The Ed Techie

The future is here...

.. we just haven't noticed it.

I had a fairly normal working day today, but I reflected on how technologically infused it was. This posting isn't meant to be smug and purvey how modern my life is, since I'm aware that (strange though it may seem) some people are not working in educational technology, and so the working day of, a plumber say, may not be so affected (but probably more financially rewarding). And also there are people who live a far more technologically enhanced life, but it struck me that we have these small incremental changes and occassionally we have to take stock. Below is my day, and I like to think that had I seen such a diary in 1990 I would have thought it was the restricted to science fiction or at least some kind of techno-eltite:

• 8am. I was working from home, which is in Cardiff, and my workplace is 150 miles away in Milton Keynes, so I start the day with email.
• 8.30 I do a blog post on the wiki tool wetpaint.
• 9.00 I have a conference call with a team at the OU working on Learning Design.
• 10.00 I have a Flashmeeting with partners on the Flosscom project who are based in Milton Keynes, Greece and Germany.
• 11.00 I have a Skype video chat, with 2 colleagues at the OU library where we haven't been able to synchronise diaries for a face to face meeting.
• 12.00 I share a document with some colleagues via Google docs
• 2.00 I start preparing a presentation for a blogging workshop. I find images that other people have created via Flickr and a couple of excellent video clips via YouTube, and look for ideas from Powerpoint presentations shared by strangers on Slideshare.
• 3.30 I update my Facebook profile after being invited to be somebody's friend and not having used Facebook for ages.
• 5.00 I meet my wife and go down the pub (okay, not much technology involved there).

Sometimes you take all this stuff for granted and it's worth stopping every now and then to really appreciate the changes that have taken place. And while all of this has been possible for a few years now, the point is that it all worked (reasonably) seamlessly and the technology was almost transparent - we just used it. When it is this pervasive in your working life you have to say that a revolution of sorts has taken place - you just haven't acknowledged it.

What a difference some design makes

I came across wetpaint today - a service that allows people to easily create wikis. Nothing particularly new there, but here's the catch - they look good! Most wikis are a bit on the bland side, but without any specialist programming skills anyone can create an attractive wiki here. It seems to have caught on too with lots of hobby and interest sites flourishing, although a lot of them seem to be just using it to create websites that don't really do much by the way of wiki.

I am currently considering where we house the FLOSScom summer school (which will be about learning in an open source community), and wikiversity seems the logical choice, but the interface of wetpaint is nicer and may encourage more participation.

Flickrvision and glanceability

I spent rather too long gazing at Flickrvision today (via Alan Cann). In a kind of web 2.0 orgy, I had some americana music playing through LastFM also which made it an audio/visual experience (of course I should have been twittering about it to really be 2.0, but I'll blog instead). Tony Hirst recently blogged about the concept of glanceability which we picked up from James Cridland. This strikes me as a good example, although I didn't so much glance as lose myself (perhaps we need another term such as procrastinatability or gazeability). I could dip in and out as I worked but it was more than just radio, and different from TV.

I have been having some thoughts about future collaboration with the BBC and one might be to generate glanceability content that is associated with a radio programme, so it can scroll across a digital TV or a web player. This might be OU material, or student generated material from OU students. Either way I think it is possible to have decent synergy between a programme that is of interest to students and content that is of interest to general listeners. I wasn't so keen on Twittervision as an entertainment or diversion, although I can see it may have good educational uses again if it was linked to a programme or event.

A critical mass of tagged, subscribable content

I haven't looked at Pageflakes for a while and went there the other day. I registered as a new user, and it impressed me with the default content it provided. It picked up I was in Cardiff from my IP address and provided me with a decent set of Cardiff related content, including:

• Cardiff news stories
• Cardiff photos
• A google map with Cardiff events marked on it
• Cardiff weather

Several things struck me about this, apart from thinking 'that's cool!' (as an aside can a 40 year old actually use the term 'cool' in any context without embarrassment?). The first was that considering it only had one bit of info to go on, that's not bad personalisation. Imagine what a learning system could do that had course history, user preferences, learning styles (if such things really existed), scores, etc to go on?

Second, this level of purely automatic content selection (I don't suppose there was a little man selecting content for me at the Pageflakes garage) has only really been realisable recently as we have reached a critical mass of content that is tagged (the photos were from Flickr and just used the tag Cardiff) and which is subscribable and available. Having been an advocate of learning objects a few years back (and as a means of writing, I am still a fan), this critical mass was something they never really achieved and so the visions of a personalised course didn't materialise. It also demonstrates, if further demonstration were needed, that making your content available in RSS and accessible (ie not behind authentication) is the key to both getting it seen and to a personalised future.

The last thing was what could an institution like the OU do with something like this, maybe in conjunction with the BBC? Users could receive calendars with appropriate programmes slotted in, maps with relevant  'learning events' highlighted in their locality (which could be user generated e.g. a meeting of the physics club in the Cayo at 8pm), content that relates to both their subject and geographical area (e.g. an example of classic Georgian architecture can be found at...), plus a range of general subject content feeds.

The poetry of webcams

When I first started out on the web, around 1995, I thought web cams were marvellous. They've kind of fallen off my radar since (maybe they've been made a bit grubby). I was playing around with Google Desktop today and one of the widgets you could add was one that cycles through webcam shots from around the world, which you can then call up. I spent an hour or so looking at these, and there is still a thrill at being able to take control of a camera on the other side of the world and turn it to look down the street.

It strikes me that a better writer than I could make something quite moving from the following scenes I observed:

• A single fishing boat putting out to sea from an Italian port
• Cars coming home along the sea front in Japan
• A solitary car driving through the middle of the night in Iowa
• The trees rustling on a campus in Virginia
• A car parked in the rain by a river in New England

Interesting the way that the subscription model and Google Desktop has reawakened my interest in this 'old' technology.

Chasing the Hawthorne effect

In a response to a comment from Alan Cann I glibly mentioned the Hawthorne effect and that maybe it wasn't the evil it is usually portrayed as. I've been thinking about this since, and wanted to explore the idea. It goes something like this:

The Hawthorne effect says that because you start experimenting that can change the behaviour of the people you are observing (see also the related Pygmalion and halo effects) . It bedevils educational technology, because say you introduce podcasting on a course and then measure student performance or satisfaction then you can't be sure that any change is really due to a pedagogic benefit of the podcasts, it could just as well be due to the novelty of having podcasts, or of being part of the experiment. There are ways of controlling it, but a lot of educational technology research is quite small scale, done with one teacher and a cohort, and this is particularly prone to the effect.

The teacher effect is probably more significant, in that if you are the teacher who introduces the technology then the very fact that you have done so will modify your behaviour. It may make you more motivated (it's fun again!), it may change what or how you teach, it may make you more reflective. In short it can rejuvenate the way you are teaching a course because you have to think about it in a different way. Now this is likely to have an effect on the students, almost regardless of what the actual technology is.

So generally researchers get sniffy about such studies. But my point is that if it does have this effect, then regardless of the cause - isn't that a good thing? Introducing a new technology (or it could be a new approach, doesn't have to be technology related) every couple of years keeps you on your toes as an educator, makes you think about the design of your course, your approach, the content. It's rather like all those studies that show that introducing new IT systems doesn't actually improve productivity, but you have to do it to keep up. If you hadn't introduced them then the organisation wouldn't  be able to compete. So maybe there isn't this great pedagogical motivation for using the new technologies, but their incidental effects are more significant.

So rather than dismissing the Hawthorne effect maybe we should be actively pursuing it, and asking yourself 'How have I Hawthorned recently?'

Some more reasons to blog

In a recent post I mused on some reasons why educators should blog. Since then I've done my official 'thou shalt blog' report (incidentally, I am really enjoying running to Thou Shalt Always Kill which contains the excellent lines 'thou shalt not judge a book by its cover/thou shalt not judge lethal weapon by Danny Glover') in which I added a couple more:

• It exposes the process – much of the community of practice theory argues that being able to participate in a community novices should be able to observe, and to an extent participate with, experts in action. A blog is good means of allowing others to observe some of the less well thought out ideas and ongoing projects of an academic. This applies to both students and other members of staff, as Christopher Semmus argues, blogging represents a good model for mentoring within a university. James Aczel has started a blog for his course H809 during production, which will reveal many of the design decisions taken in the course, and potentially be a useful resource for future students on the course.
• It provides a useful tool for engaging with other technologies – the array of web 2.0 technologies can be quite daunting. However, many of these relate to blogging, and so by keeping a blog one is exposed to these technologies in a meaningful context. The technology required to keep a blog is fairly simple to use, so it is easy to get started, and then once your blog has momentum you may wish to explore some of the related tools and technologies. For instance Technorati is a site for ranking blogs, so you may want to claim your blog in here, and Feedburner is a means of allowing people to subscribe easily to your blog, while Slideshare allows people to embed their powerpoint presentations within their blog postings, and so on. By keeping a blog there is a motivation and a means to engage with many of the newer technologies that have potential benefits for our students.
• It's a good means of getting down, or building up, all those thoughts that never quite get in to journal papers. Either because journals are too restrictive (they'll want lots of data for any claim you make), or because you never get around to it, but I know that I for one, have an idea (or maybe it's an idealet) every day (okay maybe every week - month? go, on year then), which never finds an outlet and is then lost. The blog is a good means of capturing these, and over time they may find their way in to something more research recognisable.

Of all these I think the means of engaging with technology may be the most important. Your blog represents your homestead in the virtual world and even if you don't go in for a new widget every week, you will pick up on things, for instance it would be difficult to be a blogger in any subject and not know about Twitter, say (regardless of what you might think of it). More importantly it places you in 'the network' which you might is where any educator should want to be.

Some 2.0 reality checks

The Pew Internet report  on Typology of ICT Users (thanks to John for sending me this) has some interesting findings. We do rather tend to get swept up in our little bubble around web 2.0 and modern usage of technology generally, but this paints a rather different picture. It has some great categories also: 'omnivores', 'lackluster veterans', 'light but satisfied', and my favourite which surely describes most of us at some stage 'connected but hassled'.

A few of the finding that caused a mild raise of the eyebrow:

Those who have ever gone online for no particular reason, just to pass the time - 62% (28% yesterday). This seems quite low to me.

Sent or received text messages (amongst cell phone users ) - 41%. Again quite low, I wonder if this might be different in Europe?

Have ever posted comments to a forum or website - 18%.

I think what this demonstrates is that we tend to think in terms of students, or people who want to be students, where these figures will be higher. There are plenty of adults for whom the technology has little impact on their jobs and don't really need to engage with it. Before critics jump on this and say that means we shouldn't adopt e-learning because it will alienate this audience, I think it is also true that once someone makes the decision to study they are also signing up to engage in different experiences and using ICT is one of those. One could just as easily look at how many adults engage in formal learning, where the figures would be low for the population as a whole, but that doesn't mean education is insignificant.

And then there was this piece, which I found via George Siemens: The Web 2.0 Bubble by Michael Hirschorn. There is a lot I agree about in the piece, and I like his phrase "Like “push,” “social media” is a functional advance pimped out as a revolution". In my book I was rather disparaging about the obsession with proclaiming every new technology as 'disruptive' whereas most change is actually  incremental, as the succession model suggests. And I also agree that "Social media has been around since the dawn of the Web" - in my book I said of social software "Given that the internet fosters dialogue and communication, one’s reaction to the development of social software could be ‘well of course there’s social software, that’s what the net is for.’ "

But I disagree with some of his conclusions. For instance, that the best 2.0 sites "facilitate behavior that people already engage in." I think this is rather stretching it, and missing the point. Did people really share photos the way Flickr allows before? Certainly most people didn't. And did people really engage become journalists before blogs? And did they really create and share video clips before You Tube? The sites themselves create the impetus and motivation for people to create because they can share. Even if you argue that they were doing these things before (taking photos, creating videos), then the scale of the operation now makes it something entirely different - scale matters.

I also think it rather concentrates on content and business models, and underplays the technological significance of web 2.0.  This can again be seen as evolution (of the open source model) rather than revolution, but the remix, reuse, small component, service based approach surely now wins out over the monolithic approach.

More significantly, I think it underestimates the cultural significance. Sure, something else will come along and Facebook may go the way of Netscape, but users will always expect a degree of control, decentralisation and democratisation now. The centralised, hierarchical model that is found in so many industries (broadcast, retail, education to name but three) is dead or at least quite unwell, and if that isn't a revolution I don't know what is.

I wish I'd thought of that #243

This is such an obvious, yet brilliant idea (via Beth's blog). Meredith Farkas had a book coming out (social software in libraries), and rather than have some dull cover foisted upon her by the publishers from their standard stock of photos, she set up a competition in Flickr. The winners got - a free copy of the book! While I'm sure it's a good book, it's obvious that the prize wasn't the motivation for entering, people just really enjoyed the chance to be creative. The pool can be found here. Below are a couple of my favourites:

And all are better than the publisher generated cover of my book:

Lazy graphic designers beware...

Reasons for not doing elearning 2.0

Tony Karrer recently did a post suggesting that educators should just do it and try using web 2.0 technologies in education. He's right of course, this stuff isn't rocket science, the tools are being used by millions of people everyday, so why do so many educators resist even thinking about them? This came back to me during the recent OU curriculum and technology conference. There were some good examples of part-time tutors who had 'just done it', but also a lot of resistance. This resistance isn't usually voiced as direct opposition, but is rather couched in 'reasons to be cautious'. Here are the main reasons to be cautious that I've come across, and for each why I think they're misfounded and what the (unkind) translation might be:

1. Quality - any 2.0 approach has a degree of 'letting go' associated with it. As academics, and particularly OU academics who have fought hard to overcome the distance education legitimacy deficit, any relinquising of quality control is hard to do.
   It's misfounded because - quality is important, but you need to focus on certain areas. It is worth creating some good quality content, and lots of good quality activities, but there is a trade-off between controlling all the content and allowing learners access to a wide range of material, and also very current material. It also assumes that the content out there (be it user generated or otherwise) is of lesser quality. This is not necessarily so. If the course is well designed it can accommodate a range of content and be much richer for it.
   Translation - I am experienced at producing content, and this is my default mode of operation, so don't want anything to do with an approach that undermines that.
2. Student experience - related to above, we haven't had the time to test all these technologies so can't be entirely sure of how they will hold up for large numbers of students.
   It's misfounded because - thousands of non-experts are using these technologies every day. They are designed to be easy to use and robust.
   Translation - education is different from everything else and must always have its own version of any tool.
3. Staff development - if we are to use any of this stuff we need a big programme of staff development first.
   It's misfounded because - errm, thousands of non-experts are using these technologies every day! The best way to learn about them is not to go on a two day workshop but to use them.
   Translation - I don't need to do anything because I haven't had the official training yet.
4. Pedagogical research - there isn't enough research on these approaches and technologies yet to know how to use them effectively.
   It's misfounded because - we won't have any research unless we use them, and besides we're the educators so if we can't think of good ways of using them who can?
   Translation - I don't need to do anything because there isn't enough research yet.

There are some other more valid reasons, which include 'I'm trying to but the institution is making it difficult!', but the above represent the four most common ones I've come across. I'm not entirely sure how to overcome them. One can do it by example, but I've done that with e-learning in general (when I created a course with 15,000 students in 1999) only to be met by 'ah, yes, but it wouldn't work in my subject area.' Just got to keep plugging away I guess.