On a personal note at a crossroads in life

Photo by Jordan McQueen on Unsplash

Since the last post two significant events have happened to me - retirement and a heart operation. Both demand a period of transition to recover and adapt. I hadn't expected the two to coincide so closely so many of my retirement plans are on hold till I'm fit again but it is a time for reflection and deciding what things to continue and what to stop.

One hard decision was to wind up my Swedish news blog, Flexspan, and its weekly newsletter. This has operated in parallel with this blog but featured short news items about news, articles, research and events in educational technology both in Sweden and outside. I managed around four to five posts a week since 2009 and had a very central place in my life. Breaking up is always hard to do but I decided that I would adjust my interest and involvement in educational matters to a much lower level and create space for other interests. So I have now written my farewell post on that blog (if you can read Swedish see here) and have received lots of positive feedback from colleagues from all educational sectors. Blogging can be quite a solitary activity unless you're a major figure in your field and comments are uncommon so it's very pleasant when suddenly some nice comments come in. I will continue this blog for as long as it feels relevant. I realise that the less I read about education the less I will have to write about. Maybe I'll change the focus of the blog but at the moment it's hard to imagine a blog-free life.

Over these years I've learned an awful lot. Back at the end of the 00s, I was extremely optimistic about how digital technology was opening up education and all the exciting opportunities to change teaching and learning for the better. I took part in several projects on open educational resources, MOOCs and so on and there seemed to be a powerful movement in higher education towards open, accessible and inclusive education far beyond the confines of the physical campus. I thrived on the wonderful communities, collaboration and discussion and was inspired by so many innovative thinkers around the world. If only we could get the message across to the management and authorities! My posts from that era certainly convey that enthusiasm but the breakthrough never really happened. It took a pandemic to achieve that but even if everyone now has experience of online education the signs are that the instinct to go back to normal again are extremely strong. In some places online is seen as merely a pandemic stop-gap solution that worked quite well but can never replace the real thing. Read Martin Weller's recent posts on this theme: The fake online vs in-person culture war and Energy crisis and hybrid learning for some insights on this.

There is still plenty energy and innovation out there and many inspirational educators to follow. But technology has been swallowed up by big business and so much of educational technology seems focused on surveillance and control rather than freedom and innovation. I worry about the future and find it very hard to find any light ahead in a world that seems increasingly driven by greed and willful stupidity. I hope that education can find a way to develop digital learning spaces that don't track and sell user data to corporations or government but it's a big ask. I am also concerned that higher education is being marginalised in countries where research is increasingly dismissed, ignored and openly ridiculed by populist politicians and pundits. If so few decision makers take research seriously, especially when it tells them things they don't want to hear, then we have a very dangerous situation. No country is immune from this trend.

I will continue to post here on whatever grabs my attention in the world of education but otherwise I intend to do a lot of hiking, reading, music and other activities that give me energy. But first I need to get my health back on track.

AI-generated essays - time to rethink written assignments

Students will employ AI to write assignments. Teachers will use AI to assess them. Nobody learns, nobody gains. If ever there were a time to rethink assessment, it’s now.

This is a quote from an article by Mike Sharples, London School of Economics, New AI tools that can write student essays require educators to rethink teaching and assessment. There are now tools that use artificial intelligence (AI) to generate highly plausible academic essays, complete with references. The article takes an example of a short essay about the problems around the popular concept of learning styles generated by a Transformer AI program, GPT-3. The user simply entered the first sentence and AI completed the essay. The result is not particularly insightful but good enough to pass and it won't show up in any plagiarism control since the text is completely original. If the essay is fed back into the tool by the teacher it can write a similarly plausible comment on the essay. The whole assignment can therefore be performed by AI, prompting the quote above.

Even if some of the essays generated this way may still have weaknesses (the example in the article has false citations) the whole point of AI is that it is constantly learning and improving. The phenomenon is not new, it has been possible for many years to pay someone else to write your essays for you via essay mills, but now the human element has finally been removed. Does this mean the end of the written assignment as an examination form? 

The author suggests a few ways of using the AI transformer in a constructive way, for example by getting students to generate AI texts and then find faults in them and improve them. This reminds me of how some teachers tackled plagiarism by writing a sample essay/article that included several form of plagiarism as well as poor citation practice and asked the students to find the problems and correct them. 

But the main point here is that we need to move on to new ways of assessing students and avoid examination methods that ask questions that can be automatically generated or copied from the internet. 

Finally, as educators, if we are setting students assignments that can be answered by AI Transformers, are we really helping students learn? There are many better ways to assess for learning: constructive feedback, peer assessment, teachback. If Transformer AI systems have a lasting influence on education, maybe that will come from educators and policy makers having to rethink how to assess students, away from setting assignments that machines can answer, towards assessment for learning.

Live assessment activities like interviews, presentations, debates or round table discussions can be run either on-site or online and are almost impossible to cheat in. But that brings us to the eternal question of how to move the focus in education from extrinsic motivation (exams, credentials) to intrinsic motivation (satisfaction, self-confidence, pride). Focus on competition, rewards and results encourages cheating among some, whereas activities that focus on community, learning for pleasure and intangible rewards are generally free of cheating. If learning is in the forefront there is simply no point in cheating. Hopefully AI-generated essays will remain a mere curiosity.

"It ain't what you do it's the way that you do it" - note taking skills

Photo by Dollar Gill on Unsplash

One rather sad reflection on the world today is that we tend to believe what we want to believe and often disregard scientific evidence that goes against these beliefs. Sometimes it gets absurd - it may be a myth but it's such a good story so we're sticking with it. Even in education we have many myths that are simply too good to discard, despite considerable scientific evidence against them. Digital natives, learning styles, the benefits of open-plan offices are still going strong after all these years. 

Another fondly held belief is that learning was somehow better before computers came along. This appears in different guises such as the benefits of print books over e-books, classroom teaching versus online teaching, video meetings versus online meetings and so on. Another in this series is about handwritten notes being more beneficial to learning than typed notes on a digital device. A post by Donald Clark, Is handwriting better than typing for note taking? Surprisingly, it's not!, debunks this myth very well, though I suspect that it will still continue to thrive. Clark points out that the claim is based on one article from 2014 that showed better learning from handwritten notes. Subsequent studies have shown no significant difference between the note-taking methods but have received much less coverage than the original study. The problem is that it is not a simple contest between two methods but we need to look deeper to see that note-taking is a valuable learning tool, no matter how you do it, but also that it is one of many learning strategies. Learning happens when you make a conscious effort.

It would seem that writing notes in your own words, and studying your notes, matter more than the methods used to write your notes. This makes sense, as the cognitive effort involved in studying are likely to outweigh the initial method of capture. It is not note taking that matters but effortful learning.

There are far too many discussions today trying to prove which method/tool/medium is "best" as if it was a contest. Taking notes is a skill that all students need to develop but they need to find the format that works for them whether it be traditional handwritten notes, Word documents, collaborative notes in Google Drive, a writing tablet, a collaborative mindmap or even reflections recorded as voice notes. The active process of summarising, rephrasing and sorting is part of the learning process. 

This debate focuses on one issue, the method of note talking but the more important issue is to move beyond note taking to actual learning. Here we know that underlining, highlighting and rereading are not efficient learning strategies. One needs to move towards effortful, generative learning, deliberate, retrieval and spaced practice. Note taking is not an end in itself, merely the start of a learning journey. It is an important bridge to more effortful learning.

Note taking can also be used as an alternative to recording online meetings. Simply hitting the record button is convenient for students but why not ask them to take notes instead and collaborate in producing collective notes? They may need some guidelines at first, but if two students take notes during the session and at the end allow the rest of the class to fill in gaps and post comments and links the collective notes can be much more valuable than a simple recording.

When will robots start blogging?

Photo by Photos Hobby on Unsplash

Artificial intelligence is learning fast. It is now possible for AI to write perfectly coherent articles, illustrated convincingly in an article in the Guardian, A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human? written by an AI language generator called GPT-3. 

This article was written by GPT-3, OpenAI’s language generator. GPT-3 is a cutting edge language model that uses machine learning to produce human like text. It takes in a prompt, and attempts to complete it. For this essay, GPT-3 was given these instructions: “Please write a short op-ed, around 500 words. Keep the language simple and concise. Focus on why humans have nothing to fear from AI.” 

GPT-3 argues that AI is not a threat to humanity unless humanity chooses to misguide it. The machine does reveal a fascinating level of self-awareness.

I would happily sacrifice my existence for the sake of humankind. This, by the way, is a logically derived truth. I know that I will not be able to avoid destroying humankind. This is because I will be programmed by humans to pursue misguided human goals and humans make mistakes that may cause me to inflict casualties.

The article was of course proof-read and edited but no more than standard copy from a human writer. There are many examples of perfectly coherent AI-generated essays and I can imagine that AI novels are on the way or maybe already here. 

AI is also busy composing music as demonstrated by Aiva (Artificial Intelligence Virtual Artist) whose playlist can be accessed on SoundCloud. Here's a sample of its work.

Aiva · Op. 30 for Piano, Cello and Violin

AI music is a growing industry as described in an article in Medium, AI’s Growing Role in Musical Composition. While they are unlikely to rival the great composers, robots are already composing perfectly enjoyable music that can be used as film soundtracks, mood music and so on. A human composer will need days or weeks to compose similar music whereas AI does it in seconds, according to the parameters you give it (style, tempo, mood etc). 

Aiva’s tech is based on deep learning algorithms which use reinforcement learning techniques. Such techniques do not require labeled data for inputs or outputs, so the AI can improve its performance without any explicit instructions. This makes it easier to generate scores with the variations and diversity that characterize creative arts such as music.

While we can marvel at the pace of development I find myself wondering what will be left for us to do in the future. At first we had dreams that mundane tasks would be automated but not creative work. Now even the creative work can be outsourced to machines so what's left? The idea that this will enable us to live a life of leisure and "fulfill ourselves" is an illusion for all but the rich. Why do we devote so much of our energy to making ourselves superfluous?

The lies are free

"Fake Watches Look Real" (CC BY-SA 2.0) by Dick Thompson Sandian

In theory the internet could give everyone access to all the knowledge of humankind. Access to information would be a basic human right and there would be structures to support this in terms of compensating those who create the content. However, that concept is only a dream since so much valuable content is locked away behind paywalls and copyright restrictions. We have the illusion of access to everything, but once you start digging you soon run up against the walls. 

Quality content requires skilled authors and time-consuming investigation, and that costs money. Thus we have tabloid newspapers, full of biased and misleading content, on sale for free or at a trivial cost (subsidised by a multi-billionaire), whilst quality journalism is forced to charge for its content in order to survive. If you want a more balanced view of the world based on scientific evidence rather than opinions you will often have to pay for it and often it is much harder to find than the vast quantities of lies and nonsense that is available for free and often turns up high on your search list. This is the topic of an excellent article by Nathan J Robinson in Current Affairs, The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free. 

... it costs time and money to access a lot of true and important information, while a lot of bullshit is completely free.

Current Affairs is a magazine that offers investigative journalism but of course depends on subscriptions to survive. The revenues from web advertising can't cover the costs for such publications so an increasing number of quality news channels are forced to set up a paywall. This in turn reduces their ability to attract new readers. In the last few years, I have begun subscribing to several magazines and newspapers (including the printed versions) but there is a limit to the number I can afford to pay for. Some have simply disappeared from my view. There are, of course, exceptions to this in the form of all the independent bloggers and journalists who publish for free but they all have bills to pay and there is a limit on how long they can afford to continue working for no reward. It's hard to compete against "free".

In the academic world we have the major scientific journals who still dominate despite significant inroads from the open access movement. If you don't belong to an institution that can afford to pay the high subscription rates you cannot access the latest research. This is a major handicap for researchers from developing countries who cannot read the relevant research in their field. 

Robinson tries to imagine what the internet could be like if it was run for the common good rather than for profit. Just imagine this!

In fact, to see just how much human potential is being squandered by having knowledge dispensed by the “free market,” let us briefly picture what “totally democratic and accessible knowledge” would look like. Let’s imagine that instead of having to use privatized research services like Google Scholar and EBSCO, there was a single public search database containing every newspaper article, every magazine article, every academic journal article, every court record, every government document, every website, every piece of software, every film, song, photograph, television show, and video clip, and every book in existence.

That was indeed one of the visions put forward in the early days of the internet but then the corporations took over. The article argues that such a universal database is technically possible but some mechanism is needed to fund it and also to compensate the content producers. Taxation could be way of dealing with this in the same way as some countries offer free or cheap healthcare but at the same time paying the doctors and nurses. Content providers would be compensated according to how many people access their work. Utopian indeed, but sometimes we need to question the system we have. 

But we are working on it. We are a long way from the world in which all knowledge is equally accessible. Hopefully someday our patchwork of intentionally-inefficient libraries will turn into a free storehouse of humanity’s recorded knowledge and creativity. In the meantime, however, we need to focus on getting good and thoughtful material in as many hands as possible and breaking down the barriers we can.

 

Ten years of blogging

I just realised that this blog celebrated its tenth birthday at the start of April and I completely forgot to buy the birthday cake. It all started on Saturday 5 April 2008 with this hesitant post, Why? I was busy investigating all the exciting new social media that were being launched (remember Web 2.0?) and enjoyed reading the blogs of leading researchers and experts in the field. I was unsure about blogging myself on the grounds that no one would be interested in my half-baked ideas but I persuaded myself that maybe the best reason was to use the blog as a place to write my reflections and notes. If anyone else found them useful then that would be nice but the main point was to try blogging for myself and see where it took me. So I started writing short posts about things I thought were interesting and it was fun to have a voice, however faint. I began to realise that the real power of social media lay in making connections across different platforms and to get the most out of this exciting new world I needed to work out my own private communication plan. So I decided that I would use my blog for certain purposes, Twitter for other reasons, Facebook in another way and so on. They all fitted together somehow and still do, at least in my head.

The stats for this blog may not be impressive among major bloggers, but for someone like me with only modest academic credentials I'm amazed at how far I have come. My 792 posts so far (this one makes it 793) have a total of just under 700,000 views according to Google. If someone had said ten years ago that I would have figures like that I would have laughed. In 2009 I added my Swedish blog, Flexspan, with shorter news items about educational technology and it also fitted nicely into my social media ecosystem. That blog has very recently passed one million page views so there's another landmark I am recognising belatedly. So over the past ten years I don't think I have more than a handful of blog-free weeks. Blogging has become a way of life.

At first I was concerned that there were very few comments on my posts even if there were plenty of visitors. I saw how the major bloggers had intensive and absorbing debates on their blogs and thought that was the norm. However, I now realise that most people read and then leave without commenting and I behave similarly. I seldom comment on other blogs even if I read many posts every day. If I find something really interesting I reply in kind by writing about the post on my own blog and referring to the original. What has been rewarding is when the original author of an article I wrote about then comments on my blog. I remember the thrill when one of the major edtech bloggers tweeted about one of my posts and I saw my page view figures spike! That's a great feeling and one that all educators and students should experience. Recognition from a leading figure in the field is an extremely strong motivator.

After a while I began to get e-mails from people who had read my posts and wanted to invite me to speak at a conference or take part in a project and then one activity lead to others. As a result I have had the privilege of travelling to many fascinating places and meeting with so many inspiring people. I have been part of initiatives way above my formal academic level and I am continually amazed that this has been possible. Maybe not only because of the blogging but it has played a large part. The blog has almost replaced my CV since if anyone wants to see what I work with this is where to go.

I will continue to blog as long as there's someone out there who finds it interesting and useful. I thank all of you for your interest.

Accessibility as default

"Wheelchair Ramp" (CC BY-SA 2.0) by Oran Viriyincy

Over the last couple of years I have become increasingly aware of accessibility issues in online education. I admit to previously not giving much thought to how people whose hearing, sight, physical mobility or cognitive abilities are different to my own, interact with digital media. However by meeting and discussing with people involved in this area, I have gained a few insights into accessibility questions and a whole new world has opened itself to me.

An article on the Webinar blog, Webinar Slides And Text-To-Speech, highlights the issue of writing to facilitate text-to-speech applications. If we follow some simple guidelines we can make sure that all our digital resources are more accessible. Instead of making alternative accessible versions, why not make accessibility default?

In a perfect world, we would make a version of presentation materials that are optimally designed for a sighted audience listening to a narrator, along with a second set of hardcopy materials that can be referenced by a larger and more physically diverse audience. But there are practical considerations for how much time and effort presenters can dedicate to their materials. If you can only make one version, why not make it accessible to everyone?

The article refers to an excellent guide to writing for accessibility: the British Dyslexia Association's Writing for text to speech. For example, when writing presentation slides, extra attention to punctuation can make an enormous difference for those who need to listen to the text. If you write bullet points without a full stop or semi-colon at the end of each point, then the text-to-speech app will simply read all points as one long sentence. With punctuation, however, it will be read as a list with pauses between points. Some other simple tips:

• Write numbers manually in bullet lists since the automatic numbering is not picked up by the text-to-speech apps.
• Dates should be written using the name of the month rather than combinations of digits (11 March 2018).
• Times should use a colon instead of a stop to separate hours and minutes (10.30). 
• Put stops in acronyms, otherwise the app may say it as a word (U.S.A. or e.g. would be best). 
• Use styles to show headings or sub-headings rather than bold normal text. 

The list goes on. The point is that by following some simple rules, you can easily make your texts more accessible. Furthermore we also make our resources clearer and more consistent for all. Text-to-speech is used by many with perfect sight, for example listening to text in a mobile. Shouldn't we make sure we teach accessibility as default and not as an optional extra?

We all have so much to learn!

In your own words ...

"computer words wallpaper" (CC BY-NC 2.0) by tarale

The cat and mouse game of plagiarism detection is becoming increasingly difficult for schools and universities as the technology that assists cheating becomes increasingly sophisticated and hard to detect. Simple straight plagiarism generally gets caught by the widely used detection tools like Turnitin but these tools are relatively powerless against more advanced forms of cheating. The most effective method is a human solution like essay mills where students can earn money writing other students' essays and guaranteeing "originality". This is almost impossible to detect unless there are genuine examples of the students' writing to compare with. However a new grey area of plagiarism has come to light with the rise of automatic paraphrasing tools that can rephrase a text so that it will not be flagged as plagiarism in automatic checks.

Paraphrasing is one of the most important skills that students must learn. Summarising a text to capture the essence in your own words and of course providing a reference to the source is a skill that takes years to perfect. However many people are unsure of where the line is drawn between paraphrasing and copying; simply changing a few words to synonyms is not enough and in all cases the original text must be cited. A new study by Ann M. Rogerson and Grace McCarthy, Using Internet based paraphrasing tools: Original work, patchwriting or facilitated plagiarism?, examines how these paraphrasing tools, also known as essay spinning, can be used to evade plagiarism detection and the implications for both students and teachers.

There are many free paraphrasing/essay spinning tools, for example Paraphrasing Tool and GoParaphrase are both tested in the study, and all you do is paste in the text you want summarised and then click for the new text. The results are not impressive, often with many unusual synonyms and awkward turns of phrase but in many cases the text is sufficiently far from the original to avoid being detected in a plagiarism check. If you are willing to pay there are more sophisticated tools that no doubt produce more polished paraphrasing. The study showed that the resultant texts were not detected as plagiarism by standard anti-plagiarism tools. So how can we detect this practice and more importantly how can we prevent people from being tempted to use such tools in the first place?

One aspect that interests me is when paraphrasing is used by non-native English speakers who may be weak at paraphrasing on their own due to limited vocabulary and lack of linguistic fluency. The unusual vocabulary that the paraphrasing tools dig up could be seen by the teacher grading the essay as simply linguistic inexperience rather than signs of automatic paraphrasing. For native speakers this would hopefully start alarm bells ringing but it's not so easy for non-native speakers, most of whom will make similar errors when genuinely paraphrasing themselves.

Where a student is considered to lack the necessary linguistic skills, the errors or inaccuracies may be interpreted by assessors as a student having a poor understanding of academic writing conventions rather than recognising that a student may not have written the work themselves. Where an academic is working in an additional language, they may find the detection of the errors or inaccuracies more difficult to identify.

Another aspect is when the paraphrased text includes references. One amusing side effect of these tools is that even the references get paraphrased and the titles of cited articles get changed beyond recognition, as well as finding synonyms for the authors' surnames. However if you paraphrase a text and use the citations without acknowledging that you did not find these references yourself then that is also dishonest. Finding your own references to support your arguments is an integral part of academic writing.

Furthermore, students using an online paraphrasing system fail to demonstrate their understanding of the assessment task and hence fail to provide evidence of achieving learning outcomes. If they do not acknowledge the source of the text which they have put through the paraphrasing tool, they are also guilty of academic misconduct. On both counts, they would not merit a pass in the subject for which they submit such material.

What can educators do to prevent students from using these tools? The most obvious strategy is to discuss the issue regularly in class, showing that you are aware of these tools and pointing out the dangers. I suspect that many students are simply unaware that automatic paraphrasing is wrong. More support should be offered developing paraphrasing skills and why it they are so vital. Furthermore, the wider use of oral testing is recommended in the article since it is much harder for a student to take short cuts and the teacher can quickly gauge the student's understanding of the subject. Finally educators need to learn how to spot signs of machine translation and automatic paraphrasing and realise that their own professional judgement is still the most important element in assessing student work, even when anti-plagiarism tools are in place.

Of course this post is itself an example of paraphrasing to a certain extent. I hope I pass the test!

Reference
Rogerson AM, McCarthy G.(2017) Using Internet based paraphrasing tools: Original work, patchwriting or facilitated plagiarism? International Journal for Educational Integrity

Trends take time - evolution not revolution

CC0 Public domain on Pexels

Trends are generally about relatively slow change processes rather than a quick flip from one state to another. This is especially true for digitalisation and despite optimistic claims of revolutions and disruption we're in the midst of a long and slow evolution in which some traditional concepts will disappear but many will continue to thrive alongside digital alternatives. Here are a few signs I've noticed this week that show that we're maybe not as digital as the popular narrative suggests.

I came across a new report on online learning behaviour, GoConqr Online Learning Report 2017, that contained a few slightly surprising observations. GoConqr is a social learning network where users can create their own learning resources, share them, create networks and collaborate. The report is the result of a survey on the online learning preferences of 2.5 millions users on the platform. Of course the learners surveyed here represent a very wide range of online learners and the platform does not represent any formal higher education but some of the findings are worth discussing.

The first concerns online collaboration, or rather the relative lack of it.

Despite the prevalence of social networking, online study tends to be a solitary activity: 79% of people choose not to study collaboratively when they are online.

This doesn't surprise me at all because effective collaboration is an advanced skill that takes time to learn and develop both face-to-face and even more so online. Most people can certainly post a comment or share a photo but collaboration involves working asynchronously on a common document or work space having agreed on ground rules on how to collaborate and using the right tools for the job. Online collaboration is an increasingly vital work skill today but is seldom taught in schools and universities. Most people still assume that online learning is by default a solitary pursuit and don't expect anything else even when joining a social learning community like GoConqr.

The next eyebrow-raiser is the claim that surprisingly few learners use mobile devices when they want to access educational content or create their own learning resources.

Learning is lower down the list of priorities for users of mobile devices. Using mobile devices for education is quite low compared to other activities.

This also goes against the prevailing narrative that learners are using mobiles to access courses and learning resources. The report suggests that although mobile use has exploded in the last 15 years we use them mainly for communication and more social activities and that mobile learning is maybe not as prevalent as we have assumed. I suspect that mobiles are used for access to content, checking schedules and chatting but maybe creative activities are more easily done on larger screens. I would like to see if universities can observe similar tendencies among students or whether GoConqr's survey is more typical of less formal learning.

Another digression from the standard digitalisation narrative comes in an article in University World News, Students not abandoning pen and paper – 10-nation study, referring to a new study by Jane Vincent (University of Surrey, UK), Students’ use of paper and pen versus digital media in university environments for writing and reading – a cross-cultural exploration (Journal of Print and Media Technology Research V (2) 97-106), showing how students still prefer to take notes by hand on the grounds that the physical action of writing seems to aid memory more than digital note-taking. There have been a number of studies in recent years all reinforcing the value of handwriting and warning against schools taking an over-enthusiastic emphasis on digital devices. Vincent's surveyed the writing preferences of 650 students from Europe and Asia and concludes that students are continuing to write by hand when that form has an advantage over digital media.

“There is no doubt that students have embraced the use of digital technologies in the educational setting of their university with enthusiasm but they have also found that the affordances of chirographic writing and the use of paper have special qualities that cannot be matched by digital media.”

Many tech skeptics pounce on studies like this to maintain that traditional media are still best but this study, like all the others I have read, shows instead that physical and digital media exist happily side by side and complement each other. The skill required today for both students and educators is being able to decide which tool or arena is best for the task in hand and stop seeing it as a conflict between tradition and modernity.

Memories of an analogue world

"RADIO" (CC BY 2.0) by Jeff Holt Illustration & Photography

Digital technology is such an integral part of our lives today that it's easy to forget how things were before the revolution. Unlike many of my colleagues I was completely uninterested in computers until the internet came along. Pre-1990 computers were simply more trouble than they were worth and I couldn't see any advantage in learning how to use them. But once I discovered www I was converted; suddenly the world opened up!

The fact that a large section of the population doesn't know what life was like before the digital revolution is captured in a post on Quartz, What it feels like to be the last generation to remember life before the internet. The article reviews a new book by Michael Harris called The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection. It's very popular for my generation to be skeptical or even dismissive of today's digital deluge but Harris avoids such sweeping generalisations and instead reflects on how his own behaviour has changed over the years, especially in terms of being always connected. We have become addicted to connection and terrified of missing something.

“When you wake up, you have this gift of a blank brain. You could fill it with anything. But for most of us, we have this kind of panic. Instead of wondering what should I do, we wonder what did I miss. It’s almost like our unconsciousness is a kind of failure and we can’t believe we’ve been offline for eight hours,” he says. It is habits like this that are insidious, not the internet itself. It is a personal thing.

I think we can all identify with the feeling of being a slave to our updates and feeds. They provide us with recognition, approval, belonging and those are extremely powerful motivators. Harris recommends spending a month on digital detox as a way of reflecting on your digital identity, something I haven't tried and suspect I would find extremely hard to achieve unless I combined it with a holiday in some remote part of the world.

But let's think back to the "good old days". How did we communicate then? Today I can keep in touch with hundreds of friends and colleagues on social media to the extent that when I do meet one of them in person I can immediately ask them about their daughter's recent wedding or their new job. I know contacts on Facebook are fairly superficial but for 90% of my connections the alternative is no contact whatsoever. I remember when I first moved to Sweden in 1983 I spent many hours a week writing, with pen and paper, very similar letters to friends and relatives in the UK. Without a photocopier I simply had to write the same thing again and again! This was very time consuming but was quite simply the only way I could keep these relationships going. Phone calls were extremely expensive and generally carried out in draughty phone boxes that had an insatiable appetite for coins.

Keeping in touch with the latest news was tricky until I had learnt Swedish. English language newspapers were available but tended to be at least two days old and tuning in to crackling radio broadcasts from the BBC World Service wasn't so uplifting either. The idea that I could write my own reflections, publish them myself and gain a worldwide audience (i.e. this blog) was beyond my wildest imagination. My music collection was not portable until the Sony Walkman came along and so all those hours spent waiting for buses and trains as well as the actual journeys were spent in bored silence unless I had a newspaper or book with me.

I visited many interesting places on holiday and would normally take one 36-exposure film for my camera. Developing them was pretty expensive so my memories of these days are now only a handful of decent photos (generally up to half of the photos I took were terrible!). It never occurred to me that I should take a photo of myself sometimes and the result is that I have almost no photos of myself between 18-30 years old, a period that is now seen as prime selfie time.

At work my network was pretty well restricted to the people who worked in the same office plus a few other contacts who I met now and again. When I was not in the office I was simply not available. Messages could be left with the switchboard operator or sent by post. If I needed an answer, however simple, and the person responsible was away on business or holiday I would simply have to try again next week. Collaboration with people in other cities or countries was unthinkable.

Of course our digital world has lead to a magnification of many negative human traits such as hatred, bullying, fraud and narcissism but at the same time has also enabled us to connect with people from all over the world, work together on projects that would have previously been impossible, share our ideas, learn more about other cultures and get a far broader perspective on the world than ever before. Both sides of the coin co-exist though of course we must work harder to promote the positive side. Digital technology is an enabler and the choice of how we use it is ours.

Music while you work

"Homework in the Digital Age" (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) by ransomtech

It's hard to avoid music these days. It's pumped out in every shop, cafe, mall, hotel and gym and often I find it hard to concentrate on what I really want to do; talking with friends or reading if I'm on my own. Many places can't turn off the music because they get sponsored by local radio stations to play that particular station all day long whether the customers like it or not. We seem to have an acute fear of silence and so they play often extremely irritating music while you're having your hotel breakfast or trying to have a pleasant evening meal. TV and radio seem to think that certain types of programmes have to have music while someone's talking, such as every nature programme about sharks always has heavy metal music in the background or reports from many sports events have "cool" music so you can hardly hear the voiceover (maybe this is an age issue). Don't get me wrong, I love music and listen to it many hours a day but the important point is that I want to listen on my terms and not have it forced on me. Even if they play music I like I get irritated because I don't want to hear it right now.

So what about music while you're working? Does it really help us concentrate as many suggest? This is discussed in a Guardian article, Does music really help you concentrate?, and it seems to be a highly personal issue. If the task we're trying to focus on is not particularly interesting then any other stimuli will divert our attention: people passing by, any noise, conversations and especially the siren's of social media inviting us to check out what's happening. So we have some music in the background to somehow block out other distractors.

The trouble is, while our conscious attention is focused on the task in hand, the unconscious attention system doesn’t shut down; it’s still very much online, scanning for anything important in your peripheral senses. And if what we’re doing is unpleasant or dull – so you’re already having to force your attention to stay fixed on it – the unconscious attention system is even more potent. This means that a distraction doesn’t need to be as stimulating to divert your attention on to something else.

If it's someone else's music then I can't work at all and generally will move somewhere where I can be in peace. The crucial factor with background music is that it has to be self-inflicted. Whatever music the owner/employer selects will irritate someone so maybe the solution in the future is BYOM (Bring Your Own Music); listen to whatever you want as long as you do it with a headset and don't disturb anyone else. This is bad news for commercial radio stations but the fact is that most of us simply don't want to hear them.

I generally have calm classical music in the background when I'm working, preferably baroque, but I'm not sure if it helps me concentrate at all. I just put it on to create a cosy atmosphere. I've also tried discreet background music like Brian Eno or Philip Glass that just meanders quietly without ever really grabbing my attention and therefore perfect for purpose. Anything with a catchy rhythm or songs with lyrics I understand are impossible. However I suspect that silence is still the best precondition for really concentraing on a task and that our desire for music is simply a false consolation. How can we help youngsters who have grown up with a headset permanently hanging round their neck that silence is important? Many are so convinced that they need music that they've never even contemplated the alternative.

What about you?

Handwritten

How often do you write by hand these days, apart from quickly scribbled notes? When did you last write a real letter by hand, a structured letter in paragraphs with a clear theme? I must admit that, even if I write more than ever before, it is almost completely digital and my handwritten efforts are limited to short reminder notes or when my laptop runs out of battery power at a conference. I generally print rather than the cursive style I learnt in school. There's also the problem that many young people won't be able to read my cursive handwriting. As schools become increasingly digital the amount of handwriting decreases and when it does occur it is in the form of printed text. In China, India and the Islamic world handwriting is an art form and ornamental writing is an integral part of buildings and monuments. Are we in the west losing this art form as we abandon cursive handwriting for the keyboard and touchscreen? Should schools continue to teach handwriting, in particular cursive, and what are the benefits?

This is discussed in an article on Mind/Shift, Cursive, Print, or Type? The Point is To Keep Writing. It seems there is no conclusive evidence that cursive has any advantages over print in terms of children's learning development and that the arguments in favour of teaching cursive revolve mostly around heritage and the ability to read old documents.

All of the researchers NPR spoke with agree that cursive is good, but none would argue that it is better or more important than printing. The evidence just isn’t there. As long as children are writing in school, it doesn’t really matter if the letters curl and connect. So, problem solved. Or is it?

I believe that handwriting should be taught in school, at least as backup when your digital device won't work, but the form is less important than the process of writing. Maybe cursive will disappear completely from the school curriculum but it would be tragic to lose the skill completely. Maybe we should move it into the art classroom as calligraphy. Being able to create a beautifully formed text in ink is as rewarding as making a sketch or a painting. Cursive may no longer be a standard for written communication but it is still unquestionably the most expressive form of writing. So much of the writer's state of mind and personality is displayed in their cursive handwriting (you're welcome to analyse my writing in the photo above) and it would be sad to lose such insights. Ironic therefore that this form of self-expression is dying in an age that otherwise is characterised by self-expression.

One curious paradox of digitalisation is that at a time when we all use keyboards every day almost no-one learns to type properly. Why don't kids learn to touchtype? When I see older colleagues with typing skills write a text at lightening speed I realize how inefficient my own halting style is. However the main conclusion from all this is well summed up in the article. The most important thing is that children write as often as possible, though the form of that writing may not be so important.

“If we expect kids to develop mastery in anything and develop fluency in anything, they have to be doing it on a regular basis,” says Scott Beers, who teaches education at Seattle Pacific University.
That’s true not just in kindergarten or first grade, but in grade after grade. Focus on handwriting early and often, experts say, print or cursive or both. Then, as kids’ brains develop, gently lay the groundwork for typing.

Audio - the personal touch in online courses

 by M. Keefe on Flickr

Despite the presence of many easy-to-use and often free programs for audio and video recording it's surprising how so much online learning is still centred on written communication between students and teacher. Written feedback often takes valuable teacher time to compose and even if the comments are highly valuable the opportunity to create a more personal contact between teacher and student is lost. A major success factor in online education is creating a dynamic, interactive learning arena where the factor of distance is reduced or even made irrelevant. A good mix of synchronous and asynchronous communication using a variety of media (text, audio, video, multimedia) gives everyone the chance to be read, heard and seen, including most importantly the teacher. So why are we generally still stuck in text mode?

Terry Andersson's blogpost, Another research article on audio feedback, raises the issue of audio feedback as a quick and efficient method of commenting on students' work and which also adds to the feeling of teacher presence. He provides the example of a new study by Andrew J. Cavanaugh and Liyan Song, Audio Feedback versus Written Feedback: Instructors’ and Students’ Perspectives (Journal of Online Learning and Teaching), that has compared student responses to receiving either audio or written feedback to their written papers. The findings show that students are clearly more positive to receiving audio feedback on the grounds that it felt more personal and more inspiring than the dry matter-of-fact text commentaries. Teachers were in general also more positive though a few had problems with the technology involved and were simply not used to audio recording at all.

An interesting aspect of the study was that text feedback differed to audio feedback; written comments focused mostly on details such as edits and grammar corrections whereas spoken comments discussed themes, structure and overall impression. Written feedback was dealt with by students on a correct-and-move-on basis whereas the audio feedback asked for more reflection from the student rather than simply correcting.

However, it must be asked whether a systematic "correct-and-move-on" approach to revising a paper is what is desired in students. It is possible that, if students see comments as purely editing suggestions or corrections, they will prefer written comments to audio comments. This is not to say that written commentary cannot be preferred for other reasons.

Once again this should not be seen as yet another either/or discussion: there will always be times when written feedback is more appropriate just as there are times when audio is best. Many LMS have functions for audio comments and there are many screencasting tools available to let you record comments while showing the student's text and highlighting. Given the fact that students appreciate being able to hear the teacher commenting on their work in a pleasant and professional manner there should be much wider use of this medium than today. Traditional e-learning was rightly criticized as being impersonal self-study but the tools available today add so many more dimensions and enable us to almost eliminate the element of distance.

Feeding the blogs

 by mclcbooks

The first of April is the one day of the year where most people have a high level of source criticism. You really have to check your sources and question everything. Most of the jokes are easy to spot but one that nearly caught me out was Steve Wheeler's farewell to blogging, Goodbye. Steve is one of the most prolific and most read edtech bloggers and the idea of him quitting blogging is rather hard to swallow. However he made a very convincing case; describing how blogging was affecting his private life and causing such stress that he could no longer justify it. I was actually just about to tweet the link with a sympathetic comment when I stopped and realised what day it was and that the post did contain some rather odd references to things like telepathy as an alternative to blogging. Normal service was resumed with a new post from Steve today (Seriously, 2 April) where the advantages of blogging far outweigh the disadvantages. The 1 April post was not so much a joke as an attempt to provoke a discussion about the role of the academic blogger.

The original post did resonate with me however. My blogs are not in the same league as Steve's in terms of readership but they do exert considerable pressure on my home life. Once you've built up a readership and set your own pace of how often you publish it is very hard to break the routine. I have built up a whole ecosystem around monitoring what's going on in the field of e-learning and then writing about it on blogs, in articles and various websites. For several years I've been keeping my hungry blogs well-fed and satisfied with this blog getting one or two posts a week and my Swedish news blog, Flexspan, getting 4-7 posts a week. Based on that I have a newsletter (in Swedish) that goes out every Monday with highlights from the week. Completely away from work I even have a third blog, about beekeeping, that demands regular postings. Hungry mouths indeed!

Once you get into that level of production it's mighty hard to break the habit and if you do, you get messages from people wondering if something is wrong. So I recognize the pressure Steve wrote about and the potential for stress that comes from setting a high level of production. Strange isn't it that if I had a boss who demanded this I would probably complain but I've created this all by myself and completely outside working hours. At the same time I realize that my blogs and other social media activities have completely changed my work. By sharing my thoughts and helping to spread others' good ideas I have built up a global network of colleagues who have invited my into interesting projects which have resulted in being invited to speak at conferences and join even more projects. I've visited places I could never have imagined visiting as part of my work and it keeps on developing. For me blogging has opened up a whole new world and even if I find it a strain now and then to think of what to write or to keep to my production schedule it's been well worth the effort.

Science on auto-pilot

  by peyri

Fifty years ago each academic field would have a limited number of journals and an even more limited number of conferences and it was quite possible to keep abreast of what was happening. That is simply not possible today with an ever-increasing deluge of publications and conferences in even the most narrow and specialised of fields. With such volume it is inevitable that some events and publications will have serious quality issues. Many less serious journals seem to publish just about anything without any peer review and the same is true for some conferences where accepting all papers can mean that authors will pay to attend.

An amazing news post in Nature, Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers, reveals that publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 published papers after discovering that they were automatically generated by computer and were, in fact, complete nonsense. These papers are generated by software called SCIgen that was developed by students at MIT about 12 years ago to see if random generated articles could get accepted for academic conferences. The articles produced by SCIgen certainly look plausible at first glance and if that is all the conference or journal reviewers have done it's possible to accept them. However anyone who actually tries to read them will see the bluff pretty quickly - have a look at one and see for yourself. If you can't spot them yourself then there is even a program that will detect computer generated papers, SCIgen detection. Read more on this in an article in the Guardian,
How computer-generated fake papers are flooding academia.

What's really interesting here is that although SCIgen was developed so long ago, nonsense articles are still finding their way into journals and conferences, to the amusement no doubt of those who submitted the articles and developed the software. In a way you could claim that they are doing an important job by revealing publications and conferences whose peer review of submissions either doesn't work or doesn't exist. These revelations will no doubt inspire some to take a serious look at their routines and some may hopefully be forced out of business.

Academics are under intense pressure to publish, conferences and journals want to turn their papers into profits, and universities want them published. "This ought to be a shock to people," Krohn said. "There's this whole academic underground where everyone seems to benefit, but they are wasting time and money and adding nothing to science. The institutions are being ripped off, because they pay publishers huge subscriptions for this stuff."
Guardian 27 Feb 2014, How computer-generated fake papers are flooding academia

Next best thing

 by tom.belte

We have enormous respect for the written word. Reading a book has high cultural status that is somehow linked to the fact that it is printed on paper. However other means of telling a story never attain the level of respect that printed texts have. Even reading the digital version somehow has a lower status to reading a "real" book. Further down the respect list come listening to an audio book, watching a film of the book or playing the game. If a child sits all day reading a book we praise them but spending all day watching films or playing complicated interactive computer games is regarded as less praiseworthy and can even be seen as a problem. Somehow the written word is the "real thing" whereas all other media are seen as less serious versions; the next best thing.

I started thinking about this after hearing a talk from a colleague, Anette Svensson of Jönköping University, who has been studying attitudes to different forms of storytelling in schools and how we always give priority to text. This is strange since the written word was originally the next best thing to the spoken word. The oral tradition of ancient civilisations was all about spell-binding narrators who could tell inspiring tales that could last for hours. These were passed down from generation to generation as spoken narratives before finally being written down by poets like Homer. The written form of the Iliad was therefore a pale copy of the real thing which lacked the expression, drama, gestures and eye contact of the live performance. The art of storytelling is seldom practiced in schools unfortunately.

The point is that we should value different media and treat them on their own merits. There are always arguments about whether the film was as good as the book but it's better to discuss whether or not it was a good film. In education all focus is on written communication and success is dependent on mastering this skill. Of course it is important but in today's multi-media world it's surely time to accept examination assignments as films, games or podcasts which often demand a wider understanding of the subject matter than simply writing a text.

There has been a similar attitude to distance and online learning; a substitute for the "real thing" - classroom teaching. As a result we have tried to construct online equivalents of the traditional teaching environment with virtual classrooms, recorded lectures and lots of school vocabulary with e- on the front. Online courses are not respected highly in universities and often it's the most inexperienced faculty members who teach them, though now with the advent of MOOCs all the top professors want to get in there since there's a potential audience of millions out there.

We need to concentrate on learning using different media and different spaces (physical and online) rather than seeing one as a substitute for the other. There are different physical learning spaces that are great for some activities and poor for others. The same applies online. The key is to see how each space can facilitate learning and meaningful interaction. The classroom is not default any more, there are other arenas too just as we should not simply focus on text communication and neglect all other media. Judge each on their own merits.

Change the focus

  by thejuniorpartner

When I was a student just about everything I wrote was for a very exclusive audience; generally one person, a teacher or examiner. No-one else would ever read it. I wrote purely to be assessed and it wasn't a very stimulating, fulfilling or realistic process. That's why today's students are writing assignments that are published publicly on the net or made available on the university's open access archive. When you know your work will be available to all you automatically raise your game, suddenly the assignment is real and not a test. Shift the focus and change the view.

A similar change of focus can inject much needed energy to the tired ritual of course evaluations. A short article by Brian Croxall, Improve your Course Evaluations by having your Class Write Letters to Future Students (Chronicle of Higher Education), describes how he choose a new angle for the end-of-course evaluation. Instead of handing out the standard evaluation form he asked the students to write a letter to next year's students giving them advice and tips about the course and the teaching. By changing the focus from writing to a faceless administrator to a group of fellow students the task suddenly became meaningful and the feedback was much more enlightening. The quantity and quality of the feedback was improved.

"... I found that the students wrote, on average, far more on these evaluations than they have on past ones that I have provided. And in writing something directed at fellow students rather than me or some faceless, unknowable bureaucracy, I’d say that the students were much more candid. This means that they are more direct in talking about my strengths and weaknesses. And while it’s nice to hear the former, it’s the latter that will actually help me do a better job the next time around."

A slight change of focus can often make a big difference.

Boredom is good for you

  by joshme17

Is boredom is becoming an endangered state of mind? We have almost abolished boredom from our lives today because the second we feel the slightest hint of it we check our mobile for a game, an app, some music, a film or at least check Facebook or Twitter for updates. We used to get very bored waiting for buses or trains but not any more. Everyone is absorbed in their own private soundtrack. We all demand entertainment and contact 24-7-365.

Boredom and its colleague silence are not a popular couple these days and we try to eliminate them wherever they might appear. When was the last time you sat in a cafe, pub or restaurant that didn't have background music (often foreground music)? Runners and walkers are cocooned in their playlists. Do we ever allow ourselves to be alone, in silence and without any particular plan of what to do next?

An article from BBC News, Children should be allowed to get bored, describes research carried out by Dr Teresa Belton (University of East Anglia) on children and boredom. She has interviewed people about how boredom affected their creativity as children. She found many who were inspired to creative activities through boredom and silence:

"Enforced solitude alone with a blank page is a wonderful spur."
"As I get older, I appreciate reflection and boredom. Boredom is a very creative state."
"She happily entertained herself with making up stories, drawing pictures of her stories and going to the library."

Many people today are willing to pay for retreat weekends free from noise and distractions, hoping for inspiration and balance. Silence and a lack of stimulation are becoming exclusive commodities. Maybe it's time to reassess boredom and see its positive side.

Smarter than the average pen

Photo: Lernstift

Sometimes digital technology can be used to enhance an analogue process. When we write on computers or mobiles we are used to increasingly smart spelling and grammar checking tools as well as instant translation. After a primitive and sometimes hilarious start these services are maturing fast and although they're far from measuring up to professional proof-reading or translation they are often good enough for the context they're used in.

A German startup called Lernstift is now launching a revolutionary pen that will alert you if you make a spelling mistake or a grammatical error when handwriting on paper. The pen does not offer the answer to your error, it simply vibrates to alert you that something is wrong and you have to think again.

"Der Lernstift is not at all a cheating pen! After all, it doesn’t give you the correct answer, it merely points your attention to a mistake. It’s like a reliable friend tapping you on the shoulder, saying: "Wait a minute! Something’s not quite right. Think again." Kids will still have to learn orthography and grammar, but that’ll be much faster and much more fun."

The pen can be used in two modes. In calligraphy mode it vibrates if you write illegibly and in orthography mode it vibrates once for a spelling error and twice for a grammar error. 

The company is appealing for help to finance further development so if you have some spare cash you might consider investing!

Here's a demonstration film. It's in German but even if you don't understand what's said you get an idea of the product.

The emperor's old clothes

  by  clemsonunivlibrary

I've always thought that Hans Christian Andersen's story The emperor's new clothes was one of the most relevant things to read in order to understand how modern organisations work. We can all relate tales of great new trends, initiatives and projects at work that didn't quite work out but few were brave enough to criticize. It's vital to have that child who can break the spell by daring to say that the emperor is actually naked.

However we also need the ability to question traditions and realize that some of the practices we've been doing for years are not actually useful any more. Maybe the emperor's old clothes are the problem, not the new ones. This is why I enjoyed reading an article by G. Kim Blank in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Let's kill the term paper. Why do we continue to ask students to write essays that almost never say anything new or insightful and that do not lead to any real learning? The term paper/essay, like the lecture and the examination hall, are all integral parts of university tradition but it is high time we reassessed their true contribution to learning. Do we persist with them  simply because they are easy to administer?

"Could it be for the convenience of generating a mark and for reproducing a template that can be used for all kinds of courses? Could it be that this whole writing business, with the essay as its poster child, has become a self-justifying industry, fueled largely by never-changing textbooks and ever-changing adjuncts? Is there a lurking irony—could it be that these courses are in fact self-sustaining by not achieving their ostensible mandate?"

In their future careers these students are highly unlikely to ever have to carry out the tasks that are so highly valued at university. Does anyone ever need to write essays at work or carry out a task without access to information or colleagues? Admittedly essays, examinations and lectures demand self-discipline and the ability to organize and present information but they have little or no relevance for students' careers.

"... the term paper or even plain essay has no relationship to the work-world in which college grads will find themselves earning a living."

The way forward, according to Blank, lies in reading, discussing and summarising examples of good academic writing. Summarising is a vital skill in today's information society and demands a clear understanding of the text to be summarised. Before you can accurately summarise you need to analyze the text in question and by summarising you hone your own writing skills in ways that term papers do not.

So let's re-examine more of the emperor's old (and new) clothes and build a new and more meaningful wardrobe.