The Ed Techie

Montaigne, the Godfather of blogging

 

I am reading Sarah Bakewell's marvellous 'How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer'. She uses Montaigne's essays as the basis for a biography and also to extract a number of lessons, such as 'Don't worry about death', 'Be convivial' and (my favourite) 'Read a lot, forget most of what you read, and be slow-witted'.

Montaigne seems to me to have many of the characteristics in his writing which today we associate with good bloggers. Although, as Bakewell points out, every generation finds their own interpretation of Montaigne, so this is really more a reflection of my interests than perhaps some truth about him, so for instance William Deresiewicz uses Montaigne to justify his anti-social network rant.

I'm not the first person to link Montaigne to blogging, via Lorcan Dempsey I found this piece by Andrew Sullivan called 'Why I blog' in which he says:

"Montaigne was living his skepticism, daring to show how a writer evolves, changes his mind, learns new things, shifts perspectives, grows older—and that this, far from being something that needs to be hidden behind a veneer of unchanging authority, can become a virtue, a new way of looking at the pretensions of authorship and text and truth. Montaigne, for good measure, also peppered his essays with myriads of what bloggers would call external links"

For me Montaigne shows the way for good bloggers through the following practices:

• Honesty - you really can't blog if you've got a hidden agenda. People have too much choice and so what you are after is some form of connection and this comes from people having good ideas, but also from connecting to them as an individual.
• Openness - as Sullivan points out in the quote above, one of the endearing qualities of Montaigne was his willingness to think out in the open. This is what bloggers do well, they put forward ideas, take criticism and comments, and develop those ideas partly in conjunction with their readers. They don't work quietly for three years and then release a finished masterpiece (this is a good way of working for some writing, maybe novels, but not for blogs).
• Relaxed style - Montaigne really developed that chatty, informal style which is a lot harder than he makes it look. This is definitely the style that works best in blogs, because, to reiterate the point, part of what makes a good blog is a connection to the author.
• An element of the personal - Montaigne's essays are famously rambling and rarely connected to the title. This approach doesn't always work in blogs, which tend to be shorter posts focused on a particular point, but what does carry over is the way he brought in personal elements to back up and reinforce wider points, which a good blogger does without making it a boring shopping list.
• Reflective and questioning - good bloggers (and when I say a good blogger, I probably mean 'bloggers I like reading') seem to me to adopt Montaigne's reflective approach, questioning themselves, and others. One of the delights of blogging is that it has no commercial masters to please and so bloggers tend to dig around a story, analyse it in detail and question every aspect of it (unlike many journalists who accept the PR from a company to fill space).
• Playfulness - I like bloggers who toy with ideas, mess around with media and inject some playfulness into their posts. Blogs liberate us from the considerations of many formal publications and I like people who embrace this.
• Owning a vineyard - oh, okay that one doesn't apply.

OU lifer

 

This month marks 15 years since I joined the Open University, so indulge me in a little reflection (only ten more years and I get a letter and plaque!). 

My potted OU history goes like this:

• Joined 1995 as a Lecturer on a course in Artificial Intelligence, in the Technology Faculty. I had just finished my PhD (in AI) and the OU had a course which was about to launch, when one of its authors left, so needed someone fast. I got lucky here, I don't think you'd walk straight out of a PhD into a lectureship now.
• 1999 chaired T171, the OU's first major online course, working with John Naughton. I'd done some messing about with online tutor groups, and creating web sites. John was keen to try something new for our level 1 course, and with the old course ending we were in the right place at the right time.
• In 2002 I left the Technology Faculty and joined the Institute of Educational Technology, to work with Robin Mason and H806, a masters course which was to be offered through the UK eUniversity (no, it wasn't my fault they failed). 
• In 2004 I was asked by then PVC Paul Clarke, to be Director of the VLE project. We didn't have a VLE then, but did have lots of components of one. I spent 18 months doing stakeholder analysis, competitor review, functional specification, etc (stay awake at the back there). 
• In 2006 I got offered a Chair at another university, and as if by magic, the OU offered me one too. Again, I think I was a bit fortunate here, I hadn't really planned this.
• I took up Directorship of the SocialLearn project in 2008, only to hand it over to Simon Buckingham-Shum when my wife became ill.

In between these formal duties I've worked on lots of internal projects and externally funded research grants, as well as different courses. And most importantly of course, I've become a blogger.

I list this not as a mini-CV touting for business (though if you want to acquire my services...), but to demonstrate what a good place to work the OU is. There has been much talk of the 'job for life' being a thing of the past, and that everyone will have three careers from now on. I'd say it's unlikely I'd leave the OU now (unless they kick me out), but far from stagnating, the reason I would stay is because there is such variety and freedom within my job. This is an advantage of working in a large organisation, there are always different projects coming up. The OU also allows a certain degree of flexibility, and trust. I think the days of 'we haven't seen him in years' approach to academia are gone, and there is a much higher degree of accountability now than there was even 15 years ago. But, for instance, not only was I allowed to start blogging, but I have been able to increasingly make it a key component in my recognised work. 

While, like any large organisation, the OU can be slow, and sometimes frustrating, it is at its heart, a reflective organisation I think. So when you do things like blogging, or creating a large online course, there is a willingness to consider how it should adapt its practices. 

It's also a good will place to work - you're not embarrassed to say you work for the OU, unlike some jobs you might think of, generally when you tell people you get a positive reaction. So feeling like you work somewhere that is well liked and socially beneficial makes getting up in the morning easier.

And it's also an interesting place to work. Not just because there are interesting people there (which of course, there are), but because of all universities the OU is both vulnerable to, and in a good position to take advantage of, new technologies. You therefore get the feeling of being part of an organisation which is living through the zeitgeist (ok, we're not Google, but it's not Cambridge either). As an educational technologist, this goes in the 'good thing' box, unless it means the end of all universities, when it shifts rather rapidly to the 'very bad thing' box.

So, all in all, I think I've rather ridden my luck - I got a good post in the right university just as the digital revolution was hitting and I was interested in it. A few years either side and I'd be writing this blog in-between stacking baked beans tins on the shelves of a well known supermarket.

In ten years time I'll blog what it's like to be a bona fide long server, unless a) I get the sack or b) someone offers me double my salary to just blog. Hey, everyone's got their price. 

Those OER issues

The final session of the Fiji workshop was an organized debate between two teams, one taking the pro-OER case and the other the anti one. I led the anti- team with Frank Rennie leading the pro case. I ought to say that I was asked to do this, I’m not an anti-OER person.

I think most of the argument I’m going to put have been said elsewhere, so there’s nothing particularly new in this post for people who follow the OER movement, but having been through the process of collating the arguments, I thought I’d put them here too.

So my main arguments were:

• Sustainability – this is the daddy of all the arguments, with Big OER projects costing substantial amounts of money, there is a real issue around whether we can afford to continue to do OER, or at least in the way it is realised currently.
• Lack of reuse – I just borrowed from David Wiley on this one.
• Reuse is hard – going back to my previous post about adaptation, and building on the experience of the partners in this project, it seems that taking an existing OER and adapting it to your context is actually really hard work. Often it saves little time and requires a different skill set than simply creating your own from scratch.
• Individual/institutional resistance – this isn’t really an argument, but just pointing out that there is a lot of work to be done to overcome resistance from institutions and individuals to sharing. That isn’t to say we shouldn’t do it, but we shouldn’t underestimate the effort required also.
• Leave it to others – or put another way ‘education ain’t no good at this stuff’. To demonstrate my point I pulled up traffic data comparing Slideshare to MIT’s open courseware and the OU’s openlearn, and even worse, Wikipedia compared to these two. Traffic may not equal quality learning, but my argument here was that while education ponders different ways of doing this, comes up with repositories that take years to get built and develops complex usage and metadata processes, other people just get on with it.
• Lack of evidence – we simply don’t know if OERs are useful pedagogically (we’ve got lots of anecdotal evidence). What is the return on investment here? Sure some people find them useful but then so would flying out individual educators out to each of those people to give one to one tuition, but we wouldn’t argue that is sustainable.
• Cultural imperialism? – I borrowed from Dave Cormier on this one. As he puts it: "If the MIT edtech curriculum started being the default curriculum taught in even 10% of chinese universities this gives whatever professor is teaching that course ENORMOUS control over the direction of the industry"
• Quality/Depth – I don’t really buy this argument but I thought I should include it, that there may not be the depth or range of coverage.
• Learn through creation – this one came from some people on my twitter network when I said I was looking for anti-OER arguments, and I think it’s quite a subtle one. If adaptation is difficult then there may be a tendency to use OERs ‘as is’, and I think there is some initial evidence that supports this is the main use. For the educator much of the learning, both about the subject and how to teach it, comes from the process of creation. It is the old adage that the best way to learn something is to teach it. If people begin simply taking existing OERs will there be a process of deskilling, dumbing down or simply not progressing?

None of these are deal breakers for OER, and we can see all of them as the type of issues that arise in a new discipline. Our debate also ended up being focused around a technicality, as to what constituted an OER. I limited it to the big, formal OER projects as these were easier to attack, and I could make the arguments about sustainability and education projects not being the best way to move this forward. But if by OER we really mean 'shareable assets' then a lot of these arguments become weaker.

As I said I don’t necessarily buy all these arguments and could put some pretty good counter claims to them myself, but for those of us in and around the OER world they're worth addressing. The worrying thing is that my team put our case so convincingly, we won the debate. And I didn't really want to...

Aggregation not adaptation

Tony Bates gave a keynote at the Fijian workshop I was at. It was, as always, good value as he covered changes in technology and their implications. I was in broad agreement with him but one element had me questioning him afterwards.

He repeatedly stated that if he were doing this presentation as a set of OERs he would chunk it up, stop at certain points and introduce a learning activity. He’d set it out with learning objectives at the start. In his advice he suggested that educators shouldn’t do it themselves (‘you’ll get hurt’, he joked) and should seek support from instructional designers and technical staff.

These two things seemed wrapped up in a particular view of OERs to me. In my question I argued that his don’t do it yourself advice rather precluded a bottom-up approach to OER generation, which was in my view, the best way to go. He gave a robust defence, arguing that we need both, but to maintain quality people should seek help and support.

Reflecting on this made me appreciate that I have come to a particular view around OERs, without really stating it. There is some of it in my Little OER and big OER post, but for clarity (and for you to knock down), it goes something like this. I like OERs that:

• are not explicit learning content – they do not have to be generated with the aim of being used for learning;
• do not specify the learning that will occur – I like Zittrain’s concept of generativity, that a system will have unpredicted outputs when you allow a level of creativity. I want a ‘system’ that is generative with respect to learning, and thus specifying learning outcomes or activities restricts this;
• are easily aggregated into a pathway or framework which is created by the educator. This is where I see the educator coming into the system, they pull together many different resources, and add context, activities, extra material and interpretation.

One question then is ‘are these OERs at all then, or just ‘stuff on the web’?’ I’m not going to answer that on the grounds that it sounds like the interminable ‘what is a learning object?’ debate that I gave too much of my life to a few years back.

This seems to me another possible interpretation of the principle I suggested in another post that ‘complexity resides in the network, not the application’ (I repeat this to myself twenty times every morning as a mantra). The reason I felt uncomfortable with Tony Bates’ approach was that it was pushing that complexity back in to the app (or the resource).

An upshot of all this is that I think the emphasis in much of the OER movement is on the adaptation of OERs. This is because they are Big OER, with the complexity built in to them. The Little OERs I prefer aren’t adapted, they’re aggregated, and you add stuff around them. If I was ‘World OER Leader’, then shifting the emphasis to aggregation would be my first and only decision, before I resigned and let David Wiley do the job because he’d be better at it.

Violinists and OERs

This is the first in a trio of OER related posts. I’m in Fiji currently, for the final meeting of the Sidecap project which has been looking at OER use in developing countries/regions (specifically in this project, Mauritius, West Indies and South Pacific).

I’m sure many of you will know this story, it's the kind of thing that gets passed around on email, but it was new to me (I checked and it’s true, not an urban myth). This is the common account, from Hoax Slayer:

A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, it was calculated that thousands of people went through the station, most of them on their way to work.

In the 45 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money but continued to walk their normal pace. He collected $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition.

No one knew this but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the top musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written,with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars.

Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theater in Boston and the seats average $100.

It’s usually taken to demonstrate that we don’t stop and appreciate what is around us, and in our busy lives we can pass by things of beauty and value. But I’m going to interpret it from an OER perspective.

It has two lessons here: the first is that people don’t value free things, or are suspicious of free. We have become accustomed to roughly equating monetary price with value or quality. Free is therefore obviously low quality or suspicious at least. My colleague Patrick McAndrew has related how many people are dubious or uncertain when they encounter openlearn. Their concern is that it isn’t free, that they can’t ‘just take it’, and often need a lot of reassurance that this indeed the case. So the violinist’s story reinforces the message that getting people to value free is still an issue.

The second lesson is about context. When they hear this story many people are critical of the commuters who passed him by, declaring that they would have stopped and listened, or it’s an American thing (or a Washington thing). I’m pretty sure I would have walked by also. Why? Because I’m in an underground station, which is an unpleasant place to be, I want to get out of it as fast as possible; Because I’m probably on my way somewhere and I like to be punctual; Because I’m not expecting to encounter classical music there and so have a different mindset in place; etc.

If we transport the scenario to the lunchtime and he is playing in the sunshine in the park, then my guess is that the outcome would have been different. The stunt was set up by The Washington Post, and they obviously wanted the outcome they got, so chose the conditions least likely to favour people stopping. From an OER perspective context is highly significant – the context of the learner when they encounter the OER. For example if it is being pushed in their face when they’re trying to do something else online, then they’ll ignore it, as commuters ignored the violinist because it interfered with their primary task. If you catch them at a more leisurely online time, or when they are actively seeking learning, then the reaction will be different. This would suggest that ‘build it and they will come’ is not sufficient alone as a strategy – this is equivalent to the violinist playing the concert hall. Sure it may be full but you will only reach certain people. Going out to learners in the right spaces and the right times is the key, and like our violinist, I’m not sure I have the answer to that one.

When reflection goes AWOL

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/eryda23/284475315/ by eryda23>

I was talking with a colleague the other day about the difficulties of integrating reflection as practice into education. We know being reflective generally makes for a good practitioner, but it's difficult to force people to be reflective. Schon's observations could be result of correlation, not causality, ie good practitioners tend to be reflective, but making someone reflective won't necessarily make them a good practitioner.

Anyway, there was much furore at the time about bankers and their bonuses. In much of the discussion that followed and particularly the types of statements that came from bankers and their bosses, it struck me that reflection is almost the key attribute they lack. Schon makes the distinction between reflection in action - they obviously failed to exhibit this when creating a global pyramid selling scheme, and reflection on action - they have failed to exhibit this since the downfall and the suggestion that massive bonuses are necessary to their function is an example of this.

I think it is this latter failure, that to truly accept and reflect on how badly things went wrong, and thus make the requisite adjustments that is truly terrifying. Bankers often project this attitude that the rest of us are over-reacting, and no major changes are required, just some tinkering. They are akin to a serial murderer who has been caught because they were speeding, but still protests they weren't really going over the speed limit.

'The reflective banker' has become an oxymoron, and it seems to me one of the challenges that society faces (since, let's face it the financial industry won't do it), is how to inject reflection as common practice into the banking industry, both at the individual and institutional level. A reflective banker/bank would continually ask:

i) Is what I am doing harmful for society?

ii) Am I being paid too much? (because contrary to belief it is possible to be paid too much, because it leads to next point)

iii) Is this mode of operation unsustainable?

If the answer to any of these questions is 'yes' (or even 'maybe') then big sirens should automatically sound in every household in the country.

One of the problems with extreme financial success is that it creates a bubble - we see it with footballer's also. Only those within the bubble are perceived as truly understanding what is going on (they are holders of some truth) and thus communication only happens within the bubble. And reflection is akin to criticism which is a potential bubble-burster, and thus is explicitly (through reward structures and punishment for speaking out) and implicitly (through social norms) outlawed. If truth is the first casualty of war, then reflection is the first casualty of runaway financial success.

As I started out saying it's difficult to force people to be reflective and when you do it quickly boils down to fake-reflection and game-playing. But you can provide a context within which it is encouraged. This can be through interaction with people outside of the bubble (even the dopiest celebrity is forced to reflect on their shallowness when they visit poor nations for charity), through answering criticism fairly (people who say 'I never read the papers' should be made to), and perhaps, just maybe, through education.

If various governments really want to prevent another financial crisis (which is inevitable given the paucity of real solutions to the last one), then making reflection a virtue in the sector would be a good place to start.

Launching podstars

As part of the digital scholarship which I'm heading up at the OU, we have a small pilot project called 'podstars'. We've asked for volunteers across the university, who might be interested in exploring new methods of output. We've got thirteen of these, and yesterday we had our kick-off meeting. We gave each of them a Flip camera, showed them how it worked and discussed some ideas.

I gave a brief project overview, and there was an activity, which is in the slidecast below if anyone is interested.

Podstars

View more presentations from Martin Weller.

It's a pilot project so what we want to find out is:

1. Do people go off and create new stuff or does nothing much happen?
2. Are there issues that operate as specific barriers?
3. What type of output do academics create? (are there disciplinary differences for example?)
4. What are the support issues?
5. What is their experience and how does it relate to their 'normal' output?

It was interesting that people had a variety of reasons for participating: some had a specific project in mind; others were keen to make their blogs more engaging; others wanted to use it in teaching.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone else is running a similar project, and I'll post up any interesting contributions we get.

To the ghosts who write history blogs

Okay, maybe it's not an Obama moment in history, but, as you may have heard, the OU has adopted Google Apps for education for its students, and I think this may be a significant move in educational technology. Niall announced it and Tony has given his reaction. We're by no means the first to do it, but I think the OU's adoption is significant for a number of reasons:

1. It ain't Microsoft - there will have been strong lobbying to adopt an MS solution, so the move to Google marks a shift in the power base or at least the default assumption that it's MS who do enterprise solutions.
2.  It's the cloud - a lot of other universities use the OU as a benchmark I think. I know that when we adopted Moodle, that made the decision to go with open source easier for other institutions. A kind of 'well, if the OU is doing it, then it has to be reliable' argument can be put forward. So, just as Moodle acted as a seal of approval on open source VLEs, so Google Apps signifies a reliability of cloud based solutions. 
3. It puts powerful collaborative tools in the hands of students - I commented on twitter that Google Docs might end being the most significant educational technology around. Not because it's fantastic, but because it's there and it's easy to use. Or maybe it'll be chat. Or large email storage. Whatever it is, I think students (and tutors) will start to use the technology in ways that we don't predict or demand, but because it makes their lives easier. We have struggled to crack collaborative learning for distance students for ages - maybe Google Apps will do it in one move.
4. They are not education specific tools - although it's packaged as Google Apps for education, it is really just standard Google Apps. Like a lot of ed tech people I have argued that our role is no longer to develop bespoke educational applications, but rather to take existing tools and see how these can be used in education. Google Apps reinforces that view and makes you ask the question, 'why do I need a Virtual Learning Environment, and not just a virtual environment we use for learning?'

So it'll be interesting to see how it pans out. One disappointing aspect is that staff don't get it until later. As I'm already in Google I'm waiting for everyone else to come and join me.

Oh, and the pretentious title is really just an excuse to embed this song from the Low Anthem:

	The Low Anthem - To The Ghosts Who Write History Books
	Found at skreemr.com

The centralisation dilemma in educational IT

I wrote an article for a new journal, the International Journal of Virtual and Personal Learning Environments (IJVPLE). My piece was entitled 'The centralisation dilemma in educational IT'. I argued that we have a centralisation - decentralisation cycle in educational IT, so we had distributed versions of VLE, which moved to a central VLE, and we are now seeing a shift back to decentralised cloud services.

The arguments for a centralised VLE are:

1. Uniformity of student experience
2. Centralised support
3. Quality assurance
4. Efficiency
5. Robustness
6. Integration of different tools
7. Staff development
8. Platform for expanding elearning offerings

Whereas the arguments for a decentralised model can be summarised as:

1. Quality: The individual components of an integrated system will not be as good as specialist tools performing any one of these functions
2. Flexibility
3. Pedagogic suitability
4. Relevance
5. Educator control
6. Personalisation

I then look at some of the issues around both the centralised and decentralised models before coming to this (maybe woolly) conclusion:

"Having looked at some of the issues surrounding centralised and decentralised educational IT services, we can see that there is dissatisfaction with the current centralised model, but also problems with the implementation of a decentralised model. What this may signify is that we are in a transition point as educational IT services evolve from a tightly controlled and deployed set of systems to a broader continuum of tools...

This next succession of IT services is likely to see an attempt to retain some of the benefits of a centralised system with the diversity of a decentralised one. This will see the easy, open integration of third party applications into an existing hub of central, core services.

However, this approach is still unlikely to satisfy those in the decentralisation camp, because the implementation of educational technology can also be seen as a metaphor for how the institution itself operates. The primary benefit of a centralised system is that it facilitates control – this enables universities to perform their duty of care, both pastoral and educational, to their students by controlling the environment. In order to realise a decentralised model it would necessitate a good deal of relinquishing control. But for those who favour a decentralised model, this control is both restrictive in terms of the technologies they use, but also what they do with them."

Because it's the first edition the journal is freely available so you can access a PDF of the full article here.

OU chum Niall Sclater also has an article in the same journal, entitled 'elearning in the cloud', which you can also access.

My final offer is this: nothing

 

Recently I wanted to use a Creative Commons image in a project which was a bit blurry as to whether it constituted commercial use or not, so I contacted the owner and asked them as they had specified non-commercial. They asked for payment (which is of course their right), but I didn't have a budget so I declined and found an alternative image.

Similarly I was looking for an image of a bee a while ago for a school project for my daughter and found a nice one, but they wanted $200. After I had stopped laughing I went and found a free alternative.

And this is the problem for any online commodity - there is always a free alternative available. It may not be as good, but it'll do. I apply the same approach to articles and referencing - if I have to pay to access your article, I'll find an alternative which says more or less the same thing, and which I can access freely.

The question for anyone wishing to charge for an online product then is this "are there free alternatives available". If the answer is yes, then forget charging.

In this respect I was reminded of Michael Corleone in The Godfather 2. Senator Pat Geary is attempting to extract a bribe from him and Micheal responds:

"You can have my answer now, if you like. My final offer is this: nothing"

Corleone has violence and intimidation to back up his offer of nothing - we have abundance of alternatives. I'm not arguing whether this is morally correct, maybe we should pay, but the point is about behaviour.