The Ed Techie

The future of ed - my contribution

George Siemens and Dave Cormier are running an open course on the Future of Education. They have asked for contributions on this topic, so my musical slideshare is below. As well as the various angles you might expect, I think the answer is the presentation itself - when you think about why have I created a presentation for two people I have never met, on a course I won't teach on? The answers are because it's easy, because I have a social connection, and because I think it's fun (and there's probably a bit of ego in there too). And as I say at the end, that we can do this is kind of amazing isn't it?

So here is my contribution, I'm sure they'd like yours too:

Future of Education

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Of Course

George Siemens and I ran the Course to Discourse mini-conference the other week, to discuss the future of the course. The elluminate recordings are now up if you missed it. Here is the slideshare of my presentation:

Digital Implications for Universities

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I opened the conference and so I was trying to set the tone for what was to come by considering the impact of digitisation on education. I employed a rather reductionist strategy by considering higher education as being comprised of a number of components. I used the analogy of newspapers to consider how each of their components had been weakened by digitisation. I argued that we can think of these various components as being held together like atoms in a molecule. Not all all molecules are equal and neither are all industries - the strength of the bonds between the component atoms will vary. The question then is to what extent are these components in higher education weakened by digitisation and how strong are the overall bonds that make 'Higher Education' a valuable package?

As for the mini-conference overall, I thought it went well. Attendance was pretty good (at about 70 people), but I think we could have done better. I only blogged and tweeted it, but didn't make a real effort to put the call out in mailing lists, etc.

The line-up worked very well I think. George and I bandied a few names around by email, contacted them with a rough brief and put together a quick schedule, and yet I don't think the synergy and flow between them would have been better if we'd spent months planning it and coordinating in intricate detail.

The technology worked well, although I saw a few reports on twitter that some people couldn't get access. I want to run more open sessions like this, and Elluminate seems a reasonable lightweight choice, so I hope access isn't an issue.

The discussion in the sessions was lively, and there has been some continued debate in the Moodle forums that George set up, although I still think this continuation post-event is something we haven't quite cracked yet - how do you make the event the start, rather than the end?

Anyway, thanks to all those who presented (Josie Fraser, D'Arcy Norman, Grainne Conole, Alec Couros, Tony Hirst as well as George and myself) - I really encourage you to check out the recordings of at least some of these talks, as there is some great stuff here. Also thanks to all those who 'attended', and kudos to George for setting it up and sticking with my half-baked idea.

Course to Dis-course

As part of my Year of Future Learning thang (yes, you hoped it'd gone away), I've organised with George Siemens an online mini-conference called 'From Course to Dis-course', runs May 14th - 15th. The aim is to look at the future of the course in a digital world. I think that the course, as we know it, provides a nice tight focus, but at the same time it is the base unit of education - it's something we all understand. So using it as the means to explore the impact of digital technologies will provide a useful indication of changes in higher education overall.

And what a line-up we have for you, ladies and gentlemen: George, Grainne Conole, D'Arcy Norman, Josie Fraser, Tony Hirst, and, err, me. Plus a few more to come.

So, it's free, it's informative, it's fun - what more do you want? See you there.

BTW - hashtag is #course09

Reflection on flash debate in twitter

Last Friday I attempted a 'Flash debate' in twitter. The idea was that, like Flash mobs, we'd come together via twitter to discuss a particular topic, in this case virality in education. In my previous post I drew some conclusions about the topic, but here are some thoughts on the process.

Overall, I'd say it had only middling success, you can see some of the conversations here. Although the inputs I had were good (and thankyou to those who contributed), it didn't really take off. In short, my debate around virality didn't go viral. My aim in attempting this, and indeed the whole YOFL thing, is to explore what ways of using new tools work for educators. There are several factors to consider in the Twitter debate example:

i) Topic - maybe 'virality in education' isn't that exciting, or more probably, what a debate needs is a straightforward opening question, whereas this was a bit unfocused.

ii) Timing - Fridays may not be the best day of the week, and I did most of it during the working day in the UK. This may make it difficult to catch on in other time zones.

iii) Medium - it could be that maybe twitter isn't the best medium to conduct this. It has an advantage over setting up a specific forum or wiki in that you may catch people as they go around their daily business, but it has the character limit, poor threading and is limited by the people who follow you.

iv) Initiator - I kicked it off, and it's possible that a) I don't have sufficient cache to make it fly (imagine Downes or Will Richardson doing it) and b) that debates need more than one person driving them along.

I may try another one later on, but probably more focused. Any suggestions on whether it's worth it, or how to improve it are welcome.

Creating virality in education - some thoughts

So, we had the flash debate on twitter about creating virality in education (I'll reflect on the success of that in a separate post). As promised here is some synthesis and thoughts.

What does virality mean?
Inevitably some of the discussion was around what we mean by something being viral. Is it the same as a meme? Does it just mean something that is passed on by 'word of mouth'? Can we define the key characteristics of a viral idea? AJ suggested that one factor was novelty and JoeNicholls suggested that it needed to provide a quick meaningful return on effort.

This return on investment is interesting in virality I think. At it's most basic a viral idea is simply someone forwarding a link or resource - a retweet in Twitter, or passing on a YouTube clip in Facebook. This is potentially useful, but as there is no modification by the transmitter, it is of limited educational use.

Next in terms of engagement we have a blog meme - these usually have a strict format for you to follow, but require content creation by the transmitter within these guidelines.

Lastly, we have an idea that catches on, more of a meme in the Dawkins sense than the formalised blog meme. This is an idea that causes a reaction in people often because it encapsulates a concept neatly. A recent example is Jim Groom's edupunk, which caused a proliferation of blog posts and debate. In this sense the concept is viral, because it spread rapidly within a week, but the spread was caused by the creation of new content, and discussion. It is this type of engagement and reaction that I would propose we want to see in education.

Courtesy of Crappy Graphs, I have tried to summarise this below:

Can it be used in education?
I also pondered the negatives of virality, which for me are that it can come across as a bit desperate (please make my idea go viral), it can be irritating (ie when you get sent urban myths which someone has forwarded by email in the belief they are true), and it can just promote repetition (at the bottom left of my graph). AJ suggested it can be perceived as social, rather than authorative and in education both students and staff place great value on 'authority'. Carmen Tschofen was wary of commandeering virality for education.

I think the wariness arises from invading student space, but also from promoting a form of surface level learning. Can you really teach quantum physics by virality? Well, probably not all of it, but you might get students to think about it by creating a viral idea such as 'if we lived at the quantum level...' (eg 'I could be at home and at school at the same time').

So what?
A possible accusation of all this is that it is a tautology - we have such a loose definition of virality that if something catches on we say 'it went viral'. But, I do feel there is something for educators to look at in this. Why do some YouTube videos catch on and get millions of views? Why do some ideas catch on and create the type of discussion we would love to foster in education.

So my suggestion is that alongside what we do normally, it would be worth attempting to create a viral idea in a course, even if it is to provide light relief and discussion with each other. And the good ones will be shared, and err, go viral.

Some YOFL goodies

I have 'created' (ah, what does created mean nowadays anyway), a couple of aggregating goodies for YOFL. First up, a Twitterfountain:

And next, a Yahoo pipe. Actually, Tony just let me hack one of his.

I've put both on the wiki too. Now, you see there is some point in engaging with my half-arsed idea - you'll get to appear on one of these!

Twitter Flash debate - inducing virality

Scott dropped me a line the other day saying that, in relation to YOFL, one of the skills he was interested in was 'creating virality'. I think this is exactly the sort of modern digital skill that we should be considering as educators. I'm not sure if this is what Scott meant by it, but I can see at least three reasons why it's interesting as an educator:

1. You want to create the same engagement with learning material for your students, as you see in popular memes or viral ideas.
2. A viral spread of an idea, concept, approach or technology is an excellent way of engaging other academics. Indeed it may be the only way to really address many of the issues of training and staff development, as Jennifer Jones has tried to do with her concept of Viral Professional Development.
3. As a means of engaging your wider network in distributed research, then what you are suggesting needs to have a 'viral' quality.

Of course, all this begets the question 'what do you mean by viral?' I don't want to get bogged down in definitions, but I think in essence it is an idea that people consciously or not, want to spread because it creates some level of engagement.

So, as my first YOFL experiment, here is what I am proposing - on Friday 30th Jan we have a 'flash debate' (you know, like Flash mobs where we all get together at a specified time, but in this case do something interesting and not just have a pillow fight) in Twitter around 'creating virality'. Tag it #YOFL and I should find it. I'll try and summarise it then next week.

(I realise this is all getting a bit recursive - I'm creating a viral activity about creating viral activities - if it doesn't work then that probably answers my question!)

Year of Future Learning - an experiment

I want to try something out, so would like people's views on it. My idea is to try and get some focused activity going around the concept of the learner of the future. Think of it as either a distributed research process or adding a layer of intentionality over some of what we do in the blogosphere.

I have this feeling that between us there are often very good conversations, excellent resources, great ideas, etc but we don't always take the next step in synthesising or collecting these. 

Here is what I have in mind: A loosely coupled, distributed research 'project'. We declare 09 the 'year of future learning' (#YOFL or #FLY - take your pick). I accept that 'the year of X' is a bit naff, and comes with all sorts of anti-arguments, (what about next year?) but as a means of focusing our energies, providing opportunities for review, and giving a broad enough umbrella it provides a useful framework.

This is a means of aggregating existing resources and events by tagging them - in the Weinberger sense, we may as well put our leaves on as many branches as possible, so for instance there will be sessions at Northern Voice and Alt-C which could be made part of the YOFL simply by adding the tag.

But I see it as much more than just another meme or tag, I also want to use it as a means of instigating some new open, distributed activities. I have in mind the following:

• A set of interesting questions generated by the community
• Connected blog posts around particular topics - blog-carnivals Tony has pointed me at
• An open, special edition journal
• Combined research results
• A workshop format that anyone can run, and share results via a wiki
• 'Live' events eg George Siemens' Elluminate sessions
• 'Flash debates' in twitter around a specific topic, which are then summarised
• Face to face sessions at various conferences
• A wiki/blog/site collecting all of this material together
• An end of year review

 I want to avoid any perceptions of elitism  so the idea is that this is open to anyone. I've emailed a few blog chums to see if they would be interested in doing some of the above, to give it some traction, but essentially it's open. If there is a topic of burning interest to you, run an activity and it'll be pulled in.

In addition, my colleague Grainne Conole also has lots of links into various communities, so we will be running a number of face to face activities also. This involves 'talking to people' - not sure what that is, probably some cool web 2.0 service.

The experiment for me is whether the online community can work this way, or whether it really does need a more directed, formal research project. At the moment I think we have good conversation. Conversations and dialogue can be spontaneous but they can also be focused, with a specific aim. Similarly, we have a loose-knit community of sorts, and communities can be around general areas of interest, but they can also have a common goal ('overthow a president', 'find Dave a date').

It is this second, more intentional layer that I was hoping we might foster this year. I like finding other people's posts and riffing off (or ripping off) ideas, but I want to explore whether the edublog community can do a bit more. Whether we can have purposeful conversations, aimed at addressing a specific problem.

To kick off I have created a wiki here for setting out the big questions.

I am go to aggregate anything with #YOFL and #FLY tags at some point. I make the solemn promise to summarise these once a month and try to put some interpretation to them, although anyone else is also free to do the same of course.

I will also set in motion a few activities, such as those listed above.

So, what do you think? Oh, here's a logo:

MixedInk - affordances for collaboration?

From the always useful Jane's elearning picks I came across MixedInk. It's a tool to promote collaboration to produce joint documents. Before you raise eyebrows and say 'not another one,' bear with me. It has some neat features - you are working towards a definite goal document, it has time limits to focus effort, but most intriguingly it positively wants you to take and adapt the text of other writers. As you type it finds similar phrases from other contributers, and you can add these in. Each submission can be voted on, so you can see which are the most popular/useful. And then when the document is finalised it shows which writers contributed each element.

This has collaborative assessment written all over it. You can easily imagine setting a group assignment and using MixedInk to produce it. Students can jointly create the document, and the role of each contributer is clearly visible. This is beginning to get at creating real affordances for collaboration, which are often lacking in the standard wiki. By suggesting other bits of text the tool is encouraging plagiarism, but in a good way. Using tools like this will be the way we can make assessment relevant to learners who work collaboratively in every other sphere of their lives.

I am about to try and kick of an experiment in crowdsourcing, mass contribution around understanding learning in a 2.0/participatory/digital/social world, so I've set up a quick trial with MixedInk to try and determine what the key questions are - I'll blog more about this later, but if you fancy having a play with MixedInk, here is my big education questions doc.

And here is the company's video explaining the technology:

MixedInk Demo from MixedInk on Vimeo.