Trends, predictions and black swans

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.


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

Another contender in this attractive market is Chegg who offer similarly interactive textbooks adapted for use on a tablet. Here's their demo video:



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

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

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

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

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.