The Ed Techie

The Lamb Formula = Good enough?

In my previous presentation one of the slides I didn't get to displayed the following Venn Diagram for what I term 'The Lamb formula'

(Image created by crappygraphs)

This is from Brian Lamb, who borrows the title from Errol Morris' documentary, to describe the kind of technology he likes, and thinks is useful. My take on these three elements (which may be different to Brian's) as they pertain to education is:

• Fast - Technology that is easy to learn and quick to set up. You don't need to go on a training course to use it, or put in a request to central IT services to set it up. This means you can experiment quickly.
• Cheap - tools that are usually free, or at least have a freemium model so you can buy any extension out of your own pocket. Animoto is a good example - you can create free 30seconds videos or pay a small one-off fee to create a longer one. Slideshare is an example of a free service. This means you don't need to get authorisation to use them from a budget holder. It also means you don't need to worry about the size of audience or return on investment, which is liberating.
• Out of control - they are outside of formal institutional control structures, so they have a more personal element, and are more flexible. 

Overall, this tends to encourage experimentation and innovation in terms of both what people produce for content services, and the uses they put technology to in education. If you've invested £300K in an eportfolio system, say, then there becomes an obligation to stick with it over many years. If you've picked a free blog tool and told students to use it as a portfolio you can switch if you want to and also put it to different uses.

There are, of course, many times when this approach may not be suitable, but that doesn't mean it is never appropriate. Thinking about this also brought to mind a couple of conversations I've had with Liam Green-Hughes recently, who is very interested in the notion of 'good enough'. Liam is referring to hardware often when he talks about this, the Flip cam being a good example. It is good enough at recording to make the lightweight device and the ease of use be determining factors.

I have wondered what 'good enough' means in education terms. In his Open Ed keynote Erik Duval suggested that we can afford to disrupt education, because we don't do a particularly good job anyway. I think we do sometimes become scared of experimenting in education and become obsessed about every possible bad scenario, while ignoring some of the current deficiencies (in fairness this is partly a reaction to the litigious environment universities now have to exist in).  The good enough approach suggests that using fast, cheap and out of control technologies in education is at least good enough, and may be superior in that offers new ways of working. 

Let's play OER Roulette!

(The academic version of sending your child up a chimney)

This is the last in my trilogy of Open Ed 2010 posts.

For my presentation at Open Ed 2010 I wanted to do something a bit different. I had the last slot on a long second day (ie ‘the graveyard shift’) and I was speaking after David Wiley (who gave an excellent presentation as always), so the odds were stacked against me. In addition my daughter accompanied me so I wanted to include her in some way.

I remember seeing Elvis Costello in concert once and he had a large wheel at the front with a number of songs listed on it, which they would spin to select the next number to play. I wanted to recreate this, but transporting a big wheel was unrealistic, so I got my daughter to get members of the audience to select cards. My talk had the hypothesis that by considering OERs as big and little, it provided a lens on a number of issues around OERs, including:

• Sustainability
• Working methods
• Production time
• Context
• Academic status
• The role of content
• The nature of projects
• Sites vs Portals
• Aggregation vs Adaptation
• Implict messages

This gave the presentation a non-linear structure and because I had more subjects than could be covered in the allotted time, a degree of uncertainty. It also means I can give the same presentation again and it will at least be slightly different.

The presentation is below, which I haven't had time to turn into a slidecast and is now linear, so it loses some of the interactivity. I quite liked using this approach and given my previous post on not doing presentations, it at least allowed me to play with the format to a degree, but I would have preferred it to be more participatory.

OER Roulette

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

Am I done with conferencing?

This is no reflection on Open Ed, I’ve been moving away from conferences for a while. I enjoyed giving my presentation at Open Ed, and I managed to make it interactive to an extent. But I’m coming to the conclusion that I’m done with the traditional conference format. I had a couple of discussions with Brian and Scott around this and talked about how difficult it was to break away from the traditional format. The reason comes down to money essentially, although it’s tied up with a host of other issues.

There is a circular logic in organising a conference that is difficult to escape, let’s call it the Conference Conservatism Circle, which goes something like this: In order to make a conference viable you need people to attend and pay fees. To attend most people need to get funds from their university or a research project. To justify this they need to give a presentation. A presentation needs to be peer-reviewed so they can include it on their CV. People only attend conferences that offer this. You are organising a conference and need to make it viable…

 

Cycle

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

This is another example of where academic practice is continuing despite the alternatives now available. Before we had a digital, open, network then getting people together so they could present to each other was a reasonably pragmatic solution to knowledge sharing. We have largely continued with this practice despite it no longer being the best use of the time.

I’m not arguing for all online conferences here, I think getting together with people is valuable. Indeed it’s precisely because I think it’s valuable that I think we should stop wasting it giving presentations.

The barcamp and unconference models have experimented with this, but this more fluid, practical or discussion based approach has not been widely taken up in academic circles, largely because of the economics I outlined above (and a rather innate sense of conservatism amongst academics). Here are some questions I’ve been asking of myself:

• If peer-review is still important then how about a more open model, where your proposal for a suggestion is voted on by all delegates prior to the conference?
• Why don’t we use the net for the information dissemination function (eg make our presentations live beforehand, as video or slidecasts) and then use the face to face segment for discussion?
• Can we have more practical sessions that aim to develop something? This could be a site, a learning resource, some code, a set of guidelines, etc. But actually have functioning outputs from conferences, instead of just suntans and hangovers.
• Some people are worth seeing as presenters, so is there a proportion of the conference (but a minority) that is given over to these?
• Would more open presentation formats work, eg having to speak on a random subject for two minutes?
• If conferences are really about forming networks can we facilitate people forming groups (based on prior discussions and interests) around developing research projects?

All of these seem to me good uses of the conference time and having people co-located, yet all would struggle to get acceptance and funding as proper academic activity. We do have, for instance, research proposal sessions, or writing workshops, but these are both rare and distinct from the normal conference activity. I know some conferences have been experimental in their use of the format, but the majority of conferences across disciplines are still quite traditional and are locked into the Conference Conservatism Cycle.

So my modest proposal is one of direct action. As with my stance on only reviewing for open access journals, if we all insisted on moving away from the traditional presentation format, would conference organisers, and more importantly, funders shift practice also?

I know I’ll probably renege on this, but I’ll try it out: If you want me to come to your conference, then I will only do so if I can try something akin to the formats above, and not a standard presentation.

 

The strange case of the unconnected conference

(An unexpected appearance by the Two Ronnies went some way to alleviate frustration about the lack of wifi at OpenEd 2010 - Richard Hall and Joss Winn in full flow).

I was at the Open Ed 2010 conference last week. First off, I want to say that it was great to finally meet Brian Lamb and I really enjoyed presentations from Richard Hall, David Wiley, Erik Duval, Joss Winn and others. So this post is not a comment on the quality of the conference or the discussions I had there.

The conference was held in the science museum CosmoCaixa. This is a great museum and my daughter loved it. It is, sadly, not a great conference venue. Although they had wifi in every room which you could connect to, the bandwidth coming into the museum was so low that in reality no-one could get online (I had visions of a 14K modem in an office somewhere which then got fed into all these lecture halls with great AV facilities and their own routers).

This made me reflect on how connectivity, and the amplified conference has become the norm for me. Being unable to connect had a serious impact on the nature of the conference I think, in the following ways:

1. Loss of archive -  It couldn’t be streamed, or tweeted, or live-blogged, so the more holistic, distributed record of a conference that has become the norm was lost.
2. No backchannel – within the conference itself not being able to chat with other participants and share thoughts meant some of the immediate conversation around a presentation was lost.
3. Stunted presentations – many presenters wanted to at least demonstrate a site. I foolishly wanted to play some YouTube vids (although thankfully an Ethernet connection had been found for presenters by the time I came to present which gave some limited access). Being unable to do so made it seem like we had been sucked into a conference in 1995.
4. No wider participation – at least with those present you could have conversations over coffee, but I am also accustomed to have dialogue with those in my network who aren’t present. There were many time I would have tweeted during a talk and I know I would have had a response from someone in my network who wasn’t present.
5. No amplification – if one of the measures of success for a conference is its impact in its field then to lose connectivity for its duration results in it effectively being isolated. Not to be able to amplify the content and discussion at a conference to a global network severely restricts its significance.

Before someone jumps in and says ‘perhaps you should try talking to the person next to you’, yes I did plenty of that. I’m capable of doing both. And I think there is increasing value in hosting ‘disconnect’ events, where you deliberately don’t have access, such as writing retreats. But these types of events are geared up for this and it’s what you sign up for. What the experience here brought home to me is that amplification is not an interesting extra or a techie nice-to-have – it’s essential.