For example in terms of content, he talks about the importance of having a social space (like a blog) not because everyone is going to rush out and read it, but because it’s already optimised for social media style interaction. The point is that when others start to engage, you’re ahead of the game, because they can pick up, for example, your RSS feeds, and you’ve provided space for them to comment on what you’re doing. (Haven’t you?)

There’s also a strong emphasis in the paper on the value of losing control – or rather transferring control from yourself (that is the EDU) to the community (that is the academic community). Now I’d argue that this is exactly what EDUs are doing. Essentially we’re not in the business of delivering a holy grail of authenticated knowledge, but trying to engage with the processes that the community (or communities) are engaging in.  This doesn’t sit well with a culture of “target setting” of course and anyway conversation is a much harder asset to develop than content. Stacy suggests that businesses identify their communities and look at the conversation threads that are already there, and then identify what they have to offer, as long as what they have to offer falls within their area of expertise.  Now, I have to be honest. In my research I didn’t find much evidence that EDUs were really doing that (although there was some, at one site in particular, even though they might not themselves have thought of it that way themselves, and I did detect signs of a shift towards doing so elsewhere). I also found evidence that one site was trying to go the other way and almost set the agenda for its university.  I can’t generalise from five case studies, but it did seem to me that the older (pre-1992) universities were less flexible than the later ones in this regard.

What the EDUs in the newer universities I visited seemed to be trying to do is, I suppose, to set up “Communities of practice” around educational development. The problem they face is that strong communities of practice already exist, and for an individual to move from one in which they are comfortable to a new one is challenging.  For an EDU, it’s less of a problem, because what they’re actually doing is trying to move into academic communities, through what Lave and Wenger might call peripheral participation.  You can see it in the establishments of things like “technology” or “study skills” or “personal development planning” working groups, web sites or blogs but I think these will take a very long time to percolate through because it’s much harder for colleagues to move the other way (that is from their discipline towards educational development), than it is for EDUs to move to the disciplines. I think that’s one reason why VLE’s such as Blackboard are proving so resilient. They cater very much to what the academic community of practice wants to do, (although never exactly in the way that community would like). Perhaps social media are one way in which we can help the process of change by creating a space in which a conversation about the proper role of technology in higher education can take place. There’s some evidence of this beginning to happen elsewhere, but we’re at the beginning of a long and bumpy road, that’s going to take a lot of people out of their comfort zone.

Where I disagree with the article is that I don’t think its “computers” per se that are causing this rewiring of our brain. The key phrase in the above paragraph is “The way we use…”. I think it’s what we assess in schools, and what we value as a society that are at the root of the problem. In education we are forced to focus on the product, rather than the process of learning.  (Look at the press hysteria about ‘dumbing down’ that comes out every time the A level results are published for example.) It’s symptomatic of an obsession with “productivity”, which is  certainly not exclusive to education. If all we do is reward people for ‘producing’   then I suspect that “product” is all  we’ll get, irrespective of whether it’s any good, or any use to anyone. And if that’s all you want, then information grazing is a pretty good way to get it.

I blame the protestant work ethic! Work of the Devil if you ask me!

Fair enough, you might say. But, many users want to use Turnitin to check “suspicious” pieces of work and to do this you have to use a feature called Quick Submit. The only way you can use the Quick Submit feature in Turnitin is to activate it in your Turnitin user profile. So if you haven’t done this before you create a class in Blackboard, then you can’t use Quick Submit because you can’t edit your user profile. Actually, you can, but you have to contact Turnitin to activate Quick Submit for you, which seems a bit of a pain. Or ask someone who’s Quick Submit is already on. (e.g. me!)

Having said that I entirely accept that in an ideal world we shouldn’t really need to use Quick Submit at all. If we used Turnitin as a teaching tool, rather than a detection service, (and many colleagues at Lincoln already do this – we are getting there.) then students would be properly educated about plagiarism, and would understand why engaging in it undermines their own learning and is thus a completely self-defeating exercise.

I’m not really blogging to moan about Turnitin though, more to make the point that technological imperatives can subtly change the way we work. If Quick Submit is not easily accessible then people have no alternative but to build Turnitin into the assessment process. Or they could just ask me to do it for them. So it changes my workload instead.  Ho hum.

1) Mobiles

Might possibly have some value. However, as not a few other bloggers have pointed out, things like the iPad are essentially devices for consumption of information, not for production. If we’re serious about research engaged teaching, that is students doing something  collaboratively (ideally)  and writing it up, then I’d guess we still have some way to go. (That said, I’m completely blown away by my iPod touch, which I think is the best small computer I’ve ever seen).  Not that there’s anything wrong with consumption either.  You have to start learning somewhere and reading or watching some multimedia is as good a place as any. Which brings me on to

2) e-books.

There is obvious potential in being able to carry collections of documents around in the pocket, but I’d like to see better annotation tools. If you could use applications like Zotero or Refworks to create electronic card indexes of your references and concepts I think this might be the next killer app. In truth this probably isn’t far away and would go some way to shifting them more to the production side.

3) Cloud computing.

Well, it’s already happening. The OU has moved to Google Apps for its students which will put Microsoft’s nose out of joint. Or will it? There’s a huge cloud of inertia to shift first. For example I’m currently working on a paper with a colleague at a remote campus. Google docs seems ideal for sharing the document, but I’ve found it’s almost impossible to get my colleagye to remember their password, and to stop e-mailing multiple versions of the same paper. It will come, I think but it will take longer than we expect.

4) Open Content.

Not really technology, but there has been encouraging signs that this is being taken up by UK universities, largely encouraged by the JISC funded Repository Start Up and Enhancement programme. What I like about this is that it does encourage production and sharing of work and I think it will really make a difference to the way we think about how we access academic work. There are some issues to be resolved, not least that of quality. Should judgements be made about what we put in repositories, and who makes those judgements? Librarians? Well, they do make judgements about what goes in university libraries, I suppose, although these should be informed by requests from faculties.

Among the other technologies the Horizon reports identify are “simple augmented reality”, “gesture based computing”, “visual data analysis”, “geo everything”, “the personal web”, “semantic aware applications” and “smart objects”. With the possible exception of the personal web, all of these seem to me to have value for specific disciplinary niches, and as I probably won’t know what I’m talking about I won’t go on. (No, I know that doesn’t usually stop me!)  I include the “personal web” in this group because I do think that’s a different sort of niche. A lot of people still seem to me to be very reluctant to engage with this kind of thing, and are horrified by the idea of putting anything about themselves on the Internet. Media stories about identity theft don’t help of course, but as I’ve said before, we can’t be far from a time when not being findable on the web is regarded as the exception. If that’s so then technologies that can keep track of the media we post about ourselves will become quite important tools in sifting through this information. Because there will be LOTS of it.

The question is of course, what should we in educational development be doing about this stuff? I think (hope) we have learnt by now that we can’t just ram new technologies down academics throats, so the question is how do we encourage people who are short of time (and possibly short of inclination) to experiment with it?

So, that’s that sorted!

Well, if this is so wonderful I thought, I should perhaps buy a book with real money. So I went to the web site of a leading UK bookseller and looked at their e-book catalogue. There were plenty available. But first, I thought I’ll see if others have reported any technical problems. Indeed they had: – I found  this message on one of the Lexcycle (developers of Stanza) support forums in response to a complaint that the book they had bought wouldn’t open.

This particular error usually means that the book is encrypted with Adobe DRM, which Stanza Desktop does not yet support and the Stanza iPhone only supports the eReader DRM.

Well, fair enough. I’m not criticising Lexcycle for this. Stanza is after all a free app, and for all I know this may have been fixed by now. (The message was from September 2009)  But why are publishers/booksellers using DRM to stop customers doing as they please with their own property? I know they’ll say intellectual property isn’t quite the same as a physical artefact, but the digital world changes business models, as the music industry has found out.  I would have thought selling something that can’t be used as the purchaser wants is probably not the most effective way of ensuring a high volume of repeat sales. If they’re worried about breaches of Copyright law, then there are legal remedies they can pursue.  (Although before they do that, they might usefully look up the phrase “Open Source”).  While I’m on this topic, I was also astonished at the high prices that they charge for e-books. It’s not as if e-books have higher production costs, after all, so presumably this designed to stop e-books undermining print sales.  I think the most likely long-term outcome is that one of the more experienced digital players will come up with some sort of literary equivalent of  iTunes and the traditional booksellers will just lose the business.

Which is a shame, because once I’ve got off my high horse I can see a great deal of potential for this kind of easy document portability in HE, and I think books do need to be readily accessible.  I like Stanza partly because it sits on the iPod which means it’s potentially part of a suite of apps, rather than being a dedicated e-book device, but also because it offers features to bookmark and annotate your text. all we need are  linked Refworks, Blackboard, Moodle and WordPress apps, and we’re away! Paper is so 2009!

 Firstly if you want to get a detailed account of who said what at the conference go to http://twitter.com and search for #durbbu10. Many of those present (including your correspondent) posted tweets during each of the sessions, and there are some quite interesting points hidden in there although you do lose the narrative thread that a blog post might provide. (But you wouldn’t have read it, would you?)  Secondly and more conventionally I thought I’d pick out a few highlights and offer some thoughts on them. In the social spirit though, if you want to argue, (or agree), feel free to comment on the post.  

Highlight no. 1 came in Lindsay Jordan’s keynote in which she demonstrated how she had taught teenagers about the menstrual cycle through the medium of interpretative dance.  (You really had to be there!). The point for me was that as Lindsay pointed out, she could have just uploaded a set of diagrams on to a VLE, but this way she got the students involved. Of course dance isn’t a medium that readily transfers to Blackboard, but the point was the students could all play a part in the learning experience because they all had a small part in the dance. There are ways for this to be done in technological media. But as I’ve already implied they may not want that.

 Highlight no. 2 was from Katie Piatt of Brighton University. She started her session by distributing a collection of random Lego parts to each audience member.  However some members received a pre-packed bag of parts. Then we were all told to build a car. Of course the pre-packed bags contained four wheels, a base, some axles and bricks for a body. The rest of us came up with wonderfully creative solutions from the resources we had. Her argument was that if you give students pre-packed learning materials, then they’ll just build with what they’ve been given. If you give them a different selection of materials they’ll come up with something more creative using their own prior learning. Although there is still an element of selection because in fact the random selection I described wasn’t actually random. Everybody got at least two wheels for example, which I suspect was planned. Still the point was well made, that if you don’t do anything different with your students you won’t get anything different from them.  Reflecting on this later, it did occur to me though that if you wanted students to “make cars” then the pre-pack approach is probably the right one. Very few of the more imaginative creations would actually have moved. But that’s a very instrumental approach, and unlikely ever to lead to innovation.

 The implied question is should we stop giving students ‘pre-packed’ learning material? I don’t know the answer to that but I suspect that things like the NSS and in FE OFSTED inspections strongly militate against that kind of risk taking. This was borne out by my third and last highlight was a quotation from a student. “Why would I want to risk my degree by sharing what I know with other students?” Perhaps that should be a lowlight. It’s depressing enough that students believe that universities have a quota of first class honours degrees and that by helping one another they’ll spoil their own chances. But it also implies a possibility that we could give some form of credit for evidence of public sharing. I’m not sure that this could be in the form of academic credit because it doesn’t really speak to the students’ ability as a social worker, mathematician, classicist or whatever, and that’s what we’re certifying after all.  Clearly this needs a bit more thought.

 That’s probably enough for this topic. I’ll just take this opportunity to thank the team at Durham for their organisation of an excellent meeting, and look forward to returning next year.  And, do please add comments if you want to agree or disagree with me, or remind me of a highlight I’ve forgotten.

Because the download of the Guardian is based on the printed version and because the specialist section is no longer in the printed version it’s only available in the online version! This is the same Guardian newspaper that trumpets its iPhone app and makes a charge for it. Some rapid rethinking of the business model is perhaps necessary here.

Well, yes. The lecture notes from a PowerPoint slide are not a lecture. (There I go making unconstructive remarks about PowerPoint again. Actually I think PP is a very  good presentation tool, but that’s all it is.)  My point is that just shoving such slides onto a VLE without any contextual information is largely unhelpful. We have to make an effort know what the students are failing to understand and tailor our material to correcting those misunderstandings.

If the press media wants to start charging for online content then it first of all needs to make it easy for us to know it exists and then make it easy for us to read it.

Oh Yes. Naming every link on the VLE  lecture 1, lecture 2, or worse “lecture notes from last week” is a very bad idea. Blackboard  certainly offers the opportunity to add metadata to virtually every content item, and if you’re using an open source tool like WordpressMU as a primary VLE, I’d urge that you familiarise yourself with tags.

We the end-users, the newspaper industry, and those developing smartphones would really benefit from some standards based approach to downloading such media content similar to what MP3 enables with audio.

Wouldn’t we though? Let’s face it, it took quite a long time for Universities to reconcile PCs and Macs on a single network. With students (not to mention staff)  turning up with all sorts of weird and wonderful devices I can see us looking fondly back on the Mac/PC thing as being but a minor skirmish.

my reading behaviour changed when using the iPhone in comparison to the paper product. By that I mean it was different rather than better or worse. One of the key advantages of the paper versions of newspapers and magazines is the ability to rapidly scan a relatively large information landscape and then focus on an item or article of interest. The visual real estate of a smartphone or device like the iPhone/iTouch is tiny by comparison.

Now that’s interesting. I used to  wonder if there is a difference between browsing a library shelf and searching a database. You could certainly pick up things from the books that were next to the book you were looking for. Yet, no library could possibly hold all the material a researcher needs, so you scan. If you do that with books and journals, I guess you probably do it with the documents themselves. So is there scope here for making documents scannable at a micro level. Is there something to be said for producing educational documents using some of the same principles that newspapers use to drag their readers’eyes to relevant parts of the page.

We should perhaps take note that when the majority of consumers are faced with such uncertainty their risk management strategies include “do nothing”.

Students too, I suspect!

I’ve just completed a reread of the second edition of  Diana Laurillard’s “Rethinking University Teaching” (Yes, I know, I should get out more !). I think her model of teaching and learning as an iterative conversation has a lot of merit. The notion that learners can simply absorb information from a lecturer, a book, video, or other “narrative” medium (to borrow Laurillard’s phrase) does seem to run a very high risk that the learner will misinterpret or misconceive whatever it is they are supposed to be learning. Obviously, if the learner has an opportunity to articulate their conceptions, then a teacher is in a position to identify those misconceptions and “correct” them, even if this takes several cycles.

 One of the key outcomes of reading Laurillard’s book for me though is her argument that  those misconceptions are themselves a source of data about how students come to know. We should analyse students’ submissions for common errors, and try to devise some form of understanding about why these misconceptions arise.  I can already hear the choruses of “That’s all very well, but who has the time to do that?”  And of course, that’s only one suggestion for what we need to know about students learning. How do we make learning materials customisable for different disciplines?  Not only that, how do we show that they are easily customisable? As Laurillard admits there is no real tradition of collaboration between university departments, and certainly not between universities. Indeed one might argue that the uncritical admiration of politicians for all things “Business” since 1979 has led to an inappropriate stress on “competition” between universities, which simply leads to a lot of re-inventing the wheel as they try to outdo each other in providing slightly better versions of the same service.

 Now, I didn’t really mean to start this post by pontificating about teaching or even about Government Policy – it was meant to be more of a reflective piece about the implications of Laurillard’s arguments for Educational Development Units. The research I’ve been doing into these units does tend to suggest that those working in them do see themselves as operating in a conversational framework that is not unlike the one Laurillard developed as a model of how students (and in her later chapters, organisations) learn.  This is important because, given the recent announcement about cuts to the teaching grant that was slipped outbefore Christmas, I suspect that such units are even more vulnerable than they were before.

 Actually, I do accept that EDUs have not been as successful as they might have been in bringing about a total transformation of the Higher Education landscape, but this is because they have never been large enough to play the full part in the conversation that they need to.  And, they’ve shown, in my view a quite proper reluctance to impose models of learning on academics. There is no one model of learning that is appropriate across every discipline, and to attempt to impose one would have been to guarantee failure. It’s also true that there are quite high epistemological walls between the different disciplines, by which I mean that physicists don’t take much notice of what historians are doing. (Why should they? Well, they’re actually in the same business – teaching!)  Please don’t think I’m pathologising academics as “failing” here. My argument is that they are so hemmed in by disciplinary structures not to mentionorganisational structures, that there needs to be some unit that performs the EDU’s role.  

What the EDUs can do and have been doing, is actually help to rebuild some misconceptions about learning that are still commonplace in Higher Education. (e.g.,the idea that posting PowerPoint slides on a VLE constitutes “e-learning provision”.) They can help colleagues explore the wilder shores of the VLE to find ways, such as wikis, discussion groups, course web sites, and so on to allow learners to articulate their conceptions and show staff that they need to engage with those (mis)conceptions.  They also play a vital role in helping staff to develop innovative approaches to teaching, by working with IT and other support staff to ensure that, for example, new technologies are introduced in ways that don’t compromise the safety of networks.  They could do more. The sort of research into student misconceptions described above, provided it was done together with disciplinary colleagues, would be an example, as would be a similar analysis of validation or course review documents. 

So, no I don’t think the EDU is an idea whose time has gone. If anything, that time is still to come. There is a lot of work still to be done. Yes, too many courses still accept that a presence on the VLE consists of a few PowerPoint files and fail to provide opportunities for students to participate, through mechanisms like wikis and blogs. But as more and more students are getting and benefiting from this kind of approach, then more and more students will demand it. If you want to change the practice of academics then you have to do it through their experience of dealing with their students. There has to be someone in the University who can co-ordinate and share this kind of practice.