The Ed Techie

Innovating Pedagogy report 2013

Last year a few of us at the OU produced the Innovating Pedagogy report. This listed some topics in educational technology we thought were going to be significant. No-one warned me but it was an annual event, so here is the Innovating Pedagogy report 2013.

My colleague Mike Sharples (of FutureLearn fame) does an excellent job of cajoling us into contributing and putting it all together. He operates a process similar to that used in the creation of the Horizon reports, so a bunch of us suggest topics, we vote on these, then get assigned to write a summary for the selected topics. These are then reviewed, and then we write the main section, which goes through another round of review. It's a good process and hopefully it produces a good quality output.

So this year the topics we've chosen are: 

• Badges to accredit learning
• Citizen inquiry
• Crowd Learning
• Digital scholarship
• Geo-learning
• Learning analytics
• Learning from gaming
• Maker culture
• MOOCs
• Seamless learning

Some of the list are obvious (badges) and others less so (seamless learning), so I think it's got something for everyone. Some topics (eg MOOCs) have been repeated from last year, mainly where there has been significant developments in the past year, it seemed appropriate to include them again. Next year, no bloody MOOCs ok?

If you think there are subjects missing, you're probably right. This is just our take on the current landscape, which we think others may find interesting, we're not proposing it as a definitive list. Actually, it'd be nice to see a similar report from other unis and groups. Anyway, hope you find something in it that's useful. Here's that link again: Innovating Pedagogy 2013

The role of respectable idiots

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/aussiegall/6846455366/>

I gave a talk at the Higher Education Academy 'New Places to Learn' seminar yesterday about openness and the institution. I was proposing that in order to facilitate openness you need a combination of a top-down and bottom-up process. So for example, OER projects such as OpenLearn, combined with creating the space for academics to generate and share their own content (eg by recognising digital artefacts in promotion).

One aspect I raised for creating the environment within which academics engage in openness of their own free will is the role of the 'respectable idiot'. This is a person who has a degree of respect within the institution as a 'proper' academic. This is crucial, they can't be someone who is seen as 'out there' and unlike other academics, as they'll just be dismissed as 'not like me anyway'. So they're respectable, but they're also prepared to engage in some of the experimentation and playfulness that exploring new media requires. This may mean messing around with video, or keeping a part-personal blog that doesn't use the academic voice, experimenting with format, etc. They're prepared to put a bit of their reputation on the line. The role of these people then is to act as bridges between the more radical experimenters and the main body of academia. By being respectable they demonstrate that this is a legitimate activity.

Perhaps immodestly, I think I'm a bit of a respectable idiot in the OU. And many of the people I like and follow on-line would fall into this category too. So, if you're looking for ways of encouraging uptake of new forms of scholarship in your institution, then you can do worse than finding and then shining a light on, your respectable idiots.

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.

Projects, innovation & the small price of a coffee

<Image coffee love http://www.flickr.com/photos/javaturtle/133316103/>

Stephen Downes pointed at this piece from Tony Bates arguing that the choice facing higher education institutions is often phrased as one of 'innovate or die'.  It prompted me to blog some half baked thoughts I'd had around innovation recently.

In my presentation on Academic output as collateral damage I suggested that organisations like projects. They are set up to work with project structures, which have lines of responsibility, a set of deliverables, milestones, and fixed budgets. I understand this and for a lot of tasks it is the best way to work. But here are three statements I would like to put forward:

1) The small scale, web 2 type innovation we need to see doesn't fit well into conventional project structures.

2) As money becomes tighter in higher education, there will be a strong push to control resources more, with everything and everyone allocated to a specific, accountable project.

3) The organisations that do best in the financial crisis will be those that can manage small scale innovation, and transform this into a varied offering, so that at low cost they can meet a wide range of needs.

You'll see the dilemma here - in economically straitened times, the instinct is to control everything tightly through a project structure, but this project structure is not well suited to the type of innovation you need to engage in to perform well. The institutional instincts may be contrary to the overall well being of the institution as a whole, rather like a wounded animal fighting off a vet.

A very, very, small example of this happened last week - I wanted to try a video experiment with a few people at the OU. I asked if we could provide them with coffee and biscuits to entice them along and help with the ambience and was told no, unless it was related to a specific project. In fairness I think I could have got the coffee money if I'd tried a different route (and we didn't go ahead with the experiment anyway). But it's the type of example we've all come across probably. My point here is that this might be exactly the sort of innovation you want to encourage, or maybe it's providing pizza for a bunch of developers (what cliche?), or getting someone's time for a couple of days. All of these types of informal projects become increasingly difficult in a project-centric approach.

The solution is probably to set up a non-project project, or something like Google's 10% time when people are free to explore other approaches, but these are by their very nature, unpredictable and uncertain. And in times of financial crisis unpredictability and uncertainty are not favourable characteristics for a proposal. We know, however, that these are precisely the qualities that lead to exciting developments online. So, how to square that circle?