The Ed Techie

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 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.

What I learnt from a photo a day

I've blogged on this before, after I had done my first year of a photo a day, using Flickr. I stopped that in July 2011, and found that I wasn't taking any photographs. So after some encouragement from Karen Cropper to try blipfoto, I started again in Oct 2011.

Today I ran a session at the OU along with Juliette Culver on what I learnt from a photo a day. It was a fun workshop and went down well. The slidecast is below, complete with sh**e photographs.

 

What I learnt from a photo a day

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10 Digital Scholarship Lessons in 10 Videos

I've given a talk with this title 3 or 4 times recently, so thought I'd best get around to blogging it. In the presentation I caution that you shouldn't really trust people who give lessons about the future - they're usually trying to sell you something. But lessons is a nice way to frame it, so treat them more as opinions I've come to over the past couple of years.

Lesson 1: It's not just for geeks

It is easy sometimes to get bogged down in conversations about the latest technology, API calls, RSS feeds, linked-data, etc and it seems very technical. Sometimes this has the effect of making academics think 'it doesn't relate to me'. But we shouldn't let the geeky talk (which is necessary sometimes) cloud the fact that we are looking at changes to very fundamental scholarly practices.

Lesson 2: Researchers are in a dilemma

Researchers are caught between the potential of new approaches and operating within a conservative context. A range of studies have shown recently that researchers are often cautious in their use of new technology and rather risk adverse. 

Lesson 3: Interdisciplinarity is in the network

While many people point to the importance of interdisciplinary work, it is actually difficult and costly to realise. The 'light' connections we have and ease of republishing means that interdisciplinary results can be achieved easily with low cost.

Lesson 4: We're all broadcasters now

Broadcasting and large scale public engagement used to be the reserve of those on TV or radio. As I've argued before, scholars produce a lot of content, which with minimal effort can be converted into shareable, digital resources.

Lesson 5: We're operating in an attention economy

When content and connections are abundant, then we lose the monopoly on attention. I think playing the attention game doesn't come easily to academics and is viewed as somewhat beneath them. But nevertheless this is the environment the digital scholar operates in. It can be quite subtle things such as a good title, or using interesting images in a slideshare presentation, or making use of different media, posting at a favourable time of day, utilising the network, etc. But increasingly we are competing with an excess of demands on everyone's attention and merely assuming the quality of your research or teaching will win out may not be enough.

Lesson 6: We can rethink research

I covered this in an earlier post, but to reiterate, we are often operating within a mindset of how research is performed, funded and disseminated which doesn't take into account new possibilities.

Lesson 7: New skills will be required

I didn't want to produce a checklist of digital literacies, but the following are the types of skills that will be useful (but not essential to have all of them): video creation, site analytics, curation/filtering, writing for online, liveblogging/amplifying, data visualisation.

I would probably have an entirely different list next year, but just looking at this set you appreciate how few academics are really adept at most of them, and also how unrepresented they are in formal recognition systems. But nevertheless they will become increasingly significant I'd argue, for instance research councils will be looking for alternative means of disseminating research findings, or the use of analytics to inform teaching or research.

Lesson 8: It'll impact even if you ignore it

Here I replayed the network weather argument, using the academic conference as an example of a fundamental practice that is changing because of the impact of technology, regardless of whether you personally use them or not.

Lesson 9: It's about alternatives

I can't stress this one enough. It is tempting to portray it as a case of the old model dying, being replaced by the sexy new one, and hey, if you're not on the bus with the hipsters, you'll be swept away. But the real picture is much more subtle and complicated than that. It is not the case of existing practices being killed off, but rather of us having a richer set of alternatives to choose from. The monopoly of the incumbent forms may be killed off, but not necessarily the forms themselves. Peer-reviewed journals are a good example here - they're no longer the only game in the scholarly communication town, but they still have a role.

Lesson 10: Don't focus just on risk

According to Tversky and Kahneman, we are programmed to focus on risk, but not so good at seeing benefits. In his book from Gutenberg to Zuckerberg, John Naughton has this quote from James Boyle, which sums it up:

“We are very good at seeing the downsides and the dangers of open systems, open production systems, networks of openness. .. Those dangers are real… we are not so good at seeing the benefits and the converse holds true for the closed system.”

So people often think of all the bad things that might happen, for example if they post stuff online someone might pinch their ideas, or it might take time, or there may be issues around rights, etc. But they're not so good at imagining positive outcomes, such as it might connect you with more peers, lead to new forms of collaboration, improve citations, be a useful teaching tool, or just be fun.

I used a video to set off each lesson, so here is the slidedeck, with the videos removed but a link to each one. 

UPDATE: And if you want to see me doing it live, then here is the presentation with videos at LSE.

 

Ten lessons in digital scholarship

View more PowerPoint from Martin Weller

JIME relaunch

Last year I took on the role of co-editor of JIME (The Journal of Interactive Media in Education). JIME was founded in 1996 and was one of the first open access journals, and operated an innovative open peer review system. But it had been a bit neglected over the last few years, so we shifted it to OJS, worked through the backlog of review papers, tidied up the scope, reappointed an editorial board, and now I'm pleased to announce a new issue.

This is a special issue focusing on OER, with guest editors Ester Ehiyazaryan and Alannah Fitzgerald. It's a very good issue, even if I say so myself. It features an opening article from me (what more do you want?) on creaitivity and openness in education, and then moves into 'proper' research work with papers looking at OER in Africa, motivations for reuse, and obstacles in finding OERS. I'm sure there'll be something there of interest to readers of this blog.

And now that JIME is up and running again, we are seeking new submissions. We're operating a fairly traditional model, so academic papers, peer-reviewed - take a look at Focus and Scope for the type of thing we're after. We will be doing some more experimental special issues, eg multi-media, later also. I hope to see you there.

No country for old ideas, this

So, I've been in New Delhi this week as a keynote speaker at the EdgeX conference. It was great to catch up with George, Dave, Stephen and Grainne, and to meet Jay Cross, Clark Quinn and LesFoltos. Viplav Baxi and the team were the most amazing, hospitable hosts, and it's been a real pleasure to be here. I thought I'd share a few of my own perceptions from the visit, although one has to accept they are based on a very limited scope of India, but for what it's worth.

Start-up fever - It feels like a very exciting place to be at the moment. The opening speaker said he felt blessed to be living here to witness change and a form of social democratisation experiment in such a vast scale. And the oft-repeated mantra was that education was key to this. Social entrepreneurship is seen as the means to achieve this. Just about everyone I spoke to had a start-up company. If you hadn't initiated one start-up before breakfast it was a slow day. And while this is undoubtedly driven by the desire to make money, it was also seen as the way to get things done, and the social good element seemed to be a strong driver also.

Scale, scale, scale - It is the numbers in India that make drive a lot of this. We were variously given figures of 150 million to 500 million people who needed to be educated over the next couple of decades. Those kinds of numbers are probably not going to be satisfied by a single solution. And so all manner of educational businesses and inititiatives become viable, because a small slice of that is still a big number.

Beware the undead - there are a lot of US and UK universities hovering around India, trying to sell their model as a solution. With higher education on its knees in the west, this big market attracts the half-dead universities to suck on its new blood. Ok, I'm overplaying it. I think there are undoubtedly mutually beneficial collaborations that are being established, but as George exhorted, "stay Indian". There are aspects of the Indian context that are unique and simply importing a model wholesale won't work.

Beware the bubble - while it did feel like a very exciting time, the reality of India is never far away and it may be that the task is just too great to be sustained. The last time I felt in the midst of such collective fervour was when I was at a tech conference in the US at the start of the web 2.0 explosion. I remember having breakfast and on a table of 8, being the only person without two start-ups on the go. This kind of enthusiasm is liberating, and can produce great things, but it tends to run out of steam, so I would just caution against a potential bubble here. Having said that, if I was a) younger and b) more business minded, I'd be in India now.

I met some great people, and learnt a lot, so I'll be fascinated to see how it develops. At the moment, I'd sum it up by saying it's a place where a youngish man can tell you he has 800 acres of a new city to develop a university of his own design and you don't dismiss him as delusional.

The research Hussites

[This is another from my catalogue of strained metaphors, and my grasp of religious history is rather tenuous, so I'm sure people who are better acquainted with the subtleties of Hussite history can point out lots of flaws with it. But take the surface points as of interest.]

I've been giving a talk recently called "Digital Scholarship: 10 Lessons in 10 Videos". I'll blog these in detail later, but one of my lessons is that we should rethink research. By this I mean we have a certain attitude towards how research is conducted, which was shaped prior to the arrival of digital, networked and open technologies. Some of that attitude still works, but there are also a host of possibilities that remaining wedded solely to that view prohibits.

An aspect of this that interests me is the Do It Yourself (or Do It Ourselves as Tim O'Reilly has it), do it now approach. In my talk I give three examples from my own experience:

• Start your own journal - for example my MetaEdtech Journal
• Build an app - eg our Facebook apps
• Interrogate data - such as Tony's playing around with tools and social data

But you can think of many other examples: Jim Groom's DS106 mega experiment or the MOOC approach from George Siemens and co can be seen as research and experimentation in the open.

What I find fascinating about these is that they didn't need permission. As Larry Lessig points out in his review of The Social Network, it is this removal of the permission filter that is really significant:

"what’s important here is that Zuckerberg’s genius could be embraced by half-a-billion people within six years of its first being launched, without (and here is the critical bit) asking permission of anyone. The real story is not the invention. It is the platform that makes the invention sing."

Back to research then, and our ingrained attitude goes something like this:

1. Come up with an idea
2. Write a proposal
3. Get funding
4. Do research
5. Publish

Obtaining the funding is often an absolutely necessary step - you can't build a Large Hadron Collider in your back yard after all. But it also performs another function - it validates research as something worthwhile. So ingrained is this approach, that if you don't get funding, it doesn't count as research. We don't question it anymore. 

But with the arrival of new easy to use tools, open data, a network of peers and cheap or free storage, you can do a lot of research now without funding. The video I show for this lesson is this one from Derek Sivers. He's talking about starting a business, but a lot of it could apply to research also:

So what's all this got to do with a 14th Century Czech Priest? Well, Jan Hus argued that we didn't need priests, that everyone formed part of the church and the Papal hierarchy should be undermined. I'm not making any comment on his religious argument here (he says, trying to avoid offending anyone). There is an analogy with this approach to research though. For the Catholic churches read research councils. We are all the research councils, we don't need permission to conduct our practice and we don't need their approved channels to reach the audience. 

My argument is not to overthrow research councils, we still need them, but to propose that often there are low to zero cost alternatives available which might get at some of your research question. We should consider these at least without always defaulting to the funding = research model.

Mind you, poor Jan didn't have a happy ending, so maybe I should stay quiet.

Meta Edtech Journal - new issue

You may recall that prior to Christmas I set up the Meta EdTech Journal, using Google's Annotum. It is a meta journal, where I periodically trawl through open access educational technology journals (using George Veletsianos's list), and create an 'issue' which links to a selection of these. Each has a comment from me, setting out what I think is interesting about the article.

The second issue is now out, with, I think, a good range of articles. Please let me know if it's of any use whatsoever.

And remember - if you want to curate/edit a special edition, just let me know. You need to be able to find 6 or so open access articles in a particular subject area you are interested in. It's probably easiest if you just send me these, with a comment on each. And if you feel like it, add in an overview to the special edition. Sorry, this won't get you promotion or a REF status though, just a feelgood glow.

 

The vinyl lesson

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/fensterbme/102458936/>

There has been a bit of a buzz recently that the sales of vinyl records are on the increase, and what does this mean. This isn't a 'the joy of vinyl' post, but rather that the rise of vinyl has some interesting lessons for what happens to an industry or artefact after the arrival of the digital, networked version. I think there are three main lessons:

1) The arrival of digital highlights the real value in the analogue version - in this case the vinyl wasn't about being a music distribution platform, but rather a complete art object. Its physical presence was its value. People now say that they value the limitations vinyl puts on the listener, so you have to listen to a whole album and don't simply shuffle. These are qualities that are brought into focus by the presence of the digital alternative.

2) It is more complex than simply digital replaces analogue - let's make no mistake here, although vinyl is on the increase, it is dwarfed by digital downloads. The monopoly of the old system is nearly always overthrown by the arrival of the digital, networked version. But it oversimplifies matters to say "X is dead" now.

3) The analogue becomes a specialist, hobbyist pursuit - digital and networked nearly always trumps analogue in terms of convenience. But the new values we've come to appreciate in 1) mean the analogue version moves to becoming a monority interest, but of great value to that group. It increases in (maybe financial, but certainly emotional) value, but decreases in reach.

The same has happened with nearly all analogue artefacts where a digital, networked version has come into existence. Think paper and online newspapers, maps & GPS, digital and film photography, and so on - books are in a similar transformation process now.

What's perhaps more interesting is whether the same applies to activities as well as artefacts. Shopping has seen some of this, although not to the same extent - the activity of shopping has often moved online (see reports about the death of the high street), but it hasn't quite become a hobbyist pursuit. But the convenience of online shopping has meant it has lost its monopoly and people have become to realise what it is they like about 'real' shopping (for me, nothing by the way), which is the social side. So city centres have become a greater mix of coffee shops, restaurants alongside shops.

Now here's a couple of activities to consider in the light of the three vinyl lessons:

• Academic conferences
• Teaching

Maybe that's for another post...

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.