I gave the opening keynote yesterday (7 Apr 2005) at this year's Shock of the Old conference at Oxford University's Said Business School. It was a really good, informative event with the theme of implementing innovation. It had first rate inputs from other speakers from both the higher and further education sectors. Shock of the Old has managed to carve itself a niche in the otherwise increasingly crowded e-learning conference circuit. I found it well worthwhile attending. Here's a summary and link to the slides of my particular input. [Slides 1 and 2]
My keynote was initially titled 'Lottsa Innovation … But where's the change?' but I decided to expand this slightly into 'Lottsa Innovation …. But where's the change coming from?'
[Slides 3-17]
I took, what I hope was, a fairly light hearted approach but with a pretty serious message. But first I needed to set the context for, what I see as, some pretty difficult questions that some in the sector may find increasingly uncomfortable.
As a starting point I used Alan Turing's seminal typology of systems (machines), i.e. organised, disorganised, self-organising [Slide 4]. The idea here was to provide a frame of reference to the 'systems' we were familiar and perhaps less familar with. I also provided, what some may see as, a tenuous link to David Wiley's writings on self-organizing learning systems.
I then moved on to consider the situation circa 2000 when we all optimistically piled into e-learning with the belief that whatever our favourite brand of proprietary VLE/LMS was would somehow work miracles for us [Slides 5-6]. Open source alternatives like Colloquia and COSE were perhaps the 'good guys' who were pedagogically and not content driven but were, in the main, perceived to be a minority sport. As a result HE and FE enthusiastically adopted the mainstream proprietary solutions.
But it's now 2005 and we've now learned some pretty tough lessons and have a lot more options to consider [Slide 8]. Undisputably in the 'tough lessons' category was the rise and fall of UKeU whose demise, I argued, will continue to impact upon the UK HE/FE online learning sector. Ironically, perhaps, I suggested that the negative experience may have had, and will continue to have, some positive influences upon future funding and other policies. Either way, the 'ghost' of UKeU will continue to be with us for perhaps longer than some would like.
But there's a lot more in Slide 8 than UKeU. There are the for profit and 'free' technical and social infrastructures now being built. The technologies and services represented here range from from broadband to iPods, mobile phones to Blackberries, from IMS to BitTorrent. The emergence of the 'open' movement and technologies as represented by SourceForge, MIT Courseware, Wikipedia etc was of particular note. Also, of particular note is the meteoric rise of social networking software and services where user-generated content and metadata (folksonomies) take precedence, e.g. Weblogs, Flickr, RSS/Atom et al. At the other end of the spectrum is the construction of the Semantic Web and a focus on Taxonomies. I suggested that there are now so many opportunities and services arising 'out there' that it's perfectly feasible that if institutions are found wanting in their future IT/e-learning infrastructure and services provision that the teachers and students will migrate to systems and services about which institutions have no knowledge and over which they certainly will not be able to establish any control. There are other risks for users of course in this approach, e.g. sudden loss of a 'free' service which has been embedded within a 'course'.
Slide 9 took a little diversion but. neverthless. it was related to the previous points about the growth and increasing importance of social networking software and services. Here I highlighted David Wiley's contention 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.
If Wiley's correct, and I suspect he is, we are mostly paddling around in the knowledge, comprehension and application shallows but are failing to move into the deeper learning waters of analysis, synthesis and evaluation. As we know, if you don't learn to swim you drown when you enter deep water 🙂
Slides 10-16 try to provide some hard figures to the growth of particular technologies and services. In particular I used some of the data available which attempts to illustrate the growth in the use of weblogs and syndicated feeds via RSS and Atom. I also considered the incredible growth of MP3 players as illustrative of users desire for personal multimedia entertainment, communication and information devices.
[Slides 18-63]
Now to the 'Difficult Questions' section of my keynote. First I reused my original pasteboard of services, issues, and technologies [Slide 8] but posed the question 'Knowing what we know now would we make the same decisions again?'. I then moved on to consider whether we were all technological determinists [Slide 22-26] and reminded everyone that this is usually a term of abuse from social scientists:) This was also an opportunity to promote this years BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures which have The Triumph of Technology as their theme [Slide 26].
I used slides 28 and 29 as an anchor to suggest that the often used assertion that the VLE is but a Trojan Horse for other organizational development is but a comforting myth. A myth based more on hope than reality. The reality is that solutions like proprietary VLEs have merely provided a more efficient way for pushing content online and yet again supporting and indeed magnifying the knowledge transfer model [Slides 30-32] instead of the myriad of alternative and richer, but, arguably, harder to understand and implement) options [Slides 34-37].
In slide 39 I suggest that the time has come to think beyond the VLE and, what I called, the 'walled garden' but there's a lot that can and will inhibit this move. Slides 41-45 attempt to outline as least some of these inhibitory factors (mainly people). I also suggested that, ironically, that it may well be the original change agents some of who now form the existing e-learning cadre within institutions who may, understandably, be the biggest resistors to any change. Why should this be so? Simply because they have considerable intellectual and emotional investments in earlier decisions and it's they who stand to be in the frontline of any fire arising from any signficant change of direction within their institutions.
From Slide 48 onwards I considered what we perhaps now need to do to think beyond the VLE and the walled garden. In slides 49-51 we considered some of the statements and policies arising from the JISC, particularly the ELearning Framework (ELF) and the Information Environment. In slide 52 I quote some of the views arising from within the teams working on implementing the JISC ELF vision (although I believe the timescales to VLE death will be considerably longer than they think) and in slides 53-55 I highlight CETIS' Scott Wilson's recent contribution to the Future VLE debate. In Slides 56-57 I offer two, what I consider, exemplary models, i.e. the University of Washington's Catalyst Tools and the University of Warwick's ELab Web Tools recently supplemented by their BlogBuilder tool. The latter was particularly of note because the speaker following me was from Warwick.
I finished off with a consideration of the 'filling station' model of e-learning. Users have demonstrated their preference for downloads into their personal, and highly portable, multimedia devices. I included the 'usual suspects' like Apple's iPod and other MP3 type devices but also highlighted how some of the major commercial stakeholders are now beginning to move into this media download space [Slides 58-60].
I concluded with a final alert that we, the learning technology types, whether at strategic or operational level, will have to be careful that we don't become perceived as impeding necessary change. We need to do exactly the opposite and become the initiators. It's likely to be a 'challenging' ride over the next 5-10 years (the period of the HEFCE strategy) but one thing will become increasingly clear, i.e. the status quo is, and should be, up for grabs. It would be an absolute tragedy if, in 10 years, time all we've got to show for all this effort is still a load of unexciting textual content plus a few quizzes embedded in a proprietary VLE purporting to be e-learning, online learning, enhanced learning or whatever terminology has currency at the time.
Here is the slide set (PDF 2.62MB)
