The Ed Techie

Of Course

George Siemens and I ran the Course to Discourse mini-conference the other week, to discuss the future of the course. The elluminate recordings are now up if you missed it. Here is the slideshare of my presentation:

Digital Implications for Universities

View more OpenOffice presentations from mweller.

I opened the conference and so I was trying to set the tone for what was to come by considering the impact of digitisation on education. I employed a rather reductionist strategy by considering higher education as being comprised of a number of components. I used the analogy of newspapers to consider how each of their components had been weakened by digitisation. I argued that we can think of these various components as being held together like atoms in a molecule. Not all all molecules are equal and neither are all industries - the strength of the bonds between the component atoms will vary. The question then is to what extent are these components in higher education weakened by digitisation and how strong are the overall bonds that make 'Higher Education' a valuable package?

As for the mini-conference overall, I thought it went well. Attendance was pretty good (at about 70 people), but I think we could have done better. I only blogged and tweeted it, but didn't make a real effort to put the call out in mailing lists, etc.

The line-up worked very well I think. George and I bandied a few names around by email, contacted them with a rough brief and put together a quick schedule, and yet I don't think the synergy and flow between them would have been better if we'd spent months planning it and coordinating in intricate detail.

The technology worked well, although I saw a few reports on twitter that some people couldn't get access. I want to run more open sessions like this, and Elluminate seems a reasonable lightweight choice, so I hope access isn't an issue.

The discussion in the sessions was lively, and there has been some continued debate in the Moodle forums that George set up, although I still think this continuation post-event is something we haven't quite cracked yet - how do you make the event the start, rather than the end?

Anyway, thanks to all those who presented (Josie Fraser, D'Arcy Norman, Grainne Conole, Alec Couros, Tony Hirst as well as George and myself) - I really encourage you to check out the recordings of at least some of these talks, as there is some great stuff here. Also thanks to all those who 'attended', and kudos to George for setting it up and sticking with my half-baked idea.

Bless my cotton socks I'm in the news

(yes, I have been waiting a long time to use that title)

A couple of weeks ago, a journalist from The Guardian contacted me to talk about how a tweet from Stephen Fry had sent over 10,000 visitors to the OU's Devolve Me site. The angle was initially the power of new media, but quickly morphed into educational use of new twitter. I stressed the importance of one's personal network and new forms of digital scholarly activity. I didn't really have a single message though, and journalists like to have something to hang a report around, and it seemed clear that she wanted to go beyond the Fry story.

So she spoke to Brian Kelly, and in the meantime the CLex report of the use of new technologies in higher education came out, and the piece became about more general use of web 2.0 and higher education. It was published today in the Education Guardian. After all the hype and scare stories around twitter, it's a good, well balanced piece.

It was interesting to see the piece develop. I wonder though if there isn't a little hypocrite dwelling at the bottom of my heart: I praise new media, talk about the death of traditional news, and then get a little flush of excitement when a national newspaper prints my name. Is therapy required?

Who are the reality instructors now?

Stephen Downes has a long, thoughtful piece on the implications of the financial crisis for society, entitled 'The Monkeysphere Ideology'. It's a 'make yourself a cup of coffee, sit down and read' post, in which he raises many issues. One of which is this:

"I read this headline in the New York Times: "In tough times, the humanities must justify their worth." Not business, which caused this mess, not media, which propagated the monkeysphere ideology, not accounting, law or political science, which participated by stumbling around each other in their haste to see who could be corrupted most quickly. No - humanities. And arts."

I had a similar feeling the other day when two chaps from a commercial company were bemoaning their experience in working with higher education. They complained of some 'pencil pushing idiot sitting in an office' who blocked their decisions, and claimed they were trying to 'drag education into the 20th century, let alone the 21st.'

Now I don't know the particular details of their situation, maybe their complaints are justified. But I've come across this attitude many times. The key feature is this: the commercial world is the holder of the absolute truth. I had often asked myself why this particular truth trumps all other truths. And the answer was, I guess, money.

People from the commercial sector who believe they have some truth to reveal to the misguided people in higher education see themselves very much in the role of what Saul Bellow terms 'Reality Instructors.' The reality instructor is referenced in the marvellous Herzog, ("Moses was irresistible to a man like Simkin who loved to pity and to poke fun at the same time. He was a Reality-Instructor. Many such. I bring them out") but the character is a constant theme in Bellow's novels. It is usually manifest in a male, street-wise character who delights in teaching the main, intellectual character some truths about the 'real world'. But it's worth pointing out that the main character is aware of this, enjoys it, and that these truths are rarely as valuable and as robust as the reality-instructor believes.

The reality that the commercial world wants to reveal to higher education is that of expediency, toughness, and hard work. And rather like Bellow's characters we have been rather accepting of this. But if the financial world represented the core of these realities, and that has been shown to be very unreal, then why should higher education feel obliged to listen anymore? Indeed, have the roles reversed? Instead of universities being told how to operate in a tough financial climate, maybe businesses should be coming to them and asking 'you have managed to maintain a viable business and role in society for hundreds of years. You have adapted without completing ruining your entire system, and, ahem, throwing the world into a deep crisis. How do you do it?'

Year of Future Learning - an experiment

I want to try something out, so would like people's views on it. My idea is to try and get some focused activity going around the concept of the learner of the future. Think of it as either a distributed research process or adding a layer of intentionality over some of what we do in the blogosphere.

I have this feeling that between us there are often very good conversations, excellent resources, great ideas, etc but we don't always take the next step in synthesising or collecting these. 

Here is what I have in mind: A loosely coupled, distributed research 'project'. We declare 09 the 'year of future learning' (#YOFL or #FLY - take your pick). I accept that 'the year of X' is a bit naff, and comes with all sorts of anti-arguments, (what about next year?) but as a means of focusing our energies, providing opportunities for review, and giving a broad enough umbrella it provides a useful framework.

This is a means of aggregating existing resources and events by tagging them - in the Weinberger sense, we may as well put our leaves on as many branches as possible, so for instance there will be sessions at Northern Voice and Alt-C which could be made part of the YOFL simply by adding the tag.

But I see it as much more than just another meme or tag, I also want to use it as a means of instigating some new open, distributed activities. I have in mind the following:

• A set of interesting questions generated by the community
• Connected blog posts around particular topics - blog-carnivals Tony has pointed me at
• An open, special edition journal
• Combined research results
• A workshop format that anyone can run, and share results via a wiki
• 'Live' events eg George Siemens' Elluminate sessions
• 'Flash debates' in twitter around a specific topic, which are then summarised
• Face to face sessions at various conferences
• A wiki/blog/site collecting all of this material together
• An end of year review

 I want to avoid any perceptions of elitism  so the idea is that this is open to anyone. I've emailed a few blog chums to see if they would be interested in doing some of the above, to give it some traction, but essentially it's open. If there is a topic of burning interest to you, run an activity and it'll be pulled in.

In addition, my colleague Grainne Conole also has lots of links into various communities, so we will be running a number of face to face activities also. This involves 'talking to people' - not sure what that is, probably some cool web 2.0 service.

The experiment for me is whether the online community can work this way, or whether it really does need a more directed, formal research project. At the moment I think we have good conversation. Conversations and dialogue can be spontaneous but they can also be focused, with a specific aim. Similarly, we have a loose-knit community of sorts, and communities can be around general areas of interest, but they can also have a common goal ('overthow a president', 'find Dave a date').

It is this second, more intentional layer that I was hoping we might foster this year. I like finding other people's posts and riffing off (or ripping off) ideas, but I want to explore whether the edublog community can do a bit more. Whether we can have purposeful conversations, aimed at addressing a specific problem.

To kick off I have created a wiki here for setting out the big questions.

I am go to aggregate anything with #YOFL and #FLY tags at some point. I make the solemn promise to summarise these once a month and try to put some interpretation to them, although anyone else is also free to do the same of course.

I will also set in motion a few activities, such as those listed above.

So, what do you think? Oh, here's a logo:

New ways of being open

I've done a guest post for Ken Udas over at Penn State. It's called Exploring new ways of being open, and sets out some of the evolution of the term 'open' in education, from the Open University's perspective.

But more importantly, it contains a Billy Bragg quote, so go take a look.

Bush, digital scholarship and the price of reputation

Our Vice Chancellor gave a talk on Digital Scholarship the other day, a topic that is often on my mind (read: trying to legitimise all this messing around I do). Scholarship, or rather ‘having your scholarship recognised’ which is what people really mean, is all about reputation.

In the pre-digital world this reputation could roughly be pegged to other filters. Publication in journals, books, keynote appearances, research grants: all of these require other professionals to have filtered your contribution, so your reputation could easily be established by the quantity, and quality of these measures. Of course, it meant people learnt to game the system – how to get publications out, how to network so you got invited for keynotes, etc., but on the whole it worked reasonably well if you played along.

But the very nature of the digital world is about the removal of the filter. Anyone can blog, produce a video, podcast, and generally express themselves. So, reputation becomes much harder to verify. This is a problem if we want to start rewarding digital scholarship. Put simply, 100 peer reviewed journal articles probably means you are a decent scholar – 100 (or 10,000) blog posts doesn’t mean anything. So we need to find new ways of establishing someone’s online reputation.

Let’s take Tony Hirst as an example. I think we’d all agree Tony would qualify as a digital scholar. So how would we go about demonstrating this? There would be traditional contributions too, such as developing courses, giving talks, involvement in university projects, etc but let’s focus on the online element. Here are some thoughts:

• Quality of output – Tony, or colleagues, could be asked to nominate significant contributions (blog posts, videos, etc). Personally, I've always liked the Feedistan post.
• Appearance on independent rankings – e.g. Technorati, Jane’s 100+ Elearning Professionals to follow on Twitter, or the Wikio UK blog rankings. I take Matt Lingard’s point that, especially with Twitter, these lists don’t really mean much, but if we were trying to establish an overall ranking of reputation, then collectivelythey add some weight.
• Quantity, or variety, of output – maybe being able to show the range of online activity is important, e.g. blog posts, videos, mashups, etc.
• Impact – being able to demonstrate that what you have done has been used by others. For example, Tony’s work with the OpenLearn material inspired Jim Groom and David Wiley to incorporate openlearn units into blogs.
• Testimonials – quotes from others about your work, eg Jim Groom saying “over in Great Britain there is the legendary Open University, rich with an unfair advantage of knowledge and innovation represented by cats like Tony Hirst"

I think any one of these is easy to cheat or game, e.g. by getting into blog wars you can get your technorati rating up, or by publishing very small posts you can increase your quantity, but when taken overall they provide an indication of reputation.

Which brings me on to George W. Bush. Reputation, online or otherwise, is something that it takes a long time to establish, but only a second to destroy. Bush’s failure to twice get the Paulson agreement through congress seems to me less of a failure of the Bill itself (I have no idea if it’s the right approach, and let’s face it, no-one does), but rather a failure of reputation. Put bluntly, the Iraq chickens have come home to roost. Dave Winer first pointed this out, saying:

Flash back to the United Nations on 2/5/03. An impressive almost Presidential Secretary of State, Colin Powell, delivering some chilling news, not coming right out and saying it, but definitely leading you to believe that Saddam has nukes and chemical weapons and stuff even more horrible and is getting ready to use all of it in some unspecified horrible way. .. Well, I did what a lot of Americans did that day, I sucked it up and got behind my government. And they suckered me. And I'll never forget it. I got fooled, and used, and a lot of people died, in the name of freedom, and it was all a lie.

So Bush is suffering from having sacrificed his reputation in order to legitimise the war in Iraq. And if you are going to sacrifice your reputation you had better be sure that a) it’s worth it and b) you aren’t going to need it again.

An awful lot of what us online folks do is not very easily quantifiable. Exactly how does sending a joke message on Twitter contribute to our bottom line? In the long run what we are doing is establishing our own, and by association, our institution’s online reputation. Given Bush’s reputation collapse the next time someone asks you how much is reputation worth you can answer ‘ooh, about $700 billion’.

What does the credit crunch mean for ed tech?

<Image Wall Street by BreakDennis - http://flickr.com/photos/breakdennis/2093184009/>

Brian Kelly had a post recently, entitled 'Web 2.0 in troubled economic times'. In it he stated:

"In response to a recent post CodeGorilla pointed out that at a number of participants at the Repository Fringe event had felt that use of services such as Flickr and Google should be avoided because such companies were not as well-established as many Universities."

He then goes on to suggest a number of issues we may need to address such as whether institutional IT services will be affected, whether user's expectations will change, etc. He makes the point that internally hosted services may be as much at risk as externally ones.

The BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones has a post in a similar vein, who sees worrying echoes of the dotcom crash.

I've been thinking about this recently, in particular what it means for education, educational technology and all the new types of activity and technologies that those of us in the blogosphere are always promoting.  I see one of two responses happening:

• Stick to what we know - in uncertain times an understandable reaction is to retreat into what you know best and what has worked in the past. These are not the times to start experimenting with new, risky approaches. For those in education that translates roughly as "stick with teaching subjects we know work, in a traditional manner. Publish in journals and get research funding in. Don't do anything rash."
• We need to find new models - this takes the opposite view: Now is exactly the time to start experimenting, because the market is tougher and you need to be more flexible. So, finding new ways of teaching, supporting students and disseminating knowledge are the best approaches  to respond to rapidly changing environments.

My feeling is that there will be some derision aimed at those who promote things such as free software, open educational resources, web 2.0 business models, etc. The accusation will be that these sorts of things are fine in a bouyant economy, but they are not practical in a global recession. We will be told that we need to be hard-headed, pragmatic, realistic. My response to this is that Wall Street is not renowned for being populated by whimsical, altruistic dreamers and hard-headed pragmatism doesn't seem to have got us very far, so maybe there is something in all this openness.

On a more general note, that response will be difficulto argue against, particularly in the US, it seems to me. The next time someone suggests a comprehensive health plan for instance, it would be difficult to dismiss it as too costly, or un-American, as the response will surely be "what, compared with putting $700 billion dollars into banks?".

I'll leave the last word with Rory Cellan-Jones, which is a nice reminder of how current context can make people lose sight of the bigger story:

Early in 2000, my BBC bosses briefly made me internet correspondent, just as the dotcom madness neared its peak. By the end of the year they had decided that the internet was "over" - as a story at least - and sent me back to the business beat.

Education is like freeze-dried coffee

(I'm writing a piece for On the Horizon, which Michael Feldstein is editing. In case it doesn't survive the cut, thought I'd share this analogy)

<Image by roadsidepictures http://flickr.com/photos/roadsidepictures/2634835504/sizes/o/>

The (higher) education process is largely one of enculturation, whereby students learn how to become members of the higher education community. This is appropriate for many domains and careers, but not for all and while inflexibility in the subject content may be addressed by using third party content, the inflexibility of the process is not, because the process is itself embodied in physical structures of universities. As it stands, higher education is rather akin to freeze-dried coffee – regardless of the input, the output invariably tastes of the process.

Digital literacies

I was asked to provide some thoughts on digital literacies for the Vice Chancellor, but rather than just do a dead email, in keeping with the spirit of the topic, I thought I'd put them in a blog post.

This isn't the research related view, but rather a personal perspective. Here are what I think are interesting about what we might term new digital literacies:

• Different voices - think of the bloggers you read the most. It might be people like Stephen Downes, David Warlick, Will Richardson, D'Arcy Norman, Alan Levine, Scott Leslie, Tony Hirst, etc. Now consider the top-cited researchers in educational technology journals. I'm not sure who they are, but my guess is it probably won't bear much resemblance to your top blog list. There are a few exceptions (Grainne Conole, Terry Anderson come to mind), but generally I think blogs have allowed people to find a different voice, and that has allowed very good writers who perhaps didn't find the academic journal an appropriate publishing outlet to have a voice.
• Reuse as an artform - Steve Jobs is fond of quoting Picasso's "Good artists borrow, great artists steal". The same might be said for new digital literacies "good educators borrow, great educators mashup". Taking existing material be it content, data, tools, and remixing it isn't just a shortcut or convenience, it is an independent skill of its own.
• Becoming a broadcaster - educators need to re-envisage themselves as broad-(or narrow)-casters. A lecture is a form of broadcast. You now just have many alternatives. Creating videos on your PC is, if not simple, at least achievable. Creating podcasts is a doddle. You can blog, slidecast, webcast, or hold forth in SecondLife. These are considerable skills to acquire, see for example the videos of Michael Wesch for how good they can be. Also, if you have the time watch all of Wesch's hour long lecture on a portal to media literacy to appreciate how the new digital literacies are not just nice add-ons but essential if we are to get students to participate in education.
• Multiple outlets - an additional point to the above, you now have many different possible outlets for your material, and often for the same material. A paper may appear in the conference proceedings, on your blog,on slideshare, scribd, etc. There are multiple ways of finding an audience.
• Social motivation - why do all this? Partly it's for the creative itch, we like to express ourselves, but more prominent in the digital literacies is the social motivation. If you post something you may get comments back, which may start a dialogue, which may lead to the expansion of your network.
• New metrics - I have talked a lot about this in the past, and I still don't know what the answer is. As I've often said, I don't want technorati to replace my RAE rating because it would end up influencing behaviour. But I do know that many of the traditional metrics we apply in higher education (e.g. publishing in 'quality journals' whatever they are), are simply irrelevant to understanding digital literacies.
• Openness as a starting point - following up from my previous post, part of acquiring digital literacies is about a mindset also. One of the cornerstones of this is that you start out with openness as a default - it may not always be appropriate, but it's where you start from. That way reuse, conversation and your own literacy develop.

The business of education

Tony outlined some web 2.0 business models the other day. Stephen Downes picked up on this, and commented

"[I] am compelled to think that the disaster that happens when democracy is for sale is nothing compared to what will happen when learning is for sale"

As Tony was thinking about SocialLearn, this is something I've been musing over for a while too. So, I offer this post up in the spirit of debate, because even putting the words business and education in the same sentence is heresy for some, and yet I think we will face some very difficult choices in this area over the coming decade, so we can't ignore it.

I think we should be clear that any Vice Chancellor will already tell you that education is a business. Even if students don't actually pay themselves and are funded by government, freedom of choice as to where they go, effectively creates a market. Lecturers, administrative staff and librarians don't work for free and buildings don't build themselves. Universities are therefore competing for students, and so will offer courses they think are attractive, facilities that are appealing and trade on a brand name. To this extent education is already 'for sale', and it is difficult to see how within current society it will change.

But, the situation is likely to get more complex and if the business aspect is currently hidden then it is will become more explicit. The driving forces behind this change are numerous, here are some candidates:

• Decreasing Government funding - the model of Government paying for the entire student education has been dwindling since they cut maintenance grants in the UK, and similar trends have been seen globally. With top-up grants and cutting of ELQ funding in the UK we can see a general move towards universities having to become less reliant on subsidy (I'm not saying this is a good thing, just highlighting it as a pressure on Higher Education).
• Increased competitiveness between universities - the explosion in student numbers during the 1990s saw expansion in higher education institutions. Now that these numbers have levelled off, there is increased competition between these institutions for students.
• Globalisation - many 'Western' countries specifically target overseas students, who bring in more funding. It is likely that host country universities will fight back against this, moving competition on to a global scale.
• Increased complexity in the education market - if you are a learner with a specific requirement then universities are no longer your only option. Not only are there commercial organisations who may offer training, but there are a range of other providers who have educational content which may meet your needs, e.g. Sky, BBC, The Guardian, YouTube, OERs, etc.

You may disagree with my list, but I think these are all observable forces and there are probably more. As I've already mentioned, my intention is not to argue that these are benevolent forces, but that we should recognise them and consider how higher education should respond.

I think there are two broad tactics, and then many different interpretations of each. The two main responses can be labelled political and pragmatic (they are not mutually exclusive, you could engage in both). A political response is what I guess Stephen would advocate - these argues that the existing society which creates these pressures is at fault and we should seek to change that. The pragmatic response (which I guess I'd advocate) argues that we should find practical ways of operating within this new environment.

So, to come back to the business models, here are some questions which I genuinely don't know the answers to, but which we may have to find soon.

1. Is advertising revenue ever acceptable? E.g. would ads run on a university site that provides funds for student services compromise a university.
2. Is providing free resources and tools, but charging for support and accreditation acceptable?
3. Would 2) be acceptable if the learner didn't pay, but used Government subsidised 'vouchers'?
4. Is a model that relies solely on Government funded students viable?
5. Would charging companies, not individuals, for professional development be acceptable?
6. If we believe in OERs, how do we find a sustainable model for them that allows educators to be employed while giving away their content?

And there are many more. The point is that technical and social changes are being felt by higher education. Some of this will be good, some will be bad, but we are likely to face some difficult choices, which we should start considering now.