have come into higher ed because of the freedom it offers will go into industry, perhaps in start-ups that offer services to higher ed. This may result in a skill gap between higher ed and industry in the use and development of new technology.

So these are both the challenges and opportunities for educational technology in our new context, as I see them. I'm sure I've missed some, so let me have it...

The new academic context

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/nualabugeye/2636448990/>

My starting point for this post is that the financial crisis and changes in funding are going to radically alter the higher education environment within the UK. In this post I want to set out the context within which academics will have to work from now on.

There are two things to point out: the current climate may see these changes become a reality, but they are also the culmination of a number of trends that have been occurring over the past twenty years or so; I want to set out the new context in an objective manner, and to avoid ascribing value to these changes. This is the way I think it will be, for good or ill. In the next post I'll try and explore the implications of these changes from an ed tech perspective.

The following list is based on watching discussions in the mainstream media, blog posts, twitter conversations and my own work. It could be I'm wrong about these, or indeed for many people they have been the reality for a long time anyway, but I feel it's worth setting them out to get a clear picture of the environment which we will need to operate within.

Greater accountability - this is really the over-arching one. When academics are largely being funded by students debt, and when universities have to cope with smaller budgets, then they academic activity needs to be accounted for and linked to some funding.

Funded research only - following on from the above research activity is likely to be on allocated, externally funded (or internal strategic) projects only. Time for individual, autonomous research that is not directly funded or related to teaching will largely disappear.

Limited general scholarly activity - there is a form of unwritten agreement of reciprocal activity in higher education that is largely uncosted. Reviewing articles, examining students, giving presentations, giving feedback on project proposals - all of these are essential for the functioning of the current system. But they are not evenly distributed and some people can find themselves in almost constant demand from other institutions. While a certain level of this activity will be permitted, and encouraged even, my guess is that it will be limited, as universities come to view every day an individual is doing a staff development talk at another uni as one where they are paying their salary and getting no direct return.

Cost as primary deciding factor - this is one that has definitely been around for a while but is likely to reach its apotheosis now. Cost has always been one of a number of factors to consider, for example when putting on a new course or conducting some research. Other factors such as academic credibility, long term potential, variation in offering and academic freedom have also come into the mix. Increasingly only proposals that demonstrate a reasonable return on investment will be countenanced.

Institutional focus - 30 years or so ago it was possible to view the function of universities as employing academics. Smart people needed a job, but they were pretty much left to their own devices, researching what they wanted, teaching occasionally and often being absent from their institution for long periods. Their affiliation could be seen as being to their discipline. This has been changing for a long time (and was never true for all academics anyway) and we will now see a much closer alliance to the host institution. 

As I mentioned, these have been trends over recent years anyway, and what we will see now is their culmination. It is also the case that there will be some variation between universities and individuals as to the degree to which they are experienced, but in general this is the context within which academics will operate. In the next post I'll explore what this means from an educational technology perspective.

Space - The purpose of education

<image http://www.flickr.com/photos/see-through-the-eye-of-g/5414817728/ by GollyGForce>

This is my contribution for the Purpos/Ed blog

In this post my default interpretation of education is that which I’m closest to, namely formal, tertiary education, although some of my points will be valid for other levels of education (primary and secondary) and informal, personal learning.

I’ve been writing about digital scholarship a lot recently, so one way to think of the purpose of education is to turn this on its head, and rather than consider what functions scholars perform, to suggest that the purpose of education is to have a place where these functions reside. Not all of them relate directly to teaching, but they can be seen as a collective set of functions that best make sense clustered around an education system. Boyer defined the four functions of scholarship as discovery, integration, application and teaching. Examples of these would be research, interdisciplinary analysis, public engagement and delivering lectures, respectively. All of these could be done separately and outside of the education system we know, but they are all so interlinked that it makes sense to have them combined within the same institutions and often within individuals who will span all four functions. Although research is often given priority (particularly in promotion), it is really the teaching function that acts as the glue holding these scholarly functions together. So one answer to the question ‘what is the purpose of education?’ is to say that it provides a means by which these functions can exist.

But I think if I was to have to give a simple answer I would say the purpose of education is space. For an individual student it provides space to learn without the need for immediate return or application, space to think, and for many young people for whom higher education is a formative experience, space to discover the sort of person they want to be. For society it provides space and distance from commercial pressure, where expertise can develop independently. Without this space the demands of the instant can overwhelm other considerations. This maintains a crucial mix within society. We need people who are commercially oriented, who react to trends quickly and make fast decisions. We also need those who consider many variables, who take a long view and who remain independent, just as any good group needs a mixture of hawks and doves. The danger of the commercialisation of education is that it seeks to cast everyone in the same mould, and thereby undermine a key function of education.

Your attitude to space will depend on your context: for the person buying a beach front apartment, then space is expensive, to the individual trapped in a packed lift, its absence is suddenly paramount. Getting the balance between these perspectives will be the challenge for education and society over the coming years.

 

Higher Ed - room for disruption?

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/annetta/1954945479/ by Annetta)

(Another excerpt from my Digital Scholarship book):

In other posts I have looked at some of the impacts new technology has had in other industries and what we might learn from this in higher ed. While the lessons these sectors offer are instructive, it also provides a basis for considering in what ways higher education differs, and thus may not be subject to the same influences. The major difference is that higher education is not purely a content industry. I argued in this talk that HE produces a considerable amount of content, which could be distributed and shared digitally, but its revenue is not predicated on selling this content, unlike music or newspapers.

It is undoubtedly the case that the vast amount of online content means that people now conduct a lot of their learning informally, using free resources. Combined with financial pressures, this creates a pressure, or an alternative competition for learning that is new to higher education. Anya Kamenetz details the convergence of these two factors in her book DIY U, arguing that “Do-It-Yourself University means the expansion of education beyond classroom walls: free, open-source, vocational, experiential, and self-directed learning.” This certainly represents a challenge to the monopoly on learning that universities and colleges have held for centuries, and one they should take seriously (through, I would argue, engagement with the technology and approaches).

However, even in times of financial crisis higher education has a certain resilience for two reasons: the social value of formal education is often increased in times of financial hardship; learning is not a zero sum game. It is this latter reason that I think is of real long-term significance to higher education. Even if people are learning much of what they require via open, online resources mediated through their social network, that in itself can generate the desire for further learning, and itself foster interest in formal education. Competition with informal learning is true to an extent, but it presupposes a set amount of learning by an individual, as if they have a limited number of cognitive learning tokens to be used up in a lifetime. But it is more often the case that learning begets learning. In this respect open, informal education is complementary to formal education, indeed something of a gift, rather than a threat. In a world that generates vast amounts of niche content which people are increasingly engaged with, either by generating their own, sharing or discussing, then the outcome is a larger population of active learners.

The challenge for universities then is to remain relevant to these learners. This means developing an appropriate curriculum, having flexible course options, using technology effectively and generating interest. An example of this symbiotic relationship would be between a photo-sharing service such as Flickr and university courses on digital photography. A great deal of informal learning occurs through the communities on Flickr, which can focus around themes or techniques, or the Daily Shoot site which gives photographers a daily task to perform (http://dailyshoot.com/). At some stage though many photographers want to further their understanding, or have a more structured approach and sign up for a course on digital photography. The Open University’s short course in this area has been one of its most popular, which since 2007 has run two presentations a year of 1000-1500 students on each cohort. 

More radically Jim Groom's open course on digital storytelling (http://ds106.us/), which combines 32 campus based student who are studying for credit, with learners from a global community studying for their own interest. The combination of the two groups is mutually beneficial. Participants are required to create digital artefacts and to share these on their own blogs and sites, which are aggregated together on this course blog. The course is fluid, with participants suggesting assignments, and distributed across many sites, using the hashtag #ds106 to group content.

These two examples demonstrate how the open, informal learning which many people partake in online is not necessarily a threat to the existence of higher education, and, given some adjustments by universities, can be a benefit.

There are two messages that higher education can take from this: the first is that it needs to engage in the sort of experimentation Jim's course represents if it is to turn the digital, networked and open approaches of learners to its advantage; the second is that it has the capacity to do so.

It is this second message that marks another difference with the sectors so often used as a comparison. Many of those industries did not have the revenue streams which come from accreditation and research funding to counter any loss of revenue from consumers finding alternative content freely available online. Higher education is in a position where not only does it need to disrupt its own practice, but it can afford to. It has sufficient resilience to do so because unlike content industries, that disruption does not completely undermine its current model. Higher education can be viewed as a long tail content production system, and with little effort much of what it produces could be shared as open, digital resources. Higher education can afford to do this, because their ‘customers’ (if we use that term by way of analogy with other sectors) are not purchasing that content directly – they are instead students who are paying for a learning experience which comprises that content along with the other elements, most notably support, guidance and accreditation. Other customers include research councils, commercial partners, media, charities and governmental agencies. Again these customers are not directly paying for content, and with the exception of cases of commercial sensitivity and privacy issues, they often have much to gain from openness and wide dissemination.

Some of the concerns relating to the impact of new technologies in other sectors then do not apply in scholarship, or their impact is reduced. The concerns regarding how artistic endeavour is to be rewarded in a world where all content can be easily distributed for free are very real if you are a musician, for example. These concerns are not the same for academics however, who are usually employed and so are not deriving their income from content in the same manner. This is not to underestimate the impact and challenges that face higher education, but to highlight that disruption by new technologically driven approaches is not as threatening to core practice as it has been in other sectors. This may account for why the innovation and adoption of such approaches has been less prevalent in higher education, since the urgency to respond is not as great. 

 

Games & education - a contrarian view

These are not scripts or courses in waiting...

<image http://www.flickr.com/photos/durka/4879338779/ by Thomas Durka>

It is almost a truism to say that games represent a bold new future for education. The Chancellor of the OU, and one of the wisest people around, Lord Puttnam, has often said as much: "The video game is probably the most powerful learning tool that's ever been created, and if we can only get the software right, as it were 'connect up the pieces', we could create something utterly remarkable." 

And the linkages seem irresistible - games create a structured environment where the player has to learn certain procedures to progress. They are given tips, have the opportunity to practice and have regular rewards. Most attractively, they are highly motivating and engaging, with players devoting hours to solving the problems presented to them. The player learns through trial and experimentation, sometimes collaborating with others, in a structured, scaffolded manner. If that doesn't scream 'Education!' at you then you're not paying attention. And, there has been some success in applying game based approaches to learning.

But whenever the logic seems irrefutable, and everyone is lining up to testify how great it is, then a contrarian tick kicks in for me. It's probably because I've read too much Hitchens, but I want to take an opposing view, just to see how it pans out.

So here are my reservations about games as the future of education:

Discipline suitability - although there are open games, such as World of Warcraft, many games have a very definite structure. You have to follow the narrative, and this may work well for some well structured disciplines, but not for more discursive ones.

Creepy treehouse - games are fun and motivating precisely because they are about imaginary worlds where the player is an elven wizard, or a Miami based drug dealer, or a premiership football manager. Making games about the actual stuff we need to learn about removes all of this, and is an example of creepy treehouse syndrome. When my daughter was young we used to occasionally watch Clifford the Big Red Dog, which always ended with Clifford being read a story, at the end of which the girl would pontificate 'Reading is fun!'. Even as a three year old, my daughter could spot this as a sledgehammer message. I think 'let's play a game about quantum physics' would set off similar alarm bells in any savvy 20 year old.

Inappropriate pedagogy - I think this one is less convincing, as you can have constructivist or collaborative approaches in games, but many of the conventional game engines are based around a fairly Skinnerian reinforcement principle. We would need to be wary about adopting this wholesale.

A misleading metaphor - my main concern though is that the seeming similarities between education and gaming mask more fundamental differences. My argument for this lies in observing another industry that has been seduced by the apparent similarities with games, namely the film industry. Adapting games has proven irresistible for the film industry and the logic again seems sound: games have an existing fan base; they have an easy narrative which can be adapted; they are highly visual; much of the design, look, feel, and characterisation has been done already; they're modern and sexy.

Yet, almost without fail, game adaptations have been disasters, artistically speaking. I don't know if they've returned a profit, and if they have, few have gone onto be the real blockbusters the producers would have hoped. Yet they persist because of that damn irresistible logic. Tomb Raider, Doom, Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Street Fighter, Prince of Persia - none of these have blazed standards for cinematic achievement. Look at this list of games that have been made into films and tell me of one that you'd bother to see a second time (or even a first).

The danger is that this reliance on games (and comic books, but that's another argument), creates a laziness in film making and a loss of their own creativity. Hollywood (and it is almost exclusively Hollywood that is obsessed with games) has, I would argue, made a mapping error and transferred the wrong elements across from games, and missed what is fundamentally different about films.

Games require less characterisation than films because the player participates in the game. In a movie this participation needs to be achieved through engagement and empathy with the characters. When you transfer a game to a film this lack of character creates a fundamental weakness.

In addition they operate over different time frames - a game that only lasted two hours would be considered light, and a film that endured for forty hours would be a tough sell. In games this prolonged engagement allows the player to become involved, to invest in the game. In a film this has to be compressed so all you are left with is the surface story and action.

Lastly they underestimate the discrimination of their customers. People who play Tomb Raider are quite capable of seeing romcoms or dramas. What they want from movies and what they want from games are quite different.

I wonder if the same misapplication of gaming is happening in education as it has in film. There are interesting things being done with games, letting town planners play with Sim City seems a great thing to do, and I'm sure people can point me at lots of great examples. But I think it's worth noting these reservations and thinking of games as useful in some contexts, not the great educational utopia they are often proclaimed to be.

Living in interesting times

As someone whose professional life sits at the intersection of the internet and higher education, the past week has been interesting to say the least, and not a little depressing. I'm not sure I have much to add to what's been said about the two big stories of wikileaks and student fees, but I have woken up on an almost daily basis thinking 'are we really witnessing this?'. So, lest I allow it to slide into normality, I thought I'd record some of my reactions to it all.

Wikileaks

As Clay Shirky has put it, I'm conflicted about Wikileaks - even as an advocate of openness, I know there are things of my own I wouldn't want made open, and I accept that diplomats probably need to have some confidentiality in what they say (and they could be doing work for good as well as ill we should remember). At the same time, I think the possibility of openness and revelation may bring a level of accountability to states that they will have to consider. The long term effect of wikileaks may be to make states less likely to engage in dirty, clandestine work because they know, ultimately, they'll get found out. As John Naughton puts it "Our rulers have a choice to make: either they learn to live in a WikiLeakable world, with all that implies in terms of their future behaviour; or they shut down the internet."

But what has been a revelation to this naive observer is the naked ferocity of the US reaction. The manner in which they have coerced companies (Visa, Paypal, Amazon, etc) and strong-armed the legal systems of Sweden and the UK (I make no judgement about the allegations, and have no illusions that Assange must be a nice man, but no-one else with a similar allegation would face the same legal treatment) and conducted a global campaign, including some commentators calling for Assange to be assassinated.

As Scott Leslie pointed out on twitter the other day, this is just part of an ongoing anti-internet campaign, but I think the level, and blatantness of this campaign is revealing. If the gloves were ever on, they now seem to be well and truly off. 

Shirky sums it up: "When authorities can’t get what they want by working within the law, the right answer is not to work outside the law. The right answer is that they can’t get what they want."

Whatever the rights and wrongs of leaking the cables, or of Assange as an individual, I can't help detecting more than a whiff of the conspiracy of sentiment in this. It is not just that information has been leaked, but that it has been done through the internet, by people they don't understand, and who aren't 'proper journalists'. This is when the full anarchic nature of the net comes home to them, and the lack of control they have over it. That they invented it must be particularly galling. If they could shut it down, or control it now, they would. If you think that sounds far-fetched or paranoid, consider what would have been the equivalent if a newspaper had printed the articles:

• Closing down the printing press and forcing any other printers to refuse to work with them
• Forcing all advertisers to withdraw support
• Having the editor extradited for trial
• Making selling the paper an offence

I'm not sure people would accept this, even if they disagreed with the initial publication. The traditional media would certainly be united in condemning it as an over-reaction and as having serious consequences for free speech.

Student fees

As the bill to raise tuition fees was passed yesterday, we saw the third day of the most political, angriest demonstrations since the poll tax. Inevitably the media focus has been on the violence (and the Royals for goodness sake), and ministers have sought to explain in detail how their proposals will mean that students aren't worse off. Either they are deliberately focussing on the detail to distract and confuse, or else they have failed to really understand what the protests are about. This is about more than whether you pay back amount A or A x 3 for fees, but about what kind of society we want to live in. If it is one that doesn't value higher education (particularly the arts and humanities) and views education solely as an individual transaction to gain better paid employment then that will be a society many of us don't want to live in. 

I argued before that during the Iraq war protests, Blair should've asked himself 'what do they know that I don't?', because maybe he was dealing with too much information, and the crowd had extracted the fundamental sense of the situation. If we give some of the politicians involved with passing the bill the benefit of the doubt and think they do believe it is a fair bill, then they should be asking themselves the same question. They must be surprised by the scale and ferocity of the backlash against the bill (the same politicians were complaining about political apathy in the young only a year ago, how they must wish for a return to that apathy). Instead of dismissing this as either a) a violent fringe 'hellbent' on making trouble or b) students not understanding the bill, they should be thinking 'what is the essence they have understood that we have missed amidst all the detail?'.

I would suggest it is this - education should be cherished and promoted for any society to progress.

So between these two we find ourselves in a radically more overtly politicised world, and one where the role of the internet and education are central. Tell me now that educators shouldn't engage with technology.

Open Conference video interviews

I conducted a set of interviews for the OU Conference. They all focused around the same 4 questions:

• What are the benefits of technology for learning?
• What are the interesting areas around openness at the moment?
• Are there any interesting trends we should watch over the next few years?
• What do you think about the open, online approach of the conference?

I interview our Vice Chancellor, Martin Bean, as well as Grainne Conole, Simon Buckingham-Shum and Andrew Law.

They raise some great points, including the impact of social networks, dimensions of openness, moving beyond simple sharing of data, and changes in the nature of conferences. It was intriguing how the same questions elicited very different responses. If anyone else fancies answering these questions from their perspective, please share with us, it'd be a great resource.

You can see the videos in this playlist:

I am the weak link I'm afraid, a career as interviewer does not beckon. But if you like watching a boring middle-aged man wearing a slightly snug tank top and waving his hands around, you've hit pay-dirt.

Academic output as collateral damage

Yesterday I gave a talk at the Learning on Screen conference, which was hosted at the OU, with the title of 'Academic output as collateral damage.' The talk arose from two recent events: the first was the public engagement day at the OU, which I felt was a bit old media and didn't really address the idea of academics producing digital outputs as part of their everyday practice. Jonathan Sanderson commented on 'public engagement as collateral damage', which was too good a phrase not to pinch. The second was the slidecast I produced for George Siemens and Dave Cormier's course, which both explored these issues a bit more and was also an example of the type of output I had in mind.

The (poor audio quality) slidecast is below:

Academic output as collateral damage

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

My main points were that you can view higher education as a long tail content production system. And if you are producing this stuff as a by-product of what you do anyway then a host of new possibilities open up. You can embrace unpredictability - which if you are spending £1000s on a TV series you don't want, but online unpredictability is a good thing, it's where all the innovation comes from. But most importantly I think it means we can do things we couldn't do before - George and Dave's open course is an example of this and we've only just begun to explore the possibilities that this new relationship with content affords.

Content may not be king anymore, but it has some influential friends

A couple of weeks ago I took part in a two day staff development workshop here at the OU. It had been very well organised by the Social Sciences Faculty and the aim was to get staff thinking about using new technologies to solve some of their problems in teaching. There had been some good initial work, so the groups came with problems they wanted to address, eg student retention from 1st to 2nd level, encouraging reflection, etc.

I was asked to present on the use of blogs and wikis. I gave a brief whizz through and tried to convey my enthusiasm for them as educational tools (I ended with a half-jesting 'eat my hat challenge' that whatever their issue was, I could solve it with blogs and wikis).

Why use blogs and wikis?

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

There were also presentations on:

• Interactive quizzes
• Screen/slide casting
• Podcasting

The groups then had some hands on sessions and had to choose two technologies and on the second day, set about solving their problem with these technologies.

Can you guess which of the four technologies was most popular? The answer is Screen/slide casting, with every group wanting to create one of these, and the other three all about equal after that. I think this may have been because it was more immediate (blogs take some time to get going and you need students really) and thus suited the workshop format more readily. But I think it is also something to do with educators relation to content.

In the age of the social network, it has become a cliche to say that content is no longer king, but it is something that people can readily engage with, rather than some of the more nebulous and longer-term benefits of blogging. I saw a lot of academics very excited by the liberating effect of being able to produce their own content (this was something I had pushed as a benefit of blogs also, the easy multi-media aspect). One downloaded Camtasia and was off making videos, another used Xtranormal and soon they were producing complex ideas and scripts.

The take-away message for me then was that many people are unaware of how easy it has become to create multi-media content, and that demonstrating this is a good 'way in' to appreciating the potential of a whole range of new(ish) technologies.