Lecture capture, and other e-learning issues

ELESIG, or the evaluation of E-learners Experience of Learning Special Interest Group has a Midlands Group, which met at Loughborough University on Friday 17th September, which I attended. The main topic was a discussion of “Lecture Capture” software, which is now being used quite extensively at Loughborough. However, before we got onto that there was a general discussion of the future of the group, and some of the issues that we are concerned with. Firstly, and anyone from Lincoln who is reading this should take note, ELESIG needs more committee members and more people to attend its meetings. They also offer mall grants – up to £500 for literature reviews and case studies for example, and it is well worth putting in a bid for these. The Loughborough meeting was of the regional group, but there is a national group meeting in London on 6th October. If you’re interested you can find out more about the group at
http://elesig.ning.com/

As is often the case there was quite a wide ranging discussion of issues that members were interested in. First we got on to formal methods of evaluation that were being used. This provoked quite a lot of debate including considerable scepticism about what are sometimes called happy sheets, since these usually end up in a drawer, on their short but inevitable journey to the paper recycling bin. Members described interesting projects using video, Twitter, and mobile phones, the informality implicit in small devices in general being thought to be better at engaging students in completing them, and in some ways delivering more impact to staff. Video was thought to very useful for delivering evaluation reports to senior managers

The second issue was around the accessibility and the question of how to change VLEs. What do dyslexic students think about their experience of their learning on Blackboard. http://www.lexdis.org.uk was highlighted as a useful resource. Some colleagues exporte a blackboard course onto a disc, so that partially sighted, or people with low/no speed connection can access it. (needs some software, but a good idea)

There was a brief discussion of a product called Xerte and it’s ability, or not, to produce accessible materials. Loughborough reported problems with running it, that had, eventually led them to abandon it. Camtasia was also discussed, but users had found that there was a need to produce multiple versions to maintain accessibility.

Discussions on LinkedIn about various alternatives to Xerte (e.g. My Udutu) were mentioned, but I haven’t had time to follow these up yet, which was also true of Kineo.com, which apparently contains lots of reviews of tools for creating learning materials, and apparently something called Clive Shepherd’s 60 minute Masters is worth looking at

A slightly left of field idea was that of having standards for Blackboard sites. One institution has bronze, (absolute minimum) silver and gold standards for BB sites (However, they haven’t yet succeeded in getting any sites above Bronze!)

Lecture Capture at Loughborough

Origninally, there was quite a lot of resistance but now it’s fairly mainstream in that most people experimenting with it. They have 10 fixed and 5 mobile installations, the latter being entirely software based. They’re using a product called ECHO 360. It’s expensive at £3,000 p.a. for a single installation (Plus £1750 one off cost for the fixed boxes), but their may be a way to reduce that, which I’ll get to later. There are alternatives. Some open source products were mentioned one called Matterhorn was singled out as being particularly worth a look. Essentially the system shows a thumbnail gallery of the slides with the time each is displayed. Captures are normally ready 5-6 minutes after lecture completed. Lectures are editable – so you can choose where slides are displayed within the lecture, and of course you can paste the URL into the VLE, so it’s easily accessible. Students can click on the slide and go directly to that section of the lecture. An incidental benefit was (apparently) that the system has dramatically improved academic sartorial standards at Loughborough!

It’s not without disadvantages, of course. Installations have to have duct tape on floor to indicate to the lecturer where to stand, although, apparently the space is quite generous. There is still a rather murky understanding of IP and particularly, performer’s rights, which hasn’t been fully resolved. Newcastle apparently has a policy of no reuse except to cohorts other than that to which it was originally delivered. Most of the members thought that was unduly cautious, but it did provoke a question about how long a captured lecture might last.

Initally it was hard to engage staff with it, for fear of students not attending, the argument that it perpetuates an outdated delivery mode and of course, the suspicion that it’s a way of replacing lecturers. Further, you do need to be very careful what you say! One way of dealing with the non-attendance issue was to rebrand it as ReView (emphasis on the first syllable) to stress that it’s not an alternative to attending, rather it’s a revision tool. Loughborough’s evaluations suggest that this has proved very popular with students.

Finally, and related to the rights issue, is the question of what to do with lectures once they’ve been captured. A few universities are signing up with iTunesU. It was suggested that Apple may be persuaded to contribute to the cost of lecture capture systems if people prepared to post content thereon, although, of course that will not cover the cost of the ongoing licenses.

All in all a very useful and interesting meeting, and I’d certainly recommend ELESIG to colleagues.

A new look for Turnitin

Turnitin, the Plagiarism detection service, will be getting a new look on Sept. 4th. While it’s not been easy to get previews, a few screencasts have now been released and can be seen at http://www.screencast.com/t/NTVjYWExY

I thought I’d briefly summarise the main changes here. There are some changes to the user interface, which seem to me to largely cosmetic, although still useful. Navigation is now across the top of the screen, rather than down the left hand side, which brings it into line with most other applications, and the assignment inbox has been simplified.  Unusually, Turnitin don’t seem to be giving users the opportunity to revert to the old version, something they’ve always done in the past.

However, the real changes are in the way in which originality reports are viewed.  Users do still have option to revert to the previous viewer for originality reports and grademark, if not for the interface.  If you do choose to do this comments and marks are maintained if you move between the different versions of grademark.  There’s a nice new “column viewer” for the originality report. Users can change the size at which the student paper is displayed.  (Up to about 3/4 of the screen seems to be available for this.)  The sources from which students have (allegedly) copied are now simply listed, and clicking on them opens a new window which floats around over the original source.  Another new feature here is that users are be able to see multiple sources (where the item the student has lifted is in more than one source). I’m not all that convinced of the value of this, because I’d have thought it’s main function would be to show how much web sites plagiarise each other!

The colour co-ordination between text and sources has been kept although, it’s now confined to a barely visible stripe against the source name.  But this new way of viewing the sources also offers opportunity to manually exclude sources from the originality report. You can also re-inlcude them if you change your mind. Doing either will recalculate the total originality score. So if you have asked students to take material from a web site, you can then exclude that particular site.

The final improvement in the videos is the introduction of a common viewer for originality reports, Grademark and peer mark. Essentially grademark and originality reports can be now seen in the same view.

What’s not yet clear is whether or how this will affect the Blackboard plug in. Relatively few users at Lincoln use the Grademark feature, so I doubt this will be an issue for now. However, with increasing moves to electronic forms of assessment, it is something that we’ll need to keep an eye on.

Technology for public teaching again

Still haven’t sorted out my theme – but that’s not my text for today. I’ve been reading  “The e-revolution and post compulsory education: Using e-business to deliver quality education” edited by Jos Boys and Peter Ford, and I wanted to make a couple of brief notes about chapter 2, which portrays scenarios of the “e-university” from the perspectives of students, researchers, teachers, administrators, and senior managers. The scenarios are designed to be provocative, rather than predictive, so I’m not going to take issue with their accuracy.  Clearly technology changes, all the time, and speculation always reflects the era in which it takes place.

I think there are three problems identified by the scenarios which are more problematic than might appear at first. One is data interoperability. In the chapter, Ford seems to assume that data will be easily interoperable between different systems, and I’d agree that is a pre-requisite. Yet it seems to be proving very difficult for large corporations, who are still big players in the sector (like Blackboard) to share data. I can understand the desire to protect intellectual property, but it seems to me that what is most likely to happen is that those organisations that do expose their APIs will increase their market share. (Look at the various apps that work with Twitter, Flicker, YouTube and so on, and there are some very interesting uses of WordPress in the international sector).  Those that don’t share data will become increasingly isolated.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t share the view that the VLE is dead. At least, not yet. For now Blackboard clearly meets a need, that open source tools don’t, (although I have very little experience of Moodle, and I’m sure users will rush to assure me that it is wonderful).

That brings me to my second problem, which can be summarised as “Human nature”. My colleague, Sue Watling frequently blogs about how the rush to technology often excludes as many people as it includes. Some people are physically unable to read on a screen, some do not have the appropriate infrastructure available to them, some do not have sufficient economic power, and some do not want to work on line. In a free society, as Philip Ramsey has argued is that that is a choice that must be respected.  So even if you get the data interoperability right, you have to find ways of supporting different human needs.

Finally, and emerging from the first two points is the rather institutional nature of the technologies described in the scenarios. This is admittedly a bit more problematic for any institution. There are quite proper concerns over student privacy, so clearly students’ (and staff’s) personal information needs to be protected. At the same time though there is a persuasive argument that getting students to write for a public audience actually improves the quality of their writing.  There’s also the issue that different institutions, and different organisations have different ways of doing things that have evolved out of their own particular circumstances. It can also be argued, quite plausibly,  that technology tends to mandate particular ways of doing things, that require a significant effort on the part of those using systems, because it obliges them to rethink their practice. One might conclude that from that, the best approach for institutions that want to become e-institutions is for them to develop their own systems that reflect their way of doing things. That of course is expensive, but if institutions begin to develop particular ways of doing things, and share their data and procedures than it may be that other institutions will be able to build on this work.  That doesn’t really address the issue of digital exclusion of course, but the concept of sharing can be extended to ideas in that field too.

Time for a theme change.

For some reason, the Lifestream feature (that’s basically a list of Twitter, Facebook and other web 2.0 feeds)  on the front page seems to have stopped displaying in my current theme.  (Cutline) It works on the other pages though, and it also seems to have blocked out my WordPress Admin links. I suppose I could play about with the plug in but I’m bored with my current theme anyway, so all this is a roundabout way of saying there’s going to be some visual changes around here.   I don’t really imagine there’s an eager mass audience absorbing my RSS feed each morning, but if you are a regular reader, please bear with me.

Technology for teaching in public

I’ve been asked to contribute a chapter to a book on teaching in public, specifically concerned with how we can use technology to do this. Now, I could probably knock out something on the commons, open educational resources, web 2.0 and that stuff, but a) it’s been done, and b) I want to make it a bit more theoretical. I’ve been reading quite a lot about the neo-luddite movement,  which isn’t about machine breaking, but about critiquing the role of the machine in modern society. (So put that sledgehammer down THIS MINUTE!)

Anyway, I’ve just been reading about Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and that crowd, who began to protest about the effect that mechanisation was having on culture and the general intellect, and developed a philosophy that I understand (bear with me, I’m new to this)  is sometimes referred to as American Transcendentalism, evidently to distinguish it from more religious forms of transcendentalism.  Like the neo-luddites, they weren’t particularly anti-technology, but recognised that the changes it brought weren’t always beneficial.

I really haven’t got very far with this, but I’m dimly beginning to make some connections with Marx’s notion of mass intellectuality. We often hear claims that universities aren’t producing graduates with the skills that the economy needs, (although no-one seems to be able to describe those skills in any detail), but the kind of critique of industrial thinking that the ne0-luddites and the American Transcendalists were indulging in seems to be a profoundly useful counterweight to the idea that there are a set of tips and techniques that ensure national well being.

The problem is of course, is that if this is done in public, then it is vulnerable to critique  that if universities cannot directly benefit the state, or at least demonstrate how they are doing so, then there is no logical reason for the state to pay for them. Not that there’s anything wrong with critique and debate of course. But just as the Devil has all the best tunes, that’s an argument that has simplicity on it’s side. The rebuttal of that argument is complex, involving well rehearsed arguments about blue-sky research, the value of critical graduates, (both of which the state does benefit from) and  accepting that there might indeed be alternative funding streams . On the bright side, I guess the use of open shared technologies promotes the creation of far more ideas.

But I accept that I need to think a lot harder about this, and find some evidence of how universities are engaging with open technology.

Private page problem resolved.

Many thanks to Jim Groom at Bavatuesdays for his suggestions in response to my previous post. (Love this job advert by the way!) In fact, with a bit of help from our resident WordPress developer, Alex Bilbie, we’ve managed to get themes compatible with WordPress 3.0 to display private pages through the Menu Builder, which is pretty much what I needed to do. One small gripe remains, which is that casual visitors can still see the private page links in the menu, and the 404 message they get when they click on them isn’t exactly as I would wish, suggesting that “searching might help you find what you’re looking for”.

Er, No it won’t: I want to say “it’s private, and you can’t have it without permission”. Still, I don’t want to change the message for the whole theme, so I guess I’ll put up with it for now. But, still. Thanks to Jim and Alex for their help.

Private page problem in WordPress.

I’ve been asked to look at how WordPress could serve as an e-portfolio for researchers, which I think it could do quite well, but for one annoying little bug.  Now, as a researcher, you would want a lot of public pages and posts, so other people who are researching into your topic can read what you’re doing, and hopefully share what they’re doing with you.

You would also want some of your pages to be confidential so that only you, and perhaps your supervisors could see. You might want to include case study notes, interview transcripts or other personal data for example. I would have thought that the option of making pages private would cope with that, and so it does. But the problem is that the links to private pages don’t appear in the navigation menus. Even if you’re logged in, which rather defeats the object. (Yes, you could still access the data from the dashboard, but that might be tricky if you have a lot of data, as case study researchers are apt to do!)  This doesn’t seem to be a theme issue because I’ve tried it with about 5 themes and it seems to be the same across the board.

Admittedly privacy works fine with posts, in that you can see your private posts if you’re logged in (and not if you just point your browser at the blog)  But if you’re creating a research portfolio, then the inability to see your own  private pages is, to put it mildly, irritating. And even more so, if you’re trying to teach new researchers with no experience of WordPress how to organise their material.

I guess you could play around with PHP and CSS of a theme to sort this out, but I’m really no coder. So if anyone knows of a theme which will display links to private pages in the navigation, please do let me know. (A colleague has just suggested the latest “twenty ten” theme. So, I’ll try that and let you know.)

Nope, that didn’t work either! So I’m guessing this might be a bit deeper than the theme.

Blackboard Midlands User Group report. 24th June, 2010

De Montfort University Leicester
A machine to make you think

I find these meetings quite useful, partly because they’re a good way of keeping up to date with what colleagues are doing across the region (and to tell others what we’re doing), partly because there are often demonstrations of useful new technologies, and partly because Blackboard themselves come in and tell us what they’re up to. So I took myself off to De Montfort University, Leicester where I was delighted to find this dot matrix screen urging worthy thoughts on passers by. Actually I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t turned down the wrong road.  There may be a lesson in that.

Image credit   http://www.flickr.com/photos/amyjaneb/2790492590/sizes/m/

Anyway. Among the highlights of the meeting were a demonstration of Blackboard 9.1 which De Montfort, Northhampton and Dudley College are going for. Most others there seemed to share our view that the new interface was too big a change, for their staff. That said it is a bullet we are going to have to bite soon enough, and there is some quite attractive new functionality in 9.1. It supports anonymous marking which is something that there is a lot of local interest in at Lincoln. I do have some reservations about their interpretation of “anonymous”. You can certainly hide the students’ names in the gradebook, but as you can turn this feature on and off at will, it doesn’t seem to me to be all that anonymous. Compared with the same feature in the Turnitin Gradebook, where if you turn anonymity off , you can’t turn it back on. (And it records the user identification of the user who has turned it off, who has to enter a reason for turning it off before it actually turns it off. (I hope you’re paying attention. There’ll be a test later).  There was also a nice link between the gradebook and the wiki feature. Now you can go straight to a user’s contributions to a wiki from the gradebook entry, whereas before you had to use the wiki’s page history to see who had contributed what.  Finally we were shown what Blackboard call a “mashup”. Data purists will point out that it isn’t a mashup at all, but is simply a way of integrating  material on Flickr, You Tube, and other social networking sites (and acknowledging it’s provenance) into a Blackboard item.  It’s actually quite a slick feature, and technically doesn’t breach anyone’s copyright, although I still think it would be wiser to restrict your use of such materials to those with a creative commons license.

An interesting feature was that the demonstration was streamed live from Dudley College using Elluminate which seemed to work quite well, and may be a useful way of delivering lectures and other teaching interventions remotely.

The other big product that was demonstrated was Echo 360,  a lecture capture system. Essentially this works by the lecturer walking into the room, switching it on, and it records everything that happens. (audio, video, and even co-ordinates any slides that might be displayed) As it records a “thumbnail” is created every minute, (it looks a bit like the “scene” menu on a DVD) so it is easy for students to navigate through the lecture to any particular scence they are interested in. As you might have expected there was some scepticism that such a tool would deter students from attending, but in fact those who had attended claimed that they found the reverse was true.  If anything, recorded lectures had a slightly higher attendance than non-recorded lectures, possibly because if it was thought worth recording, that sent the message that it was worth attending.  And as one colleague pointed out, the lecturer always has the option of saying…

“And the questions on the exam will be….” (Presses pause). (Presses play). “…Oh, you’re watching the recording are you? Oh dear!”

Although that is perhaps a little cynical.  The point is that the recordings can be integrated into a Blackboard course thus providing a service for students who are genuinely unable to attend, or need to revise the finer points of a lecture.  Neither there is much of an issue in terms of data storage as Echo host all the data, although the university or the authors of the data retain full intellectual property rights in it.

Of course I couldn’t get the sales people to admit how much it would cost. All they would say  was that they had a wide range of licensing models. We’d also have to consider which rooms we’d want to equip with the service, but an increasing number of universities are offering this type of facility, so if we want to remain competitive, it is perhaps something we should investigate further.

Capital. An alternative?

Just finished Mark Fisher’s entertaining polemic “Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?”  There were certainly some useful ideas in there. The notion of the non-existent “Big Other” to justify the use of surveillance and control technologies, which include processes like auditing as well as more obvious physical technologies such as CCTV and keystroke logging was particularly interesting.  Big Other was and is as prevalent in autocratic societies like Stalin’s Russia, as it is in the ostensibly democratic societies of today. Of course Stalin, (or News Corporation) isn’t watching everything we do. It’s just that we readily believe that they are.  Perhaps the really radical position to adopt is that none of it matters very much.

Now, following a technique used by Fisher himself, I’m going to make a popular culture reference. So, in fairness to anyone who has not yet seen the last episode of the BBC series Ashes to Ashes I’m going to warn of what I believe is known as a Massive Spoiler Alert. If you don’t want me to spoil the plot for you stop reading now.

OK? Right. Well, if you did see it, you’ll have picked up on the eschatological bent in the story line. (You couldn’t really have missed it.) What I think was very telling was that the Hell that the characters nearly ended up in was a police station. That is in their terms, a  place of work. And a place of work is a place where you have to portray yourself as something other than you actually are. In contrast the Heaven was a pub, where there is no real surveillance (other than the internal surveillance provided by the landlord), and there is a license to be yourself. (Admittedly the consumption of alchohol helps!). I don’t know if that’s what the writers had in mind, but the phrase “In your face, Protestant work ethic” did rather spring to mind.

Which brings me back to Fisher. I did rather like his suggestion that industrial action might usefully take the form of refusing to co-operate with those forms of labour that promote surveillance. (e.g teachers could refuse to co-operate with Ofsted inspections.) It would be interesting to see how the media reacted to this approach. Such action wouldn’t hurt the community that the service is provided for, and it would be very hard for employers to reduce wage bills (He claims at one point that colleges welcomed one day strikes, because they cause minimal disruption and significantly reduced costs.)  But there’s that Big Other again, and it makes me wonder whether the answer to Fisher’s question is actually “No”.  If no-one is actually listening, (at least for very long, ) does anything we do matter very much.  Perhaps if we all thought that… Actually, time for another cultural reference (and a bit more eschatology). In the 1960s  John Wyndham wrote a short story “Confidence Trick”  about a tube train crash.   After the accident the train continued underground with a few  passengers until it got to Hell. One of the characters looked about him, with growing disbelief and shouted that “I don’t believe any of this”. Whereupon the scene dissolved and they all found themselves  back on the street outside the Bank of England, under which the accident had evidently occurred.  Whereupon the same character looked at the bank,  drew in his breath, and began to shout “I don’t bel…” only to find himself pushed into the path of a speeding bus. In his subsequent explanation to the police the character who did the pushing said something like “Well, I couldn’t let him destroy civilisation. We have to have something to believe in”.

Maybe we don’t.

The neo-Luddite turn in the academy?

Following on from my last post, I’ve been reading a bit more about technologies, or rather trying to engage with some of the ideas that underpin them. Before we get started it’s important that I clarify that by “technologies” I’m not specifically referring to computers, e-learning, or stuff like that. I’m not excluding them either. I am using the word in the older sense of  the applying of scientific, or pseudo-scientific theories to practical problems.

The problem as I set out in the last post was that we tend to be overfond of using corporate technologies, and modelling ourselves on business techniques. This weekend I’ve been reading a book called the Hacker Ethic by Pekka Himanen. There’s a fascinating discussion of personal development (or self-help) literature in the book, that compares the modern pursuit of status, which can be defined through the acquisition of money, power, or both, with the mediaeval pursuit of God. Both are, Himanen argues, ultimately unattainable in that they miss the point, which is to explore and develop the passions that drive us as human beings. These days, I suppose,  we are invited to share in the values of Capital.  He further draws attention to the similarity of modern self help books to the monastic rules that were used to guide monks along the path to God. I’m not going to repeat the arguments in the book here. If you’re interested in this stuff you can read it yourself. What I am going to do though, is speculate on the implications of this line of argument for the modern university.

If we follow a rule too closely, we are essentially engaging with a performative technology. Put more simply, if we do this, that, the other, that, this and then the other again, and do it all in the right order then we will achieve our “goals”. One could reverse this and see technologies as essentially a modern version of a monastic rule. (The rule of St.  Bill of Gates, or St. Stephen of Covey!)

As an aside, I was recently browsing through the business section of a bookshop and noted a whole shelf devoted to a series of works inviting me to manage the “Richard Branson”, “Philip Green”, or “insert corporate worthy of your choice here” way. There were about a dozen such titles and I remember wondering at the time how much of the success of these people was down to chance. I’m not suggesting that they didn’t work hard for their success, or even that they haven’t applied the “technologies” rigorously. I’ll bet though that other people have applied them even more rigorously and are not the subject of such works. I doubt any of the books discussed that issue. (I haven’t read any of them. When I noticed the title of an adjacent volume “Are you a badger or a doormat?” I decided that this sector of the publishing world had taken leave of its senses and left the shop). Of course the only lesson to be drawn from this story is that such books are written for profit which is achieved by the promotion of adherence to “rules” by customers.  I suspect the author of the last named work cares more about their royalty cheque than about which domestic article or wild animal you personally identify with!

To get back to the point, Himanen’s take on this kind of thing is that these are effectively modern hagiographies, which any properly critical pedagogy should take with a large pinch of salt. As he points out, the Rule of St Benedict abjures the disciple to sit quietly and listen to the words of the master. Which brings me at last to the Luddites. (About time too!) I’ve been involved with educational technology long enough to have heard almost every colleague refer to themselves at some point as a Luddite. In my doctoral thesis I made a slightly flippant remark that people are being unfair to themselves when they do this, as there haven’t (to my knowledge) been many outbreaks of organised machine breaking in universities. (But, if you do know of one, please, please  let me know through the comments!). I stand by that, because I think academics who characterise themselves so, are doing themselves a huge disservice. Most of us in HE have comparatively high levels of IT literacy even if we think we don’t.

On reflection my comment was unfair to the original Luddites, who were actually protesting, not against machines as such, but against the creation of new rules (or technologies) that would totally change their way of life. It wasn’t that a machine could make better stockings. It couldn’t. All it could do was make acceptable stockings. We still think the label “hand-made” is an indicator of quality, (often in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.) And the factories imposed new rules which reduced the stocking maker to the status of a cog in the machine. Now consider this quotation about a particular form of academic development that I also used in my thesis.

We should not be telling our students things, we should be ‘managing their learning’ and enabling them to develop ‘transferable skills’;. This is a matter of technique and procedure; who the teacher is, what s/he knows and what s/he cares about are or should be unimportant (Cameron, 2003, quoted in McLean, 2006, 143-4)

I suspect Cameron would have been at one with the Luddites in a philosophical sense. She shows, quite rightly, the same concern for the replacement of a skilled craft with technological rule based approaches that achieve something, (managed learning, transferable skills) that might be valuable, but are nowhere near as valuable as a critical engagement with an academic discipline. The other point about such approaches is that they profoundly undermine the Humboldtian concepts of Lehrerfreiheit and Lernfreiheit.  Respectively they refer to “freedom to choose what to teach”, and “freedom to choose what to learn”). If you have to manage your transferable skills, by completing a personal development plan, which by the way, will be assessed where is your academic freedom? If you have to spend your time teaching students how to do this, where is your academic freedom?

Rhetorical self indulgence aside, does this kind of neo-Luddism  have anything positive to offer the academy? I think it does. Before I expand, I must reiterate that neo-Luddism is not anti technology, in the sense that it calls for a return to quill pens and parchments. ICT is an essential part of modern life, and a neo-Luddite agenda would exploit it to the full. Anyway, what does neo Luddism offer us? First it asks us to take a properly critical look at the “rules” and the technologies we use to pursue them. Second, it asks us to define what we would replace the rules with. I haven’t addressed that in this post, but like Himanen, I would argue for passion (for a discipline), activities that support the development of that passion, and for freely sharing of the outputs of those activities. Third, I think it asks us to look at how sustainable we can make our work, which I think we can only do through sharing our discoveries. These are perhaps matters for future posts, but I’d like to leave you with a final thought. Have you ever seen an organisation chart where the chief executive’s box is drawn at the bottom of a page? No?  The reason for that is that information like water, tends to flow downhill, and this is true of any organisation. Remember St. Benedict’s advice to the disciple? “Sit quietly and listen” Those who are able to restrict information can choose what they tell you.

Now, I ask you. Is that any way to run a university?