Technology and academic freedom

Julian Beckton Technology, Web 2.0 ,

I’ve been invited to participate in a research project that will look at academic freedom in the United States of America, which is a fascinating topic, but before I jump in, I thought I’d try and link it with my previous project. (My doctoral thesis which I am about to submit. Fingers crossed!). That looked at models of educational development units and how they might fit into the contemporary university.

In my thesis, I noted in passing that there was some dissatisfaction among academic colleagues with what might be categorised as technical-rational interpretations of educational development, or if you prefer a certain impatience with attempts to reduce university teaching to a set of tips and techniques. Because my work involves supporting educational technology, and because I think technology tends to impose certain practices, or ways of working, I suspect instrumentalism is a route we can be very easily tempted along.

The question that I’m beginning to wonder about is whether the way we use technology could be a threat to academic freedom. I’m aware of the Edupunk movement, open source and web 2.0 of course, but corporate software does seem to continue to exercise a powerful hold over higher education. Most of the corporations offering services to universities appear to be relatively benign, (for now anyway!) but what started me thinking was an excellent introduction by Beshara Doumani to a collection of essays entitled “Academic Freedom after September 11”. He identified three threats to academic freedom – Government, private advocacy groups, and the privatisation of the university, this last in the sense that the benefit of higher education was perceived as shifting from the state and wider society, to the individual, the student as consumer.

Doumani was writing in 2004, at the height of the Bush administration’s paranoia about Islamic terrorism, and while government interference does have the potential to threaten academic freedom, for now I want to think about the other threats. Since the financial crisis of 2009, universities are being urged to broaden their income streams, which isn’t entirely unreasonable, but seems to me to run the risk of allowing funders to direct what is taught, or how it is taught. Drifting slightly off topic for a moment, would an evangelical church want to fund a hypothetical Darwin Research Institute for example?  More locally for Lincolnshire would the food industry be keen on funding a programme that taught students how to grow their own food?  (I’m not saying they wouldn’t, just that there are potential hostages to fortune).

Getting back to the point, if we persist in using corporate technology then we can only do what those corporations want us to do. One of those things (if the corporation has any sense) is likely to be to train students in using their products so they’ll take them into the workplace.  Incidentally we’re also committed to paying their bills, if their services are all we are able to use. Just to add to the fun we are often subjected to licensing agreements that mean we lose access to our data if we decide we no longer need the software.   We’re effectively locked in and therefore not free to do anything that these suppliers might one day disapprove of.  (I’m not saying that this is all some sort of conspiracy theory. It’s much more subtle than that! )

Now I might be talking myself out of a job here, (since one of my roles is to provide support for Blackboard users) but if we are serious about protecting academic freedom I think it well worth our while exploring, and researching the potential of alternative open source and web 2.0 technologies as well as advocating their use.  That can lead to accusations of self-indulgent hobbyism, but these things take time because we can’t ram these alternatives down our colleagues’ throats, or we get back to the technical-rational problem I talked about above. There’s also a risk that the seeds we plant don’t germinate, but to end on a positive note if we are going out to raise funds from the local community, perhaps we could sell our expertise to others. The exploitation of open source technology such as Mahara for E-portfolios , WordPress MU for building  web sites, for local businesses seems to me to be one source we could explore by assisting them in installing the software, providing training and consultancy for their staff and so on. Thus we’d be engaging with the community without compromising our own academic freedom.

Phew. What a long post!

PDP: Where does it sit?

Julian Beckton Personal Development Planning

There’s an interesting article in the latest issue of ESCALATE, arguing that PDP (personal development planning) should be delivered separately from the academic curriculum. The reasons given are that:

  • Students don’t see the value in it.
  • Academic staff don’t feel they have the expertise or the time to deliver the  personal one to one work it requires.
  • Recent guidelines from fundholders and others stress the employability aspect

There is some truth in all of these points, although I think that once the concept is explained to them, students do see the value of it,(well, some do) although I accept that the siren call of the city’s nightlife is likely to prove more alluring than spending their free time with their e-portfolio. More to the point, academic assignments carry marks and personal development plans (usually) don’t, so it’s a perfectly rational decision for a student to prioritise the former.

The second point, about academic staff not having the time or expertise also seems to me a question of priorities and values. If they could see the value of PDP then I am fairly sure that more would adapt their practice to incorporate it.  Which raises the question of whether PDP actually has any inherent value? The key word for me has always been “personal”. Obviously it has value for some people, but maybe not for others. I can’t see any teacher wanting to spend time making any student do something they don’t want to do, but equally it would be wrong to deny it to those students who do want to do it. We can of course provide all sorts of e-portfolio tools (Mahara, Pebble Pad, e-folio, and dare I say it even WordPress and Google Docs can be pressed into service), but all of them still need support both in terms of providing a reliable  network infrastructure, and in providing help to students. All of which adds to workloads.

Thirdly, of course employability is important, and I’d expect guidelines from Government and employers to stress it, but I wonder if the emphasis on”planning” is a little too instrumental. (And as the image implies, it isn’t too focussed on a very specific corporate type of employment) I’m not convinced that anything more than short to medium term career planning is possible, (or desirable) for most undergraduates. I know students are increasingly diverse, but we still seem to have quite a lot of 18-21 year old school leavers, who probably don’t have sufficient experience of full-time work to on which to base a realistic career plan. But the practice of planning is as relevant to preparing for a dissertation as it is to searching for a job.  I also think the reflective element of PDP is actually more helpful to putting thoughts in order, than trying to imagine a future. More accurately I think it’s part of the process of developing the mind set that can imagine that future and for that reason I wouldn’t want to lose it.

I am not saying we shouldn’t offer employability support. But, I do feel that there is a danger of falling into a “deficit” trap, of the sort that I suspect hindered the “learning development” movement in its earlier years. If we value these things then we  have to make them part of the whole student experience rather than push them off into some sort of pseudo academic ghetto. Value, in an academic environment is measured in marks.  So, I think if we want students to build personal development plans, we have to find some way of assessing them, or at least the process of building them.  The challenge is to do that without detracting from the importance of the disciplinary content of a student’s degree.  Now, there, I freely admit to being stuck!

New cycle route

Julian Beckton General Interest, Uncategorized

No, nothing whatsoever to do with educational technology but I fancy writing about something else. It’s the first day of spring, (and a nice one at that) and while I’m supposed to be panicking about completing my thesis, I had a far better idea. I thought I’d wheel out my “proper” bike and shake off some of the winter dust it’s been accumulating. I set off down the Cycle route which leads out of Lincoln, through Skellingthorpe, and on to Harby, with the idea of doing a 2o mile loop around Lincoln. The first part is a disused railway line, which I had thought was pretty much abandoned after Harby. However, when I got there , I noticed that the fence that separated the cycle track from the railway  was gone, and a brand new trackbed had been laid. Ever inquisitive I followed it and discovered that it now runs all the way to Fledborough Viaduct, (pictured) a rather impressive structure which carried the railway across the Trent and miraculously appears to have escaped demolition.

Fledborough Viaduct
Fledborough Viaduct

The viaduct itself is still blocked off, but work is clearly going on to re-open it. Which is much needed as the only way to get across the Trent in those parts is by using the Toll Bridge at Dunham a mile or so to the North. If you’re on a bike, that’s not much fun as you have to ride down the very busy A57 for a few miles either side to get to it. Clearly the  work isn’t finished – there are no ramps up to the roads that cross the new cycle route as yet, and while the track bed is perfectly rideable, I think it will need a more rainproof surface in the long term.  All this may explain why there’s been hardly a mention of it in the local press so far. While in truth it’s not the most scenic, or photogenic of routes, it is going to be a fantastic facility for local people. I don’t know how far the plan is to extend the line on the other side of the river, but apart from a short section through Lincoln itself, it’s now possible to have a traffic free ride from Kirkstead Bridge to Fledborough – which I guess to be about 20 miles. And, I’m very pleased to see our industrial heritage being re-used in this way so credit to Nottinghamshire County Council for pushing this through.

Social Media and the EDU

Julian Beckton EDUs

I’ve just been reading a rather interesting article by Richard Stacy, published in something called the “Capco Journal of Financial Transformation”  (Not a publication to which I subscribe; he republished it on his blog!) which is about the potential of social media to transform practices across the business sector. It also, I thought, had considerable relevance for the way we work in educational development units.

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.

Let’s all blame computers for everything bad. Again.

Julian Beckton Technology , ,

Picked up an interesting tweet that led to an article by Susan Greenfield about how computers may not be the most appropriate intervention in schools. Her critique  is that the way we use computers, essentially to graze for bits of information, is damaging our ability to think at length and in detail about a topic. You might be surprised to hear me say this but I think she has a point.  I’m largely unimpressed by claims that children and young people can “multi-task” much better than adults. All the evidence I’ve seen points to the fact that they are actually pretty rubbish at multi-tasking, if by multi-tasking you mean the simultaneous achievement of multiple and complex objectives. (That’s not a dig at the younger generation. I freely admit I’m rubbish at it too, but that is because it is an extremely difficult thing to do. In fact I don’t think I know of anyone who can do it)

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!

Minor Turnitin annoyance.

Julian Beckton Technology

I’ve been in correspondence with Turnitin UK about a few problems we’ve been having recently. One was that I couldn’t edit my user profile within Turnitin. This, it seems is because, we use the Blackboard plug-in. Apparently all data about user profiles is taken from Blackboard, and you can’t change your profile in Turnitin itself because it would cause a conflict.

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.

Educational Technology Horizons

Julian Beckton Technology , , ,

I’ve been reading the NMC “Horizon Reports” for 2009 and 2010 recently. These are surveys of new technologies that may have some impact on education in the next few years and they’re quite interesting reading. Here are some of the key points.

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?

e-books.

Julian Beckton Technology , , , , ,

I’ve been quite interested in the potential of e-books for some time, but not had any direct experience of using them. Well, happily for me, Santa left an iPod touch in my stocking this Christmas, and I was straight on to iTunes, to download the Stanza e-reader application. From there I went of to project Gutenberg and downloaded a few free copies of public domain books. Well, I am blown away by the ease of reading with this app.- I found myself picking up the iPod at all sorts of odd moments, and as I had to make a short (well, 1 hour) train journey for work on Friday, I was dipping into those PDFs I’d downloaded for reading later. (You know: the ones you never actually read.) Now, I’d probably  never have printed those documents out, let alone carried them with me on a business trip, so, for a short while I was convinced that there might be something in the idea of mobile learning after all. Well, I’m still quite convinced, but I found that we still have some way to go. Accessibility remains an issue, although I think the Stanza app tries hard in this respect, and the inventiveness of the developer community so far makes me reasonably convinced that we’ll see further improvements.

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!

Shareville

Julian Beckton Technology, Virtual Learning Environments , , , ,

Regular readers (yes, both of you) will know that I’ve been a little bit sceptical about the concept of virtual worlds in education in previous posts. That’s probably because World of Warcraft, Second Life, and so forth weren’t really designed for educational purposes so we’ve sort of adapted them. That’s not to say there hasn’t been some good stuff done in SL. I like Teeside’s Bayeux Tapestry sim in second life for example. But I was also impressed by Shareville, a virtual town, developed by Birmingham City University.

Shareville is a “virtual town” which was designed to help students prepare for learning in the workplace. You can navigate round the town using a grid based “map”. Clicking on a square will take you to a still 360 degree photograph of a district of the town, and by moving your mouse around the photo the user gets taken into interesting scenarios.  It’s perhaps pushing it a bit to compare it with things like Second Life, because you don’t have an avatar, it’s not a fantasy world – in fact it’s a rather grim view of reality! Technically I suppose it’s just a database. But it is expandable, so different scenarios can be added for different disciplines.  I also liked the way that Shareville was designed to be used in conjunction with other systems – no attempt is made to duplicate resources that might be in Moodle, Wimba or Mahara. Tutors put instructions on how to use Shareville in the VLE and users access that.
Anyway, rather than me going on about it, watch this presentation from the designers. There are also links for visitors to go and have a play with it.
While we’re on the subject of virtual worlds, I couldn’t resist this. I know it’s really just a game, but isn’t Lego about building a virtual world in the first place. So it’s a virtual world within a virtual world. A conundrum for the philosophy dept.