The corridor of uncertainty

MOOCs get more massive

2012-01-24T17:02:00.000+01:00

Remember the course in artificial intelligence that Stanford University offered as a MOOC (Massive open online course) last year? It attracted about 150,000 students from all over the world though the actual number who really participated varies from article to article. Now, according to an article in Wired Campus, Tenured Professor Departs Stanford U., Hoping to Teach 500,000 Students at Online Start-Up, the teacher from the AI course is heading a start-up aiming at spreading open education even further. Sebastian Thrun, professor of computer science at Stanford, has announced that he is leaving the university after discovering the potential of mass online learning.

Udacity is the name of the latest in a fairly long line of open education providers aiming to provide online lifelong learning to a global audience. This spring they're offering two courses: Building a search engine and Programming a robotic car. According to the article, Professor Thrun hopes to attract hundreds of thousands of participants and provide free education on a global scale. They've already assembled a team of teachers and technical experts and are recruiting more.

"We believe university-level education can be both high quality and low cost. Using the economics of the Internet, we've connected some of the greatest teachers to hundreds of thousands of students in almost every country on Earth. Know Labs was founded by three roboticists who believed much of the educational value of their university classes could be offered online for very low cost. A few weeks later, over 160,000 students in more than 190 countries enrolled in our first class, "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence." The class was twice profiled by the New York Times and also by other news media. Now we're a growing team of educators and engineers, on a mission to change the future of education."

Last week I noted the appearance of Next Generation University and now along comes Udacity. The MOOC concept is developing rapidly and more variations of the theme will follow.

Here's the preview video for the search engine course:

Apple take aim at textbook market

2012-01-20T18:41:00.000+01:00

The last couple of days have been dominated by Apple's announcement of its new iBooks2 app and the iBook Author tool. The reviews came thick and fast from news sites and bloggers and 24 hours later it's not easy to find a new angle to write about. The main points of all the hype are:

Apple will distribute interactive multimedia "textbooks" for schools and colleges via iBooks for $14.99 or less.
The textbooks are optimized for iPads.
iBooks Author will be available free for teachers, writers and students to write their own interactive textbooks and publish them.

As you can see in the video below it certainly looks impressive and throws down the gauntlet to the academic publishing industry that has so far been rather reluctant to leave its printed comfort zone (at least here in the Nordic region). The ability to take notes, highlight and compile revision material and flash cards is extremely attractive and the ability to access all your course material on a device lighter than many standard textbooks is extremely attractive to students. As so many schools invest in one laptop/iPad/tablet per pupil the race is on to fill these devices with compelling and immersive learning resources. Apple of course wants to dominate this sector and by rolling out iBooks2 they hope to persuade more local authorities, schools and colleges to join the Apple family.

It's probably the authoring tool that has attracted most attention and controversy. The fact that teachers and students will be able to publish their own multimedia e-textbooks is extremely empowering and can very well leed to a major shift in the production and use of course literature. Schools can save a lot of well-needed cash by not needing to buy class sets of textbooks every year and the teachers can publish their own material. One article that was particularly positive to the opportunities of iBooks Author was 5 Ways iBooks Author Changes the Education Landscape.

However the big catch is that once created the content is tied in to Apple and cannot be distributed outside their walled garden. I simply can't share my book to anyone who cannot use iBooks and my content cannot be given a Creative Commons license. This is a point that many bloggers find unacceptable, for instance Marshall Kirkpatrick on ReadWriteWeb:

"It's hard to wrap my brain around the cold cynicism of Apple's releasing a new tool to democratize the publishing of eBooks today, only to include in the tool's terms and conditions a prohibition against selling those books anywhere but through Apple's own bookstore. There's just something so achingly awful about it."

Audrey Watters, as ever highly insightful, takes the discussion one step further in her blog post Apple and the Digital Textbook Counter-Revolution. She sees the whole concept of textbooks as increasingly irrelevant as we are able to access a vast range of material directly on the net. Why do we need prepackaged textbooks at all when we should be encouraging students to fins sources for themselves and use the vast amount of resources that are freely available?

"Once you've recognized that textbooks are just an assemblage of resources and that, in a digital world, there's no reason to bind it together and publish these en masse, then I think you can see a path to liberation from that industry model. You can disassemble, reassemble, unbundle, disrupt, destroy the textbook. It is truly an irrelevant format."

Once again Apple have succeeded in putting a cat among the pigeons and whatever you think about proprietary solutions and walled gardens there is no doubt that this model will inspire competitors to respond. Whatever solution wins the future of education is digital.

Next Generation University

2012-01-17T21:52:00.001+01:00

New alternative paths towards higher education are opening up every month. The growth of open educational resources mean that the content for a course is freely available and does not need to be developed by the university or school. Collaborative learning means that students learn in groups and through their own personal learning networks. The missing ingredients in the mix are the teacher's role of facilitator/guide/mentor and role of examiner. Those elements do not necessarily have to be provided by the same institution and thus courses can be offered free of charge and based around a flexible and personalized infrastructure. Students of the future will be able to follow personalized learning paths following courses provided by a variety of providers, sometimes completely net-based, sometimes work-based and sometimes more traditional campus-based courses. In the end the student's e-portfolio can be presented to a university or accreditation institute for assessment and a degree can be awarded.

by Kevin McShane

This model has been adopted by another player in the open education field called Next Generation University. NGU has dubbed itself "the world's first free university" though this seems a debatable issue since University of the People and Peer 2 Peer University have been active for the past two years. Information on the site is still rather sparse but the list of collaborators and funders is certainly impressive. They plan to start by offering a limited range of courses, mostly in health sciences.

"NextGenU's learning model builds on educational best practices, including using high-quality online learning materials (e.g., text, videos, images), interactive peer activities (e.g online chat rooms, and creating and assessing peer-generated case studies, images, and multiple choice questions), and hands-on mentored experiences (e.g., seeing and discussing patients). This model mirrors and expands on the traditional university experience through interacting with peers and experts in the field of study, while learning basic knowledge on one's own via online learning materials. It does not have active faculty involvement (that's part of how we can offer the trainings for free), though course creators, advisory committee members, and other experts will participate some in chat rooms."

Students work their way through the open course material and discuss and interact online. Every student is urged to recruit a mentor qualified in the subject being studied either in the student's geographic vicinity or online. These mentors receive mentoring guidelines from NGU and are then expected to offer guidance and be part of the assessment process. This process is a mix of self-assessment, peer assessment, mentor assessment and tests. At the end of a course the student should be able to offer a portfolio of work to a nearby university for assessment and hopefully credentials. In this way NGU does not need to provide any credentials but must make sure the students' work can be validated by a "regular" university.

I've already written several times about the OER university initiative which certainly seems more robust and sustainable than this one but whether or not NGU manages to take off it is clear that we're only at the start of an innovation wave in higher education and further initiatives in this direction are in the pipeline.

Teaching to learn

2012-01-16T09:00:00.000+01:00

Learning is all about motivation. If you really want to learn something you will. If you don't want to learn you find excuses. This I think is particularly applicable to the use of the net in education. Today's web-based tools, communities and communication channels do not demand very much, if any, technical knowledge and if you really want to learn it's not so hard. However many teachers are reluctant to take the plunge and examine the opportunities for learning that open up once you attain a reasonable level of digital competence.

CC BY Some rights reserved by cogdogblog

Two articles on this subject have caught my eye in the last few days. First one by Jim Salsich called Do Teachers Need to Relearn How to Learn? He sees a mismatch between our expectations that students are able to learn independently and teachers'ability to learn new tools for teaching. If we are not curious and interested in learning new ways to teach then how can we expect our students to show a curiosity for learning?

If we expect our students to use “critical thinking, problem solving, and decision making” (ISTE student nets 4) and “apply existing knowledge to generate new ideas, products, or processes” (ISTE student nets 1.a), shouldn’t we be able to do the same as teachers? If we can’t apply these skills in our own learning, how can we teach our students to use them?

So many teachers wait for training sessions to learn new net tools and applications but maybe the most important training is to learn how to be a self-directed learner, just as the students should be. If teachers are not interested in learning, experimenting and changing, how can they expect students to do so?

"Learners are no longer dependent on learning directly from an expert, the information is literally at their fingertips, they just need to know how to access it. And most important, learners of all ages need to be the drivers of their learning. Just like our students, teachers need to seek answers through active exploration. Again, if we are not independent learners, how can we expect our students to be?"

Steve Wheeler's excellent blog, Learning with 'e's, has a new post, We learn by teaching, where he elaborates on the idea that teaching is learning and that teachers may well learn as much as their students on a course.

The real magic occurs when we are all learning together, and I would like to argue that this should be the case in any learning environment. In his 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire wrote 'Education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.'

Of course we all have stressed schedules and it's hard to devote time to experimenting and exploring new web tools, but when there's a will there's a way. As Salisch writes in his post many of us have simply started exploring new possibilities on the net, not because of any training initiative at work or because the boss has told us but because we are simply curious and interested in testing new ideas. That is the driving force behind learning - for students and teachers alike.

Smart windows (not the Microsoft variety)

2012-01-13T16:19:00.000+01:00

Take a window in your house or office and embed a touch screen. You can either look out at the world outside or transform the window into an interactive computer screen. That's the vision presented in this short video showing Samsung's Smart Window. People on the other side of the window can't see what you're doing on the screen so there's no security problem.

The big question is can you run Windows on your window?

Facebook pulls the plug on historical members

2012-01-12T13:58:00.000+01:00

by fishyfish_arcade

A few days ago I reported on a fascinating experiment where students from the University of Nevada class of 1915 became Facebook users (see earlier post Facebook as a time machine). The experiment came to an abrupt halt a couple of days ago when the curator of the students' accounts, Donnelyn Curtis, was met with a message from Facebook that their accounts had been suspended. She very kindly wrote a comment to that effect on this blog which was much appreciated. The reason, not surprisingly, was that only real living people can have Facebook accounts and they must use their real identity.

This new twist is covered in more detail by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Facebook Deletes University’s History Project for Violating Social Network’s Rules. The next stage is to recreate the 1915 students as a Facebook page rather than as a profile in the same ways as groups, organisations, fan sites and companies do. The sad part of the story is that all the correspondence and comments that was linked to the original profiles are now lost since Facebook gave no warning of the suspension. The new form may not feel as real as the first incarnation but hopefully the experiment will find new openings and spawn other innovative uses for social networking.

"Although the suspension presents a temporary setback for the project, Ms. Curtis said she’s encouraged by the amount of attention the couple received.“From what I saw, there are a lot of people interested in learning history from simulated real people,” she said."

I wonder if Google+ would be interested?

Play it again Sam

2012-01-11T22:13:00.000+01:00

Back in about 1994 I was at a conference where they demonstrated a piano that could be played over the net. The piano was in the room with us and was then "played" by a pianist in another town using the net connection. The idea was to demonstrate the possibilities of remote music teaching and we were all suitably impressed. However I never heard any more of remote piano playing. Music was often cited as one of the subject areas (like science and languages) that just wouldn't work as distance learning but is now flourishing. My university has for several years now offered highly popular online courses in piano and guitar using video lessons and with students sending in own recorded sessions for comment.

by tamaki

Today I read an article in the New York Times, With Enough Bandwidth, Many Join the Band, about the popularity of music lessons via Skype. The photo in the article shows a guy practising the bagpipes in front of a laptop, connected to his teacher (watch a video of a virtual bagpipe lesson).

"Students who used to limit the pool of potential teachers to those within a 20-mile radius from their homes now take lessons from teachers — some with world-class credentials — on other coasts or continents. The list of benefits is long: Players of niche instruments now have more access to teachers. Parents can simply send their child down the hall for lessons rather than driving them. And teachers now have a new way to build their business."

The same applies to all sorts of private tutoring. It seems that Skype and other e-meeting tools are more exploited within informal learning than in the formal system. Whilst many schools and colleges are only just starting with such online tutoring it's flourishing privately. I admit that music lessons on Skype are not as good as face-to-face; the sound quality and synchronisation are never perfect. But compared to no lessons at all they offer enormous opportunities to students and teachers alike.

Facebook as a time machine

2012-01-07T22:06:00.000+01:00

I've just read about an intriguing project from the University of Nevada. According to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (On Facebook, Librarian Brings 2 Students From the Early 1900s to Life), staff at the university have created Facebook profiles for two former students from 1915. These students died many years ago but their student lives have been recreated on Facebook as a way of giving present day students a glimpse into the university's heritage and student life almost 100 years ago. Facebook user Joe McDonald and his future wife Leola Lewis now "post" updates on their student life based on archive material and have already won a large following.

Relatives were of course consulted before this project got off the ground and Donnelyn Curtis, director of research collections and services at the University of Nevada at Reno, tries to keep their digital lives consistent with reality, as a glimpse at their profiles will show.

“It’s been hard to walk the line between being historically accurate and making it interesting for college students,” she said. To help keep the pair’s virtual personalities consistent, Ms. Curtis composes all of their updates. Mr. McDonald’s favorite activities are boxing and “hanging out with friends,” while Ms. Lewis’ include ranching and shopping.

According to the article they plan to introduce other characters quite soon to create more period interaction. A new Facebook trend in the making perhaps? This is of course not quite in line with what Facebook would like to see. Since the whole point of Facebook is to provide advertisers with information about our habits and preferences the presence of ficticious characters undermines their business concept. How many other examples like this are out there? Can Facebook do anything about it and should they even try? New opportunities open up all the time.

Trends, predictions and black swans

2011-12-28T08:00:00.000+01:00

As the year winds down the net is full of lists. Everyone is nominating the top ten hits/flops/trends of 2011 or predicting the equivalent for 2012. In technology it seems that touchless control could well be the next big thing. We've only just got started with touch screen mobiles and tablets and now we won't even need to make physical contact any more. CNN's Top 10 tech trends for 2012 predicts that gesture and voice control will feature heavily in 2012 whereas touch screen control will move into the laptop market that is still dependent on the trusty but now threatened mouse. They also expect bendy mobiles that allow you to control for example zooming or scrolling by flexing the device (as reported here actually!).

by h.koppdelaney

In terms of education tech the theme seems clear; open or closed. This year has seen significant advances in open education with the Brazilian ruling that educational materials produced by state teachers should be freely shared by Creative Commons licences and several other similar moves in other parts of the world. Stanford and now MIT have hit the headlines by offering free and open courses to the world and a partnership of universities launched the OER University initiative that certainly challenges many time-honored academic traditions. These developments are nicely summarised by Audrey Watters in a post called Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2011: “Open”. There have indeed been many reasons to be cheerful this year in terms of open education but Audrey also points to some rather black clouds on the horizon. Parallell to the drive towards more openness we also see the industry giants trying to pull us into their own walled gardens and we also sense the academic publishing industry hitting back and defending its role.

"Will more universities offer opencourseware and demand open access? Will government funds help promote OER? Will these funding efforts subsidize open content from a closed set of “common” standards? Will “open” become the magical marketing term that giant education companies adopt? What happens to the open Web when companies like Facebook, Apple, and Amazon want to attract consumers to their Internet silos, and similarly what happens to open content when publishers must scramble to adapt their business models to a digital world?"

Openness is best but it can be hard to manage. How do we "organise freedom" as Björk sings in one of her songs. Quality open resources can be very hard to find and there's a bewildering range of sources. Many people in the end will sacrifice an element of freedom if they can have a reliable, easy-to-use and ready-made walled garden delivered by a big name company.

"What does it mean — culturally, technologically, philosophically — for example, that Google’s Chrome browser has now surpassed the open source browser Firefox for market share? Do folks really care if something is “open”?"

Dave Cormier, one of the leading MOOC pioneers, looks forward to 2012 with a selection of What if ... predictions, Seven black swans for education in 2012. He descibes his predictions as black swans;
"A black swan is a suprise event that changes the whole nature of a conversation."
What would happen if some country/institution invests a pile of money in producing high quality free textbooks and making them available to the world? What if a university like MIT decides to start providing accreditation for open online courses? What if international students stop coming to our universities because they can get the same education elsewhere and much cheaper? What if a completely free learning management system really takes off? Some thought-provoking scenarios here.

2012 will feature much more openness in education but also a lot of reaction as the mainstream begins to take notice. So far most of the OER movement has been under the radar of university leaders and has been allowed to progress relatively unhindered. However when openness really begins to ruffle some feathers there will be a reaction.

MIT up the stakes in open education

2011-12-21T20:50:00.001+01:00

Open online courses at university level are gaining momentum. There are the MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) run by George Siemens, Stephen Downes, Dave Cormier and colleagues, a wide range of open courses facilitated by Peer 2 Peer University and now Stanford University's headline grabbing Artificial Intelligence course with over 50,000 students. They all offer exciting new arenas for collaborative learning and offer people a chance to participate in a stimulating and challenging learning environment. However none of them offer full university credentials - yet.

The free students on the Stanford course took the full course but were not eligible for university credits. Instead they received a certificate from the teachers but without the Stanford stamp of approval. P2PU are experimenting with badges as a means of acknowledging student achievement and this may well lead to new ways of giving credibility to informal learning. Several universities are experimenting with MOOCs but noone is putting their name on any grades.

MIT campus by opencontent

Enter MIT. As pioneers of open educational resources MIT have been openly publishing their course material for several years now via the OpenCourseWare initiative and anyone can access it and work their way through the courses. However there has so far been no support from the university nor have there been any credentials on offer. This week came the announcement of the formation of a new online learning initiative called MITx (see article MIT launches online learning initiative). A range of courses are to be offered free via a new online interactive learning platform; the course material, virtual labs, assignments and study guides will all be available online and students study together as in many MOOCs. At the end those who pass will get an MITx certificate. It's not quite the real McCoy but the MIT name is there. They insist that assessment will be as rigorous as on the full campus version and the MITx certificates will not become short cuts to credentials. The full university experience is still number one for MIT but for many people MITx will be the next best thing. Plus you don't have to move to Boston to study.

It's part of a clear strategy to extend the global reach of MIT. According to MIT President Susan Hockfield:

“MIT has long believed that anyone in the world with the motivation and ability to engage MIT coursework should have the opportunity to attain the best MIT-based educational experience that Internet technology enables. OpenCourseWare’s great success signals high demand for MIT’s course content and propels us to advance beyond making content available. MIT now aspires to develop new approaches to online teaching.”

The learning software will be open and other educational institutions are free to develop their own versions. One aim of MITx may well be to use it as an experimentation area for new learning technologies and methods with students and other institutions contributing to development. One question that springs to mind is whether the MITx certificates will become more sought after than those from smaller universities. Is there a risk that the MITx label could in some places have more credibility than local certificates?

A two tier structure is emerging in higher education. The mainstream system with both campus and online courses and a parallell open system free to all but without the same level of tuition and support. The latter form is the university's contribution to global lifelong learning. This is the rationale behind another exciting initiative, the OER University, that is being launched by a partnership of 14 universities. The demand for higher education is growing so fast today that we simply can't build or staff enough universities to keep up. Offering these free open courses does not involve great costs to the university, does not compete with the core business but helps meet the global demand for higher education. Then of course there's a good helping of positive marketing for the university included in the deal.

Read more in an article in Inside Higher Ed, Advancing the open front.

Gesture control

2011-12-20T09:00:00.000+01:00

If you've ever been alone in a friend's living room and decide you want to watch some TV the big challenge is finding the correct remote control to get the thing started. It's even more fun when you've mislaid the control and are virtually helpless without it.

But soon all this will be history and remote controls will be one more example of obsolete technology to tell your grandchildren about (see a list of other rapidly disappearing gadgets, Ten tech items you won't be needing anymore). Gesture control is hot technology and will very soon be helping you link up with your TV, computer and mobile, as reported in a BBC article, Touchless smartphones and TVs could be on sale in 2012. Motion capture technology is already established in Microsoft's Kinect and Nintendo Wii but now an Israeli company XTR3D is getting noticed for developing gesture control using 2D cameras to enable us to control our TVs, computers and mobiles by just waving our hands. Screens can be controlled from up to 5m with simple gestures enabling you to choose functions, flip between photos, scrolling a list or enlarging an image.

Here's a quick publicity film of what's in store. One advantage is that you don't get the screen stained with sticky fingerprints.

Photo:
by sm3287

Future skills

2011-12-19T09:00:00.000+01:00

CC BY-NC-SA by Vermin Inc

21st century skills is a pretty well-worn concept by now but despite repeated calls from industry the education sector is still rather slow to react. The California-based Institute of the Future has now released a report called Future Work Skills 2020 and the findings are worth quoting here. They do not discuss what jobs or fields will be at the forefront in the years to come but have investigated which skills will be essential. The findings are brieflt summarized in an article in Gigaom, The 10 key skills for the future of work.
Have a look through the list and decide if schools and higher education are able to address these issues and if not, what needs to change?

Sense-making. The ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed
Social intelligence. The ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions
Novel and adaptive thinking. Proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based
Cross-cultural competency. The ability to operate in different cultural settings
Computational thinking. The ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning
New-media literacy. The ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms and to leverage these media for persuasive communication
Transdisciplinarity. Literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines
Design mind-set. Ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes
Cognitive load management. The ability to discriminate and filter information for importance and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques
Virtual collaboration. The ability to work productively, drive engagement and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team

Innovation yes, but not here please

2011-12-16T11:16:00.001+01:00

Just about every organisation on earth has a business plan that claims to embrace innovation or welcome change. It's very easy to use buzzwords like these in strategic documents but another thing altogether to really encourage innovative thinking. The difficulty is that innovation is disruptive and means that we have to reassess our comfortable routines. New ideas lead to change, insecurity and the fear of not being able to adapt. The easiest strategy therefore is to dismiss the innovative ideas as impractical, too expensive or unrealistic and continue with business is usual.

by Joe Doe 2010

This is the topic of an article on Psyblog called Why people secretly fear creative ideas. We are all creatures of comfort and once we're found a good strategy that works well enough we tend to stick to it. We tend not to welcome criticism of these routines and certainly not ideas that may force us to completely change the way we work. The article cites a study that showed how teachers tend to dislike creative pupils since they challenge the rules and ask too many questions. That applies in most organisations.

"... the more uncertain people feel, the harder they find it to recognise a truly creative idea. So as a society we end up sticking our heads in the sand and carrying on doing the same old things we've been doing all along, just to avoid feeling uncertain."

I think almost all of us who work with net-based learning and the use of technology in education recognize this scenario. In an already cash-strapped education sector the idea of radical change in the way we teach, the structures we've trusted for so long and the institutions we work for is rather frightening. It's going to cost a lot of money, take a lot of time and force us to revise many of our most deeply imprinted beliefs. The really worrying problem is the longer we delay and deny the more disruptive the change will be when it finally comes.

YouTube for schools - all the good stuff minus the distractions

2011-12-14T21:43:00.000+01:00

There has been a vast collection of educational video material on YouTube for years now, mostly under the YouTube EDU brand but even on TeacherTube as well as the open YouTube. However all these suffer from ads in the margins, irrelevant (and irreverant) comments and other distractions. Now Google has cleaned up the act with a new service YouTube for Schools that filters out the distractions and only allows the educational content to shine through. The idea is that schools and colleges can sign up, create an account and then fill their own channel with the material they want to use.

This is a strategic move by Google to help YouTube become accepted in schools that have so far blocked the service completely. YouTube for Schools allows schools to in effect censor what YouTube content students can access in school and teachers can create playlists and select from all the educational content without seeing the wilder side. An article on the Open Culture blog quotes a YouTube representative:

“We’ve been hearing from teachers that they want to use the vast array of educational videos on YouTube in their classroom, but are concerned that students will be distracted by the latest music video or a video of a cute cat, or a video that might not be appropriate for students,” writes YouTube Product Manager Brian Truong. “While schools that completely restrict access to YouTube may solve this distraction concern, they also limit access to hundreds of thousands of educational videos on YouTube that can help bring photosynthesis to life, or show what life was like in ancient Greece.”

A welcome initiative though the downside is that the students can probably access the full distraction of YouTube on their own devices anyway. Also, somewhere along the line we still need to discuss issues like attention, distraction, source criticism and information retrieval so that they can find the good resources for themselves despite the distractions. We need to be careful of the line between benevolent protection and censorship.

When social media get too social

2011-12-12T09:00:00.000+01:00

An innocuous and untalented video clip gets posted on a web site. Someone likes it and puts it on YouTube and before long several thousand people have seen it and passed the clip on via Facebook and Twitter to thousands more. In a matter of hours the clip has gone viral and out of control whilst the person who made it is still blissfully unaware of their new-found stardom. This is the scenario presented by Tom Scott in this TEDx talk.

The scenario he describes is not true (yet) but it's made up from several true stories and shows the potentially frightening power of today's social media. Certainly makes you think about taking control of your digital identity before it's too late.

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Creative commons explained by a weasel, a crocodile and a goose

2011-12-09T08:21:00.001+01:00

We need to keep spreading the word about Creative Commons in education so that we can share resources without having to ask permission. It's a simply system really but takes a little explaining before it becomes clear. There are lots of films and other resources out there to help people understand how CC works but this film is rather different. Explaining CC with the help of glove puppets and some baking.
The creator of this has a whole YouYube channel with lots more films featuring Randy Weasel and his friends.

Me and my iPad

2011-12-08T15:39:00.001+01:00

When do people use tablets/iPads and when do they use laptops? This is discussed in an article I've just read on Google called Consumers on tablet devices: having fun, shopping and engaging with ads. They've surveyed the habits of tablet users to see what they do with them and when. The result is that tablets are mostly used at home for entertainment, reading and social interaction whereas the laptop is generally for work. Tablets are often used whilst doing other things, like watching TV or eating breakfast and we like to carry them around the house. However whenever we walk out the front door it's the laptop we generally take with us. It seems the tablet is finding its niche and that it isn't replacing the laptop, simply complementing it.

by Steve Rhodes

I've got the entire Apple family to help me through the day: iPod, iPhone, iPad and MacBook (honest, I'm not an Apple devotee, it just happened that way). All of them are at least a year old so I can't impress anyone anymore but it's interesting to reflect on how they are used. I too only use the iPad in the house, mostly for social media, especially flicking through news feeds and social networks via the excellent Flipboard. The laptop however is almost exclusively a work device but I take it almost everywhere since I try to be as paper-free as I can and I take most of my notes on the laptop.

If I try to rank my devices in hours of use the laptop is way out in front followed by the iPhone and then the pod and the pad bringing up the rear. They all get used but since I spend a lot of my life at work then the two most useful work devices get the most attention. The pad and the pod are almost exclusively for free time. I expected the iPad to replace the laptop and would still like that to happen but so far I haven't been able to fit it into my work routines other than for reading and browsing media. But now I realize I'm not alone in that respect. How about you?

Teaching the test

2011-12-07T20:58:00.001+01:00

The educational debate in many countries centres around measuring the quality of schools and universities by their test scores. More and more league tables are produced and papers love analyzing the winners and losers. Schools that get good results will survive whilst those at the bottom of the league will be forced to close. This is creating a false sense of security since it assumes that the tests really do measure skill and intelligence and that everyone is honest. Neither of these assumptions, sadly, are true and as a result the system simply doesn't work.

by timlewisnm

This is explained in an excellent article by Jonathan Keiler in Education Week, When test scores become a commodity (subscription only article, some of it is quoted on Will Richardson's blogg). He argues that test scores have become commodities and trading is therefore not always honest. Since schools are paid by results and good results enhance reputations there is a great temptation for some to sugar the results to increase income and prestige. Teachers are judged as good if their students pass the tests and this can result in teaching the test. Competition between schools and between teachers means less collaboration and less sharing of resources. This in turn leads to everyone having to reinvent the wheel over and over again. The students may pass the tests but have they really learnt anything? Teachers who don't focus on tests risk being seen as incompetent. The result is a test factory that has little to do with producing the critical independent thinkers and innovative entrepreneurs that industry keeps asking for from the education system.

Schools could become little more than test-preparation institutes, ignoring subjects and skills that are not assessed, with faculty members who resent and distrust one another. Meanwhile, many honest and dutiful teachers will go down in flames.

Then there is the matter of student cheating. Keiler argues that the commodity approach invites this since test results become hard currency and when a commodity is valuable there will always be people tryig to cheat the system to earn a fast buck or two. That happens in most areas of society and it is no wonder that it also occurs in education.

Related to this is an article in the Washington Post, School board member who took standardized test, about a senior school board member who decided to try the tests that his school students had to sit. He failed spectacularly of course but his criticism and insight afterwards are interesting:

“It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate. I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities....
It might be argued that I’ve been out of school too long, that if I’d actually been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test, the material would have been fresh. But doesn’t that miss the point? A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took.”

I'm not against testing. We all need challenges and ways of tesing our skills in realistic situations and we thrive on a certain level of competition. We need to focus on what and how we test so that students' futures are not simply decided by how they perform in an exam hall. There are plenty of excellent examples of meaningful assessment and examination but the debate keeps veering back to simplistic views of assessment and an unfortunate association between education and the market place.

Redefining e-books

2011-12-04T13:31:00.001+01:00

We keep using new technology to repackage old concepts. A lot of e-learning has simply put classroom practice into a digital framework. You're still in a classroom and what goes on there is mostly or wholly hidden from external view and the material is mostly text-based. Recorded lectures are extremely popular today but again we're simply digitizing the tradtional format and even if many lectures are stimulating and sometimes inspirational we're not exactly breaking new ground. We simply create an alternative version of traditional practice without considering how new technology could actually chage the way we teach and learn.

The same is true in e-publishing. I've written many posts about e-books in the last year or so but I wonder if we should always define the new in terms of the old. Maybe the concept of book is firmly rooted in the printed version and when we make it digital it ceases to be a book? Why just digitize a winning concept - why not change the concept and make the electronic version something distinctly different? That's the theme of yet another good article I've found on Mind/Shift, Blowing Out the Digital Book as We Know It. E-books in black and white divided into pages and loaded on to specially adapted devices doesn't sound too innovative. Does material designed for today's laptops and tablets need to be in book form? Is page division still relevant?

A company called Inkling is trying to design a new form of interactive "textbook" (it is hard to escape the old terminology) that is interactive with fully integrated video, search and social notetaking. Instead of basing the digital version on a published print book they are creating the digital version from scratch. The video below gives you an idea of the concept.

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Inking - A textbook case of innovation. from Inkling on Vimeo.

The article on Mind/Shift asks the ever popular question of whether these new forms of digital publishing add morevalue to the learning process than print books and the answer is, as always, that it depends on how you use them. No book adds to the learning process by itself - you need to do something meaningful with the content with the help of a teacher, colleagues or both. Computers, books, mobiles, blackboards, notebooks and so on do not lead to better learning; it's what you do with them all that counts.

Maybe books will not die as many predict. Print books are extremely effective for packaging say fiction and have the clear attraction of not being subject to battery power. Print books will certainly decrease in number but maybe we need to see the digital market as a new concept that will complement some areas of publishing, replace others and create new ways of sharing and constructing knowledge and learning.

Changing campus

2011-11-30T19:57:00.001+01:00

In a meeting this week I was presenting arguments for investing more in distance education. One objection was raised that if we have too many online courses we won't be able to fill our campus places and our classrooms won't be used so much. That's both right and wrong. On the one hand it's normally the case that online students study that way because they don't want to move to campus (because they are already established in their home town with family and career there) and therefore distance learning is not a threat to campus. On the other hand however it is a valid argument since as we move even campus courses online there may not be such a need for the classrooms and lecture halls.

by Brunel University

The latter argument is well discussed by Tony Bates in an article Is online learning a waste of space? An increasing number of courses use blended learning (hybrid courses) where classroom teaching is combined with online discussion. Input (lectures) is recorded in advance and available on the net and much of the course's discussion and collaboration takes place in discussion groups and social networks. As more and more realize that there's little point in gathering students together simply for one-way communication there's more focus on using the classroom time as productively as possible. Not all campus students actually live on campus so when you demand that they gather there many have to travel across town or commute from the suburbs. You need to offer something really interactive to justify calling them all in. That means the classroom time will be more viewed more critically in the future and as a result there will be less need for classrooms, at least of the traditional design. There is also likely to be more focus on field work and project work in companies and organisations. The campus will not disappear but the infrastructure will certainly change over the next ten years.

As learning goes more online and as we realize that we can meet and discuss more flexibly, both physically and online, the use of campus floor space will radically change and some buildings may no longer be needed. This creates tension since the image of a university is so intimately tied to the campus buildings and environment. Venerable old buildings as well as shiny new ones are highly visible symbols of the university's academic status whereas a great virtual campus on the net does not attract such attention, even if it is likely to be more beneficial to students.

Bates wonders, therefore, if there are any studies on how online courses impact on campus infrastructure and whether any universities are planning accordingly.

"Also it means not looking at campus planning in isolation from plans for online learning. I don’t know of any institution that has tried to look at the costs and benefits of a move to online learning in this way (if so, please let me know!), but a more holistic approach to the planning of campuses and online learning could lead to improved efficiencies and even perhaps improvements in quality of the learning experience at the same time."

He concludes by asking the following questions and it will be interesting to see what answers come in:

1. Is the impact of online learning on physical space an issue that is appearing or has appeared on your campus? if so, how is it being handled?
2. Do you know of any study that has looked at the impact of online learning on campus facilities?
3. Is this a road worth travelling? Are the benefits likely to prove ephemeral or impossible to measure?

Music you won't enjoy

2011-11-28T09:00:00.000+01:00

Repetition and patterns are the reasons we enjoy music. Here's a fascinating TED talk by Scott Rickard about the challenge of writing a piece of music that has absolutely no repetition or pattern but is not simply random. The technology behind sonar signals for submarines lies behind what is called the world's ugliest music. Pure mathematics actually. Enjoy - or not!

Twitter for academics

2011-11-27T17:38:00.001+01:00

I've been using Twitter as a tool for work for almost three years now and it's one of the most important sources of information about work-related topics that I use. Very few people I know in Swedish higher education use Twitter and although I can understand a healthy bit of skepticism I think there should also be a bit more informed curiosity and willingness to experiment. Most colleagues simply can't see a use for Twitter and many see it only as a medium for updating friends about where you are or what you're eating just now. Twitter is sadly mostly associated with celebrities and chit-chat. It took me a few months before I realized the potential of Twitter but once I realized it just took off!

by Brajeshwar

However if you're doing research or just want to keep up with the latest news and articles in your field Twitter is invaluable. I've built up a network of around 400 people who I follow on Twitter (too many I suspect) and all work with various aspects of e-learning. I get a constant stream of links to relevant articles, news and videos that I can dip into any time and this forms the basis of my own blog posts and articles. I in turn tweet links to all the articles and news I find every day to anyone who wishes to follow me (@alacre).

A new guide has been produced by the London School of Economics to help academics discover the benefits of using Twitter as an integral part of their research activities, Using Twitter in university research, teaching and impact activities.This is a downloadable guide taking you through the most important features in Twitter and heling you to create your own network and using Twitter with your students. The contents of the guide are sumarised as follows:

Building your following and managing your profile
Using Twitter to maximise the impact of your research project
Making the most of Twitter alongside your own blog
Using course accounts with students
A step by step guide to adding a Twitter feed to Moodle
Extra resources and links to blog posts and articles on academic blogging and impac

Have a look at the guide and I think you'll see that there are many benefits in getting started with Twitter. The authors of the guide are keen to get feedback so feel free to contact them at impactofsocialsciences@lse.ac.uk.

Quality is in the eye of the beholder

2011-11-22T13:00:00.000+01:00

One of the key issues in the adoption of open educational resources in higher education is how to guarantee quality. When resources are shared freely on the net without the traditional publishing process of peer review and publisher approval, how can we know if that material is reliable or not? How can we build up processes for assessing the credibility of these resources so that teachers will be able to use them with confidence?

by Jeremy Brooks

Stephen Downes has just written a highly relevant blog post highlighting some problems with the quality assessment of OER, in particular in the context of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses). His article, MOOCs and the OPAL Quality Clearinghouse, is in response to the questionnaire on quality assurance and open educational practice as part of the Open Education Quality Initiative (OPAL). What really attracted my attention in the post was the idea that quality is not an objective attribute that is decided in advance by experts. The quality of a resource lies in the view of the beholder - how valuable is this for you?

There is not the presumption that (a) there is a single type of quality that applies to all participants, and (b) that this quality could be recognized by course facilitators. Accordingly, what we observe in a MOOC is that participants will cluster around different types of materials or media - for example, they may cluster around a discussion board, social network site, or virtual world. Quality is then indicated in different ways specific to those environments.

So in the open learning environment of the MOOC, where each learner has their own learning objectives and follows her/his own path through the material, the question of any pre-determined quality label is largely irrelevant since it is the process resulting from the resource that determines the quality for each learner.

'Quality' in a MOOC is defined not as the exceptional nature of published materials, but rather the richness and utility of conversation and discussions mediated by those artifacts and other activities. Hence, quality is determined post-publication, and even post-distribution, as an emergent property, and not aninherent property of the resource itself.

Downes' answers to the OPAL questionnaire raise a number of fascinating new issues about quality in open learning that need to be discussed further. One important aspect to remember, however, is that MOOCs tend to attract highly educated and digitally literate participants and the wisdom of the crowd will therefore work well. I'm not sure we can work in the same way with student groups who are less digitally literate and more accustomed to traditional teaching. I'm sure we do need quality assurance for OER but maybe we need to realise that in certain environments like MOOCs the need is not so great. I look forward to more on this.

When in Rome

2011-11-20T20:38:00.001+01:00

I remember a TV comedy sketch from way back (can't remember what show) about people who go back to ancient Rome in a time machine. When confronted by Roman soldiers one guy says proudly that he got top grades in Latin at school and he would do the talking. So he said proudly "voco, vocas, vocat, vocamus, vocatis vocant" (present tense of the verb to call) to the puzzlement of the Romans. That summed up what Latin meant to many school pupils of the past; endless recitations of verb and noun declensions without any understanding of what it was for.

by MarcelGermain

I belong to one of the last generations who learnt Latin at school as a matter of course. Latin was simply an integral part of your education though few of us ever realised why. I studied it for four years but learnt very little, though I must admit I'm tempted to try again some time since I now see the point and would be highly motivated.

That's why I was intrigued to read an article in Mind/Shift, Can an Online Game Crack the Code to Language Learning, about a Latin teacher in Connecticut, Kevin Ballestrini, who has created a language learning game for Latin that has really caught students' imaginations. In the game students are taken back to ancient Rome to solve a mystery and where their progress through the game is dependent on them mastering various features of the language. Another fine example of how education can learn from gaming to make learning more compelling. The virtual environment makes ancient Rome come alive and the language has at last a clear relevance that we never had access to.

Another student observes a huge difference in how the game format has helped her learn this obsolete language. “I took Spanish for four years and I don’t think I’ve learned as much as I have in that class as I have in just two months,” said Caroline Scheck. “I can write sentences because we’re using it like we’re writing a story. As a child, you’d learn Latin by people speaking to you in sentences. You know how sometimes in languages you just learn words and then later on you use sentences? This time, we’re just learning it as if someone was speaking to us.”

They may not be as good as we were at identifying the ablative absolute (Hic rebus dictis: these things having been said - I'll never forget that!) but they can actually use the language in a constructive way.

The bookless library - good idea but there's a catch

2011-11-17T17:13:00.001+01:00

Continuing on the theme of e-books (see earlier posts Why students don't use e-books as much as expected and Library extreme makeover) I'd like to return to the subject of bookless libraries. We've already got banks that have no cash and the paperless office is fully feasible though seldom seen. So what about the bookless library? As sales of e-books and varieties of tablets, e-readers and iPads increase the need for libraries to be filled with books becomes questionable. So let's move out the books and journals and create the library of the future.

But is there a catch here?

There is a problem and that becomes clear after reading an article by Barbara Fister in Inside Higher Ed called The myth of the bookless library.The problem with collections of e-books and e-journals is that the library has to pay a hefty yearly subscription to gain access to them. If you stop paying you lose the collectiuon. Instead of winning freedom by going digital the library commits itself to often extortiate annual fees to maintain its virtual collection. The books you used to buy were not cheap but once they were on the shelf you knew what you had. Not so with much e-literature.

"When you know that a subscription you’ve been spending tens of thousands of dollars on will vanish if you fail to pay the rent, you trim where you can, and for the past thirty years, that’s been the book budget, which is more discretionary than those demanding subscriptions. No wonder university presses and other scholarly book publishers are banding together to license digital book collections by subscription. It seems the only way to guarantee your product will get into libraries is to charge a lot for something that disappears if you stop paying."

Interestingly there is no sign of print book production falling despite the hype. We've never printed as many books as we do now so they won't be disappearing any time soon. It's easy to fall into the trap of seeing all digital resources as free. Yes there are plenty of open educational resources and open access material out there but the publishing industry is busy remodelling its business for the digital market and there's a lot of money being made out there still. The transition to the bookless library will not be such a smooth one.

Photo:
by quinn.anya

PowerPoint is innocent!

2011-11-13T14:13:00.001+01:00

Everyone loves to blame PowerPoint for boring presentations and dull meetings. But wait a minute, isn't it the speaker's fault if the presentation is boring? PowerPoint is just a tool and it's up to you how you use it and what you put on it. Have a look through this self-explanatory presentation that stands up in defence of poor old PowerPoint and instead points the finger at lazy users who don't spend enough time thinking about the message they want to communicate.

is it the car's fault if you're a bad driver?

Don't Blame PowerPoint! It's just a vehicle

View more presentations from Clear Presentation Design

Library extreme makeover

2011-11-11T15:29:00.001+01:00

As the shelves of books become less relevant there's plenty speculation about the future of the public library. The library's future roles of digital information hub and learning space are well discussed. Traditional librarian skills such as information literacy and source criticism will be even more essential in the future as the vast amount of information mushrooms. Libraries may well need to change their name to encompass their new roles as they turn into community centres, learning spaces, information centres and cultural arenas.

3D printer by kakissel

However there may be other roles for libraries to adopt and one possible avenue is described in an article on the excellent news site Mind/Shift, The public library, completely reimagined. The article describes a library in the USA, Fayetteville Free Library, that has recently been completely rebuilt and, in addition to the roles described above, hs also taken on the role of techshop or as they say Fab lab. Here visitors can borrow equipment such as 3D printers to design and produce plastic shapes and designs or a laser cutter. Basically you can learn how to use expensive and new technical equipment with assistance at hand and develop new skills and new project ideas. The library becomes a workshop and the fundamental idea of stimulating culture and education takes on a new dimension.

In the past, books were seen as a luxury so libraries gave everyone access to that knowledge for free. Now that books are accessible for all libraries can instead offer public access to new technologies that are beyond the reach of the average citizen. Devices and tools that would otherwise only be available to employees of major companies can be tested by anyone and in this way new skills can be learned and new ways of using technology may be discovered.

Librarian Lauren Smedley, one of those responsible for building the new library in Fayetteville, says in the article:

"... libraries aren’t just about books. They are about free access to information and to technology — and not just to reading books or using computers, but actually building and making things."

Why students don't use e-books as much as expected

2011-11-10T08:00:00.001+01:00

We keep hearing about the boom in e-book sales, especially in the USA, but according to an article in Mind/Shift (Why aren't students using e-books?) students aren't using them as much as expected. You could interpret this as evidence that they prefer print format but the truth seems to be the lack of course literature available in e-format. A survey by e-book provider eBrary shows that e-book sales to students have leveled off over the last three years, whereas the mainstream fiction market for e-books is growing rapidly. But it's not because students don't want e-books; it's simply too complicated. According to the eBrary survey:

“the vast majority of students would choose electronic over print if it were available and if better tools along with fewer restrictions were offered.”

Firstly there's a reluctance by publishers to release e-book versions of profitable textbooks and when they are available they cost almost as much as the print versions, despite the problem that you can't lend your e-book or resell it after the course as you can with a printed version. Then there are all the different formats available for different e-book readers, iPads and tablets. It's simply too time consuming and expensive and you can't just buy all your e-books from one place.

Students are becoming increasingly vocal against the high cost of textbooks and their built-in obsolescence - since they're revised each year the second-hand value is zero. E-books are the obvious way forward but the business model needs changing. Publishers are of course reluctant to give up a very lucrative business but the growth of free course literature on Wikibooks or Flat World Knowledge is a significant disruptive force. Integration with social media to create social reading also needs to be developed. The industry needs to streamline and focus on new models rather than simply preserving the traditional model.

"... it does highlight the ways in which students’ needs aren’t being met yet by digital content providers. That means there’s still a huge opportunity here to reshape what the textbooks of the future look like. Openly licensed content, for example, could address students’ concerns about sharing. Better social tools could help meet their needs for social reading and learning. Open educational resources could provide content, while an iTunes model of sorts — one that sold the “song” (or rather the chapter) rather than the “album” (the whole book) could save students money."

Photo:
by Stefan BÃ¤smann

Flipping the classroom

2011-11-07T08:45:00.000+01:00

Here's a good diagram that explains the thinking behind the concept of the flipped classroom. The principle is that by using recorded lectures and examples the teacher can set the input as homework and use classroom time for practice, discussion and tutoring. In the traditional setting the pupils practice at home and when they get stuck the teacher is not there to help. Parents are not always a reliable option!

Of course this assumes that the pupils will actually watch the input at home at all. Then again the traditional set-up is not working either so it's well worth seeing if the flipped model can raise motivation.

Created by Knewton and Column Five Media

Adding the spark

2011-11-05T10:18:00.000+01:00

I stumbled upon an old article in The Guardian earlier this week, Why do 60% of students find their lectures boring?. It is based on a 2009 study of student attitudes to teaching by Dr Sandi Mann and Andrew Robinson of the University of Central Lancashire. I've written several times about the limitations of lectures and the need to spend classroom time on more interactive activities and let students access lectures on their computers or mobiles. This article breaks no new ground by criticising dull lectures but the interesting part was that students find even lab sessions uninspiring. According to the study the practical work sessions were even worse than the lectures.

"We might expect more hands-on practical sessions to be more engaging but, surprisingly, lab work and computer sessions achieved the highest boredom ratings in our study. One of the problems with lab studies is that the experiments the students conduct are often just controlled exercises where the results are already known"

The main reason for this is the fact that although the students were practising necessary skills the sessions were merely exercises following strict guidelines (ie. do it like this) and without any element of discovery and creativity. Doing is simply not enough, we need to be more engaged in the process and feel that we are discovering new skills for ourselves or in collaboration with our peers. Prescriptive workshops are similar to lectures in that they are clearly teacher-centred. The shift towards learner-centred activity is not an easy one for teachers raised on the traditional paradigm and it is all too easy to revert to old habits.

So what kinds of activities then will inspire students and pupils? How do we create engagement and enthusiasm? A superb example can be seen in an article and film on Mind/Shift, Technology Adds Spark to Science Education. The film, produced by KQED Education in conjunction with Northwestern University’s iLab, shows pupils using various laptops and tablets to perform virtual science experiments, create their own simulations and studies and interact with complex experimental equipment in labs on the other side of the world. The enthusiasm and creativity is clear and the fact that they can perfom experiments that could never be performed in the classroom (dangerous radioactivity experiments demanding extremely expensive equipment for example) adds to the interest. Instead of controlled and predictable training exercises they are interacting with the real world and with the teacher's help reflecting on their experience and learning together.

I just wish they would stop using terms like cyber-learning as if it was something just landed from outer space. It's about learning - with the tools and media available today.

The flexible smartphone

2011-11-01T21:44:00.001+01:00

The mobile business has been so dominated by Apple, Google and Samsung in the last couple of years that the grand old master of mobility, Nokia, has been virtually on the ropes. However, last week they bounced back with a vengeance announcing a new line of very attractive smartphones using Microsoft's new mobile operating system, but even more impressive was demonstrating their new prototype flexible mobile. Called a kinetic device, the idea is that you control functions by bending and flexing the device. Instead of the finger movements that control most touch-screen devices today, Nokia want us to bend and twist our mobiles in an intuitive way.

Mashable's Pete Cashmore, writing on CNN (Why your next phone might be bendable) claims that this bendable mobile will herald an even more important breakthrough, the foldable screen:

"You see, the biggest limitation of any device these days is screen size. There's a constant tension at play: You can have a small screen that fits in your pocket (your phone) or a big screen for home use (a tablet computer). But you can't have both. Or can you?
The ultimate dream for these flexible displays is that they could roll up: Imagine a phone-sized device that could unfurl to be the size of a tablet"

Just around the corner are wafer-thin flexible screens that can be folded away and placed on any surface. Now that has enormous implications for us all. How about digital paper? As foldable and flexible as paper but a full screen that you can take anywhere. The race is on. Here's a short video showing Nokia's prototype.

It ain't what you do it's the way that you do it

2011-10-23T18:53:00.002+02:00

Does technology improve learning? Will results improve if all school pupils have laptops? Two frequently asked questions by tech skeptics and the answer in both cases is probably no. Technology on its own is not going to make people learn more and no amount of laptops or wireless broadband capacity is going to make pupils and students more insightful. At the same time we have no evidence that books make people learn better or that lectures have any effect on learning. You can have access to all the wisdom in the world without actually learning anything from it.

by ransomtech

The key to learning is how all that information is woven together, the discussion that arises from it and how people discuss and develop those ideas. The central role in this process is that of the teacher, providing the context and inspiring reflection and inquiry. If that role is not developed then no amount of investment in resources will make a difference (whether they be physical or virtual resources). This is clearly stated in a blog post by Dennis Pierce, On ed tech we're asking the wrong question:

"Few people would suggest that textbooks—by themselves—hold some larger power over whether students learn. But if we wouldn’t expect this of textbooks, then why should we expect it of educational technology?"

We seem to be preoccupied with asking the wrong questions.Technology never promised to be an instant cure. It all depends on what you do with it. Too many initiatives buy the hardware first and then wonder what to do with it. We need to invest much more in helping teachers make the most of all the exciting tools and methods that the net can offer today. We need more vision, strategies and above all leadership in helping all sectors of education become relevant for the 21st century instead of entrenching itself in the structures and practices of the 20th century.

"Technology can facilitate this learning process; it can open up new avenues for learning; it can provide teachers with useful information about their students, and it can point children to lessons geared toward their particular needs. It can do all of this in ways that are clearly superior to other resources or methods of instruction. But technology doesn’t exist in a vacuum. For technology to have an impact on student achievement, schools also need sound teaching, strong leadership, fidelity of use, and a supportive culture, among other things."

Quality matters

2011-10-21T08:58:00.000+02:00

Here's a short film with an excellent selection of quotes from the EFQUEL Innovation Forum 2011 that I attended in Portugal in September (read my post on the conference). Statements on the importance of quality in e-learning and the spread of open educational resources from the main speakers at the conferences such as Wayne Mackintosh, Asha Kanwar, Ulf-Daniel Ehlers, Claudio Dondi, Steve Wheeler and many more.There's even a contribution from me in there. The overall message is simple but enormously challenging to everyone concerned with e-learning: creating quality e-learning leading to credible credentials. Get the gist of a whole conference in just ten minutes!

What did you learn in school today?

2011-10-17T19:58:00.001+02:00

In the formal education system the main aim for most is to get the grades needed to get a good job. Passing exams is therefore hard currency allowing you access to well-paid jobs, and so students everywhere learn to give top priority to tasks that will ensure that they pass the next hurdle. It's no surprise then that many are willing to take short-cuts to success by cheating in ever more ingenious ways. That's the theme of an article in Mind/Shift called What's behind the culture of academic dishonesty?.According to the article cheating in higher education is at an all-time high and even the most gifted students are doing it to ensure they get the top grades they need.

by jackhynes

An article in Psychology Today (School is a Breeding Ground for Cheaters) by Peter Gray of Boston College argues that the present school system is to blame. You're not at school to learn, you're there to learn how to pass the tests. That's how students and schools are judged and we seem to be increasingly obsessed with league tables showing how effective schools are. This leads of course to schools teaching how to pass the tests to ensure that they move up the rankings. It's a destructive circle.

"Students become convinced that high grades and advancement to the next level are the be-all and end-all of their school work. By the time they are 11 or 12 years old, most are realistically cynical about the idea that school is fundamentally a place for learning. They realize that much of what they are required to do is senseless and that they will forget most of what they are tested on shortly after the test. They see little direct connection--because there usually is none--between their school assignments and the real world in which they live. They learn that their own questions and interests don't count. What counts are their abilities to provide the "correct" answers to questions that they did not ask and that do not interest them. And "correct" means the answers that the teachers or the test-producers are looking for, not answers that the students really understand to be correct."

In stark contrast look at all the learning that takes place away from the classroom. Many pupils and students who go through the motions of learning in school become passionate learners in their "spare" time pursuing their own interests, whether it be motorcycle maintenance, geneology, gardening or following a favourite football team. Learning for the sheer pleasure of discovery and becoming an expert in your particular passion. Think of how much energy people put into this type of learning; hours of reading, long discussions with fellow enthusiasts, endless practice, trial and error until mastery is achieved. There are no exams and nobody cheats - there's no point.

Just imagine that level of devotion applied to school or university work. People love to learn if the motivation is from within and even if there are no tangible rewards apart from sheer pride in being good at something. Whenever we put grading and financial rewards into the equation the stakes are raised and corners are there to be cut. We need to look more closely at informal learning and learning psychology and find ways of making the formal system more meaningful.

AR - through the looking glass

2011-10-13T20:33:00.001+02:00

A few years ago you saw people in town walking or standing with a mobile phone at their ear, talking. Today most people hold their mobiles in front of them texting, checking e-mail or watching a video clip. But in the near future we'll be holding the mobiles in front of our eyes and looking at the world through the eye of the mobile. At least that's what the developers of Augmented Reality (AR) are hoping. By watching the world through our mobiles we get an overlay that provides information about what we see: menus from the restaurants we pass, information on tourist attractions, what rooms are available at the hotels we pass etc.

An article on the site PSFK, Augmented reality: fad or the future? includes the following videoshowcasing potential uses for augmented reality. I've shown several AR videos on this blog in the past and the number of possible applications keeps growing. This article wonders if we really will wander around looking at everything through the lense of our mobile devices but it's no stranger than today's mobile habits. The question is whether we will dispense with the small talk at social gatherings and instead check everyone's details first via AR. Before you've even said hello you will have been through the person's LinkedIn and Facebook profiles and checked out their online CV. Standard chat-up lines like "Haven't I met you somewhere before?" just won't work any more.

Off course

2011-10-12T20:58:00.000+02:00

My first Arabic story!

During the spring I started learning Arabic at an evening class in town. I did most of the learning at home and on train trips but the weekly lesson time was a good reminder to keep working and gave me a framework for my learning. We all need a bit of structure in our lives and activities without deadlines tend to get pushed down the to-do list. I continued on my own over the summer but at a much slower pace and very irregularly. I'd like to continue the course but it was cancelled because there were too few participants. I write so often here about self-directed learning that I should be able to continue without the help of a course but I realise that I need those deadlines and a bit of pressure.

How many people sign up for courses at all levels only to be told that there aren't enough participants to start the course? People with ideas, plans and lots of interest. How many give up their dreams there and then? How many come back next term? Here's the limitation of building learning around the classroom paradigm; if the course doesn't run, no learning. It's a supply and demand market but should learning be dependent on such forces? If the course doesn't run just find a group on the net with a similar interest and learn together. Those are the skills that will be needed in future and need to be taught all through school. The art of helping yourself, networking and learning together.

I'm sure there are opportunities on the net to continue my studies. I've got lots of self-study material as well as podcasts and so on but I realise that I need the motivation provided by regular meetings/checkpoints (face-to-face or online) to push me onwards. Any suggestions?

Digital literacy for all

2011-10-10T20:41:00.000+02:00

Most media focus is on the glitzy new devices rolling off the production lines at Apple, Samsung, Dell and company but we tend to forget that these are virtually impossible dreams for the vast majority of people in the world. Students and pupils in developing countries have no chance of affording an iPad, a Blackberry or a Kindle but they do need to lean the digital skills that will lead to qualified jobs in the future.

That's why it's good to know that there are companies producing affordable devices that may lack the bells and whistles of the market leaders but they provide people with a platform to learn. First there was the One laptop per child initiative that saw Uruguay become the first country in the world to provide laptops for all primary school children and several others have followed. Over 2 million pupils and teachers are now part of the global OLPC project. The low priced XO laptop has now spread to schoolchildren all over the world and is extremely simple, robust and energy-efficient. The laptops have been sent directly to countries' education ministries and have then been distributedto the schools just like textbooks. The result is that several developing countres have a far greater level of digitalisation in schools than many European countries (including Sweden).

by judy_breck

There's more good news for affordable technology with the recent launch of an Indian tablet called Aakash (sky in Hindi) that has most of the features of the more famous touch-screen tablets but retailing at only $35-$50. Initial plans are to distribute 100,000 of these to selected university students over the next few months before rolling out fully. For most students this enables them to fully benefit from the educational resources available on the net in a country where standard devices are far beyond a student's allowance.

Watch a TV report on the Aakash tablet from Al-Jazeera.

Here's a report on the story from Newsy videos:

Watch India Unveils $35 Computer Tablet for Students in News | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Edit your life

2011-10-06T20:49:00.000+02:00

Is editing a 21st century skill? This inspiring TED talk by Graham Hill urges us to review the clutter in our lives, create more space and reduce stress. I can strongly identify with this message since I definitely have too much stuff and now feel inspired to do some editing; both with physical possessions but also with the digital clutter that leads to stress and worry. Time to clean up the e-mail in-box, all those old documents on the hard drive, photo albums on Facebook. Maybe tomorrow.

Language matters

2011-10-03T21:52:00.000+02:00

by European Parliament

We native speakers of English have a tremendous advantage. We are able to use our native language and can make a good impression at conferences with relative ease. Everyone else however has to present their complex ideas using a language that is sometimes their third or fourth language. I have heard many faltering presentations at academic conferences by non-native English speakers where the speaker has not been able to do him-/herself justice because of language difficulties. I often wonder how good they could be if only they could speak freely and whether it would be a good idea for some conferences to arrange for interpreters so that at least 2-3 official conference languages could be used. Interpreters may well be an expensive option but they would give more participants a voice.

In the spring I attended a conference in Spain where 4 languages were used: Spanish, English, French and Italian. Interpreters sat in booths and did a magnificent job translating everything in all combinations of languages. We had panel discussions where every member used the language that they felt most comfortable with and everyone simply plugged in a headset when the language changed. The result was that many people who would have been silent in an English-only conference were able to speak on an equal footing to the English speakers.

I also notice a tendency of native English speakers (maybe even me!) not to make any allowance for the fact that the audience is mostly non-native speakers by speaking at full speed and using idiomatic English. We need to be more aware of what it's like to listen to a foreign language all day long and be expected to contribute to complicated discussions on themes that you understand but cannot formulate well enough in that language. The native English speakers are generally very vocal at conferences but how do we give a voice to those who may well speak several languages fluently but non of them is English? It's convenient to assume that all academics can speak English but it acts as a strong filter, empowering many but disempowering many more.

Why is public research not public?

2011-10-02T11:25:00.000+02:00

Public money often funds research. That research is carried out by publically employed university researchers. The research findings are then submitted for publication and are peer reviewed by other university professors to see that the research is good enough for publication. Fine so far but here comes the catch that is attracting increasing controversy. This public research is then published in scientific journals that charge often very high subscription rates. University libraries then pay a large chunk of their budgets to get access to these journals so that students can read them. So more public money is paid to the publishers to see articles written with public money but which is inaccessible to the general public. Amazingly the researchers and reviewers get paid very little for their efforts. The reward for the researcher is of course academic reputation but the cost to public funds is unacceptably high.

In the last few weeks there have been several highly critical articles on this theme, for example Steve Wheeler, Sharp practice:

"For a long time I have felt very strongly that some academic publishers are operating a sharp practice by exploiting the goodwill of scholars. Large groups of lecturers and researchers act as journal authors and reviewers without payment, and then the publishers sell this content on to other academics at grossly inflated prices. Other highly knowledgeable academics give up their time, also for no payment, to review and advise editors on the content, and this can be painstaking work - read this by Martin Weller on the real cost of 'free reviewing'. This is not sustainable and must change."

The answer is of course the now widespread principle of Open Access where articles are published in open journals and are free to all. These journals have not yet achieved the academic status of the traditional publications but they are run by the academic community for the academic community. The peer review process is just as rigorous and the articles are available to the world. Many traditional journals now allow parallell publication whereby the article is also published in an open access journal, often 6 months after initial publication. However many journals still own exclusive copyright, effectively locking away public research from the public.

Last week the academic heavyweight Princeton University made a highly influential move in favour of open access by preventing staff from signing away the copyright to their articles to for-profit journals and insistig that articles also be made avaiable as open access. Exceptions to the rule must be first approved by the university. If Princeton can do this then many other prestigious universities may well follow suit. Read the details of this in an article in The Conversation, Princeton goes open access to stop staff handing all copyright to journals.

In that article the significance of Princeton's announcement is summarised as follows by Professor Simon Marginson (University of Melbourne):

“The achievement of free knowledge flows, and installation of open access publishing on the web as the primary form of publishing rather than oligopolistic journal publishing subject to price barriers, now depends on whether this movement spreads further among the peak research and scholarly institutions.”

If university libraries did not have to pay millions of dollars/euros to pay for access to articles written by university faculty maybe they would be able to use that money to fund more important work like providing better support to students and faculty. Let's hope more universities take a stand like Princeton and work out a new way forward for scientific publication.

Steve Wheeler has posted a list of recommended open access scientific journals in a new post, The open case.

Photo:

by maolibrarian

Quality apps

2011-09-28T17:57:00.000+02:00

The torrent of apps just keeps on flowing. There are millions of them out there and although there are plenty of excellent apps for education there are also plenty of less than excellent ones. Finding good quality apps is not easy and there's not much help out there even if you want to make a more discerning choice. App stores all have rating systems but they are often a poor guide since most voters give a simply thumbs up or down and little or no explanation. Many of the ratings are done automatically by bots. So how do you know what to download? Sadly there's no answer today.

by Jorge Quinteros

This problem has been highlighted in an article on Mind/Shift, How do you find good educational apps?. Sifting through thousands on apps on iTunes or Google Apps is a frustrating process and you tend to rely on tips from friends or news articles. Some reviews are helpful but mostly it's a case of trial and error, not a particularly academic process. If apps are going to find their way into university courses and schools there must be quality criteria and ways of in some way certifying that the educational value of the app. Once again we need filters to be able to make more educated choices and it's not enough to only rely on the wisdom of crowds. Acquiring a lot of "likes" doesn't really count for much.

We need a credible peer review process for apps that are aimed at the education sector and some kind of approval stamp that educators take seriously. I read recently that the Danish Ministry of Education is planning to launch an app store for Danish schools by 2012 with approved apps (see article in Danish from ComputerWorld). This is a bold and admirable step and I think this official seal of approval is essential if mainstream teachers are going to take the plunge and try out mobile apps in their teaching. However we still need to develop some international standards so each country does not need to reinvent the wheel.

Read more on this theme in The world of children's apps: a shake-up? on GeekDad.

Textbooks go digital

2011-09-25T21:19:00.002+02:00

Here's a nice summary of the state of digital textbooks and where they are heading. If any part of the publishing business needs to go digital it is this one. Too many school and university classes sit reading textbooks that are sometimes over 10 years old and how reliable are they as sources? Digital material can be updated continuously and kept relevant but they're unlikely to be as profitable as the printed versions have been for so many years.

As ever this graphic is probably on hundreds of blogs by now but good things are meant to be spread. Just click on the graphic to see a larger version.

Via: OnlineEducation.net

Unplugged on the road

2011-09-24T11:37:00.001+02:00

I travel a lot in my work and am privileged to have a job that allows me to visit so many fascinating places and meet so many people. However one aspect of being on the road really irritates me and that is connectivity. I've got all the devices you need to be able to work anywhere but for various reasons they aren't always able to deliver what they promise. Allow me to write a few paragraphs of general moaning.

First there is the problem of mobile coverage on trains. Train travel is excellent since it should allow you to work as you travel. The trouble is that, at least here in Sweden, the mobile networks don't follow the railway tracks and coverage is patchy and on many sections non-existant. Phone calls need to be made during stops at stations and as for accessing the net, you're really in trouble. Of course you can do a lot of work off line but I try to do most work on the net and am rather reliant on coverage. I'm sure I'm not alone in wishing that the mobile operators try to focus on providing coverage for rail passengers now that roads are well served.

Second is the problem of mobile data roaming costs. In Sweden I've got flat rate unlimited net access on my computer and mobile but as soon as I cross the border to, say, Copenhagen the cost rockets. The result is that I switch off virtually all connectivity as soon as I leave the country since the cost of simply checking e-mail can be steep. The only hope while abroad is to find free wifi and check everything then. I can't believe that the costs of mobile data rises tenfold just because I cross a national border but I suspect that the reason for the prohibitive roaming fees are to avoid the home networks being swamped. If we all had flat rate for all data access the bandwidth demand could outstrip capacity. If that's the reason please explain it to us all. If not I hope the EU and national authorities can find some way of pressing prices to acceptable levels. Then we would not have to find so many strange work-arounds like buying local pay-as-you-go SIM-cards just for a few days' visit and so on.

Thirdly, once you get to the conference centre and log on to the wifi and think all is well you look around for the nearest power socket. These generally seem to be very scarce and the few that exist have a flock of laptop users around them trying to share the same watering hole. Many times I've got all the cool technology but the batteries are dead and it's back to pencil and paper. Not alway a bad thing but conference centres need to address the power socket problem as soon as possible.

All the technology is in place to be able to work anywhere but there are still a few snags to work on. It shouldn't be so difficult to fix.

Photo:

by spentrails

Badges

2011-09-20T23:18:00.000+02:00

If you’ve ever been a scout you’ll know the motivating power of badges. A shirt sleeve full of them meant respect. We all love to collect symbolic evidence of what we know, who we know, where we’ve been, what groups we belong to and so on. Facebook and other social networks thrive on this. It’s all about belonging and showing who we are.

The last week or so has seen a lot of discussion in educational blogs about the concept of open badges to show competence in informal education. In the formal education system you earn degrees and certificates after passing set examinations and completing course assignments. However informal education has no such certification (that’s is of course why it’s called informal!). We probably learn most of our skills and knowledge informally, often without even realizing it. We learn by watching others, asking friends and colleagues, reading, searching, testing and by making mistakes. But it’s hard to convince others, in particular potential employers, that we have these skills since there’s no approved certificate. This is where badges come in.

The Open Badges project between Peer 2 Peer University and Mozilla is developing a system for awarding badges for demonstrated achievement in informal learning, awarded by institutions or groups of peers (watch a presentation of this project via the links at the end of this post). This principle has been in place in the world of open source programming for a while now and those badges are highly respected in that field. In some cases they can carry more currency than a university degree since they are awarded by fellow experts in that particular field. What Open Badges proposes is to have a system for awarding a wide range of badges for all types of competence. These badges can then be shown on your web site, Facebook or LinkedIn profile and so on. P2PU is already awarding badges in some of their courses (School of webcraft).

It’s important that the badges link to more detailed information about what requirements lie behind the badge and who has awarded it. It’s a way of making informal learning a little bit more formal. The key factor is credibility. Your badges will only be valid to those who understand what they represent and have respect for those who have awarded the badge. To others they will be meaningless. It’s essential that the system is transparent and it is possible to see what you have actually achieved.

Some people are, however, worried that this is simply commoditizing education and that badges will prove nothing. There’s a fear that we will drown in a torrent of meaningless badges awarded ad hoc and that may become as valuable as collecting “likes” on Facebook. As Jason Green wrote in his post on the subject (Badges – the Good, the Meh, and the Ugly):

“How will one ensure that the badges a person claims truly belong to them? Since badges are digital, anyone planning to validate them is going to have to make significant investments in security and redundancy. If your badge is hacked or the validator is no longer able to document its validity, the badge is worthless.”

A further worry is that badges are awarded for demonstrable skill rather than for general knowledge. How can we award badges for having an overall understanding of history or culture? Badges, like formal certificates, cope best with measurable skill-based competence.

The strongest critic of badges in the last week was Alex Reid who wrote two posts on the subject in quick succession. He fears that since badges may make you more employable they will become commercialised and a market will emerge. In Welcome to badge world he wrote:

"Perhaps one might find the notion of open badges appealing. Open meaning what? Anyone can open their own diploma mill, err I mean badge-selling operation? Of course not. Badges would have to be accredited by someone. Not sure who, but I doubt getting that accreditation will be free. How could it be? What open means is market-driven.Badges will have monetary value. People want them as a route toward getting jobs. They will pay for them the same way they pay now for college credits. When we look at all the free, DIY learning that is out there now, it's free precisely because it hasn't been commodified. You can download stuff from MIT's Open Courseware because that kind of learning has no commerical value. If you want to get a badge though, that's going to cost."

Valid points one and all, but at the same time I think that if badges can encourage more people to invest time in learning and provide motivation to continue learning then that can't be bad. It's just one of many ways to reward informal learning and we need to keep experimenting. Watch this space.

Watch the sessions from EFQUEL Innovation Forum about open badges and certifying informal learning

Photo:
by J-W Brown

Process more important than result

2011-09-18T16:14:00.003+02:00

There was a pre-conference day before the EFQUEL Innovation Forum devoted to user generated content (known to its friends as UGC). UGC is defined as free educational resources that have not gone through process of peer review. Often it is a web site, wiki or group blog that has been created by learners and freely shared. Generating content is an important part of the learning process by providing involvement, motivation and performance. This is the focus of an important European project called CONCEDE which aims to:

"... improve the effectiveness of teaching and learning by enhancing the quantity and quality of user generated content that can be incorporated into higher education learning provision."

The project aims at creating a quality framework for user generated content using a mix of users' comments, reviews and ratings as well as institutional quality procedure and find a way of creating a system of trust for UGC. If we can easily see that a learning resource has been endorsed by many and fulfills clear criteria we are more likely to use it.

Here's a film from Swinburne University in Australia describing the process of creating UGC, in this case a student wiki (see film on original site)

This type of quality control is essential work if UGC is going to be used in mainstream education. However, I wonder if the value of this type of content lies more in the process of creation than in the finished product? Creating a quality resource involves a wide range of skills: collaborating, defining, researching, categorizing, creating, adapting, editing and reviewing. The end product is a source of pride for all involved but the journey was the most valuable part. This was described by Steve Wheeler in his presentation as an example of paragogy – peers helping each other to learn in a collaborative process (push) instead of being “pulled” by the teacher.

However, once completed, it is often not as valuable as it was during the process of creation. Other learners may well use the material in their studies and some may even build on it but anyone wishing to investigate the same subject would probably try to start from scratch and build their own site. I have several abandoned wikis as a case in point. It was great fun while I was working on them but once I'd reached the end I just left them to their own devices. I don't think anyone has taken them over but their value to me was in the process not the result.

Maybe by having quality markers and reviews in place these resources will not fade and die but may find new curators. Anyone wanting to take care of my mothballed wikis is welcome to do a makeover!

EFQUEL Innovation Forum - opening up

2011-09-18T14:49:00.000+02:00

This week I’ve been in Lisbon at the EFQUEL Innovation Forum 2011. EFQUEL is the European Foundation for Quality in E-learning and the theme of this year’s conference was Certifying the future. There is a vast range of learning resources freely available on the web and a bewildering assortment of courses at all levels that use these resources. The problem for everyone involved is creating trust and authority and this is essential for the acceptance of open educational resources in mainstream education.The conference focused on how to create quality assurance and credibility in e-learning.

Wayne Mackintosh

Wayne Mackintosh was one of the keynote speakers and took an active part throughout the conference. He presented the ideas behind the OER University initiative that is soon to start offering courses based completely on OER but leading to recognized university qualifications (read an interview with Wayne on the background to OERu). He repeatedly stressed that credible certification is the most important concept in the OER movement today. Can we offer higher education to more people at very low cost without compromising on quality?

He identified two misconceptions about OER that are often used as evidence against open education. The first is that if universities give away content for free they will go out of business. The value of a university is not in created content but in reputation, context and validation. The fact that many universities already “give away” their courses and at the same time keep growing and attracting students (Open University, Athabasca, MIT etc) seems to bear this out. The second red herring is that OER are not important due to poor quality. Indeed there are an awful lot of poor OER but since OER are produced by qualified educators it is up to all of us to make sure that the resources we produce are of high quality. Better tagging and quality assurance are essetial here.

The idea of the OER University is to offer learners access to course material based solely on OER, provide open student support and learning communities leading to assignments that can give real academic qualifications. However you don’t have to follow any set course to get qualifications. You can learn however you want and if you can fulfill the university’s criteria you will get a qualification. The vital part here is that there should be no compromise on the standards set by the university but how you get there is your business. In the near future I am sure we will see more institutions that concentrate on validating and certifying competence gained elsewhere.

OER University is, however, not trying to set up a new university. The qualifications will be awarded by one of the participating universities in the partnership (at present Athabasca University, Empire State College, Nelson-Marlborough Institute of Technology, OER Foundation, Otago Polytechnic, Thompson Rivers University, University of South Africa, University of Southern Queensland) so that you will have a certificate from a recognized and reputable university. This scheme is designed to reach out to students who would not otherwise been able to participate in higher education and is therefore not aiming to cannibalize on the universities’ main student base.

There is no real investment needed to be part of the OER University partnership, just a new way of looking at higher education. Wayne threw out the challenge to European universities to join the venture since no institution from this part of the world has so far shown interest. It will be interesting to see who will step forward.

Photo:
by JRandomF

Off-piste learning

2011-09-11T10:29:00.001+02:00

Informal learning is becoming more organised (if that isn't a contradiction). If you want to learn something the net is full of free resources that can inform, inspire, instruct and provoke. There's no need to wait for someone to organise a course to attend, you just get started. Pick and choose from thousands of online lectures from the world's universities, read articles and open scientific journals, read blogs and participate in discussion groups. It's all out there but few people are able to really exploit these opportunities. Most people do not have the information literacy skills to find the material, make advanced searches, check the validity and so on. You also need to find others with similar interests who can support you and provide you with feedback. You need to find a network to help you learn.

by mike warren

So why not take a course in how to be a self-learner? This also sounds a bit contradictory but there are an increasing number of initiatives trying to help more people take charge of their informal learning by offering courses (albeit non-traditional courses) in how to do it yourself. Peer 2 Peer University has now teamed up with Anya Kamenetz, author of the book The Edupunk’s Guide to a DIY Credential to run an open and free course, DIY U: Getting started with self learning. It is due to run this autumn and I suspect there will be more of the same in the future. As with all P2PU courses it's very much student-driven and there's no traditional teacher up front to instruct. The course is divided into 4 main tasks: Write a personal learning plan, Build your personal learning network, Find a mentor, Demonstrate value to a network. These are the vital elements in being able to take charge of your own learning, whether it is for your career development or interest.

The phenomenon of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is another example of the meeting between formal and informal learning. Universities are arranging free and open courses without formal academic credits where students from all over the world can work through the tasks and collaborate around different themes. A hard core stay the full course whereas others are very active only on the tasks they feel most interested in. In addition there are always a large number of curious onlookers who don't really get involved but want to see what's happening. These "lurkers" are not a problem because many of them are just testing for future reference and may participate fully next time round. I know because I've been one!

Stephen Downes has now created a new site on how to run a MOOC, The MOOC Guide, with background, rationale, practice, examples and advice. This is very timely as more MOOCs are being launched and interest grows.I've only skimmed through the guide but it seems comprehensive and authoritative, as you would expect from one of the leading figures in open education today. Again these courses are all about building you learning network and developing it. Your network is not just a group of people who attend the same course for a few months, they will be there in the future too and your network will evolve and develop as you learn more.

Do it yourself education is not just about self study in front of your laptop. Learning requires communication and context. Doing it yourself means being able to build a network of people who can help you learn and who are also learning, though not necessarily the same things as you are. Defining what you want to learn, finding like-minded people and helping each other find material to discuss and work through are the skills that all schools and colleges should be teaching today.

Webinar - The missing link: connecting formal and informal learning

2011-09-07T13:42:00.004+02:00

Next week, on Friday 16 September (09.45 - 11.15 Portugal time), I'll be moderating a session at the EFQUEL Innovation Forum 2011 in Oeiras in Portugal (see venue pic on right).

It's part of a theme called Alternative certification and validation practices and I've entitled this session The missing link – connecting formal and informal learning. It's basically about how new forms of informal collaborative learning can somehow be assessed and gain acceptance from formal education.

I've decided to extend the reach of this session by using the e-meeting tool Adobe Connect and that means that any of you can drop in and listen to the speakers and chat with us. I'm keeping it simple in terms of technical production, using a couple of laptops, webcams and an echo-suppressing microphone so it won't be a blockbuster production.

Here's the description from the conference program:

The missing link – connecting formal and informal learning
The net offers enormous scope for informal learning and several interesting initiatives are attempting to provide frameworks for collaborative, student-driven learning, for example MOOCs, open courseware etc. In this session we will spotlight just a few of these initiatives and discuss how such informal learning can be assessed and certified and whether the formal higher education system can find ways of integrating these alternative structures. Representatives from OER University (Wayne Mackintosh), Peer 2 Peer University and Open Badges project (Erin Knight) and OpenStudy (Chris Sprague and Preetha Ram) will participate.
The session will take the form of an open webinar via Adobe Connect Pro with participants both at the conference and on the web. Speakers will have video feed but individual participants will be able to interact via a chat function. The virtual room will be opened to the public about 15 minutes before the start of the session and participants only need to click on this URL and log in with their own name.
The Adobe Connect room and technical support is provided by SUNET, the Swedish University Computer Network.

Watch the sessions

The flipped classroom

2011-09-04T23:00:00.000+02:00

Here's an excellent infograph that describes the principles behind the concept the flipped classroom. Basically the idea is that classroom time has always been devoted to teacher input in the form of a lecture and then most of the practice and reflection was homework. The flipped classroom principle lets students/pupils watch recorded lectures at home and use classroom time for practice, reflection and discussion.

We all remember sitting at home with school work that we didn't understand and wasting so much time trying to figure it out. If that had been done in class the teacher could have helped. Input should be available on the net and set as homework and when we have the students on one place let's use that time for learning not lecturing.

Created by Knewton and Column Five Media

Why is lecture capture so popular?

2011-09-01T21:12:00.001+02:00

The lecture is one of the holiest rituals in education going back hundreds of years and therefore is seldom questioned. At its best a lecture can be inspiring, provocative and entertaining as many of the popular TED talks clearly demonstrate. However an awful lot of them are rather tedious and do not contribute very much to learning. Yesterday's bored students doodled, read a magazine or daydreamed. Today's bored students chat on the net. Why do we still believe that you can get a hundred individuals in a lecture hall and expect them to all learn in the same way from a monologue? Shouldn't we study whether this form of teaching is effective? Lectures are a part of the academic furniture and no course is complete without at least one a week. Students expect to be lectured to and teachers are expected to lecture. Noone wonders if the emperor has any clothes on or not.

by ahyang

Today's technology gives us limitless opportunities to explore new pedagogies but instead we use technology to continue doing what we've always done. Online lectures are everywhere, freely available from iTunes, Academic Earth, YouTube Edu and almost every university's web site. They're very popular and many of them are indeed excellent. On the other hand many of them should never have been released.

That's the subject of a critical article by Mark Smithers entitled Is lecture capture the worst educational technology?. He's not against lectures when done well but the practice of simply recording every lecture on campus and putting it on the net is largely counter productive. A dull lecture is twice as dull on the net.

"Traditional lectures aren’t designed for online delivery. They’re too long. Their length is designed to fit in with the timetabling constraints of the buildings in which lectures take place not for any pedagogical reason. Why should this physical constraint be allowed to migrate its way into flexible online delivery?"

The answer is to divide the lecture into shorter sessions and record them with a net audience as the target. Smithers states that mass use of lecture capture is simply an easy way out for universities under pressure to show that they are keeping up with digital development. Filming lectures shows you are involved in online learning without having to change your methods and traditions. Universities who really use the potential of the net (like, say Open University or Athabasca University) have had to invest an awful lot of time and resources rethinking how they teach and plan courses. That costs money and forces a lot of radical changes. Not everyone is ready to open Pandora's box.

"The argument is that staff can deliver their material online but still maintain their traditional delivery practice as well. That is to say, all they need to do is click a button and they’re delivering material online. I’m not really quite sure why an ability to avoid providing staff development is seen as a positive attribute for an edtech but it would seem to the case here. Actually, I do know the reason, it’s because staff development involves cultural and organisational change within a higher education institution and that is much harder than installing servers and recording devices."

The Floating University

2011-08-31T20:46:00.003+02:00

The concept of university is under review. Even if the term is strictly defined in most countries there are plenty of new educational arenas flying the university flag but not following the traditional definition. I've frequently discussed Peer 2 Peer University and University of the People in this blog and although they are not "real" universities, the name sets the tone and the level of the type of study they provide. Their courses are university level though they do not lead to recognized university credits (yet). Purists may protest and scoff but these are providing higher educational opportunities in interesting new ways to new groups of students and I would expect such alternative forms of higher education to increase in the near future.

by aimilino01

A new variation on this theme is being tested this term. It's called simply The Floating University. The venture is described as:
"...a joint venture between The Jack Parker Corporation and Big Think, a knowledge forum where the world's top experts engage the thinking public to explore the big ideas and core skills defining the 21st century."

What they've done is to sign up a star-studded cast of academic elite and filmed a series of polished lectures where they give their overviews and thoughts on their various fields. The lectures are supplemented by notes, suggested reading, assignments and discussion forums and the result is a series of master class courses: a kind of academic All-star game. The first course is being launched right now and is called Great big ideas.

"Great Big Ideas delivers the key takeaways of an entire undergraduate education. It's a survey of twelve major fields delivered by their most important thinkers and practitioners. Each lecture explores the key questions in the field, lays out the methods for answering those inquiries and explains why the field matters. It is an effective introduction to thinking differently, and a primer in the diverse modes of problem solving essential for success in the 21st century."

Unlike the university alternatives mentioned earlier, the Floating University is not an example of open educational resources, nor is it free. Great big ideas costs $495 for the 12 lectures and study material. Individuals can enroll but the main idea is to provide ready-to-go courses for other universities to offer. I would imagine that those "real" universities can then provide their own teachers to guide students through the material but they would obviously not need to do any lecturing themselves.

The course is being offered as a regular campus option by three major universities: Harvard, Yale and Bard. One unique feature is having top harvard professors teaching a class at Yale and vice versa. I can imagine a future scenario where smaller universities around the world will offer Floating University courses where top academics provide the input but the local teachers provide the context and guide the students' discussions and reflection.

Is this a threat or opportunity or simply filling an innovative gap in the market? It's certainly a fascinating area to keep an eye on.

Have a look around the Floating University web site. There are plenty of films and sample lectures but since all are copyright I can't show them here.

Altered images

2011-08-30T11:33:00.000+02:00

Augmented reality has still not broken through as an everyday technology but it's developing fast and I suspect that in the not too distant future it'll suddenly be everywhere. Here's the latest in a line of videos showing new applications for augmented reality and each time it seems to be moving closer to finding that soft spot for mass adoption.

I like the interaction between mobile and printed media giving newspapers, books, ads, billboards, signs and so on digital content and creating a bridge between the two media. Too often we see dramatic headlines that the digital world will make all printed media obsolete in the very near future. This causes understandable reactions of panic or denial ("over my dead body") and unnecessary conflict.

A lot of discussion about digitalisation is rather too radical; that new technology will sweep away all traces of the old methods. This often just leads to traditionalists digging in even deeper. Let's look at all these amazing new opportunities and see what we can do with them to make learning even more exciting. Some old ideas will fade away, some will be retained and others will be remodelled. Evolution is the name of the gamer.

Anyway have a look at this video from Junaio.

Borrow a librarian

2011-08-26T22:43:00.000+02:00

Up till now you a library was judged by the extent of its book collection. Floors of bookshelves demanded respect. But soon when most resources are digital and available on the net the library will need to redefine itself and that process is already under way in many places. When all information is just a click away and students can have their entire course resources on a thin tablet or even smartphone. What then is the library's key resource? In a word - librarians.

by UBC Library (people in photo are not connected to the story)

I came across a short but thought provoking news item from Canada, Public library will lend out people as ‘living books’. A library in Surrey, BC, offers the opportunity to borrow a librarian. You can check out a librarian to get help with finding information for a project for example. Not for days of course but for an hour or so. An extension of this would be to discuss how to gather business intelligence for your company, how to study online etc. The key resource is expertise in how to find and exploit the resources of the web.

Numerous such “living books” have reportedly already volunteered and will be available for chats over coffee in the library’s new cafe. “What we’re aiming to do is bring the library to life for people,” explains deputy chief librarian Melanie Houlden. “There are huge repositories of experience and knowledge in their own brains.”

The opportunity for all libraries is clear. Content is everywhere but human beings can give context and support. The library of the future depends on the expertise of the staff and not on the mileage of bookshelves. Even the smallest library in terms of space can provide invaluable support to its users.

These boots were made for charging

2011-08-25T20:25:00.005+02:00

Smartphones and tablets are wonderful but their batteries don't last so long. You know the feeling - you notice the battery is low and that you forgot the power chord at home or at work and in a few minutes you'll be cut off. It generally happens just when you're expecting a call or need to access information. Unless we can develop batteries with much better capacity we're going to have to find new ways to recharge them.

Hope is at hand. According to a new BBC article we may soon be able to charge our mobile batteries by simply walking (Mobile phones could soon be 'powered by walking'). It seems that around 20 watts of power is lost as heat as we walk and the aim is to capture that energy and put it to better use. A device placed in your shoe generates energy by kinetic charging. Walking sets micro droplets in motion in the device and this is converted into enough energy to charge a mobile. Scientists at the University of Wisconsin have developed this technology and have recently published a study in the journal Nature Communications (Reverse electrowetting as a new approach to high-power energy harvesting, T Krupenkin, A Ashley Taylor).

"The new personal mechanism uses a principle known as "reverse electrowetting" - converting the energy of moving microscopic liquid droplets into an electrical current. Once placed in a shoe, the device - which consists of thousands of these electrically conductive droplets - is able to generate electrical energy. There is enough power, according to the researchers, to charge a standard mobile phone or laptop."

They have now formed a company, InStep NanoPower, to further develop this technology into a commercial proposition.The first problem is to transmit the power from the shoe to your mobile or laptop; a wire would be somewhat clumsy. According to the company web site the power can be transmitted wirelessly.

I look forward to this technology to put an end to searching for all those annoying power cables (every device has its own unique solution of course). Very soon you'll see people in the park taking their laptops for a brisk walk.

Photo:
by xJasonRogersx

Cloud library

2011-08-24T22:08:00.002+02:00

by Extra Medium

Imagine a place where you can download books, music and films completely free as often as you like. When you're finished with them you just give them back.You never need to buy them yourself and if this place doesn't have what you want they can get it from their network of contacts.Sounds a bit dodgy doesn't it? Some kind of pirate web site? No it's called a library.

The point is that we have been borrowing books and other media for years without any debate about copyright. A new article by Paul Carr in Tech Crunch, Book piracy: a non-issue, doesn't see any reason for fearing the free sharing of e-books. Books have always be read by many more people than buy them, either by borrowing from libraries or friends or from second-hand shops. You can sell maybe 10,000 copies that are then read by 100,000 people. It's very doubtful if you would sell more books if all lending was forbidden and it's better to reach a wider audience than a very narrow paying one.

"To all intents and purposes, books borrowed from libraries mean authors receive no compensation. Meanwhile, every day, millions of people around the world loan books to their friends, or donate books to charities, or leave them on public transport or otherwise share them in ways that negate the need for the recipient to buy their own copy. None of this constitutes stealing from authors, and you won’t hear a peep of objection from the publishing industry or authors."

The problem with e-books is that they cannot be shared very easily and there are strict restrictions on how libraries lend them. Publishers fear they are heading the same way as the music industry but forget that millions of books are shared in accepted ways already. Carr argues that genuine readers will be quite happy to download e-books legally if the price is reasonable and the purchasing and downloading process is simple and hassle free but once you've bought the e-book it's quite natural to lend it to friends and family as we always have done.

Or maybe we pay a standard access fee every month and then read anything we want from the cloud with no need to download at all? The cloud library.

Distractors or enablers?

2011-08-19T12:38:00.001+02:00

The subject of mobiles in the classroom or lecture hall is still controversial with many institutions banning them and countless examples of irritating use of mobiles in class. There's no doubt that today's smartphones are rather addictive and it's extremely difficult to teach when the entire class is busy on their mobiles. However, although teenagers are extreme users of mobile devices their parents are not far behind. Every day I see drivers with mobile phones in one hand as they overtake me. Look around at your colleagues in meetings and at conferences and you'll see them busy updating Facebook, checking e-mail etc. So it's not just a teenage phenomenon. We're all guilty to some degree.

It's all about respect I think and that is what we should discuss in class and even at work. Knowing when to switch on and when to switch off. When we need to discuss face to face we switch off the mobiles. However we also need to be more sensitive to spending too long on one way communication. If you force a large group of people to listen to a one hour lecture you can be sure that many will find their mobile much more interesting than your speech. Keep the discussion active and engaging and the distractions won't be so attractive.

I've just read a good article on how mobiles can be used effectively in the classroom, Backchannel learning in an organizational setting (Dave Kelly, eLearn Magazine). It deals with the use of mobiles in corporate training but the ideas are equally applicable to schools and universities. Instead of being distractions mobiles should be used to create more student involvement. One quote stands out:

"Simply put, learners are now walking into your session carrying the ultimate engagement tool right in their pocket."

The so-called back channel at conferences and classes can be used to gather student responses to the ideas being discussed and to transmit those ideas to a wider audience and involve even outsiders in the discussion.Mobiles are ubiquitous today and are not going to go away so all attempts at banning them are going to be futile. However we need to spend more time discussing the art of paying attention and showing respect, remembering that it works both ways. Teachers must also try to cut the one way communication and students must try and be able to focus attention when required. We need to think more about why we gather people together in one room and use that time as constructively as possible. If we don't people just switch off.

Photo:
by touring_fishman

Close to you

2011-08-13T15:12:00.000+02:00

Being in the same room as a teacher does not mean you learn anything. However we still judge the quality of a university course largely on the amount of time students are in the same room as a teacher. This contact time still normally takes the form of lectures which tend to be fairly one-sided unless the number of students is very low. Many students say little or nothing in their lectures and it's doubtful if they really learn so much from this precious contact time. Since lectures can now be prerecorded and watched anywhere and any time wouldn't it be better to put them on the net and create more time for real contact in the form of discussion, experiment and group work?

by teddy-rised

This issue is discussed in a lengthy but thought-provoking article by Paul Ramsden in Times Higher Education, When I grow up I want to be spoon fed. He sees the current debate about contact hours as too simplistic since most of these hours consist of lecturing that is often one way traffic.

"Lecturers and their institutions need to remind themselves that university teaching is not a delivery process. On the contrary, it's a sort of conversation - and in a conversation, listening is as important as speaking. This implies less conventional lecturing and more communication. It is a national disgrace in 2011 that the most common form of contact hour is still the lecture."

He sees the lecturing tradition as spoon feeding and advocates putting much more responsibility on students to take charge of their learning rather than cramming lecture notes at the end of term. There is also a need to make students much more involved in course design and giving them a good deal of responsibility for redisgning a course for the following year's students.

"Perhaps the most telling evidence that we are getting this part wrong comes from the 2010 NUS survey. About 90 per cent of students want to be involved in shaping course design, but only 59 per cent say that they are. The primary basis of a positive student experience and lasting learning outcomes is taking an energetic part in the life of the university - and collaborating with fellow students and staff, both in class and out of it. Providentially this way of thinking about "contact" fits well into the culture of academic collegiality."

Courses can be much more student-driven and this is a feature of more innovative initiatives like Peer 2 Peer University that I have frequently mentioned here. It's a case of moving education from a charter holiday where everything is planned in advance and the teachers look after you all the way to a backpacking holiday where you have to work things out for yourself with the help of your fellow travellers. Not that I see it as a case of one way replacing the other but I believe that we learn much more by backpacking, especially when the teachers are part of the backpacking team as experienced guides.

Do it yourself university

2011-08-09T17:20:00.003+02:00

Higher education is still a fairly exclusive commodity even if the number of students rises every year. In most countries it is still a major investment for a young student and many will take over 20 years to pay back the loan. In addition to that competition for places, especially at the top universities, is fierce. Millions of people are denied higher education because they can't afford it, can't move from home or are not able to meet the entry requirements.

With the wealth of open educational resources freely available today it is possible to put together your own education using the best resources and the methods that suit you. The material and information is all out there but it still requires a great deal of self-discipline, good study routines and a high level of digital literacy to fully benefit. There are plenty of courses available through innovative educational initiatives like Peer 2 Peer University, University of the People and the various MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) that a few universities are offering. However most of these courses assume that participants are already familiar with social media and comfortable using wikis, blogs, discussion forums and e-meeting tools.

Anya Kamenetz has written a guide book to DIY education, Edupunks, edupreneurs and the coming transformation of higher education that aims at providing inspiration and support to those who want to learn "off piste." She has also produced a shorter version, The Edupunk's guide to a DIY credential which is a step by step guide to taking control of your own learning and research using the tools and resources freely available on the net today.
EdupunksGuideMost of this DIY movement is completely off the radar of mainstream higher education and she sees the issue as the elephant in the room for universities today as she explains in this short video interview.

The Elephant on Campus | Anya Kamenetz clip #1 from Mind Twin Media on Vimeo.

There's a good summary of this issue on the excellent blog Innovative Educator, The Do It Yourself (DIY) Guide to Credentialing, with more links if you want to investigate more.

Guides like this are extremely valuable and the volume of informal learning taking place today is a growing but virtually invisible force in education today. However it still excludes many potential students who simply don't have the right level of digital literacy and will need lots of support and encouragement to get started. We need to link in libraries, learning centres and other adult education groups to support digital literacy projects and offer face-to-face guidance in the community to ensure that there is always an option available for everyone who needs education and training.

PS
I've just found Stephen Downes excellent practical guide to learning in the digital age, Access :: Future. Practical advice on how to learn and what to learn. (link to pdf)

Only a paper moon?

2011-08-07T21:48:00.002+02:00

We've had at least 15 years of net-based learning in universities and the numbers of online students rises year by year. Today most campus courses rely on the net for distribution of course material, discussion, assignments and information and the university's accounting, HR and other administrative routines are all computerised. So we should be able to say that technology affects every process in higher education.

However, despite the omnipresence of technology in academia it is still not fully accepted. This is stated most clearly in an excellent article in Campus Technology, Ad Hockery and the Potemkin Effect in Higher Ed IT. It's based on a presentation given by Kenneth C.Green at the recent Campus Technology 2011 conference. Universities today offer a host of online courses but often with very little support for teachers or students and that's why Waters refers to the Potemkin effect - courses are just flat facades with nothing behind them. Little wonder then that the drop-out rate is high.

The problem is often that top management have little understanding of how technology impacts education and tend to delegate responsibility for online learning to IT managers, believing still that this is purely a technology issue and not a pedagogical one. Teachers do their best to support each other and often provide student support over and above the call of duty but in many universities there are far too many such ad hoc solutions that cover up for the lack of an overall strategic approach. Universities need to build an infrastructure behind the facade.

"The faculty need support," he said. "They're not ancillary to this conversation but central to it. And we need to communicate with presidents and provosts about the value of that support--about how critical it is, that it's part of the infrastructure--so we don't have Potemkin campuses."

Photo:
by kathleenie

Brain drain

2011-08-06T10:37:00.002+02:00

A favourite recurring theme of many tabloids and popular TV shows is the idea that digital technology is damaging our brains or making us stupid. Tales of obsessive gaming, gambling and social networking are seen as evidence of the perceived dangers of new technology rather than further examples of obsessive behaviour which has always been present in society. The real question is how to deal with obsessive behaviour in general (eating, drinking, drugs, gambling etc have always been around); the net just gives us new arenas for such tendencies.

We've always been wary of new technology that we see as being "unnatural" (simply because it's new). The well-known example of men with flags walking in front of the first railway locomotives to ensure that they could not go too fast is a clear parallell. After that there were several scientific papers that warned that our brains would not be able to cope with speeds of more than 30 mph and these fears continued as the speeds increased. I remember discussions in the sixties and seventies on the damage television was doing to children and scare stories of TV-addiction were not uncommon.

Many scare stories quote scientific reports and studies to back up their claims but is there any real scientific eveidence for these dangers? This is the subject of the following lecture by Dr Paul Howard-Jones, senior lecturer at the University of Bristol’s Graduate School of Education, who has written a report The impact of digital technologies on human well-being. He has sifted through 170 studies on the relationship between digital technology and its effect on how we think and learn and in this lecture he discusses some of the most common concerns about the net and sees if there is any scientific evidence to back up these fears.

The idea that the internet is "rewiring our brains" is actually true but not in a negaitive way. The brain is vey plastic and is constantly adapting to new stimuli.Children's brains are more plastic than adults' and exposure to the media-rich environment of the net stimulates new ways of thinking and can lead to new strategies for learning. One clear point in Dr Howard-Jones' lecture is that we need to provide better support for children, parents and teachers in how to use the net to stimulate learning and creativity.

One area of digital technology that is highlighted as having the greatest potential for learning and creativity is gaming. The lecture gives examples of research on how gaming stimulates more parts of the brain than other learning activities and there is good scientific evidence for the present trend of gamification in education. Discussion of gaming in the popular press today still focuses on some people's addictions to simple "shoot-em-up" games instead of the complex and immersive strategy games that are in fact mainstream and that are being increasingly used in corporate, military and even academic training.

The basic skills we use on the net are far from new; we read, write, communicate, watch films and listen to music. The net enables us to blend all these elements in new ways and allow new ways to collaborate and work. Instead of scare stories, bans and limitations we should be spending more time helping people to use our digital media in a responsible and mature manner.

Read more about this in an article by Tony Parkin, Fear of technology that can turn our brains to mush (Merlin John Online)

Blogsitting

2011-07-28T09:00:00.011+02:00

While I'm on holiday I thought it would be fun to have a guest write a post here. My blogsitter this time is my colleague Chahira Nouira from the United Nations University in Bonn, Germany (follow her on Twitter).

What is your blogging strategy while you are away on holidays?

The holiday season has started and many of you may have started looking for the house sitter, the dog sitter but have you considered a blog sitter? Taking a break is very often getting disconnected from computers and the internet. But how is it for the blogosphere?

Last year I was observing some of my favorite bloggers and their different strategies for blogging while they are away. Steve Wheeler (Learning with 'e's), Martin Weller (The Ed-Techie) and Tony Bates (www.tonybates.ca) had different strategies that I would like to share here.

Steve was announcing his holidays and that he won’t be online but he also announced a series of post to be published during that period of time. I very much enjoyed reading the series called “Web feats”. The posts were programmed in advance so that readers could have posts on a regular basis while he was away.

Martin chose another alternative and invited Phil Greaney who wrote a great and long post. The nice thing was that Martin took the time to comment and encourage his guest from his holiday home in France.

Tony Bates, wrote a post announcing he would be away to spend some time with his family and would be posting when he returned.

I got the feeling that in the first case readers could get their regular posts but rather be in a lurker mode and won´t comment as often as they would usually on Steve´s blog. As for the second case, Martin joked about him being worried that his guest would take over the blog. This did not happen of course and I think that it made me discover a new writing style on that blog. In both cases it was entertaining and enriching. In the third case I was clearly said not to have any expectations, so I just put the coming back date on my calendar!

These are examples of blogs I read; I am wondering what other bloggers do. What did you decide to do with your blog while you are on holiday?

Chahira writes on the SCIENTIA blog on education and e-learning related subjects.

Unplugged

2011-07-21T20:48:00.000+02:00

by the JoshMeister

Many of the conferences and seminars I attend are full of online educators all sporting the latest in laptop and mobile technology. Many want to tweet, blog and mail their impressions of the conference or look up the links that are suggested in the sessions. However there's often frustration in the ranks as we realize that the conference venue has no or inadequate wifi, a severe shortage of power sockets or poor mobile coverage. Many university lecture halls have a handful power sockets up front for the lecturer but nowhere else and getting a seat near one of these oases becomes hard currency.

This year I've sampled all variants but it seems that many venues are not keeping up with the explosive development of social media. Wifi capacity that was fine a year ago for checking web pages and mail is now hopelessly inadequate when everyone is filming, sending photos and live streaming. In addition we're now writing our notes on cloud services like Google Docs, preparing slideshows on SlideShare or Prezi and all of that needs net access. As we migrate towards cloud computing, demands on conference venues' wifi will accelerate and those who are not prepared will suffer. There's no point at looking at last year's stats when planning this year's conference.

Imagine when every delegate comes with a cloud-based laptop like the Google Chromebook or with iPads and other tablets. Plan capacity on those lines now and you will be an attractive venue next year.

Read all about it

2011-07-18T18:39:00.001+02:00

I started this blog very tentatively back in April 2008 (read the very first post) deciding to try out blogging just to see what would happen. Since then it has become a way of life and I now spend rather a lot of my spare time writing three blogs as well as looking after a couple of web sites and various social networks. Throw in Twitter and Facebook and it all adds up to a fairly large digital footprint. The fun thing about it all is that one thing leads to another and the channels of communication multiply almost automatically.

My daily news on Paper.li

Today there are some excellent applications that can compile impressive web sites around your everyday communication. If you have a reasonably sized Twitter network you can make a daily newspaper based on your daily Twitter feed using Paper.li . It simply selects the most popular tweets from your followers each day and expands them into a newspaper format. Very attractive and involves virtually no work for me, apart from maintaining a good Twitter network of people who provide good content. See my daily news summary. I don't know how many people check my news site but it gives me the highlights from my Twitter network without even needing to log on to Twitter. The content is chosen by people I follow and I follow people who provide good links and valuable information.

This tool can be easily used with classes or projects. A group of students or a project group can start a Twitter account and follow key experts and bloggers in the chosen field. Paper-li will then compile this feed into a daily newspaper that monitors the subject being studied and gives students instant access to hundreds of relevant articles and new ideas.

My Scoop.it site, Corridor of Learning

I've just started a very interesting service called Scoop.it. It provides a plug-in button on my toolbar and when I see an intersting article or news item I simply press the Scoop.it button and the article shows up on my own site which I decided to call the Corridor of Learning. On this site you can see what I've been reading recently and it links directly to those articles. I use this as a silo of potential blog material, handily presented on one page. I can quickly select an interesting article and put it on my Scoop.it site for reading in detail later. Some of it I will use for blog posts here and some will appear on my Swedish blog Flexspan (there's a translation widget there if you don't speak Swedish).

My site is just a reflection of my own reading but Scoop.it can also be used to great effect in the classroom. A Scoop.it site can have several contributors so a group of students could co-curate a site, adding relevant items from day to day and providing a visually attractive bibliography for their assignment. A new feature allows you to search for and link up with other users who curate similar sites to your own as this new video shows.

As I wrote earlier, once you get started on this you just can't stop and your network and involvement just keep on growing. And I haven't even mentioned Google+!!

Scylla and Charybdis

2011-07-14T12:45:00.001+02:00

I have a nagging sense that I really should get a Google+ account and see what all the fuss is about. My Twitter stream has been full of lyrical accounts of the advantages of Google+ over Facebook and already there are plenty of articles and guides to using G+ in education and its potential use for collaborative learning in general. But somehow I can't bring myself to put my toe in the water yet.

From what I can see as I press my face against the shop window there are plenty of attractive features in G+ that Facebook so far lacks, especially the ability to divide your friends into circles and create separate and more specific conversation groups. It looks more structured and easier to manage too and of course it integrates so well with all the other Google services that most of us use.

I try out new apps and services all the time but I hesitate with this one. The main reason is that I can't cope with yet another social network just now. I have my networks on Twitter, Facebook and a few other places and if I start with G+ it'll be another one to keep tabs on. If all my contacts mass migrated from Facebook to G+ then maybe but at present it'll mean an even more fragmented social network (plus log-ins passwords etc). I remember joining Google Wave and then wondering what to do with it. For the time being I will observe through the window and see how it goes.

Another point is the battle for world domination taking place between Google, Apple and Facebook. An article by Sebastian Anthony on ExtremeTech this week, Google+ Too many eggs in the Google basket, warns that we should be wary of letting just one company take care of all our digital needs.

"The problem with this rationale, however rosy it may seem, is that you’re simply moving from one internet juggernaut to another. You’re taking your chips from Facebook and investing them in Google+. This might be a satisfactory solution in the short term, but do you have any rational reason to believe that it’s better in the long term? Is Google a nicer company than Facebook? Google’s record with privacy-related issues (Buzz, Street View, Wi-Fi snooping) is just as bad as Facebook’s, if not worse, and it remains under investigation by governments around the world. Google+ certainly shows that Google has learnt from its mistakes — but just remember that Google makes its money by selling you; by knowing where you live, what videos you like watching, and your entire search and surfing history, Google sells targeted advertising to the tune of tens of billions of dollars per year. Selling you is of Google’s revenue stream."

They all want our interests, preferences, networks and communication so they can sell it to advertisers and we have to bear this in mind. They're out there to earn money, plain and simple, and we need to play the one off the other no matter how tempting it is to enter their attractive but walled gardens.

Like Odysseus we have to steer a careful path between Scylla and Charybdis.

Image: Work found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Johann_Heinrich_F%C3%BCssli_054.jpg / CC BY-SA 3.0

Change perspective

2011-07-11T14:27:00.003+02:00

All innovations and new ideas must be tested and questioned before they can be widely accepted but how often to we test and question traditional methods and structures?

I heard a lecture a while back where we were asked to imagine how books would be viewed if they had just been invented in a world where multimedia games and the web were the norm. Reading books would be seen as a solitary activity where teenagers hide themselves in their rooms with no social interaction, no multimedia stimulus and very little physical activity. These strange book-lovers would congregate in quiet and unstimulating buildings called libraries where they all sat silently reading without even talking to each other.

An amusing thought in the light of today's discussions about gaming and social media but it is useful to sometimes look at accepted practice in a new light.

Another case is a blog post by Katie Stansberry on MindShift, 10 reasons to ban pens and pencils in the classroom. It's well worth reading and she presents the same arguments as are often used aginst the use of mobiles in the classroom she shows how dangerous pens and pencils can be. The case against pencils is just as convincing as that against mobiles and it all depends on what you do with these devices. The same device/method/tool can be either a trivial distraction or an invaluable learning opportunity.

I agree that we need to examine and questions innovations but we should not becom complacent in our attitude towards accepted practices. Just because classrooms/lectures/examinations/books/age-based classes etc worked in the past does not mean that they will work today. Keep questioning and re-examining.

Photo: by Muffet

Creative Commons - let's make it easy

2011-07-09T19:09:00.001+02:00

A lot of effort is put into preventing plagiarism both in schools and universities and there are some excellent intitiatives in this field. Often students simply don't realize where the borderline to plagiarism lies or think that a few choice sentences here and there won't do any harm. But many institutions have published guides and often clear, informative and often light-hearted guides to help students do the right thing.

However there is not the same interest in helping students to choose correctly when it comes to photos and films. Both teachers and students simply search for good photos on Google and then copy and paste into presentations and essays. Creative Commons licensing is now widespread and there are millions of photos, films, diagrams and texts that can be freely copied and even reworked. However very few institutions have a policy for the media use and Creative Commons licensing.

This is the subjetc of the following interview with Professor Lawrence Lessig, Harvard University, on EdTalks.. The main point is to make it as easy as possible to use open resources. If schools and universities have a clear policy on using CC material and there are clear guidelines for staff and students that will help enormously. However Lessig says that responsibility also lies with Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to make it easy to filter image searches so that you can quickly search for open resources. Today it's easy to search for photos and films but the main search engines make it impossible to choose the right ones. A simple search filter to click on wuld suffice.

Today it's easy to break copyright law and most of us do so unwittingly. Let's make it easy to follow the law and move the free material up front so people realize the wealth that is available. If someone wants their material locked away under copyright then let it remain hidden: If you share you're work will be used.

Communication breakdown

2011-07-05T20:30:00.001+02:00

by barbaranixon

I know a lot of people who hate PowerPoint presentations. I see their point but I try to defend the much-maligned tool. Used well the slide show helps the audience follow your argument and lets you provide memorable images and key words or quotations at strategic moments. I've heard too many people who proudly say that they don't like PowerPoint and instead will simply present "unplugged". Unless the presenter is a skilled orator, these casual presentations are often self-indulgent wandering narratives that are often impossible to follow. There are, of course, alternatives like Prezi but in the end they're all just tools and require the presenter's skill and sensitivity.

Used badly however, PowerPoint (or Prezi or whatever) is sheer agony though the fault lies entirely with the user rather than the medium. Despite years of presentation training courses in most organisations slides like the one featured above are still all too common. At several conferences over the past couple of years I have squirmed my way through dull presentations where the speakers actually read their slides to us, showed diagrams that were impossible to read beyond row three or used colour schemes that remind you of sixties psychedelia (ie yellow text on green background). Why does this go on unchecked? Strangely academic conferences are badly afflicted despite all participants being involved in education.

There's a good article by Rob Weir in Inside Higher Ed called End large conferences that takes up this theme with a vengeance. He has had enough of large academic confernces and his main objection is having to sit through a steady stream of excruciatingly dull paper presentations. The point of conferences for some faculty is to get a paper accepted and the presentation is simply a reading of the highlights, often with the stress on reading. Instead of trying to provide a concise, informative and convincing summary many presenters get bogged down in academic detail from the start and few, if any, of the participants are any wiser at the end. Sometimes you feel the speaker is simply ticking off the boxes (paper accepted at international conference - tick, paper presented - tick, paper published - tick).

Weir's objections are understandable and we do need conferences to be more engaging and to provide time and space for discussion and networking. The presentation of papers is a deep-rooted academic tradition that we don't need to throw out the window. I've seen the full scale from inspiring to abysmal but maybe conferences could provide guides to good practice to help presenters prepare the right kind of session. We need to stress the need for good presentation skills and give priority to those who can communicate effectively. The presenters hopefully want to communicate, the audience want to learn - why do we get it wrong then?

Don't forget to remember

2011-07-01T08:57:00.002+02:00

There's a fascinating article in the Guardian, Why we must remember to delete – and forget – in the digital age, that discusses the probelm that the net never forgets. We keep hearing stories about people who have got into trouble because long-lost indiscrete photos or Facebook entries get dredged up again with embarrassing results. Time heals all wounds is a saying that may need revision soon since the wounds can now be instantly reopened thanks to the infinite storage capacity of the net.

The article centres on an interview with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, professor of internet governance and regulation at the University of Oxford's Internet Institute.He argues that we need to have a built-in sell-by date in our digital content to indicate when it should be automatically deleted. The owner of a photo, film or blog post should be able at any time to set a lifespan for the file. Many items should be stored indefinitely but we should be able to erase material that is no longer funny, relevant or suitable.

"He suggests that users, when saving a document they have created, would have to select an expiration date in addition to the document's name and location on their hard disk. "Expiration dates are about asking humans to reflect – if only for a few moments – about how long the information they want to store may remain valuable."

We need to focus on what is actually worth remembering and be able to filter out embarrassing trivia. The principle of forgive and forget is impossible when everything is recorded. The disadvantage of digital expiry dates is that real criminals can more easily cover their tracks, though there's nothing new there since we've always been able to burn old letters and photos.

It's also a question of digital management. Just because we have virtually unlimited storage space doesn't mean that we should save everything. Mountains of digital garbage is lying on the web simply because the owner simply doesn't know how to delete it or has forgotten it even exists. We're all guilty on that count. Let's make the choice of expiration date a standard feature and help keep what's really worth remembering.

Photo:
by antwerpenR

Pandora's box

2011-06-28T22:17:00.002+02:00

The announcement last week that the Brazilian government intends to make all learning resources created by state-employed teachers freely available under Creative Commons licences (see earlier post) was welcome and will hopefully be an inspiration to others. However it did tie in very well with the presentation I made at last week's EDEN conference in Dublin. Together with my colleague, Ebba Ossiannilsson from Lund University, we presented Opening Pandora's box - conclusions from a Swedish OER project (see presentation below). The full paper will hopefully be published in a special issue of EURODL (European Journal of Open, Distance and E-learning) in the near future.

The act of making learning resources freely available on the net and fostering a culture of sharing between institutions and teachers is a necessary step towards opening up education but it is only the beginning of a tough process. I see OER as Pandor's box and by opening the lid you let out a host of "demons" that all need to be addressed.

Using OER means you have to review the role of the teacher; from the traditional sage on the stage to a new and more challenging role of mentor/facilitator/guide/critical sounding board. That alone is a controversial and uncomfortable issue for many and once you accept it you then have to review the student's role and even that of the university/school. The university/school is no longer a silo of knowledge and resources - those are everywhere and ubiquitous. Why should we come to such institutions? Students must take much more responsibility for their own learning and adapt to collaborative learning. How do we assess such learning? How do we integrate informal and formal learning and find ways of assessing the value of all that is larnt outside the formal system?

Maybe one reason so many decision makers seem reluctant to embrace OER is that they realize the dangers of opening the lid. However isn't it better to take control of the process despite all the challenges than to hide behind tradition and risk the box exploding in your face in a few years time?

Eden2011

View more presentations from Alastair Creelman

New practical guide to using OER

2011-06-26T18:33:00.001+02:00

British authority JISC have launched a smple yet important service to teachers who want to use open educational resources (OER) in their teaching but are unsure of the technicalities.They've produced two wizards that giude you step-by-step through the process of finding the right Creative Commons licence for your work, combining licences and using other people's CC-licenced work.

According to Prodromos Tsiavos, England and Wales Project, Legal Project project lead, Creative Commons UK:
"These tools allow users of the CC licences to make quick, easy and accurate decisions as to when and how to use multiple combinations of the CC licences. They reduce the complexity of copyright law and empower the end user by reducing the need for external advice when licensing copyrighted material. CCUK strongly supports this collaborative work and believes it will substantially contribute to the re-use, utilisation and proliferation of CC licensed content."

At the moment even those who genuinely want to use resources in the right way have great difficulty getting it right. Any resources that make it easier to use OER and avoid copyright infringement are very welcome.

Read more, Open up educational resources legally with new JISC tools.

EDEN 2011 in quotes

2011-06-23T17:14:00.000+02:00

As an attempt to sum up some of the themes of the conference here's a selection of quotes in no particular order. I hope they are all accurate but if I have misquoted please let me know. Any other good ones you can add?

Why is there no Nobel prize for education? (Alfredo Soeiro)

Competency is not a thing, it's a cultural construct. (Graham Attwell)

If you're not working with mobile apps, you are out of touch with progress. (Dennis Pamlin)

Valuing learning for all. Everywhere and in any mode. A dream? (Alfredo Soiero)

We are only in the opening chapters of the transformation of education and social transformation by technology. (President Mary McAleese)

Education should disrupt as much as it should build. (Graham Attwell)

The future is not widely distributed, so it's not here yet. (Paul Kim)

Education should be open and adaptable, designed to suit the pace and place of the learner. (President Mary McAleese)

Many still consider that quality in education is synonymous with exclusivity ... the notion of an open university, that measures its success by the number and variety of people that it includes, is deeply threatening. (Sir John Daniel)

Have you seen a power socket in here? (me)

EDEN - mismatches and challenges

2011-06-23T15:17:00.006+02:00

I've just attended the annual EDEN (European e-learning and distance learning network) conference in Dublin and it's time for some post conference reflection.

The standard of the keynote speakers at the conference was very high and all made excellent contributions but the strongest impression in my opinion was the address given by the Irish President, Mary McAleese (read the speech). The fact that the country's president addressed a conference on e-leaning was highly significant but what really mattered was that she spoke with a clear understanding of what we work with and with a shared view of how technology can radically change education by reaching out and empowering people in new ways. I've heard many dignitaries (principals, politicians etc) opening conferences with glossy platitudes and sound bites but this time there was a clear understanding behind the words. Her address was as much a keynote speech as the other experts. Getting the chance to briefly meet her afterwards put the icing on the cake. My favorite president! Read more on this on Steve Wheeler's blog.

The main theme of the conference for me was one of mismatches. The opening keynote by Sir John Daniel set the tone by offering both good news and bad news. On-line and distance learning (ODL - yet another TWA, three word acronym) is booming all over the world yet opposition is also growing. Universities are offering online courses but have seldom any clearly stated goals or strategies for the field. Quality controls are often sadly lacking and it's no surprise therefore that success rates are low. This ad hoc attitude to ODL means that potential cost savings are not realized and often the online courses end up costing more than they should leading to increased criticism from traditionalists. Daniels urged the conference to focus on eliminating the rotten apples and focusing on quality.

There's another mismatch in this question. Even if we have ambitious European quality initiatives for ODL such as UNIQUe and OPAL (Open educational quality initiative) there are extremely few institutions interested in becoming certified. Maybe the reason is that the major university rankings are based on research rather than teaching and so they focus all efforts in climbing the rankings by attracting more research funding. Until quality assurance for ODL is widely accepted and implanted there will always be a credibility debate. Daniel closed with a provocative statement that we may see a future where public institutions focus on research and the teaching is left to for-profit institutions, as is beginning to happen in the USA to a certain extent.

Another mismatch often discussed is that although ODL demands new skills and expertise it is often assigned to the least experienced teachers. This, combined with the points above, also leads to quality issues unless clear strategies, routines and support are in place to support the responsible staff.

On a slightly more mundane note a further mismatch was that this conference, brimming with laptops, mobiles and iPads, was held at a venue that had a severe lack of power sockets. Lecture halls had a couple of sockets at the front for the lecturer but otherwise you were unplugged. This meant that even the most hardened net-enthusiasts were sometimes forced to take out the old pencils and paper. Time for universities to embrace the opportunities the net allows for education. Lecture halls are built for one way communication and we need more rooms for dialogue (both face-to-face and online) instead.

I'll compile a list of quotes from the conference in the next post so stay tuned.

Read Sir John Daniel's keynote: 20 year of distance education in the garden of EDEN: good news and bad news.

See all the keynotes: 20 June, 21 June, 22 June.

All keynote presentations (slideshows)

Brazil shows the way for open educational resources

2011-06-18T15:40:00.000+02:00

by reanetbr

OER seminar at the Sao Paulo Legislative Assembly by reanetbr / CC BY

Although grassroots initiatives to encourage the development of open educational resources are essential they can only have limited impact unless there are clear policies and strategies from the top to nurture them. That is the main conclusion from a Swedish OER project that I have led over the past year (read an article on the project). There are plenty of resources, repositories and good examples from many universities and schools but unless there is an overall national strategy there will only ever be islands of innovation and no mainstream impact.

I've just been pleasantly surprised by an article on the Creative Commons website, Brazil introduces OER into federal legislation and adopts local government policy. The Brazilian government has just passed legislation requiring government funded educational resources to be made freely available under Creative Commons licenses. Furthermore, work produced by state employees (ie teachers at all levels) in their official capacity must be made freely available as OER.

This seems to be common sense to me and it’s amazing that this move even creates media interest. If we are paid with taxpayers’ money our work should be available to those who pay for it; the general public. Instead, most of a university’s production is locked away from public view and there is far too little cooperation to minimize the weekly reinvention of the wheel. If we really wanted to find more money to invest in better teaching and research we need to encourage the open sharing of resources. Good ideas must be shared and spread, teachers encouraged to network and collaborate on course development and institutions discouraged from all producing their own slight variations on the same course.

The Brazilian legislation will probably not have much impact on the government here in Sweden or in many other European countries but I am convinced that we must take this step.

Attention seekers

2011-06-17T21:28:00.000+02:00

There's an recent article in Times Higher Education that raises an important issue but could lead to people making the wrong conclusions. The article, US unplugged: manifold benefits of disconnected learning, discusses the problem of students using laptops and mobiles in class and as a result not being able to concentrate on what the teacher is saying. I've written on this topic many times and am worried that this sort of article will produce knee-jerk reactions like banning technology in class or give the tech-skeptics justification to remain in their shells.

by TylerIngram

The article tells of research showing that students can concentrate better if they are tech free and evidently some lecturers are banning computers and mobiles in class. I agree that the distractions of the net are sometimes simply too tempting and that it can be extremely frustrating trying to teach a group who are all staring into their screens. However we should not just believe that this behaviour is restricted to students. We older adults are just as bad in my opinion - just look around you the next time you attend a conference.

The trouble with banning technology is that it doesn't address the problem. If they weren't checking Facebook they'd be gazing out of the window, doodling, reading a newspaper. All the things we did during boring lectures in the seventies. People who aren't engaged are easily distracted and logically if the classes are stimulating the distractors will be less tempting.

However I realize that even the most engaging subject matter and enthusiastic teacher can have difficulties reaching students hiding behind their screens. The skill of paying attention needs to be discussed in class. When should you unplug the tech and concentrate on the people in this room right now. You don't ban technology but you need to discuss a framework for its use. As Howard Rheingold has written so often we need to reteach attention. We need to develop the skill to know when to switch off devices and concentrate and when to switch on. You go online to network, search for information and collaborate but when you're discussing or brainstorming in a face-to-face group you need to concentrate on that interaction. We all need to know when to go unplugged, both students and teachers.

Inspiration from Uruguay

2011-06-12T15:20:00.000+02:00

Uruguay is the first country in the world where all children in public primary schools have their own laptop. Yes you read correctly. Whilst so many much richer countries agonize over the pros and cons of technology in the classroom they have just gone out and done it. Of course this development has been built on the One laptop per child initiative and the inexpensive, no frills XO laptops but it still demands commitment from government level and a clear strategy; something that is sadly lacking in many richer countries.

The scheme has been a great success as the film below clearly shows. These children are learning 21st century skills whilst many children in Europe and North America are still learning as their parents did. Interestingly the film includes interviews with parents and teachers who have learnt from and been inspired by their children's success with their laptops. The children have helped the adults to become more digitally literate.

There are now plans to build on this success as can be seen in an article on the World Bank's blog EduTech, What's next for Plan Ceibal in Uruguay?. Now all public secondary schools will introduce one laptop per pupil and all schools will of course have internet connections.

According to the article the next ambitious stage in Uruguay includes the following measures:

the conversion of all secondary and technical school (and some primary school) science labs into 'digital labs', utilizing sensors and other 'probeware' devices
the piloting of new educational robotics curriculum
new online nationwide mathematics contest
the expansion of pilot efforts in online assessment and evaluation
a roll-out of Plan Ceibal into kindergarten classrooms on a voluntary basis (teachers submit plans to Ceibal for funding)
the regular refreshment/replacement of OLPC XO laptops already delivered
a new Plan Ceibal Digital Library, to include 100+ books and other educational materials (such as those from the Khan Academy), hosted on local school servers

Wouldn't it be nice if our educational decision-makers took a closer look at examples like this?

Head in the clouds

2011-06-10T18:04:00.001+02:00

The forecast for the next few years in the tech world is very cloudy. A few weeks ago saw Google announce the new Chromebook, a computer-like device that has a browser and precious little else in it. Since you can do just about everything in the cloud today what's the point of having all those applications in your computer? Goodbye computers and all the complicated maintenance they entail. If all your applications and storage are in the cloud you don't need to fetch updates, buy anti-virus protection, configure, clean and all the other routines you hate.

This week it's Apple's turn to grab the cloud computing limelight with the new iCloud concept. The idea here is to move all the apps on your Apple devices into the cloud and enable you to access everything from any device (as long as its an Apple device of course - that's the catch). Your e-mail, documents, photos, films and most importantly music will all be stored remotely instead of on one computer as today. If you make changes on one device they will apply to all devices making it irrelevant which one you use. You can start reading an e-book on your laptop and then continue reading on your iPad for example.

I get frustrated with the current situation where I have all my iTunes material on one older computer and can't work out how to move all the music to a newer computer. It's not easy and I cynically suspect that that was the intention. Also iTunes needs regular updates which tend to pop up when you least want them and take consideable time to download and install. To avoid all that hassle and to be able to access everything without all those syncing sessions at home would be heaven.

What does this mean for education however? Well everything really since it will accelerate the shift to cloud computing making all computer labs obsolete and forcing the IT departments to reinvent themselves. There's a good article on this on the blog Apps in Education called What iCloud means for Education - You can "iCloud it".

I really hope that the move into the cloud will make IT more user friendly. There's simply too much tech in today's computers for the average non-techie to cope with. Few people really know how to upgrade, install patches, check security, fix bugs etc and even fewer actually find such things interesting. If cloud computing lets us easily access services without having to mess around under the hood all the better. The only worry I have with this move is that the main players (Google, Apple) want us to subscribe to their walled garden. The iCloud solution is probably going to be very easy to use, secure and cool as long as you accept the limitaions. It may be that we have to sacrifice freedom for ease of use and convenience. I hope not but that's the way it generally goes in business.

by AJC1

The classroom syndrome

2011-06-09T20:56:00.001+02:00

Why do we keep on arranging meetings when we have much more engaging alternatives available via the net? Let's face it, an awful lot of meetings are extremely tedious and tend to be dominated by a handful of participants. Of course it's good to meet each other now and again but many people sit through a 2-3 hour meeting without saying more than a couple of sentences (although they may have a great deal to say if they got the chance). Notes may be taken during the meeting but are seldom shared and collaboration is very rare. Sadly, monologue is the most common form of communication.

by antoniofurno

This is the focus of an article by Andrew Marcinek on Edutopia, Stop meeting and start connecting and sharing. Instead of so many ineffective and time consuming meetings the author suggests using collaborative web tools like Google Docs to encourage everyone to contribute but not necessarily at the same time. Information can be shared on the common document and everyone is able to contribute when they can during the day. Those who would not have been able to attend a face-to-face meeting can now fully contribute.

"This type of meeting also allows the participants to work more productively under a deadline, and revisit points of interest along a timeline -- the document has a revision history option that allows users to look back through every revision made on the document. Finally, a shared document like this, that is open and transparent, allows all parties to continue sharing, growing, and reflecting."

Meetings are another example of what I'd like to call the classroom syndrome. Just as we simply cannot imagine learning taking place without some kind of classroom structure in place (physical or vitual) we have great difficulties in escaping from the tradition of having meetings. The technology is available to allow us to find more creative and rewarding ways of learning/meeting/teaching but we keep returning to the comfort of the traditional form. We use technology grudgingly to allow variations on the traditional theme instead of starting afresh and thinking "how can we work/learn more effectively using the new opportunities provided by technology?"

The education bubble

2011-06-06T22:28:00.001+02:00

Is higher education a bubble waiting to burst? That's the question asked by Trent Batson in his column on Campus Technology this week, Is higher education ready for the 'the education bubble?' With tuition fees ever rising and a growing mismatch between the education provided and the expectations of an increasingly global and digitized industry the question is whether higher education is worth the investment.

by Jeff Kubina

The trouble is that even if it is clear that the net is radically changing society, universities seem generally paralyzed, unable to recognize the changes taking place and deeply rooted in traditional concepts of learning and teaching. Batson is not confident that they are capable of changing:

"Can institutions that have invested so heavily in a guiding concept of learning transform themselves? Probably not. Institutions work to preserve the status quo; preserving the status quo is perhaps the main goal of any institution: After all, one fundamental purpose of “institutionalizing” anything is to make it permanent."

He is not suggesting that traditional four year campus education will disappear any time soon but alternative learning arenas will develop that will offer more flexible and more work-related options. The process of radical change in higher education has not even started since it entails a complete revision of every level of the institution. New technology can transform education just as it has transformed so many other aspects of society but it is not being allowed to because it forces institutions out of their comfort zones.

Another good article on a similar theme is by José Picardo, The case for online social networking in education. His post is more aimed at schools than universities but the message is similarly relevant:

"The internet – with its social networking and communication – provides us with a way to evolve teaching and learning to a level that better matches our 21st century students’ needs as well as their expectations – although it may be pretty standard for you, you can understand that a child born in the year 2000 might consider writing a letter a bit old-fashioned.
By putting the children first, we can then begin to imagine a new pedagogy in which teaching and learning are upside-down, focusing on the needs of the children, rather than those of the adults tasked with their schooling.
A child’s imagination is boundless. Just for a moment, put yourself in the shoes of a child and imagine. Imagine new possibilities.
And while you’re at it, keep reminding yourself that your job is not to teach, but rather to ensure learning happens."

Excellent articles both of them but, as always, they seldom reach the eyes of those who most need to read them.

Just ban it!

2011-06-02T18:25:00.002+02:00

The internet is a reflection of our society and reflects the whole spectrum of human activity from inspiring ideas and research to the worst depravity imaginable. The media tend to give publicity to the worst aspects of the net and as a result many people see it as a frightening arena; a place where identities are stolen, crimes committed and it is all too easy to lose control. It's not the sort of place you want your children to roam freely in. As a result many schools have strict firewalls that block social media services like Facebook and YouTube and ban the use of mobiles.

There certainly is a lot to be wary of and children (and adults) need to be careful and know how to avoid the threats that do exist. The trouble is that even if you ban, say, YouTube in school the kids can access whatever they want the minute they leave the building. Instead of taking the easy way out and just banning everything, why not help pupils to use the net responsibly, search more critically, find ways of filtering information and taking responsibility for their online presence in, say, Facebook?

That's the subject of a good post by Tom Barrett called Blocked for me, open for you. Schools in the UK (and no doubt most other countries) ban different websites and there's no consistency in this. One school can have a highly open and permissive attitude and a school just along the road may ban just about everything. Barrett has set up a site to highlight these inconsistencies by getting people to tick off which tools and sites are banned in every local authority in the country. That way you can wonder why YouTube is banned in one town and not in another.

Schools' attitudes to technology vary alarmingly from region to region and even neighboring schools can have completely different approaches. One school offers all pupils laptops, wifi, e-books and online course administration whereas another school is stil run as it was 20 years ago. This threatens to further accentuate the digital divide. After so many years of trying to create a school system where everyone has equal opportunities and equal access to knowledge we seem to be busy reversing the process.

As more and more teachers use social media as an integral part of their teaching and are trying out new ways to extend the pupils learning beyond the limits of the classroom, it's time to really discuss how open school should be. By creating a web survey highlighting the inconsistencies and arbitrary decisions made about social media Barrett hopes to stimulate a more mature discussion. Too often decisions about banning services are made over the teachers' heads and sometimes due to misconceptions about the supposed "dangers".

Photo: by RipperDoc

The Sirens' call

2011-05-30T21:49:00.000+02:00

We should stop complaining that teenagers can't pay attention to lessons and are forever distracted by digital devices. We adults are just as bad, if not worse. Just look around at meetings, conferences, coffee breaks and social occasions - we simply can't resist the digital sirens' alluring call. Every slight vibration or beep makes us check our mobiles just to see who has contacted us. How much of our attention is actually focused on the meeting we're physically present at?

by Quang Minh (YILKA)

I'm guilty too I freely admit. My constant stream of updates and comments is just too interesting to turn off sometimes and at the slightest sign of boredom in a meeting I'm in there checking the latest. However I am beginning to force myself to switch off the distractors more often to be able to get things done. It's easy to create the illusion of being really busy reading updates, retweeting, chatting and so on whilst the activity you really need to concentrate on lies underneath all other applications open on your desktop.

Despite being a devoted Twitter user I'm beginning to have doubts about having it on screen as a public back channel during conferences. As a speaker it's good to get some visual feedback from your audience that you're making some kind of impact - smiles, nods, puzzled expressions all help. Speakers have always been encouraged to make eye contact with the audience but what do you do when noone is watching you? Now you only see the tops of people's heads as they stare into their laptops and tablets and the only feedback is on the screen behind you. Some are even watching you via the webstream on their screen! Without that contact it gets pretty lonely on stage.

Of course we could abandon lectures altogether and in many cases it would be fully justified but I've seen excellent and highly entertaining and informative lectures where many in the audience were more interested in playing games or chatting with friends. I'm not sure they even give the speaker a chance. The tweet-flow on the big screen can certainly add to a presentation if it is done properly; moderated and the questions are forwarded to the presenter. However mostly the speaker is unaware of what's going on and participants enjoy the chance to show off their wit/irony on the big screen. At a recent conference for teachers that I attended, one presentation featured pupils from a school showing how they worked online with assignments. One pupil had been following the back channel and bravely commented on the audience's comment feed as "childish". Et tu Brute!

As additional reading on this theme have a look at an article in Big Think called Backchannel backlash. Thoughts along similar lines can be read on two Swedish blogs that I follow (see posts in Swedish at Lilla Gumman and Digital Kultur).

Textbooks - the end is nigh

2011-05-28T09:14:00.001+02:00

Textbooks account for a major post in every student's budget but not for much longer. I've written many times on this theme and can find very few arguments in favour of keeping the printed tomes. Textbooks are first in line to go digital. Printed textbooks are always out of date (especially technology and science), cannot be updated without printing a new edition once a year and are very expensive investments considering their short sell-by date. Online resources can be updated daily and are subject to constant peer review. Just try and change a Wikipedia article and see how long your change lasts before being erased if you aren't able to provide references.

by timuiuc

There's an excellent post on the need for course literature to go fully online by David Warlick, Six reasons why textbooks should stop being textbooks. He argues the case for open source textbooks online which can be updated regularly and scrutinized by the most demanding of reviewers - the teachers who use the resources. He gives six convincing arguments for this development that can be briefly summed up as follows:

Technology exists already
There's a wealth of content already freely available
Plenty expertise available (ie teachers)
Communities are already in place
Learners should be part of the process
It's about developing literacy into the digital domain

He's against the official approval stamp that authorities give traditionl textbooks since today's information society is too fluid to be able to decide that any particular book is approved for several years to come.

"Do textbooks, from the bookstore reflect today’s prevailing information environment? No! But do digital textbooks, that are stamped “Approved” by some government agency, reflect an increasingly dynamic information environment and rapidly changing world any better? I think not! Teachers should be collecting, evaluating, editing and assembling their own textbooks, because it requires them to practice and talk about the contemporary literacy skills of a digital and networked information landscape — in front of their learners."

Instead of publishers and authorities deciding what students shoul read the decision making is now delegated to the teachers and to an increasing extent the students and pupils. New literacy skills are essential for teachers and students to be able to collaborate on what reading (and other media) should be included in a course. This negotiation is a process that leads to a deeper understanding of the subject since all are involved in exploring the latest ideas and theories.

The potential of tools like OER Glue (mentioned in a previous post) points the way forward I think. Using freely available resources teachers and students can together collaborate on compiling course material and resources. The learning experience will be greatly enhanceddue to greater invilvement but before this can be realised we need a change in attitudes towards what we mean by education, teaching and learning. We need new attitudes towards collaboration and new literacies. That is the challenge facing education today. The future is waiting but how do we get there?

Connecting people

2011-05-26T15:40:00.002+02:00

The stats behind the rise and rise of Facebook are impressive and very good for wowing disbelievers at conferences and meetings. 600 million people have Facebook accounts and they spend an average of 700 billion minutes a month updating their profiles, chatting and sharing. It is now the default community for virtually the whole world (China is a noteable exception). The opposition has simply been blown out of the water and they march on unchallenged.

by Loren Sztajer

Since so many people are already in there, that's where discussions tend to happen and we increasingly combine work and leisure activities and contacts. It's easy to get swept away by the fun of Facebook and forget that they are after all a company who are making a lot of money from our identities. By getting virtually every website on the net to include like buttons after every article (2.5 million sites did this in the first year of the service) Facebook can gather astounding amounts of information about our lives, preferences, interests, friends and family and this information is extremely interesting for advertisers. Few people even bother to go through ther security settings on Facebook making it even easier to gather data. Furthermore, the problem that they keep tweaking the security settings without fully explaining what's going on makes it very hard for all but the most dedicated to make the necessary changes.

Can anyone challenge the might of Facebook any time soon? Can we have a more secure alternative that is run on more altruistic lines? Enter Altly, an embryo community that at present is trying to pitch the concept of a free alternative to FB. They aren't ready to launch yet but they invite you to reserve your identity in advance. Their blog provides the rationale behind the concept (The need for an alternative to Facebook).where they sum up their principles as follows:

Privacy is ULTIMATELY important.
We should know EXACTLY who can see what information about us.
Control of our information should be in OUR hands, and it should be EXTREMELY easy for us to control it.
WE should choose what information is stored, how long it is kept, and who it is available to.
Our digital life, our personal information is EXTREMELY valuable, and each of us should not only control who has access to it, but BENEFIT from it.
Advertisers should be part of our community, but should NOT have an unfair advantage over us.
All of our data should be OURS, and no one else’s. If we choose to leave our social network, we should be able to easily take ALL of our data with us, and COMPLETELY delete all data if we choose.
If other social networks should be developed, they should be able to interoperate with one another.

I agree with all the above and wish them luck but they've got a massive challenge in front of them.

Just for a little extra reading, have a look at a New York Times article on Facebook's plans for media sharing, Facebook is developing ways to share media.

All lies but who cares?

2011-05-22T11:41:00.001+02:00

by Caucas'

I can't help mentioning an intriguing new angle on net-dating. It's not a subject I write about but I saw an article in the New York Times (I'm not real but neither are you) about a service called Cloudgirlfriend.com. The idea is that you create a totally fabricated profile for yourself complete with celebrity photo and wait for other heavily disguised soulmates to make contact. Everyone is lying but what the hell?

Admittedly many profiles on regular dating sites are probably slightly economical with the truth so it's almost refreshing to see a service that admits freely that everything on it should be taken with a sackful of salt. The original idea was that the service could create Facebook accounts for your highly enhanced personality so that you could engage in your fantasy relationship in the midst of your regular FB life. However that fell through since Facebook was less than enthusiastic about being swamped in false profiles. Thank goodness for that.

However the idea of forming fantasy relationships online is not new. Virtual worlds like Second Life are full of avatars that bear little or no relation to their owners and when you meet people there you have no idea who you are really talking to. Many people manage to live their second lives and form relationships based on mutually agreed deception. I spent a lot of time in Second Life a few years ago and created 3 different avatars just to see what it was like to "be" someone else. I realized that I'm no good at role play and even if my alter egos were unlike me my personality shone through anyway. I stopped the deception and used an avatar that looked like me and had a similar name.

For many the opportunity for online roleplay can certainly be very valuable. Whether a real relationship can develop from one based on blatantly false identities is another matter.

Build your course with open resources

2011-05-21T16:00:00.001+02:00

I've just discovered a tool that seems to have enormous potential for more adventurous teachers who want to teach with open educational resources (OER). It's called OER Glue and it enables you to build a course around open content from a wide range of sources. The idea is that OER Glue provides a course structure similar to that of an LMS and you simply select the resources you need and "glue" them together. You don't need to embed or copy the resources you need, they stay on their original sites and you simply show them in their original setting. In this way, if a resource is updated, it is updated on your course and in that way you ensure that all resources are relevant. You can mix all kinds of resources: texts, video, audio and photos. OER Glue provides the framework for you to link the resources into a coherant course.

Could this be a way of bypassing the standard university LMS and creating a more dynamic course structure? Could this be a breakthrough in helping more teachers use OER more effectively? It certainly looks promising.

For a more detailed review of OER Glue read Trent Batson's article in Campus Technology, OER Glue: 'Use Open Education Resources Where They Are; Integrate With Everyone'.

Have a look at this introduction video.

Badges of learning

2011-05-16T14:13:00.000+02:00

We all learn new things every day. We learn by asking, watching, imitating, practicing, testing and thinking. In fact we learn much more outside formal education than inside it but we don't get any credit for this. What counts are the degrees and certificates you get for attending classes and passing formal exams. However increasing numbers are learning on the net through informal communities, watching TED-lectures, Khan Academy or iTunes U or getting involved in collaborative work designing new open source applications. How do we recognize lifelong learning?

Peer 2 Peer University, the collaborative learning initiative that already runs a wide range of online peer-driven courses, is examining the idea of badges that can be awarded for successful completion of courses. Together with Mozilla they have started the Open Badges project to create a structure for all sorts of adult education institutions and other organisations to award digital badges that can then be shown on your website, social media sites and CV. They can be awarded for completion of courses, demonstrated skills or for significant work in online projects.

All sorts of organisations could issue badges but one issue that will undoubtedly be raised is that the actual badges will be so easy to copy. How will they ensure that you really have deserved that badge on your profile? I would imagine that each badge will link to the issuing organisation who should quickly be able to confirm that you have indeed been awarded it.

P2PU is already piloting open badges in their School of Webcraft courses. By successfully completing course assignments participants can unlock various skills badges that show what they have achieved (see more about the P2PU badge scheme). Badges can be awarded by peers also participating on the course. The framework for tyhe open badge system is outlined more fully in a draft article called An open badge system framework.

This could lead to a whole new landscape in terms of how we demonstrate our skills to future employers. The formal system is not going to be swept away by this development but the new badges offer a way forward to recognizing people's real skills and should complement existing structures. Hopefully the formal system will see this as an opportunity and not a threat. For Open Badges to gain credibility it is vital that some more forward thinking higher education institutions join up with the project.

For more thoughts on this read article by Michael Sean Gallagher, Open Badges and Acknowledging Decentralized Activity in Learning

The computer is dead, long live the cloud!

2011-05-16T13:13:00.000+02:00

Our computers are going on a crash diet and could soon be ultra-thin. This video from Google could just be a major landmark in the history of IT. They are releasing a new concept in laptops, Chromebooks, and the revolutionary feature is that they do not need heavy programs, file managers and tons of extras like the standard laptop. Basically the Chromebook lets you access the net and that's it.

It's a logical step really since you can do just about everything you want in the cloud today, so why bother filling your hard drive with uneccessary flab? Without this heavy burden the Chromebook can start up almost immediately (the desktop I'm writing on now can take at least 5 minutes to get up and running). If everything is stored in the cloud you don't need to download anything and consequently there's no need to have virus protection. Irritating updates and patches will disappear since the version on the net will always be updated. When you can easily and cheaply subscribe to a massive cloud-based library of music/films/books/games why then go to the trouble of downloading copies? Of course people will always find ways of beating the system but this innovation could lead to the end of file sharing since there will be little point in it.

How long will it take before our trusty desktop computers and software-heavy laptops head the same way as the fat TV and CD-players? The tide could turn very quickly if the price is right. The only problem could be that the whole concept of cloud computing is still relatively unknown to the vast majority. It might however be easier to use than grappling with the extremely unpredictable and infuriating quirks of the average desktop.

What will this mean for education? It could make computing affordable for all since such thin terminals shouldn't costs anything like today's laptops. What does this mean for all the schools and universities that have just invested heavily in providing students with laptops and iPads?

Read Mashable's summary of this, Google explains life after the desktop.

E-books coming of age

2011-05-14T20:46:00.001+02:00

I have not been terribly interested in e-readers like Kindle because they are simply electronic books. They don't offer much more than the printed version and there isn't much more you can do with them apart from reading text. In addition they are in black and white with no photos or illustrations. There is simply few compelling reasons why I should buy such a limited device.

The iPad and all its competitors have really swept the e-readers away since they do so much more and can offer a reading experience that printed books can't deliver. E-books have to be different from print, they have to offer features you can't get in print and only then will people really start buying them.

He's a recent TED talk by Mike Matas showing a new type of interactive e-book that points the way forward.

Social art

2011-05-10T22:31:00.001+02:00

One of the advantages of today's social web is that you can get a constant stream of recommendations and tips from friends and applications that can sometimes lead you to discovering new books, music, films and interests. In the early days of the net we simply surfed, often aimlessly from one link to another and now and then you stumbled upon something really interesting that you didn't know existed.

Today we get recommendations based on profiles, previous purchases, friends and preferences. Amazon were one of the first to offer this and now you can't go far without a message telling you that if you liked A you might also like B, C and D. It's all highly mathematical of course, based on increasingly complex algorithms, but the aim is that the recommendations will eventually reach the level of serendipity - when you stumble upon something you didn't know you wanted but realize is exactly right. A future web 3.0 will allegedly know so much about our preferences and interests that it can serve us with serendipitous links.

Now the art world is going social with a new social art site called Artfinder . The concept is similar to other social applications; you are lead through a selection of paintings and asked to select your favourites. Artfinder will learn your preferences and then begin to suggest other works and artists that you might also like. The more you use the service the better the recommendations.

They can't cover the entire art world since many art galleries are not so keen to share their works on the net but Artfinder has signed up a representative selection from many famous galleries. The idea is to help beginners learn about different styles and schools of art and to build on their interest. Once you dip in you can soon get immersed and the recommendations keep coming.

It's a bit like Spotify for art and you can build up your own virtual collection, share with friends, discuss and collect. For that serendipitous effect there's even a shuffle button that offers a random selection of works.

Be prepared

2011-05-08T16:47:00.001+02:00

Is higher education losing touch with the demands of the 21st century workplace? Traditional hierarchical management structures are giving way to virtual teams, global project groups and a higher degree of independence and entrepreneurial enterprise. Companies need employees who know how to network, can quickly find relevant information and are completely at home in the increasingly digital business environment. Are universities preparing students for this?

The answer would appear to be no according to a new article in Times Higher Education by Cathy N. Davidson, So last century.Universities still prepar students for linear careers in hierarchical organisations as was appropriate last century. Once you had gained the academic foundation at university you joined an organisation and then progressed your way through the ranks until you were pensioned off at 65. Today's students are however likely to change career at least four times. The main lesson to learn, therefore, is the ability to quickly adapt and learn new skills on the fly. In the writer's opinion most universities fail to recognize these 21st century skills that are most likely to dominate employers' future wishlists:

"Think about the skills this environment requires. This end-to-end principle requires new sorting and attentional skills, collaborative skills, judgement and logical skills, synthesising and analytical abilities, critical and creative skills, qualitative and quantitative skills, all together, with few lines between them. These are sometimes called "21st-century literacies", a range of new interpersonal, synthesising, organising and communication skills that companies insist today's graduates lack."

This is not simply about using more technology, it's about changing the way we approach higher education. Think of how much time is spent by students learning the art of writing academic dissertations and articles. Certainly it is a process that requires discipline, logical thought and excellent language skills but how often do you have to write like this at work? In business such complex writing would seldom even be read. Short and succinct summaries highlighting critical agruments are much more common tasks at work, usually based on a wide and complex amount of background information. The ability to find relevant information, filter it and present convincing arguments from it are essential skills for the future.

As the article states so nicely in conclusion:

"My students live an extracurricular digital life that is as rich, varied and ever-changing as is the world of work that lies ahead of them. Sadly, in between their digital personal lives and the digital work life ahead stands the institution of education as stern and unyielding as Taylor with his stopwatch, clocking how long it takes to move a wheelbarrow of bricks from Point A to Point B. This has to change. The time is right, now, to rethink education for the world of work of the present, not for the past. Let's get started."

Photo: by 96dpi

The folding phone

2011-05-06T16:20:00.000+02:00

A BBC article heralds the arrival of the folding mobile smartphone, Flexible phone made from electronic paper to debut. Researchers from Human Media Lab at Queen's University, Canada and Arizona State University's Motivational Environments Research group have developed a smartphone on electronic paper that can be bent and folded. You simply fold the sheet into smartphone size and then open apps and flip through pages by bending and pressing the paper. The version shown in the demo below is of course rather unsexy but it's just a matter of time before communication devices can be sewn into clothes of kept folded up in your pocket.

Otherwise it's interesting how the whole concept of mobile technology has changed so radically in just a couple of years whereas the terminology has stood still. We still talk about them as phones even if fewer and fewer people ever use them for traditional voice telephony (especially so with teens). We need a new name for these mobile devices that gets us away from the phone concept. Maybe when the foldable versions hit the streets we'll find a new name.

Read the press release from Human Media Lab.

There is already an e in learning

2011-04-29T11:03:00.000+02:00

This week I've taken part in a meeting about quality in e-learning. This is a crucial field for the credibility of net-based education and despite the enormous range of online courses available from the world's universities and colleges there are still relatively few who have any consistent and recognized quality systems in place. Internationally acknowledged standards are essential so that e-learning can become a fully integrated part of the academic world.

by Leo Reynolds

However I wonder if partitioning off e-learning as a somehow separate field isn't self-defeating. The traditional approach to education with filled lecture halls, chalkboards, heavy course books and lots of paper and pencils is always viewed as the default. E-learning/flexible learning/net-based learning or whatever you want to call it is the upstart outsider always having to prove its worth. In a world where computers and net access have become largely ubiquitous and the vast majority of the population uses the net for communication, collaboration and creative work is there really still an argument for any type of education to be offline? How can you run a course for today's students that completely ignores the last 20 years of technical development and if you do how relevant is it for those students?

Instead of partitioning off e-learning as a curiosity we should be talking about measuring the quality of all education in the same way, assuming that the net is used for a great deal of the course material, communication and collaboration. Some may be more online than others but you will need very good arguments to claim that you can run a relevant course as it was run in the 1960s. Learning has already got the letter e in it; the prefix should be superfluous.

YouTube copyright school

2011-04-22T16:03:00.001+02:00

This short video is Google's attempt to inform in a clear and light-hearted way about copyright issues on YouTube. The message is clear and YouTube have some effective mechanisms in place for alerting copyright infringement. However much more than this film is required to encourage users to follow the rules.

Since YouTube makes it so easy to copy and embed videos it's no surprise that everyone does it. If a film is copyright then the owner should be able to disable the embed button, but as long as it is in place then people will embed! I'd like to see YouTube fully adopting Creative Commons, making it simple to label a video with the relevant CC license and having the attribution built into the embed code. If I embed a film here the full attribution should automatically come with it. As it is now I enmbed and hope for the best.

A search function in YouTube for CC material, as already exists on Flickr, would help those of us who do want to abide by the rules. The problem with copyright and Creative Commons is that it is so complicated to follow the rules and as a result few people do so. CC has to be fully embedded in all content and it should be easy to label works with the right license as well as simple to search for free-to-use content. If not then don't be surprised that no-one bothers.

Thanks to The Clever Sheep for alerting me to this. See his post, Copyright school.

Books in the cloud

2011-04-21T22:05:00.002+02:00

Bookshelves beware! After the success of streaming music services like Spotify and Last.fm the next logical step is a service which offers you unlimited e-books on the net for a modest monthly fee. So we welcome 24symbols into the digital arena. 24symbols is a social reading service, at present only in a beta version with a limited selection of titles but will no doubt grow in the next few months.

by uncafelitoalasonce

The business model is very familiar. The free version allows you to read books online but you are faced with regular adverts. If you want to lose the ads you have to pay a monthly subscription, starting at $9.99 for the basic option. Just like Spotify you don't download anything, you simply view your books on the web from any device you wish. You can access the book you're reading from any device anywhere and when you've read it you simply move on to another. You have no book collection, simply a list of titles you have borrowed.

It's an attractive deal and the publishing business is in for a very bumpy ride now. Unlimited net-based books would seem to me to be most attractive in two areas of publishing. Firstly the paperback market could well migrate to the cloud very quickly. As more people carry tablets and iPads with them on train or bus journeys those last minute detective novels you buy at the station will become downloads. Few people really want to keep their impulse-bought paperbacks anyway so a digital version can be read and discarded easily. If you don't like the book you just go back to the digital library and choose another.

The other attractive market for "streamed" books is course literature. Many books you buy for a course are of limited interest after the examination and just spend years untouched on the bookshelf. In addition, many course books have a very short sell-by date, especially technology books, and simply having access to these books for the duration of the course will be appreciated by most students.

This type of service could bring many benefits. Old and "out of print" titles could remain in circulation since there is no logic in withdrawing them. In this way a vast number of interesting books could be revived. New books could be published much more cheaply and we could see a flood of new literature and an arena for young authors. On the other hand we heard similar arguments when they introduced commercial radio and TV. The flip side is that we simply get a "greatest hits" selection and the new talent hasn't a chance of getting in.

However I don't see printed books disappearing anytime soon. Here the publishing business differs from music. Music has changed format regularly over the years and we are more willing to accept the changes. Books have been around in their present form for a few hundred years and this is the first change of format since the printing press appeared. The book is more culturally entrenched than the LP or cassette and will take a lot longer to replace. This change won't happen overnight but it's already under way.

Learn, unlearn and relearn

2011-04-17T21:56:00.000+02:00

I've just found an excellent summary of the principles of networked learning and connectivism by Debbie Kroeker as part of the open course (MOOC) Connectivism and Connected Knowledge 2011. It's nicely summed up by this quote from Alvin Toffler:
"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn."

Thoughts on Connectivism from Debbie Kroeker on Vimeo.

Changing behaviour through virtual experience

2011-04-17T21:12:00.001+02:00

There's still a great degree of skepticism about the value of virtual worlds in education but there's plenty of activity going on and valuable experience being gained. At Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab they've carried out an interesting piece of research on how virtual worlds can be used to bring about changes in attitude in ways that cannot be duplicated by more traditional communication.

This particular experiment was about people's attitudes to the environmental impact of paper use. One group was given written descriptions of the effects our paper consumption have on our forests and how non-recycled paper leads to deforestation. Another group went into a virtual world and cut down trees with a virtual chainsaw. Despite the graphic details and convincing rhetoric of the written accounts the groups who simply read about the problem did not change their paper consumption after the experiment whereas those who had been in the virtual world really did change their behaviour afterwards.

The research was not about paper consumption or deforestation but about how virtual experiences can have a real effect on our behaviour. This is not the first example of such research but it shows that virtual and augmented reality will be increasingly used for simulations and training as an effective behaviour reinforcer and in many cases will enable us to simulate experiences that would be impossible or extremely costly to carry out for real. Watch the video below for a report on the Stanford experiment and read the article from Stanford Report, New virtual reality research – and a new lab – at Stanford.

Learning through digital media

2011-04-11T22:20:00.000+02:00

There are countless sites with learning resources and tips on how to use technology in education but what is often lacking is more academic analysis and reflection. I've just discovered a fascinating collection of peer-reviewed essays on educational technology called Learning through digital media which manages to combine practical examples of how to use web-based tools and applications with thoughtful reflection. Recommended for my less convinced academic colleagues.

Read, for example the introductory article, Introduction: Learning Through Digital Media by Trebor Scholz.

Locked away

2011-04-08T07:51:00.000+02:00

It is a strange paradox in the academic world that research that is often funded by public money and that should be of interest to many is then only accessible to a privileged few. The main objective of most researchers is publication in one of the major scientific journals and, of course, this is what really counts in your CV when you're aiming for higher positions. However these journals command hefty subscription fees and university libraries devote a large part of their budgets to journal subscriptions. So students and staff can read the research papers but they are essentially out of the reach of the general public. This immediately places a barrier between the researcher and the general public. Shouldn't research results be freely accessible for all?

This is the subject of an editorial article in The Guardian entitled In praise of ... academic wikipedians which examines the reluctance of academics to seriously get involved in more open publication. The scientific journals have a long established business model and one that clearly works and it is not surprising that they have not been so interested in open access. As the articles states:

"While the stated aim of academic journals is disseminating ideas, they throw barbed wire around themselves and keep the interested public out."

The principle of Open Access (research being freely accessible on the net in fulltext) has become relatively widespread but many journals have been reluctant to allow parallell publishig on open sites. The vital factor here is status. Publication in open access journals doesn't quite have the same impact as publication in the top journals and it's going to take time to change this entrenched pecking order.

But what about Wikipedia, the most comprehensive reference work ever compiled and the default source for millions every day? The article wonders why so few academics are intrested in contributing. Wikipedia is still generally frowned upon as an academic source but the challenge from Wikipedia is that if you don't trust what you read why not help us improve the information? Right now the Wikipedia Foundation Research Committee are carrying out a survey, Expert barriers to Wikipedia, to find out why there is so little academic involvement (read more in another article Wikipedia wants more contributions from academics). Since Wikipedia is often the first reference point for so many people (students, journalists, general public) it would make sense for the universitiesto get involved and make sure the information is comprehensive and trustworthy.

Once again the problem is status. Contributing to Wikipedia gives almost zero status on an academic CV and as a result there is no reason that faculty should devote hours to that rather than concentrating on work that gives results. Of course there are plenty of pioneers who believe in the principles of open publication and collaborative work but they are still a tiny minority and the mainstream faculty is still highly skeptical. Who can tip the balance?