I’m playing catch-up here but I did promise the University of Chester that I would add some further narrative to my image rich (but text poor) slides supporting the keynote ‘e-Learning: Opportunities and Threats in the 21st Century’ I gave at their recent annual staff conference (25 May 2006). Here, therefore, is my ‘value added’.
Chester is one of the HE institutions taking part in the pilot phase of the UK HE sector’s e-learning benchmarking exercise. The theme of this year’s conference was e-Learning: Enhancing Learning with Technology.
Chester set an exemplary standard both in conference organisation/support and in voluntary staff attendance. Staff conferences are usually modest affairs, but Chester fielded some ~ 360 delegates (a number which an international conference would not be ashamed of) and managed to offer a rich variety of one and two hour workshops (led either by its own staff or invited speakers). The remainder of this posting annotates the slides that supported my presentation and needs to be read in conjunction with the PowerPoint slides now available from the University of Chester site.
I had my Higher Education Academy hat on so it would have been pretty easy to focus only on a comfortable, but rather prosaic, perspective of e-learning that addressed only the top-down strategic drivers for, what we currently call, e-learning. A keynote, however, needs to be more stimulating for, and challenging of, its audience and so I spent a long time setting up the context for my key challenges. In fact it was bit like one of those US dramas when the introductory credits are still popping up halfway through the broadcast.
Slides 1 and 2 – Wishing to get down to the business of slaying dragons immediately my first challenge came in the title slide (slide 1) when I crossed out the ‘e-Learning’ in my title and re-titled my presentation ‘Technology Enhanced Learning: Opportunities and Threats in the 21st Century’ (slide 2). The rationale being that the e-learning moniker is now well past its ‘sell-by-date’ because it is so conceptually vague that it makes it almost impossible to decide what is in the e-learning pot and what is not. For example, definitions of e-learning which assert that it is any learning supported by ICT means that automatically everything is in the e-learning pot and so students who use, say, Microsoft Word to prepare an essay are undertaking an e-learning activity. Alternatively, is the academic who displays a single PowerPoint slide during a didactic lecture and the students who view it taking part in e-learning? Or maybe there’s a temporal dimension to the concept of e-learning, e.g. if the academic showed 30 minutes worth of PowerPoint lecture then would that count as e-learning whereas 1 minute’s worth of exposure should not? Or maybe it’s to do with pedagogical intention and so if students access Google (or a library database) once during a teaching session (say that takes 2 minutes) then that counts as e-learning although the contact time with the technology was trivial? Adding further confusion to this conceptual mash-up we can of course include ‘e-delivery’ and ‘e-administration’ so that before we know it anything and everything that involves bits, bytes, databases, computers, and networks lays claim to membership of the e-learning family. It that’s the case the term is now redundant. Ironically, the unhelpfulness of the e-learning concept can rapidly be brought into sharp relief when attempting to benchmark it as the current UK HE e-learning benchmarking exercise (e-benchmarking) is attempting to do. Let me illustrate what I mean. If institution ‘A’ decides that ‘xyz ‘ belong in the e-learning pot, but institution ‘B’ decides that they do not then we can forget about sector wide comparisons and, frankly, it’s probably a waste of sector effort trying to standardize the inclusions/exclusions. The time has perhaps come to throw away this unhelpful e-learning moniker. After all we didn’t require to specifically proclaim the need for p-learning (printing press learning ) or b-learning (book learning) 
Technology Enhanced Learning may, of course, have its own conceptual ambiguities but it has at least got that shiny word ‘enhancement’ in its name and so it perhaps becomes just about possible to argue that if an alleged TEL ‘event’ isn’t enhancing learning then it isn’t TEL no matter how much ICT is involved or how long/how little students are exposed to it. TEL implies a positive learning outcome from the use of technology and not just an emphasis on the mode of delivery as implied by the ‘e’ in e-learning.
Slides 5-43 (context setting) – Yes there really was this number of slides; but despair not. The vast majority are a progressive sequence of screenshots with links to sources which acted as a storyboard for the ‘story’ I wished to tell.
Slide 6 – My assertion here was that back in the good old (and rather naive) days when the concept of e-learning first bubbled to the upper layers of HE decision making all we thought was required was to choose one of the emerging hot, then new, proprietary products called Learning Management Systems/VLEs and voila! the institution’s e-learning future was assured. The good old days for most institutions was probably around the year 2000; not long in the great scheme of things, but an eternity in IT development and, for some, conceptual development terms. But at least options were few. All of the original products highlighted in the slide have undergone or will be undergoing transformation as a result of organisational changes, e.g. the absorption of WebCT into Blackboard.
Slide 8 – Fast forward from the late 90s and early 2000s and technology and social infrastructure developments in many parts of the world offer a bewildering, but much richer, range of technologies, services and concepts that will undoubtedly impact on how people can and will learn (and teach). I slipped mention of self-organising systems into this slide just to remind myself and the delegates (one of several such reminders) that the richness and availability of provision is now so high (at least in our part of the world) that it has become relatively easy for individuals and groups (academics and students) to function in an ICT universe that lies far outside any institutional provision. The implication being that those responsible for institutional learning technology provision will need to work much harder to stay relevant to its users than it has had to do so in the past. It will be necessary to think beyond the natural inclination to ban technologies and services that don’t fit in with, sometimes narrow, current conceptions of what are learning technologies and how they should be used, e.g. the banning of weblogs for use by staff and students.
Slides 9-21 – A sub-sequence in setting the context which attempted to showcase some of the data indicating just how connected the UK and the world is becoming and how this may changing ‘consumption’ behaviour.
Slide 10 highlights the UK OfCom Nations and Regions research report (PDF) which profiles communications and media use in the constituent parts of the UK.
Slide 11 highlights the comScore Networks report about the global online population and level of engagement. A key aspect of the comScore report being that China in particular, and Asia more generally, now has a far greater scope for increased numbers of their populations ‘connecting up’ whereas many countries in the West are fast reaching the point where those who want to connect up have already done so (or will shortly do so). That’s not to say that there is not considerable scope for continuing qualitative improvements in the West, e.g. widespread availability of improved bandwidth (including all rural areas). The comScore report doesn’t just consider connectivity it also considers engagement as measured by the number of hours online per month. It appears, according to comScore, that the UK and US fail to enter the top 15 of countries for time spent online.
Slide 12 – The Oxford Internet Institute, however, offers more of a UK-centric viewpoint in their The Internet in Britain: the Oxford Internet Survey 2005 in which the investigators (Dutton, W.H., di Gennaro, C. and Millwood Hargrave A) show that the amount of time per week users spend online appears to be associated with their self-rated ability in using the internet. I used a few charts from the Oxford Survey in my presentation but recommend readers visit the primary source because this gives a much richer analysis than I could possibly do.
Slide 13 – So is the internet changing user’s behaviour? Perhaps. Slide 13 highlights an extract from some of the work of the Chimera partnership which was established to provide insights into people’s behaviour and opinions on technology. An extract from Chimera Working Paper 2005-2006 cites Gershuny’s reminder that ‘killer’ internet applications will not necessarily be oriented to passive consumption of media but perhaps need to be more socially facilitative.
Slide 14 – Back to the Oxford Internet Survey and it looks like passive viewing of television is what is being displaced in order to make time for internet activities, but at the same time multitasking also seems to be the order of the day for internet users.
Slide 15 – And how are people communicating on the internet? According to the Oxford Internet Survey good old email may appear to be holding its own but I suggest we need to pay close attention to that Instant Messaging technology. Generation @’ won’t necessarily automatically reach out for email as their primary communication method; a possibility I attempted to address in the supplementary callouts in this slide. And just as a little final aside in this slide I drop in the assertion that ’email is where knowledge goes to die’ an aphorism that I wish I could claim authorship of, but alas I cannot. As best as I can trace its provenance Email is where knowledge goes to die was the title of a posting by MyST Technologies’ Bill French in 2003. I recommend reading Bill’s posting, it’s short but deeply insightful.
Slide 16 – We all currently tend to focus on institutional network provision and infrastructure but this slide highlights the growing importance of the home as the primary point of internet access; a point that we should perhaps take account of in future decision making.
Slide 17 – My final extract from the Oxford Internet Survey focused on the investigator’s findings regarding e-learning although the School Material and Distant Learning (sic) categories must have encapsulated a lot more activities than the top rating ‘Look up a fact/definition’ categories.
Slide 18 – A quote from OfCOMs’ Communications Market Quarterly Update (August 2005) about the increasing number of broadband connections in the UK (the actual numbers will be higher now). I pose the question about what the potential impact could be of this and increasingly useful mobile devices on our (or more accurately, our political and organisational leaders’) concept of ‘the office’, the library, the lecture room.
Slide 19 – Extends the previous slide to consideration of the impact of fixed mobile convergence, the impact of different types of wireless technology, and services, like the telephone, gravitating to the internet. This slide in effect sets up the hook for Slide 20.
Slide 20 & 21 – An example of one Voice over IP service most people were likely to have heard of, i.e. Skype. I also included the Skype Answering Machine (SAM) extension in the screenshot because I wanted to use this as an example of the type of ‘free’ web based service that has affordances that should be of interest to academic staff because of the potential for enhancing the learning and teaching experience. Yet, such services may challenge current institutional concepts of ‘approved’ e-learning tools and environments as well as current IT policies. For instance, the Skype/SAM combination can enable a researcher, learning resource producer, or student to undertake interviews and automatically digitally record the interactions for later analysis, editing and online publication. It is this very technique which has enabled Auricle to offer an occasional series of recorded interviews with various experts and ‘thought leaders’ without having to jump on a plane or train or invest in anything more expensive than a laptop and a modest headset (Slide 21). Alternatively, the Skype/SAM combination could automate the digital capture of expert audio responses to a series of questions either emailed or published on a web page/weblog. The economic, academic, and pedagogical case should, arguably, be unassailable for such uses; but yet institutional Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) can easily fail to recognize the positive academic and pedagogical benefits/opportunities of such new technologies while still setting some reasonable boundaries to prevent misuse. There is a considerable risk that blanket bans on such technologies which are based on an assumption of misuse (or excessive consumption of bandwidth) will prove counter-productive and will merely encourage academics and students to increasingly look outside educational institutions for technologies which they decide more appropriately meet their needs, i.e. institutional ICT provision comes to be perceived as increasingly irrelevant or inhibiting.
Slides 22 to 27. Continuing my longest introduction in history I then moved to the subset of my context-setting slides which focused upon user-generated content, sharing of material and repurposing/remixing.
Slide 23 – Just to illustrate that user-generated content has surfaced in the consciousness of the mainstream media I used the BBC’s recent announcement of a major overhaul of their web site to take greater account of user content, i.e. the BBC Web 2.0 project.
Slide 24 – I used this slide to illustrate the growth of that über-source of much user-generated content, i.e. the weblog. I’ve been tracking and recording what Technorati claims since November 2004.
Slide 25 – That conceptual dendrite of the weblog, RSS, was next up with Syndic8’s feed count chart providing the evidence for how a modest de facto standard arising from, and developed by, a grassroots community can have a major impact.
Slide 26 – But syndication and RSS can be pretty abstract concepts and so this slide provided one example of what a simple aggregation of RSS feeds from multiple sources can do. I used the RSS feeds arising from the weblogs maintained by the institutions taking part in the pilot phase of the UK’s HE e-benchmarking exercise to illustrate the point. The University of Chester is one of those institutions. The key point here is that whilst each of the sources remained the information owners the syndication/dissemination/network-forming functions that are integral to weblogs came without further effort on the information owners part.
Slide 27 – Next up was that ultimate expression of repurposing/remixing/extending functionality from more than one source, i.e. the Web Mashup. In an academic world steeped in concerns related to preserving IPR, personal reputations, and detecting abuses like plagiarism the concept of the ‘mashup’ or remix can be, to say the least, ‘challenging’. But yet major commercial interests like Google or Amazon, and parts of the public sector in other countries have found considerable benefit in facilitating ‘free’ access to parts of their flagship online products by third parties. The example I used to illustrate the point combines the output of two different web sites (Google Maps) and a US police database to make a new online application called Chicago Crime. There are many more such ‘mashups’ available and it is a concept that developers of the next generation of learning environments/resources/tools need to explore and exploit; that said, it is perhaps also interesting to reflect on the challenges to creating such remixes in countries/cultures where data funded from the public purse is not as easily available as in the US. In the UK the Guardian newspaper is currently leading a campaign called Free Our Data.
Slides 28-43 – The final sub-section in context setting which was called ‘The Communication and Dissemination Channels are Opening Up’.
Slide 29 – Back to the BBC for an example. Here the screenshot was of the BBC’s Listen Again facility where missing a favourite radio programme has ceased to be an issue for the internet savvy (as long as the listening is done within 7 days of transmission). The point being here that when the mainstream media is providing functionality like this then the expectations of the population are going to rise and so the challenge (or is that opportunity?) for institutions is to consider whether, and how, they can prepare for such rising expectations.
Slide 30 – The BBC is not stopping at audio listen again facilities. The increasing availability and uptake of domestic broadband access to the internet already means that video news can already be streamed to people’s homes and workplaces.
Slide 31 – And it’s not just news. Full episodes of entertainment programmes are now also on offer as illustrated by the BBC Two website.
Slides 32 – 43 – But the fundamental flaw in each of the above media represented in Slides 29-31 is that these examples tend to assume that users are prepared to be tethered to a computer with fixed internet access. No longer. My assertion is that we need to think increasingly of the internet as a ‘filling station’ for material which is downloaded to ‘devices’ over which the user has a great deal of, if not total, control.
Slide 33 – A montage of some of the devices now available to which users can download material and can carry with them. From the now ubiquitous iPod like devices/MP3 players, handheld video devices and would-be claimants to the e-book throne.
Slide 34 – Sony’s latest attempt to capture the nascent e-book market with their Sony Reader device. Eventually, this, or some other, e-book device will be perceived as a ‘must-have’ much like the iPod or analogues have in that sector of the market and at that point major changes to the way we store and disseminate books becomes possible, if not likely. For example, the ‘books’ in a reading list for a programme or module of study could be automatically downloaded to such a device on payment of the tutorial fees? In Sony’s first iteration of such a device a ‘book’ could also automatically ‘expire’ after a particular time and was no longer available to the reader. Here than Sony had introduced the concept of leasing information for a time but not owning it. Such moves to information leasing may be unpopular particularly when we are used to buying a book, lending it to a friend, and selling it on if we so desire and will undoubtedly inhibit the take-up of e-books much more than the technology. Consider the following scenario, however, which currently applies to the music industry. Let’s say that the decline in CD music sales continues to drop as the number of consumers who enjoy the convenience of downloading and paying for music online increases. There comes a point, therefore, when the music industry decides that it is no longer viable to support the mass production, marketing, and dissemination of music CDs and decamps fully online. At that point downloading ceases to be an option. The irony here is that the very fundamental shift in music distribution that concerned the industry so much originally may well provide an environment in which they have a much greater degree of control if the only supported alternative to information purchase becomes information leasing. Now simply apply the same concept of information leasing to whatever e-book devices emerge in the future. I’ve got a feeling this is not too far fetched since, in effect, its little different from the licensing and access arrangements already made for academic journals with the only difference being it would not necessarily be an Athens or Shibboleth that would be responsible for the access management, but could be the e-book complete with digital rights management which undertakes this job. A pessimistic doom-laden scenario or an inevitable business model? It depends on your perspective, but I’ll be back with some more examples of this information leasing trend in later slides.
Slide 35 – There are already many relatively useful mobile devices on the market, e.g. phones, PDAs, laptops, but none would claim to offer the same extensive functionality or internet connectivity of the desktop or laptop computer. The vision now, however, being promulgated is a new generation of ultra-mobile computers which aspire to near desktop computer functionality. An current example of one device is the Samsung Q1. What matters in such devices wanting to take the computer crown is weight, size of screen, on-board data storage, connectivity to the internet, and a highly usable mobile interface supplemented by the ability to connect to standard interface devices when static, e.g. keyboard and larger screen. Devices like the Q1 are probably useful indicators of the way ahead but once larger volume on-board flash memory falls to a mass-market price even more interesting examples of this genre are likely. The implication here is that highly mobile multifunction devices like the Q1 will be eventually be coming to a campus near you and that will have significant implications for institutional ICT provision and support. For example, will the institution still require extensive labs or learning centres with fixed desktops or does provision need to focus on docking points/wireless access? What about the security of such mobile devices? Currently, most laptops are still of sufficient weight to act as a disincentive for students to carry them around all day but yet what provision is made for storage between lectures/tutorials etc? The ultra lightweight device, however, may have no such disincentives and so teachers will find themselves facing cohorts of students with devices capable of silently accessing information and communicating via the internet/intranet during their teaching. The choice here will be whether to attempt to ban their use or alternatively exploit the opportunities. See also item 2 (Slide 8).
Slide 36 – Still on the Internet as Filling Station track here I offer some of the market information on the trend in MP3 player purchase. If anything probably an underestimate. The price of these ultra-ultra mobile devices has fallen dramatically and are now associated with the widespread adoption of podcasting (even by the mainstream media) and so offer a fairly economic way of disseminating audio information and analysis as part of a learning experience.
Slide 37 – Whereas earlier slides focused on how within a couple of years audio is now being widely disseminated by the ‘Internet as a Filling Station’ video is fast being given the same treatment. The slide illustrates Microsoft’s entry into this area of the market.
Slide 38 – Sony also wants to be key player in the video download market.
Slide 39 – Yet again the BBC signal is taking the lead, this time in the video download arena, and some of their decisions will have profound implications for the population of the UK and beyond. Perhaps ironically, this slide contains a link to a streaming video in which Ashley Highfield, the BBC’s Director of New Media describes and demonstrates the corporation’s iPlayer. The video contains lots of interesting information but if you are time-poor I suggest you scrub along the timeline of the video clip until you are about 4 minutes in. I’ve attempted to summarize the salient points in the call-out on the slide with these being that the Digital Rights Management system of the iPlayer will limit viewing to a seven day window after transmission and will restrict viewing to the UK (and presumably the Isle of Man and Channel Islands) only. The implications are actually pretty profound, i.e. viewing on iPlayer only (so computer only?); temporal restrictions that are not, currently, imposed by aVCR or DVD Recorder, and regional restrictions/routing of internet data. I also detected hints of a pay model for relaxation of the temporal or regional restrictions. From my perspective, what the BBC is proposing is leading us all into uncharted territory. It is an interesting combination of enhancement and restriction and so I look forward to commenting upon the impact.
Slide 40 – Not content with offering us video as a digital stream or computer download the BBC 3 (the youth-oriented channel) is also offering to download video to your mobile phone.
Slide 41 – BBC Radio is also offering an increasing number of its broadcast programmes as ‘podcasts’. On the surface these are audio file downloads of popular BBC radio programmes but my operational definition of a podcast (below) perhaps indicates where the added value lies in the concept.
Def: Podcast
A, usually compressed, digital media file (usually, but not always, music or – and – speech) which can be pre-selected and routinely scheduled to be automatically downloaded via RSS to a computer or mobile listening/player device, e.g. an MP3 player/iPod.
Slide 42 – Shows, ‘Nimiq’, one of the many free podcast applications that put the definition in the previous slide into action. I merely enter the podcast address into the application once and, thereafter, it automatically downloads the latest edition of a programme which I can then listen to when I am ready (not when a broadcasting schedule dictates I have to). Now everyone can be a ‘broadcaster’.
Slide 43 – Shows ‘Blackboard toGo!’ an attempt to merge the concepts of centralised VLE and portable device. The web site is no longer available but in my view the architectures and underlying pedagogical models of VLEs will have evolve considerably before the marriage of concepts attempted by ‘Blackboard toGo!’ will make much sense to intended users.
Slides 44-48 – Consider some of the top-down drivers which have influenced (or are still influencing) our thinking about and use of technologies to enhance learning.
Slide 45 – Some ‘blasts from the past’. The Teaching and Learning Technology Programme (TLTP). The Computers in Teaching Initiative (CTI). The Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning (FDTL) and, finally, the UK e-Universities (UKeU) initiative. The fate of UKeU is well known but my ‘ghostly’ representation illustrates how it will continue to influence our thinking for many decades to come. As Chester’s Vice Chancellor’s introduction to the conference highlighted, we all perhaps now have a more grounded view of what is possible and appropriate.
Slide 47 – the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) 5 Year e-Strategy is the vehicle for concepts like personalisation, cross-sectoral progression, and communities-of-practice. What’s of interest to me here how the strategic statements will be resolved with the tendency of all governments engaged with major IT initiatives to centralize, standardize and build a concomitant bureaucracy. Without some creative thought and internal defence of the strategic principles, support for personalisation and communities-of- practice could easily be lost as the administrative objectives dominate.
Slide 48 – The HEFCE e-learning strategy. The slide is self explanatory but note the ‘Goals’ hyperlink at the bottom of the slide which provides further detail.
Slides 49-60 – Provides an overview of some of the major actors and visions in the e-learning space. It’s not meant to be a definitive list.
Slide 50 – I’ve gathered as many hyperlinked logos on one page as is possible. Some of the roles will be pretty obvious, e.g. funding bodies and agencies, but others exert influence in other ways. For example, look at the Research Council’s zone on the bottom right on the page which contains a hyperlink to the recent Technology Enhanced Learning research call. The work of QAA (Scotland) with its ‘enhancement themes’ should also be of interest. The work on developing and implementing e-learning technical standards is exemplified by IMS and ADL (although the latter’s influence on HE is more questionable). The US Educause is roughly the equivalent of the UK Association for Learning Technology (ALT) and both are the source of excellent sets of resources about the role of technology in learning as well as catalysts for staff development events. Anyway, this is a slide to explore.
Slide 51-52 – Here I consider some of JISC’s activities in the e-learning space along with the availability of Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETLs) and the Academy Subject Centres.
Slide 53 – Back to a slide I showed earlier with the emphasis being on the growing online population in China which, according to this source, has much greater scope for growth than, for example, the US or the UK (which still have a lot of scope for qualitative improvements, e.g. broadband bandwidth). This slide provides the lead into slides 54-56.
Slides 54-56 – Outline the eChina~UK project. Note particularly the mention of ‘inter-cultural pedagogy’, an important and critical area of research which needs to inform the whole UK HE sector.
Slides 57-58 – The only institution I included in my logo wall (Slide 50). The unique nature and size of the UK OU means that we should pay a lot of attention to what it is doing. I give two examples. First its involvement in the Open Courseware Initiative which is building on similar international initiatives to make learning material ‘freely’ available and so demonstrating that giving material away does not undermine the foundations of the institution but that ‘giving away’ still costs if you are going to do the job properly. The second slide focuses on the OU’s recent decision to build their learning environment from an open source ‘Moodle’ base. From my point of view, what the OU’s decision demonstrates is that what really matters if an institution wishes to enter the Virtual Learning Environment / Learning Management System arena is not whether it should inevitably be proprietary brand X etc. What is more important is the size and dynamism of the support and development community behind the scenes. The OU is set to be a major contributor to what is already a sizeable community.
Slide 59 – The UK’s JISC and the Australian Government’s Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) are collaborating in the development of the E-Learning Framework (ELF). The basic premise here is that it is possible to abstract the architecture of what we currently know as e-learning into agents and services. Why could this be important? First such a framework approach helps to simplify and visualize what is currently a complex and largely hidden set of inter-relating concepts, applications and infrastructure. Second, once you start thinking in terms of discrete services (rather than the mega-bundles of functionality we currently have) it becomes possible to consider substituting or replacing services. Third, the ELF helps us think beyond e-learning is a VLE.
Slide 60 – And of course there’s the Academy/JISC supported pilot phase of the e-Benchmarking Exercise. The slide provides an overview of the institutions taking part in the pilot phase and the different approaches (hyperlinked) being piloted. The slide also shows a link to a self-organising group of Scottish Universities, i.e. a Scottish Benchmarking Group (SBG) who are ‘shadowing’ the HEFCE funded exercise facilitated by the presence of one of the group as part of the e-benchmarking pilot.
Slides 61-66 – These slides lead into the denouement of my presentation. Despite the apparent richness of technological provision, the past investments, and the strategic visions, in the HE sector technology can be simply become an innovative way of not changing.
Slide 62 – Here is begin to build the analogy with the horse-drawn ‘tractor’ which is tried and tested as we know it just works.
Slide 63 – Then the internal combustion engine comes along and we have an opportunity to automate our tractor and what do we try and do? We put reins on it of course because that’s the way we are used to steering it.
Slide 64 – Now take the argument and apply it to what we are trying to do with technologies which are supposed to ‘enhance’ learning.
Slide 65 – Only one slide but it links to lots of others. The first link goes off to my passive knowledge transfer representation. The second link jumps to my sequence on alignment of outcomes, assessment, events, activities and resources. The third links to David Wiley’s assertion that “the further up Bloom’s taxonomy a desired learning outcome is, the more important social interaction will be in promoting student achievement of the outcome … the extent to which one automates their instruction is directly proportional to the extent to which their instruction is confined to the bottom rungs of Bloom.†(David Wiley, 2004, Sociability and Scalability in Online Learning Environments. The fourth links to Gilly Salmon’s 5 Stage Model which shows that e-learning engagement is a process not an event. The fifth links to a two slide sequence on Web 2.0 (which merits a whole other conference presentation of its own).
Slide 66 – Concludes my presentation.
Although my time to respond to questions was squeezed by the amount of territory I covered there was couple of very good ones along the lines of
- Q: Should an institution necessarily respond to all the technical opportunities now available?
Answer – Even it was inclined to do so, an institution would find it very hard to keep up with the myriad of technologies and opportunities now ‘out there’. It’s unfortunate, however, that, the first response of HE institutions to technologies and services that are at variance with current ICT policies can be to ‘ban’ their use when the actual need is for academic or related staff to make informed decisions, and draw informed conclusions, about the teaching and learning potential of new technologies or processes. One solution is to make available the equivalent of a prototyping/project lab which can be used to evaluate new tools and processes both from a technical and pedagogical perspective. Such an approach would enable the more rapid integration of sucessful ‘projects’ into the service environment and would also provide an outlet for the essential lateral thinkers, mavericks, and creatives who, at times, can show the rest of us a new way forward.
- Q: Who is responsible for educating and informing about the ethical issues which arise when using the new communication technologies?
Answer – Great question (obviously from someone with a great deal of insight) into the dilemmas that can sometimes arise from the use of communication technologies whose deliverables can sometimes be viewed both as hero or villain depending on which grouping one belongs to or whether one is delivering or receiving. For example, one person’s efficient distribution is another person’s spam, one person’s efficient management is another person’s autocratic ‘command and control’ via email, one person’s freedom of speech is another’s political/racial bias (or student disrespect of academic staff). I do see a link with the first question in that we could remove all the ethical risks and dilemmas by banning technologies which seem to expose us to such risks, e.g. weblogs, wikis, email, discussion boards etc. Universities are meant to be about the incubation and nurturing of ideas and ‘deep’ thought and so its much better that part of this nurturing is building an ethical awareness via organisational development and reasonable Acceptable Use Policies (AUP) which facilitate the responsible and ethical use of technologies. I used the example of the University of Warwick who are, arguably, the leading exponents of instiutional weblogs in the UK and who do not bring their weblog network to a close if a few students appear to be acting inappropriately; they tackle that occurence as a discrete problem requiring discrete action. Again, arguably, the University of Harvard Acceptable Use Policy provides a good reference model for statement of policy which facilitates rather than inhibits technology use, while still setting clear boundaries for behaviour. The problems arise when there are no AUPs or when they are constructed in such a way as to act as a disincentive to use, e.g. all external facing communications have to be cleared by, say, a corporate communications department. Who is responsible for all of the above? The answer is everyone; but different people can contribute in different ways. Those responsible for staff and organisational development need to ensure there is an ethical dimension to inputs about the use of new technologies; those responsible for the development of policies need to ensure that their AUPs are understandable, available, and reasonable; those responsible for student developent shouldn’t assume they already have the information and media literacy skills, in the presence of such a vacuum where are they then to acquire their ethical understanding?
The above responses are probably rather fuller than I managed to give on the day but they are what I wanted to say and, anyway, I haven’t worked out the technique for putting hyperlinks into my spoken words … yet
