The Ed Techie

Twitter is your IT support

<Image http://www.flickr.com/photos/duncan/7172953614/>

This post isn't intended as a criticism of anyone, rather an observation on a trend I've noticed from several others also. 

I'm running my block of the Masters course H817 as a MOOC. It'll start this March, and one of the things I wanted is a DS106 style blog aggregator. That is, I want the contributors to register their blog, and for posts they tag appropriately to repost automatically in the course blog.

Now, the sensible way to do this seems to be to install WordPress and use the FeedWordPress plug-in. For reasons I won't go in to, I haven't been able to get this done at the Open University, despite trying since last July. I've spoken to people at others unis and it isn't isolated to the OU, it seems to be this low-level, experimental type of IT support is increasingly difficult to find.

Do you know who I think the culprit is? The VLE. As universities installed VLEs they became experts at developing enterprise level solutions. This is serious business and I have a lot of respect for people who do it. The level of support, planning and maintenance required for such systems is considerable. So we developed a whole host of processes to make sure it worked well. But along the way we lost the ability to support small scale IT requests that don't require an enterprise level solution. In short, we know how to spend £500,000 but not how to spend £500.

With time pushing on, I got some local support in IET (thanks Will), and investigated the best options. It became clear that hosting externally would be the easiest option. I asked on Twitter who the best hosting solutions were and got a great set of responses. Alan Cann suggested siteground and sent me a friend's introduction offer, so I signed up with them. In 10 minutes I'd followed their WordPress installation, installed WP, found the FeedWordPress plug-in and installed that too. The blog is here: h817open.net

My next problem was to get registration to work. I looked at what DS106 have done, and in response to a request on Twitter, Alan Levine pointed me to this solution from Martha Burtis. That was a bit beyond my coding skills. So I created a simple Google Form and embedded it in my blog. I then asked Martin Hawksey if he knew how to take a Google form output and turn it into an OPML file as FeedWordPress allows you to create a list of syndicated sites from an OPML file. He pointed me to this service, which does just that.

He and Tony also suggested some solutions which will help with autodiscovery (ie finding the feed for the blog if someone just enters their main URL). Martin lists some options here. I haven't quite cracked this yet, so it needs people to enter their feed url, which isn't ideal, so I'll keep working on this.

So, I think I have a working solution. If you have time, could you try it for me by registering your blog here and then posting something which has the tag #h817open. Only posts with this tag should appear. You can just do a test post, but perhaps more interestingly you could respond to the idea of whether "openness has won" or not with a post "Openness has (hasn't) won because..."

This took me about an afternoon. The problem is that it's quite a flaky solution, the OPML service could disappear, I don't really know if it will work for all blogs, and there's no support. So it could go down and I've got no backup. More worryingly I am at the edge of my expertise here, so I can't really do much more. So a university supported proper grown-up solution would be preferable. On the other hand, one of the things I frequently say is that the best thing we can teach our students is how to be good members of a network. And this is a clear demonstration of why I believe that. I think this tension between the innovative possibilities of new technology and the understandably cautious nature of institutional IT services will mean that we'll all need to do more of this DIY tech set-up and experimentation. And the only way to do that is to have a good network who can help.

One last plea - I joked with Alan that I needed DS106 out of a box. I think I'm serious though - it would be great to have a step by step, idiots guide to installing and setting up a DS106-like environment. The rest of us don't have Alan and Jim's tech skills, so getting to the starting line is difficult. I know they'll say you should invent your own way, but they done so much great work that I don't think they realise just how much expertise they have. A simple installation that let the rest of us get started, would mean we could all go off in different directions then. So any of the DS106 crowd up for it? And I do mean a simple guide, it has to be Weller-proof.

 

Eportfolios - J'accuse

This is a bit kicking a man when he's down as most people have turned away from eportfolio software now, but it still persists. It's also old hat - Jim was telling us this ain't your eportfolio mama, three years ago. But maybe now is a good time to reflect. I would like to one day do a series of posts about collective fantasies that grip educational technology, and why they don't turn out the way we envisage (learning objects anyone?).

This post was set in motion by an email from a colleague asking whether I thought blogs were better means of achieving portfolios than specific eportfolio systems. I answered yes, but it set me thinking as to why I've always had an aversion to eportfolios. They can be seen as a case study of how educational technology gets it wrong, for the reasons below.

A key characteristic of these ed tech mass hysterias is that they're based on a good idea - an eportfolio sounds great. It will be a place to store all the evidence you gather to exhibit learning, both formal and informal, it supports lifelong learning, career development, etc. Who wouldn't want one of those? Unfortunately, the idea is too seductive and all encompassing, it becomes a panacea for many ills. Which leads to the first main problem.

Over-complication – because we are developing software to suit a range of stakeholders, feature creep becomes inevitable. The question of ‘how simple can we make it’ is not one that is usually asked. So for eportfolios we find we need new standards to export and move between institutions, ways of locking down items so they can be verified, means of providing different views for different audiences, etc. In a blog the answers to these problems are: RSS; is it important?; and tags respectively.

Institutional, not user focus – a related point is that we end up developing solutions that are sold or selected by institutions (see also LMSs). An institution has a very different set of requirements to an individual. However, if you want eportfolios to work, then it’s individuals that need to like them and be motivated to use them. This emanates from an institutional tic, which is the need to own and control systems and data.

Focus on the tool, not the skills – having developed our overly complex, institutionally focused tool, it now requires a good deal of training for students to use it, since it isn’t very intuitive, and they didn’t know they wanted it anyway. So it becomes a tool that is focused around a particular course, often with credit attached to it. In short it becomes a tool used inside education only. There is little focus on the more general skills which are actually the main benefits: sharing content, gathering and annotating resources as you go, becoming part of a network, reflecting on work, commenting on others, etc. In short, the sort of skills that make for a good blogger.

Lack of social element – the eportfolio often becomes institutionally branded and focused, and because it is has been designed by educational technologists who are probably a bit sniffy about all this social software business, doesn’t allow for much of the easy social elements found elsewhere. This can be functional (eg is embedding easy), but more often it is cultural – the culture of blogging is one of openness and reciprocity, whereas eportfolios are tied into a more academic culture of individualism, plagiarism and copyright. In this environment the social element does not flourish. 

Educational arrogance – maybe arrogance is too strong a term, but eportfolios demonstrate a common mistake (in my view) in educational technology, which goes something like “Here’s some interesting software/tool/service which does most of what we want. But it’s not quite good enough for higher education, let’s develop our own version with features X and Y”. In adding features X and Y though they lose what was good about the initial tool, and take a long time. Blogs are good enough for eportfolios, if what you want from an eportfolio is for people to actually, you know, use them. 

Succession and the art of stretching a metaphor

As Scott has blogged, he came to visit us in Cardiff recently, while staying at the OU for a month on a fellowship. We had a lot of great chats, and while I failed to convince him of the ways of atheist, reductionist rationalism, I did manage to convert him to my succession metaphor for technology adoption.

I used this in my VLE book a while back, and it goes something like this (from the book):

When there is a new environment, for example barren rock, a few pioneer species, such as lichens begin to grow. The acid from these decomposes some rock particles, and their own death creates a coarse soil. This is suitable for mosses, which require little soil, and in turn these decompose to enrich and deepen the soil, until it is suitable for some grasses to grow. The process ends with the establishment of a stable, climax community.

In elearning terms, VLEs, and in particular commercial VLEs have acted as the pioneer species, moving in to the new environment and creating slight changes which make the habitat suitable for secondary colonizers. These might be seen as open source VLEs, or closely integrated systems such as portals and eportfolios. The kind of environmental changes wrought by VLEs include general acceptance of the elearning approach, integration with administrative systems, staff development, recruitment of enthusiasts, changes in assessment practice, acknowledgement of tools already used by students, and so on. Once these systems have been established, then the environment would be more receptive to systems that require more radical changes in practice, such as CMSs and PLEs.

The corollary of this metaphor is that there is a 'natural' progression. Now I think we should always treat nature metaphors with a bit of caution, but if one accepts that existing technologies change their environment, then this new environment becomes one in which new technologies can flourish. It may take time though - as with plant succession you can only jump from the barren environment to the climax community by a lot of intervention, for example bringing in lots of soil and species.

But I hadn't really taken the metaphor beyond this initial comparison, but in my conversation with Scott we began to explore it further. In particular, what are the conditions that prevent succession? It doesn't always occur in nature - for instance on a beach a big storm will wipe away some of the colonizing plants. If the barren environment is your patio for example, then human intervention by way of deweeding, will prevent the environmental changes required.

In terms of learning technology, what is the equivalent of the avid gardener, killing any weeds, grasses or mosses that threaten to grow on their patio? Because if we think that there may be a natural progression through technologies, then identifying these barriers helps the process continue. 

One such barrier might be the investment people and institutions have put into the existing system. This is like the succession getting to a certain level, and then the gardener maintaining it at precisely that state. When institutions deploy a VLE there is a good deal of investment in other systems which communicate with it, in staff development, and expertise. There are also people whose professional identity becomes allied to that system - they become the 'Blackboard guy' or whatever. There is thus a combination of personal and institutional forces which are acting to stop succession going further. In our analogy this is like we've trained a group of volunteers to do all the deweeding and clearing of an area, so to allow succession to happen would mean upsetting a lot of people.

A second, more insidious barrier is that of commercial interests. If succession is about the gradual replacement of one environment with another, then those with a commercial interest a particular environment will seek to maintain that. In our analogy it's like the council have signed a contract with the purveyors of weed killer - they don't want the succession model to flourish. In learning technology this can be achieved through software patents, vendor lock-in, long term contracts, and the general promotion of a 'we solve your problems' attitude.

A third barrier might be the emotional attachment people have to software. I commented once before that although we justify software choices in terms of rational decision making around features, it is often an emotional, irrational preference, much like supporting a particular football team. Like with football teams we can only be monoamorous with software. The problem here is that we often don't appreciate we are arguing from this emotional attachment stance and cloak it in other languages - around integration, access or features. In the analogy then this is like the enthusiast who wants to maintain the environment at a certain state (maybe there are some wild flowers they are particularly fond of) and so don't want to let it alter.

There may be more, but I think tugging at the seams of the metaphor as it were, has helped me think about these issues. My new motto: Let's stretch this metaphor till it snaps.

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.

The VLE is to teaching as Powerpoint is to presentation

The title says it all really, but just to unpack it a bit more. As Sarah Horrigan commented recently, people find VLEs very dull. This is partly because they are made to use – if you banned VLEs it’d be a sure way to make them interesting. But I think what the VLE and Powerpoint have in common is that they are in the first wave of digital democratization tools.

Such tools can’t be too far removed from traditional practice, otherwise people simple won’t use them. So they provide a useful stepping stone onto a more digitally enhanced future (where it’s always sunny and everyone loves each other).

The danger with both of them is that they represent not a potential stage on a journey for many, but the endpoint. Their ease of use and similarity to existing practice is seductive in this sense, you don’t really have to change what you do much.

Thus we have boring courses in VLEs and boring, bullet pointed presentations in Powerpoint. There is nothing intrinsic in the tools that means boring is the only outcome – good presenters will have excellent Powerpoint presentations and good teachers will have excellent VLE courses. But nevertheless there is something about their proximity to standard practice that means boring is all too often the end result. I suspect this is a ‘churn’ problem – we used to have learn a new approach or technology once every ten years (or lifetime). Now it’s every year (at least) and it takes time to appreciate that there is no end.

The journey needn’t necessarily be onto another technology, it can be making better use of the existing one. But realizing that your practice with these technologies is always evolving is the key I suspect, and that completing the training course is not the end point.

The long-awaited 'education as fruit' metaphor

I have just returned from the ALT-C conference in Manchester, where I held a workshop with Brian Kelly called 'Realising Dreams, Avoiding Nightmares, Accepting Responsibilities'. My role was to present the future, and then for us to discuss what the obstacles were to realising it, and the related issues for educators, learners and IT services. Here is my presentation:

Dreams of future learning

View more presentations from mweller.

In my talk I decided to use an extended (tortuous some might say) fruit based metaphor. It begins to get rather pained towards the end, but stick with it, I think it comes to fruition (ahem). It goes something like this:

Current higher education is about selling apples (the basic undergrad course). We have different types of apples, and they vary slightly in size, colour and taste. But it is still just apples.

If what we do is sell apples, then our current concerns are: Better apple packaging (the VLE may or may not be dead, but it's really just better marketing for apples); the costs of growing, distributing and selling apples; the quality of our apples; growing new varieties of shiny apples (someone is trying to grow a blue apple to appeal to kids). But it is still just apples.

Now if we consider the future of education, the key word is variety. It is not about perfecting one's apples, but accepting the whole range of possible fruits. With this comes a set of issues:

• It comes in different sizes - not just the slight variation we have around apples (eg tweaking a three year undergrad course to be two years or four years), but the whole range of sizes ranging from the tiny Wolffia angusta to over-sized pumpkins, so we need to recognise and facilitate learning that takes ten minutes or involves extended participation in a community over a number of years.
• It has many different types - obviously we're not dealing with just apples now, but kumquats, kiwi fruits, oranges, melons, etc. So this means recognising different types of learning and different content. We no longer determine the curriculum but it is now varied and open. It also has blurred boundaries, instead of the very definite ones we have now - the classic 'tomato, fruit or vegetable?' argument could also apply to learning. Is hanging around in a forum learning? Is game playing learning? The key is that we accept that the boundaries are now blurred and we seek to recognise different types of learning.
• Any time - we don't just sell our apples during opening hours, but offer home delivery any time of day. The old dream of 'just in time' learning was something that was touted around when learning objects were new, and SCORM was being pushed. The difference this time around is that then it was based on automatically assembly of content, but now it is based on a human network. And it's not just a dream - any of us who have put a call out on twitter know how quickly you can get a response. But this could be extended further - access to a marketplace of accredited mentors for example.
• Assembled/mixed/aggregate how you want - now we don't have just apples, we can all mix our own fruit salads, and with the full range to choose from, few salads will ever be the same. As a party host I can create my own fruit offering, just as an educator I can create a 'course' on any subject I want by mixing together resources, tools and adding in my own elements. Or as a learner I may have a core set of resources (a base fruit bowl) and can then add in from a wide range of selected content to create a partially personalised course.
• Based around easy sharing - we all have access to so much free fruit now, we share it easily and without question. Sharing is now the default action online - we share jokes, content, links, views, activities, ideas. Any vision of future learning should have sharing as the basic action and build from that. I would go as far as to say that teaching our students how to be good sharers within their subject community is the number one aim for education.
• Range of tools - we're not limited to tools that only apply to apples now, we can have the full range of tools and cutlery available. Whether we believe the VLE is a stepping stone to a world of wide-ranging tools, or should be abandoned now, surely any dream of future learning would embrace the growing panoply of tools.

So there you have it? I'm sure you'll tell me where the metaphor breaks down, but what I really want is examples of how we can extend it to a ludicrous degree. Metaphors are only fun when you really stretch them.

VLE vs PLE fight club

<Image Pirate Test by Danksy http://www.flickr.com/photos/petedanks/2770208173/>

I did a debate with Niall Sclater for the upcoming OU course Technology enhanced learning around PLEs and VLEs, 'refereed' by John Pettit. We pitched it as me being the PLE guy and Niall the VLE man, for the sake of discussion, but we're probably closer in agreement than this would suggest.

You can listen to the audio here (including jazzy intro and fade-out music). [Update, jazzy music is courtesy of http://www.oliverledbury.co.uk/]

For a one take shot, I think it comes out reasonably well, although I am the least coherent of the three.

Technology as metaphor (or I'm on e-Literate)

I was really pleased to be asked to contribute an article to the edition of On The Horizon that Michael Feldstein is editing. As part of the procedure all the authors are writing a guest blog post on e-Literate. It feels kind of like getting the opening slot on the Parkinson show (US readers - substitute with Leno).

My piece is up now, called SocialLearn: Bridging the Gap Between Higher Education and Web 2 (surprise choice of topic, I know!). As well as talking about SocialLearn I wanted to make the argument that the technology we (individuals and institutions) use is a metaphor, or at least an artefact, for how we engage with the social issues. My argument then is that the conventional LMS is the wrong metaphor, not just the wrong technology, for engaging with some of the changes we are seeing that we might cluster under the web 2.0 banner. I am in the position of being able to quote myself, so I'll let M Weller sum it up:

I would suggest that the reason the centralised LMS is not the answer to the ‘web 2.0 problem’ for education is because in its software DNA it embodies the wrong metaphor. It seeks to realise the principles of hierarchy, control and centralisation – the traditional classroom made virtual. This approach won’t help educators understand the new challenges and opportunities they are now facing.

A PLE - VLE continuum

There's been a bit of a PLE flurry of posts, generated by some Twitter discussion. Chris Lott posted that he couldn't see why people think you can't teach PLEs, or about PLEs. Scott Leslie argues that some don't like the acronym:

It’s personal, not monolithic” complaint with the term, which I get and agree with. My response is not to defend the “PLE” acronym but instead just say if it bothers you, come up with a different one, or don’t use a moniker at all, but more importantly, model model model it for the 95% of learners (and teachers) who are drowning in the tsunami of information and choosing to turn their backs rather than learning to surf

Meanwhile D'Arcy Norman maintains (with the aid of some cool diagrams) that one person's PLE will differ from another's, and it is the people that are important:

the exact technologies that are in use at any particular point in time don’t matter as much as the fact that it is people being connected through them. Tools come and go constantly, and the only constant is that the people are the important part of the equation.

The debate on twitter seems to have been about whether one can usefully talk about PLEs since, by their nature, everyone's is different. There is no The PLE.

I'd like to argue that the term is okay, it has context (that of VLE), and also there is some benefit in 'teaching' PLEs. But maybe we need to nuance the term a bit, as we may be lumping things together. If in doubt about an acronym, let's create some more! So we have:

• VLE/LMS - a centralised system that gives a consistent user experience to everyone
• TLE - Teacher learner environment. This is along the lines of Scott Leslie's loosely coupled teaching applications. Less centralised than a VLE, the educator determines the range of tools, e.g. a blog with specific widgets, but all students use the same.
• DPLE - Default PLE. In this novice users (could be educators, students, employees, etc), are given a default set of applications to constitute their PLE, but they have the freedom to switch them out over time. A minor example might be my recent conversion to iGoogle from the standard Outlook provided services. Except the option and ease of switching would be stressed more. Imagine a default Netvibes page, which people would soon customise.
• PLE - the type of thing we ed techies have accrued over time, and continues to evolve. Work might be required on getting these apps to talk to each other, but really the people who operate at this end don't need much help.

This gives us a continuum of personalisation:

One thing to appreciate here is that there is no value judgement attached by the placing on the diagram - being further to the right isn't 'better'. These different approaches to technology will be suited to different contexts  and audiences. That is probably obvious to everyone, but was something of a mild epiphany for me - PLEs and VLEs are NOT in competition necessarily.

[Update - that last sentence originally had the 'not' missing (such a small word). I've added it in, but now I'm not sure - which is truer for you - they are in competition or they aren't?]