Digital school strategies

Schools need to plan their technology strategies very carefully. There are a lot of factors to consider, including current development of technology and its future proofing, existing systems and interoperability, access and provision of networked resources, skills and capabilities of teaching staff, market forces and socio-economic influences, to name a few. But these are just the tip of the iceberg. A recent interview I did for the New Zealand teachers' Interface Magazine touched on some of these issues, and here I would like to elaborate on some of the answers I gave. My additional comments are in italics:

What are the biggest tech-related challenges facing schools?

It's about encouraging reluctant teachers to adopt, embed and apply new technology effectively within authentic teaching and learning contexts. We also need better in-service training and orientation. If teachers use new interactive whiteboards in the same way they used ordinary whiteboards, they're missing the point, failing to capitalise on the excellent functionality and, worse still, depriving students of diverse interactive learning experiences.

One of the most important digital divides to overcome is the technophobia divide - the wills and the will nots. Often this is the most difficult to bridge, but when undertaken in a sensitive manner, it can be accomplished. With the best will in the world, you are never going to win the hearts and minds of every teacher. But you can win the majority, and to meet the challenge you need to enlist the support of some of the opinion leaders among your teachers. These are often the ones who are already demonstrating best practice, and who are thoughtful and reflective on their own professional engagement. Enlist their support as evangelists and champions of new technologies, and you have won half the battle. Find those positive deviants in your school - you know - the ones who always seem to do things a little differently to everyone else. You will not get much farther though, if the technology is not fit for purpose.  

Training at the point of need is also a must. In service training of teachers, where experimentation and failure are permitted, are essential if the use of new technologies are to be promoted. Sensibly, most teachers are reluctant to use new ideas of technology in their classroom unless they have first tried it out. Give them time to discover for themselves, in a psychologically safe environment, what works and how it works. Let them have time to consider how they can use new technologies to enhance learning in their classrooms. In service training is not just about giving people information. It's also about allowing them to develop their own skills and to ask pertinent questions as they try out their ideas.

What do you think are the key elements schools need to address in a digital strategy?

Anti-cyberbullying guidelines, e-safety and acceptable use policies - all of these are important, but the best way to formulate them is to get teachers and students together around the table to discuss the best ways forward.

Often I see raised eyebrows from teachers and parents when I advocate students as advisers on school internet policies. And yet, in the final analysis, most would admit that children and young people know quite a lot about how to use technology, and many have already learnt where many of the dangers lie in web use. Who better then, to ask to advise on safe and acceptable use of the Web and computers than those who are going to be the most affected by them? If we dismiss the ideas and thoughts of students because 'they are only children', we run the risk of ignoring one of the most powerful resources any school possesses. 

Is there anything you'd like to see schools do differently?

Far too many schools are throwing money at new technology, without fully understanding what it can do for their students. Some purchase large amounts of technology without any real plan for its implementation. First identify the problem and then seek the technology solution that best addresses it.

This is one of the biggest challenges schools face. We see a new, shiny technology, realise we have some money to spend before the end of the financial year (spend your allocation, or have it cut next year!), and end up buying something that we don't yet know how we will use. I have seen many school cupboards full of equipment that was bought but never really used. 

Every school seriously needs to formulate its own strategy for the appropriate procurement and purchase of new technologies. Firstly, each school needs to locate where its unique problems, challenges and needs are. The next step is to consider all of the possible solutions, including technology answers. Once this has been done, decisions need to be made on the best way to address the problems or deficits, and only then should technology be considered as one of the possible solutions. Technology is not always the most effective answer. It should only be purchased if it is seen to be the best answer, where the problem could not have been addressed effectively any other way.  The acid test for the introduction of new technology is: what does this add to learning that could not be achieved any other way? If technology enhances, enriches or extends learning, then it is generally a good idea. If it adds nothing new or does not improve the situation, forget it.

Here is the link to the complete interview for Interface Magazine.

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What is digital learning?

Over the next two weeks I'm in New Zealand, doing a series of keynote presentations to teachers on the future of education and technology supported learning. The mLearn tour is sponsored by a company called Telco Technology Services who specialise in supporting teachers in New Zealand schools with technology training and provision.

As a part of the build up to this tour, which takes in the cities of Christchurch, Wellington, Hamilton and Auckland, I was interviewed for Interface Magazine. Two of the questions and my responses are below, but I wanted to elaborate, so here is a more complete response (my additional comments are in italics):

What excites you about technology in education?

It's the huge potential and great possibilities to move learning beyond the traditional walls of the classroom. Learning has always had a large informal component and now we're witnessing its fruition in mobile learning, augmented reality, gaming, and other technology-supported learning on the move. We're also in the age of the learner as their own node of production - it's exciting to see students working with their teachers to create, organise, repurpose and share content on a global scale through social media and personal devices.

We are in fact living in very exciting times, where change is occurring at a rapid pace. We live in unprecedented times where everything technology touches grows exponentially. Some of the new approaches on the horizon, such as learner analytics (where big data can be captured and applied practically to visualise how better learning can be achieved), and advanced networks which can connect people to each other globally, are rich both socially and personally. At the social end of the spectrum, these tools can offer infrastructures to benefit the entire community, whilst at a personal level, each students will be potentially able to benefit. 

The most important task now for all teachers everywhere, is to firstly begin to appreciate the huge potential these tools and technologies can have on education. Secondly, teachers need to make up their minds what they are going to do with these technologies. What really excites me about technology in education is that many teachers are already discovering new and innovative ways to use technologies such as Interactive White Boards, social media and touch screen tablets to liberate learning and democratise knowledge. As the movement grows, and more teachers become technologically savvy, so we will begin to witness the emergence of new pedagogies and powerful approaches to learning and teaching. We will see more students creating their own knowledge, and with teachers as arbiters and facilitators of that knowledge, as this happens, we will see a very powerful new kind of relationship between students and teachers emerging in schools, colleges and universities.

How would you define digital learning?

Learning is learning. Whether you use technology or not is relative. Using the tools and technologies I outline above will enable you to connect with more content and peers, more quickly and effectively. However, learning without technology is also a reality for all of us.

I have had several conversations recently with colleagues about this question. Many agree that learning is learning, no matter how you label it, but there are caveats. Last week in Sydney at the Future of Higher Education conference, I asked an expert panel why those of us involved in education are so obsessed with prefixes. We hear about digital learning, e-learning, blended learning, mobile learning, and even micro-learning. Students don't really care what the learning is called, as long as they learn, and ultimately pass their exams and achieve their grades. Does it matter what we call it and what prefixes we apply? Many of the above kinds of learning overlap considerably, and the technologies we use are similar if not identical. 

One of the best responses from the panel was that the prefixes are there not for the learners but for the professional community - i.e. teachers and especially academics - to gain some kind of purchase on exactly what we are discussing. I can see the point in this. But I still feel uncomfortable with the idea that we should differentiate between different kinds of learning. Ultimately, what ever tools are used, they must be used appropriately and effectively. I still hold to the belief that learning is learning. I wrote about this some time ago, when there were discussions about whether there were any differences between andragogy and pedagogy. Here's the bottom line: Learning will happen if the conditions are right, ad it will happen whether teachers and technology are present or not.

You can read the complete interview here in Interface Magazine.

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Looking both ways

I am often asked by my students what the best ways are to demonstrate critical thinking in their essays. The answer is quite simply to look both ways. Providing a balanced and objective argument where opposing perspectives are considered, is always a good foundation for criticality. But we can do much better than that. Critical analysis is where students can understand several ideas or theories, and can show how they are related. Critical evaluation is where they take the synthesis (coalescence) of these ideas and judge their collective and individual worth, in the context of the essay question.

This is one reason why I strongly suggest that students don't indiscriminately pepper their assignments with direct quotations from the literature. They are then left with an essay that seems disjointed. It looks as though they have arbitrarily selected several quotes and have placed them in their essay, hoping for the best. Often, the essay just doesn't flow naturally. They need to judge the worth of any theory or idea they include in their work. Inserting lengthy quotations into text tells me that the student is struggling to pad out their assignment, and may even have run out of time. It looks much better, I argue, if students embed these ideas as paraphrased statements into their commentary. It takes more energy to do this, but it looks a lot more cohesive. If they do this, they demonstrate to the reader (and marker!) that they not only found the idea and can understand it, but that they can also contextualise it. For me, that is a much more impressive approach to answering an essay question and leads into a more convincing argument and conclusion.

Ultimately, we ask students to demonstrate criticality to show that they have not only assimilated the knowledge that is associated with their studies, but also that they can apply it in contexts that are defensible and that they can achieve objectivity. Taking several perspectives into consideration also sets them up for a life of professional practice. If you can't discern, you will find it difficult to critically reflect on your own practice, and that is the essence of being a professional.  It's funny - you wait for a long time for a theory to come along, and then suddenly two appear at once. Look both ways.

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Disruptive innovation: Where do we go from here?

I enjoyed my 'trialogue' with Andrew Jacobs and the audience at this year's Learning Technologies conference. We were asked to cover the topic of disruptive innovation and learning, and gladly accepted the challenge, with the proviso that we could try something a little different. We didn't want to stick to the run-of-the-mill conference presentation format, so we opted for a kind of 'staged disagreement' instead. Between us and the audience of Learning and Development professionals, we managed to cover several key areas of disruptive innovation, discussing and debating issues of corporate identity, organisational change, learning support, the role of the Learning and Development professional and new technologies, and we also debated the work of Clay Christensen, Everett Rogers and Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and other useful models and theories.

Some cautionary tales and light-hearted stories were also thrown into the mix. Andrew and I had some fun as we highlighted some areas for concern and celebration, and discussed positive deviance, change management and change agency. Here is the link to the full video, with synchronised slides and contributions from the audience. Any comments are very welcome.



 Photo by Merrick Brown

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Digital age assessment

In this continuation of my short series on new and emerging pedagogy, I can reflect on my last two posts which focused on the potential for any time any place learning and the changing roles of teachers and students, The latter is characterised by students who take more responsibility to not only discover their own learning and determine their own pathways, but also using their personal devices to learn through knowledge creation, sharing, repurposing and organisation. These posts were prompted by a blog written by Daniel Christian on emerging trends of new pedagogy.

Christian's third trend is perhaps the most technology focused. He says: "An increased use of technology not only to deliver teaching, but also to support and assist students and to provide new forms of student assessment." This is an important point. Assessment and learning are inseparable in any good pedagogy. If the first does not fit the second, then we see a failure of that pedagogy. Far too often assessment fails to delve deeply enough, or fails to capture actual learning. If students are relying increasingly on digital technology to connect them with content, peers and tutors, and to facilitate new, distributed forms of learning, then we should endeavour to assess the learning they achieve in a relevant manner.

For my own students, especially those who are increasingly familiar with technology, I have introduced new formats and modes of assessment. No longer do they need to stick to paper based essays. They can also submit videos, blogs or wikis if they so choose. The assessment criteria themselves do not change, but the marking rubrics do. In a recent post on assessing students entitled 'Digital Assignments: How shall we grade them?' I focused on some of the issues we can encounter when we shift modes and allow formats other than the traditional paper based essay. These included issues of equivalency of effort and word count, the sequencing of content and the differing affordances of technologies and platforms.

The times are changing, and so should our methods of pedagogy.

Photo by Steve Wheeler


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Power sharing

In my last post I discussed Daniel S Christian's three trends of an emerging pedagogy. I speculated on whether a new social divide might also emerge as a result of the new pedagogy he outlines. Christian argues that much of the change we are currently witnessing in teaching methods is driven by new technologies. His second trend reflects the changing roles of some teachers and professors. He identifies...

"...an increased sharing of power between the professor and the learner. This is manifest as a changing professorial role, towards more support and negotiation over content and methods, and a focus on developing and supporting learner autonomy. On the student side, this can mean an emphasis on learners supporting each other through new social media, peer assessment, discussion groups, even online study groups but with guidance, support and feedback from content experts."

Clearly, Christian bases his argument on the premise that teachers and students are mutually comfortable in power sharing. For the lecturer, this means voluntarily relinquishing their traditional position as the sole arbiter of 'truth' in the classroom, to embrace the position of co-learner. For many, this would be a radical departure from their expected roles. For the students, it would require them to assume a greater responsibility for their own learning, and becoming more pro-active in knowledge creation, and self determination of learning pathways. Students will also need to be more willing to share their ideas and work with each other, and to collaborate more closely in the learning process.

In some sectors of education this may be more easily achieved than it is in others. Will professors in higher education be willing to let go of their relative positions of power. After all, they have worked hard all their academic careers to establish themselves in positions of respect and authority. They have spent a lot of time and energy carving out niches for themselves in very specialised and focused areas of scientific research. How willing will they be to take on a less central role in this new pedagogy? Conversely, students entering higher education are faced with increased tuition fees. Will they expect their professors to continue to take the lead in delivering knowledge, or will they readily adopt the role of co-creators of knowledge? Universities around the world are built on their reputations for high quality teaching and research. They are also identified by their status as centres of knowledge production, where traditionally, professors have been the intellectual capital of the institution. Some would therefore feel justified in jealously protecting their positions as acknowledged experts and resist any calls to take a sideways step and let their students lead. Knowledge is power, and holding that position of power can be seductive.

Many agree that technology has a role to play in this shift in pedagogical emphasis. Students now bring their own devices into the traditional learning environment, creating their own personal networks and learning environments. They are intimately familiar with the functionality of their devices, knowing how to use them to connect to, create and organise content. They are adept at connecting to their friends and peers too, but will they be willing to power share with their professors, take on greater autonomy and assume more responsibility to direct their own learning in the future?

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A growing divide?

In his blog on Learning Ecosystems, Daniel S. Christian claims that a new pedagogy is emerging that is directly driven by the upsurge in online activity. I believe him, because I see similar outcomes wherever I travel, in schools, colleges and universities around the world. Christian identifies three key changes in pedagogy that I want to discuss over my next three blog posts. The first, he describes as "A move to opening up learning, making it more accessible and flexible. The classroom is no longer the unique centre of learning, based on information delivery through a lecture." 

Some would argue that this is a trend that has been gathering pace for the last decade or more. Traditionally, learning has been situated in classrooms or lecture halls, where the presence of an expert or specialist in a subject takes to the stage and delivers knowledge directly to the assembled students. The didactic method is cost effective in terms of the amount of contact time lecturers or teachers need to invest in the process. The student is then left to think and reflect on the knowledge they have 'received' and eventually, is assessed on how well they can remember, apply and evaluate this knowledge. Classroom centric learning has established itself as a 'tried and tested' method of pedagogy, and it doesn't seem to be waning. Every organisation it seems, continues to practice this approach, and educational institutions everywhere continue to build classrooms and lecture halls along the same design. Although the didactic method has been severely criticised as less effective than more active and participatory pedagogies, it persists.

And yet, with the advent of mobile technology, learning can now take place any where, and at any time. Perhaps even more critically, learning can take place at the pace of each individual learner. Formal learning, though methods such as the flipped classroom, and Massive Open Online Courses, seems to be migrating slowly but steadily away from traditional learning spaces, at least in some quarters. Those who are proponents of these methods claim that a paradigm shift is taking place, and that many traditional environments will either need to adapt to survive, or face extinction. Others are not so sure, claiming that the traditional learning space will always be with us, because people need to connect socially and the best way to do this is through face to face interaction. A third position is that traditional learning environments will change to meet the needs of the digital age, and that the flipped classroom is one example of how this will proceed.

The question we now need to ask is: Will there be a divide between learning that continues to rely on traditional learning spaces, compared to learning that takes place largely outside the walls of the traditional classroom? Moreover, if there is such a divide, will it be delineated by its cost effectiveness, its conceptual differences, or its pedagogical impact?

Photo from VCU Libraries


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A safer Internet?

Hardly a day goes by without some tragic story about sexting, cyber-stalking, paedophile grooming or cyber-bullying hitting the news. As more and more children use mobile phones and access the Web, so the incidents rise proportionately. We wish it were not so. We would all love to see a free and open Web that everyone could use without any fear of abuse, bullying or blackmail. But with every new tool and technology comes a danger from a small but determined section of society who wish to bend their use, to exploit and to abuse for their own selfish purposes. No matter how hard we tried, we would never be able to completely eliminate nefarious use of the Web, but there are ways we can at least ameliorate the risk by protecting the younger members of our society from these dangers.

The statistics are shocking. According to a recent BBC survey of 3500 parents and children, only 8% of parents thought their children had seen something upsetting on the Internet. However, 15% of their children reported seeing something upsetting on their smart phones.  Only 41% used safeguarding or filtering software when using the Internet. By the age of 11 many children have already posted up their own YouTube videos, and may have set up fake accounts on sites that require them to be at least 13 years old. By the age of 13, some have tried sexting, and many are regularly using services such as Snapchat, Skype and Instagram. Many parents don't understand the capabilities of these sites.

Today is Safer Internet Day (#SID2014), when we celebrate good and appropriate uses of the Web, and share good advice on how to protect vulnerable users from those out there who would seek to harm them. There are two ways we can intervene. The first is technical, and this can be a challenge for some parents, especially those who know very little about how to use computers and mobile phones. There are websites that can help parents to understand the risks and dangers children can be exposed to. The EU sponsored Safer Internet Programme site for example, raises parents' awareness of the dangers of the Internet and offers advice on intervention they can take if they are concerned. Parents can, for example, enter the type and model of smartphone their children use, and the website will show them the controls and tools that are available to use on that particular handset, and how to turn off cameras or block certain sites. Another useful site is the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), which offers a similar service of advice and support. The BBC's Webwise site also has some great resources on Internet safety.

Putting a block on your teenager's phone though, is no guarantee of safety, because at least 38% of 11-16 year-old children in the survey claimed they knew how to remove parental blocks and reactivate functions.

A second and possibly more successful way to ensure better and safer use is to apply social intervention. Parents are encouraged to talk more to their children about their use of technology, and discuss with them the risks and potential dangers. Finding out what sites children visit online, who they talk with and what they talk about is useful information to help parents decide how to manage access to the Web. Schools too are playing their part in educating children into safer and more responsible use of technology. But parents and teachers - all of us - still  need to know more about the ways we can protect our children from the dangers that lurk on the Internet and show them how they can enjoy the Web in safety.

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The survival of Higher Education (5): Recommendations

This is the fifth and final part of my short series of posts on the future of higher education.

In my previous post I discussed the ways technology might help to promote the survival of universities in a time of financial upheaval and disruptive culture.

In this post, I discuss change management and outline some of my recommendations for the adoption of new practices and technologies.

Recommendations

Ultimately, to ensure that technologies are successfully adopted, institutions need to demonstrate that each is relevant and can be used effectively to support, enhance and extend learning beyond what is currently possible. The value added potential of new technologies becomes the unique selling point, including its capability to change or challenge current provision. Change however, comes with a price, usually in human cost. Many teachers are reluctant to embrace new technology because they may perceive it as undermining their authority, it may challenge roles they are comfortable within, or require them to invest time and effort into learning how to do something new. Many are unhappy about change and some will actively resist. Often such resentment or distrust of new technologies can be transmitted to students, particularly those who are more mature. Universities therefore need to find ‘champions’ - early adopters of the new technologies who are also respected opinion leaders within the academic community.

Changes often come from the grassroots upwards, but without support and nourishment from the top, many seemingly useful changes fade and die. Managers and leaders need to listen to the views of their staff (and also their students), and commit their institutions wholeheartedly to new innovations that are pragmatic, to ensure that they are spending money on technology that fits into the every day teaching and learning activities of the organisation. Such decisions need to be informed by empirical research that is generalisable.

Institutions will need to secure adequate funding so that new technology is sustainable. Too often organisations buy into new technology but fail to budget for ongoing support such as training, upgrades, repairs and maintenance. Professional development should be offered that is realistic and authentic so that teachers can situate their new skills within everyday practice. Finally, institutions will need to offer better opportunities and incentives for teachers to encourage the use of new technologies that are relevant across entire curricula. Sometimes curricula may need to change to accommodate shifts in practice, and there should be latitude to embed new technologies into everyday practice.

Conclusion

The advent of new and emerging technologies such as interactive touch surface devices, mobile and wireless technologies and the social web, afford teachers with unprecedented opportunities to try out new pedagogies which would previously have been difficult or impossible. Teachers may see new technologies either as opportunities or as threats. Whatever their views, the teachers who are most likely to be successful will be those who embed new technologies into their courses, and who adopt a role that us supportive of flexible and mobile learning. Technology will not replace teachers, but teachers who adopt new technologies will probably replace those who don't. Younger students who entered higher education in 2008 were the first students who had grown up in a world in which connection to the internet had always been there. They expected to have fast and seamless access to digital resources, social networking and mobile learning opportunities. Students today have even greater expectations, and if this kind of provision is not forthcoming or is discouraged, they will go somewhere where it is available.

It is up to the institution, through clear leadership, strong support of innovation and the adoption of a culture of blame-free experimentation, to ensure that new ways of using technology are discovered and that technology becomes embedded into the fabric of education programmes. Only then will we begin to see the social web being used to its fullest capacity - as a liberating tool to enable students to learn anywhere, at any time, and in a style and at a pace that suits their individual needs and preferences.

Previous posts in this series:

The survival of Higher Education (1): Changing Roles
The survival of Higher Education (2): Changing Times
The survival of Higher Education (3): The Social Web
The survival of Higher Education (4): 5 Key Objectives

Photo by Felix Burton on Wikimedia Commons


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The survival of Higher Education (4): 5 key objectives

This is a continuation of my short series on the future of higher education, and builds on yesterday's blog post on why Social Web tools are useful to support student learning. We start with the question...

...how will technology help to shape the future of Higher Education? 

It is increasingly apparent that learning technology and digital communication will play a key role in the shaping of future higher education. For digital technologies to become as successful in education as ‘paper and pencil’, I believe that five key objectives will need to be achieved:

1. Technology will need to become more ‘transparent’ (Wheeler, 2005). That is, technology will need to become so embedded into the day to day experiences of teachers and students that it becomes common place, and even mundane. The novelty value and opacity of technologies often prevent users from ‘seeing through them’, beyond the shiny toy with the buttons and lights, to a tool that is useful because it does something previous tools could not do (John and Wheeler, 2008).

2. Universities must offer better and more sustainable support to academics. Often teachers are pushed into situations where they need to cope with new ideas and new technologies without clear guidance. In such situations, teachers will often struggle and fail with technology, or they will resist to the point of rejection. Very few will actually succeed without help. Appropriate professional development, support services and dialogue with experts will invariably overcome many of these issues (John and Wheeler, 2008).

3. Teachers need to see the relevance and application of new technologies. For teachers to adopt new technologies, they must first see the applications and understand the benefits (as well as the limitations) of the tool. If a tool adds nothing new to the teaching and learning equation it will be perceived as irrelevant and will be rejected (cf. Norman, 1990).

4. Many teachers will need to gain greater confidence in the use of new and emerging technologies. This will mean that they will need to be continually adaptive and responsive to change as it happens. This relates back to training, which brings familiarity, but teachers also need to see beyond the technology, using it as an extension and enhancement of their own cognitive capabilities, or ‘mind technology’. They will also need to see that technology can be contextualised into real and authentic teaching situations. And they will need to be willing to change their own practice occasionally.

5. More research is needed into what can be done and what cannot be done with new and emerging technologies. How else will we know whether or not something works, who it works best with, and under what conditions it becomes less successful? We can find out through trial and error, or more preferably, we can discover through thorough and systematic research in which new technologies are tested out in authentic situations. 

Tomorrow: Recommendations 

References

John, P. D. and Wheeler, S. (2008). The Digital Classroom: Harnessing the Power of Technology for Learning and Teaching. London: Routledge. 

Norman, D. (1990). The Design of Everyday Things. London: The MIT Press. 

Wheeler, S. (2005). Transforming Primary ICT. Exeter: Learning Matters.

Photo by Felix Burton on Wikimedia Commons


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The survival of higher education (3): The Social Web

This is a continuation from yesterday's blog post on changing times and the survival of higher education. Below are four reasons why the Social Web and associated media are changing higher education. Although this is not the entire story, I believe we will need to adopt these and other new technology mediated approaches widely if we wish to secure the future of higher education. This is because...

...the Social Web connects people together 

At Plymouth University, we very quickly began to explore the ways Social Web tools could support our students. Around 2007 we started using blogs to support several of our student teacher groups that were geographically dispersed across the South of England. These were mostly mature and part-time students who held substantive posts in training agencies, colleges and universities, and in community adult education centres, the military, National Health Service, the police force and the prison service. Some were itinerant because of the nature of their jobs. Military students for example may be serving overseas, or in submarines. Some did not have the opportunity to meet face-to-face with their peer group and sometimes suffered from prolonged lack of tutor contact. For the majority, their busy lifestyles did not allow them to enjoy more than brief contact with their fellow students on more than a once weekly basis because travel into a teaching centre can be time consuming, expensive and tiring. Here social media were used to connect people, enabling them to collaborate together in project work, small group learning and online discussions. The MentorBlog project for example, employed the use of two-person blogs to connect students with their professional mentors, who may never have had the opportunity to meet face to face (Wheeler and Lambert-Heggs, 2008). Using two-person blogs, students were encouraged to regularly write their reflections on professional practice directly to their blog. Their mentor was able to read the student’s posting and then comment directly to the blog with their own observations, guidance and support (Wheeler and Lambert-Heggs, 2010).

The Social Web promotes collaboration 

Collaborative forms of learning are becoming increasingly popular methods of adult education, because they involve all students in the process of learning. Social software is based heavily on participation, and this is apparent in a number of features including social tagging, voting, versioning, hyperlinking and searching, as well as discussion and commenting. The power of this kind of social media is that it includes all in the process of creating group based collections of knowledge, and artefacts that are of specific interest to the learning community.  

One of the most popular activities on our wiki based learning programmes was called ‘goldmining’. In this activity, each of the students took individual responsibility to seek out, evaluate and then post useful websites and online learning resources that were deemed indispensable to the group. These were posted up onto the
group wiki, and a short summary attached by the ‘gold miner’ to explain what it contained and why it would be useful. Students were encouraged to explore each others’ gold dust resources and attach their own comments on how useful they found them. Attached discussion groups supported more in depth and
informal discussion about the activity. It is doubtful whether such a useful and comprehensive collection of online resources complete with evaluative commentary, could have been assembled any other way, or in such an organised manner.

The Social Web challenges current provision

There is a sense from many younger students that the institutional managed learning environments are not popular tools, because they fail in comparison to the more colourful, flexible and accessible social networking tools that are available for free on the internet. Further, students enjoy personalising their online spaces, a task that is not particularly easy or positively discouraged within institutional systems. This is particularly evident on a cursory inspection of any social web space, whether it be Facebook, Snapchat or any other popular free space. Students ‘pimp’ their pages, adding colour and textures, favourite images, links to their favourite websites, including mashups to video sharing sites such as YouTube and photo sites such as Flickr. This was often impossible or forbidden on university and college sites, where a corporate branding and image uniformity was enforced and surveillance imposed.

If they wished to change this kind of restrictive provision and depose the ‘tyranny of the institutional VLE’, universities would need to undergo a radical shift in policy. VLEs (virtual learning environments) are used to provide a ‘walled garden’ around expensive and copyrighted resources, as well as the imposition of control over access, tracking and assessment of student learning. The problem now for many education institutions is to try to strike a balance between maintaining the element of control, whilst enabling students to personalise their own learning environments and tailor them to their own preferences and learning styles. Wikis and blogs to a certain extent can achieve this objective, but there can be constraints and disadvantages to this approach, not least a resistance from students themselves who may not wish for these tools to be imposed upon them.

The Social Web creates new and enhanced learning experiences 

In the last few years my colleagues and I have created several new learning activities that can be used by students in shared online spaces. We have designed the activities so that they offer students experiences or access to resources that would be impossible or difficult to offer through conventional means. Activities are not mandatory, but can supplement and enhance traditional, classroom based provision. One project known as the WikiLit project is offered as a means for students to gather together evidence of core skills in and around literacy and numeracy learning (Wheeler et al, 2008).  Students generally disliked doing the activities on the wiki, although several actually liked the concept of the wiki and could see how it could be used with their own students. The biggest problem they identified was a lack of time, and most agreed that the wiki activities actually made more work for them. Students were resentful that they had to access materials online, and several issues were raised including lack of familiarity, lack of access and lack of understanding about what was required of them. A major conclusion from the WikiLit study is that although the wiki is a useful tool to bring distributed students together for collaborative learning, the subject matter and the manner in which it was delivered occluded the positive aspects for this group of students. Future provision should be less rigidly subject specific and more open for students to bring their own content to the space. Moreover, students and staff should be given better induction and training in the use of the tool, so that the potential is better exploited.

Continues tomorrow...

References
Wheeler, S., Yeomans, P. and Wheeler, D. (2008). The Good, the Bad and the Wiki: Evaluating Student Generated Content as a Collaborative Learning Tool. British Journal of Educational Technology, 39(6), 987-995.

Wheeler, S. and Lambert-Heggs, W. (2008). MentorBlog: Connecting Students and their Mentors using Social Software. In S. Wheeler (Ed.) Digital Learning: Repurposing Education. Proceedings of the Third Plymouth e-Learning Conference, University of Plymouth, 4 April 2008.

Wheeler, S. and Lambert-Heggs, W. (2010). Connecting Distance Learners and Their Mentors Using Blogs: The MentorBlog Project. Quarterly Review of Distance Education 10 (4), 3-17.

Photo by Felix Burton on Wikimedia Commons

The survival of higher education (3): The Social Web by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The survival of higher education (2): Changing times

This is a continuation from yesterday's post on changing roles, disruptive innovation and the survival of higher education.

Changing Times

It is now time to take stock. My two keynotes were conceived, written and presented over a decade ago in 2000, at a time when the Web was still in its infancy. I was certainly speaking for a time before the advent of what is now referred to as Web 2.0 or the ‘social web’. In this paper, having revisited my previous speeches I'm going to try to gaze once more into the near future in an attempt to determine what education might look like in the light of the technological developments that comprise Web 2.0. I will attempt to contextualise these changes at the level of both organisation and individual, to provide a picture of how universities and teachers might manage their business in the coming decade. Once again, I will do so based upon my knowledge and experience gained from a career in which research has been central to my work. As my starting point I want to examine the phenomenon that is Web 2.0 and provide some examples of current pedagogical practice using the Social Web. I will then speculate on the current changes in practice that might emerge, both for the institution and the teacher. Finally, I will suggest that there are five key objectives to achieve if universities are to achieve success in the use of learning technologies in the future.

The Changing Web (2.0) 

So what exactly is Web 2.0? This is a contested label for new and emergent properties that are found on the Web. It is a complex network of dynamic resources that we all acknowledge is constantly changing to adapt to the growing demand for entertainment, communication and access to knowledge. Debate centres upon whether the emerging social applications constitute a sea change or revolution in the Web (cf. van Dijk, 2002) or simply another phase in its relentless progress. Personally, I find myself in agreement with Brian Winston (2003), preferring to view social applications as a facet of gradual evolution rather than symptoms of sudden revolution. Essentially, the Web has become more social. As with most other technology innovations, Web 2.0 applications have grown out of the need for people to connect together, share experiences and knowledge, enhance their experiences and open up new possibilities in learning. The Social Web is comprised of software that enables people to both read from, and write onto web spaces. It is literally the ‘architecture of participation’ (O'Reilly, 2004; Barsky and Purdon, 2006) and demands active engagement as a natural facet of its character (Kamel Boulos and Wheeler, 2007).

Web 2.0 tools include popular applications such as blogs, wikis and podcasting; social networking sites such as Facebook; photo and video sharing services such as Flickr and YouTube; social tagging, aggregation and curation of content; the use of Twitter to connect with, and create massive personal learning networks; and concepts such as the folksonomy, Darwikianism and the wisdom of crowds (Kamel Boulos, Maramba and Wheeler, 2006). Finally, we cannot afford to ignore the growing influence of mobile phones and apps as a disruptive force and the capability they have of enabling any time, any place learning.

A Social Web that supports learning 

Staff at the University of Plymouth have been using Web 2.0 (social web) tools in teacher education for the several years and have attempted to qualify their use in a number of areas of learner support including shared online spaces (Wheeler et al, 2008) and blogs (Wheeler and Lambert-Heggs, 2008). The essential premise underpinning the use of any Social Web application is that over a period of time it genuinely becomes self-supporting, and that the students will enjoy the freedom to produce their own content and study pathways. The problem with this is that students may not always be as accurate or fastidious in their content generation as they could be, and may need guidance on the pathway they choose to take. However, there is evidence that students begin to support each other when they share the same online space and have mutual goals to achieve. One of the most popular and easy to use tools in the wiki - a shared website which anyone can edit.

We quickly discovered that wikis are so open as to cause problems if some form of scaffolding or structure is not created for students. We therefore designed a number of activities for the wiki. One of the first learning activities was to generate a set of rules about acceptable and unacceptable behaviour online. Students proposed and discussed their rules, which included the banning of offensive language and racist comments. Known as ‘wikiquette’ (wiki etiquette), this popular activity was subscribed to by all of the groups, and the result was a consensus of rules over which the entire group had ownership. There is no evidence that any of the rules were ever broken, but if any wikiquette rules had been transgressed, it would have been likely that the rest of the group would have taken action to sanction the perpetrator.

Tomorrow: Part 3: The Social Web

References

Barsky, E. and Purdon, M. (2006). Introducing Web 2.0: Social networking and social bookmarking for health librarians. Journal of the Canadian Health Libraries Association 27, 65-67.

Kamel Boulos, M. N., Maramba, I. and Wheeler, S. (2006). Wikis, blogs and podcasts: a new generation of Web-based tools for virtual collaborative clinical practice and education. BMC Medical Education 6, 41.
O'Reilly, T. (2004). What is Web 2.0. O'Reilly Media. Retrieved 7 February, 2014.

van Dijk, J. (2002). The Network Society. London: Sage.
Wheeler, S., Yeomans, P. and Wheeler, D. (2008). The good, the bad and the wiki: Evaluating student generated content as a collaborative learning tool, British Journal of Educational Technology, 39(6), 987-995.
Wheeler, S. and Lambert-Heggs, W. (2008) Connecting distance learners and their mentors using blogs: The MentorBlog Project, Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 10(4), 3-17.
Winston, B. (2003). Media Technology and Society: A History: From the Telegraph to the Internet. London: Routledge.

Photo by Felix Burton on Wikimedia Commons


The survival of higher education (2): Changing times by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The survival of higher education (1): Changing roles

My last blog post focused on the disruptive forces that are currently assailing businesses and the public sector. I argued that there are two kinds of disruption. The first, undesirable form of disruption stops us from getting to where we wish to be. The second kind of disruption enables our journey to a better place. So what will be the future of higher education, and how will it survive against this hostile backdrop? Will it embrace disruption, or will it resist? A few years ago I wrote a reflective essay to address that very question, based on two invited keynote speeches I gave in Norway and the Czech Republic, in May 2000. Here, presented in a series of short excerpts over the next few days, is a revised and updated version of my paper.

A Tale of Two Keynotes

We live in tumultuous times where change is constant and disruptive and where technologies are increasingly pervasive throughout society. Such change and disruption has been in the background of my thinking about learning technology for the past decade. In May 2000, I was invited to present two keynote speeches about the role technology would play in the future of higher education.

The first keynote was presented to the European Universities Continuing Education Network (EUCEN) at the University of Bergen, Norway and was entitled ‘The Traditional University is Dead - Long live the Distributed University!’ (Wheeler, 2000a). In my speech I outlined the economic and organisational problems faced by universities in a time of radical technological changes, and economic stringency in which traditional catchment areas and boundaries were being eroded. I argued that in order to survive the economic and societal challenges, universities would need to revise their approaches to education provision. I urged universities to develop new strategies that were based upon digital technologies to widen access, increase quality and generally subscribe to the idea that students need no longer attend traditional lectures to achieve quality learning outcomes (Wheeler, 2004). I also pointed out the need for universities to create their own niche markets of unique or signature courses, and that universities would need to co-operate together in order to survive the economic turmoil and to make sense of the strictures and limitations economic turmoil and to make sense of the strictures and limitations that would be imposed due to governmental pressures.

My main recommendation however, was one grounded in the technology mediated learning approach. I argued that due to advances in information and communication technologies (ICTs) that traditional student catchment areas would begin to disappear or become less obvious (the death of distance) and recommended that universities turn their attention to blended and distance methods to broaden and extend their reach (the distributed model). I advised my audience that a number of new technologies were becoming increasingly available, easier to use and more economically viable to purchase into. I pointed out that one of the key technologies for the future would be the World Wide Web (I was of course unaware at the time just how vital it would become) and that managed (virtual) learning environments would become a useful means of organising and supporting online learning for large groups of distributed learners. I took a risk and argued that universities that could not or would not rise to these challenges would either cease to exist, or become subsumed into larger universities who could respond to the challenge.

In this speech I was deliberately provocative, and was rewarded by a passionate response from the delegates. Many were convinced that I was correct, whilst many more were equally convinced that I was wrong. It prompted much debate and led to a number of publications which presented my thinking to a wider audience (Wheeler, 2000b; 2001).

Changing Roles

Later that same month, I presented a second keynote speech at a Teachers’ Conference held at the University of West Bohemia, Plzen, in the Czech Republic. In that presentation I focused on the role of the teacher and how it was changing as a result of technological drivers, such as the introduction of new ICTs as well as political, societal and organisational demands (Wheeler, 2001; 2000b). I drew upon my experience working in British and American schools to describe some of the new technologies and media methods that were emerging, and outlined their applications in teaching and learning. I argued that new information and communication technologies offered teachers an unprecedented chance to enhance and extend their practice. I went on to suggest that teachers needed to modify their classroom management, curriculum design, resources development, assessment and evaluation methods and communication techniques, if they were to remain effective and responsive practitioners. Again, this was a somewhat contentious speech, particularly as many teachers are traditionally minded, conservative in their approach, pressed for time and notoriously resistant to change.

My first keynote dealt with the changes institutions needed to make to survive in the new knowledge economy; my second keynote argued for changes at the level of the individual practitioner. In hindsight, neither argument was too wide of the mark. Across Europe and other western industrialised nations, most universities now have their own corporate e-learning strategies, and most manage their own virtual learning environments (McConnell, 2006).

Furthermore, many teachers have now adapted their everyday practice to incorporate digital technologies into the classroom and to extend learning beyond the traditional boundaries of the institute (Bach et al, 2007). Distance education is high on the agenda of most higher education institutes and a great deal of effort and time has been invested into staff development to ensure that teachers are up to date and aware of how to teach remotely using new technologies. Teachers have now started to harness the power of technology and the Web and personal networked devices within their working practice, for organisational, communicative and pedagogical purposes (John and Wheeler, 2008).

It is not only the role of the teacher that has changed. The embedding of digital technology into the fabric of everyday study has also changed the way students learn (Colllis and Moonen, 2002) and is more in keeping with what younger people expect (Veen and Vrakking, 2006). Now students can assume more responsibility for their own learning and design their own study trajectories. They are able to learn while on the move using personal devices, and are able to access a vast storehouse of knowledge through ubiquitous access to the Web. Communication is also an easier prospect with texting, instant messaging and shared learning spaces becoming ever more common place. In many ways, and for most students, it would be hard to conceive of a way of learning and working that was devoid of the Web, e-mail or mobile phones.

Other posts in this series:

Part 2: Changing times
Part 3: The Social Web
Part 4: Five key objectives
Part 5: Recommendations

References 

Bach, S., Haynes, P. and Lewis-Smith, J. (2007). Online Learning and Teaching in Higher Education. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Collis, B. and Moonen, J. (2002). Flexible Learning in a Digital World: Experiences and Expectations. London: Kogan Page.
John, P. D. and Wheeler, S. (2008). The Digital Classroom: Harnessing the Power of Technology for Learning and Teaching. London: Routledge.
McConnell, D. (2006). E-Learning Groups and Communities. Maidenhead: Open University Press.
Veen, W. and Vrakking, B. (2006). Homo Zappiens: Growing Up in a Digital Age. London: Network Continuum.
Wheeler, S. (2000a). The Traditional University is Dead! Long Live the Distributed University! Keynote presentation for the European Universities Continuing Education Network (EUCEN) Annual Conference, University of Bergen, Norway. May 4-7.
Wheeler, S. (2000b). The Role of the Teacher in the use of ICT. Keynote presentation for the Czech Teachers’ Conference, University of Western Bohemia, Plzen, Czech Republic. May 20.
Wheeler, S. (2001). Information and Communication Technology and the Changing Role of the Teacher. Journal of Educational Media 26(1), 7-18.

Wheeler, S. (2004). Five Smooth Stones: Fighting for the Survival of Higher Education. Distance Learning 1(3), 11-17.

Photo by Felix Burton on Wikimedia Commons


The survival of higher education (1): Changing roles by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Disruption!

There are two kinds of disruption. There is the disruption that stops you doing things, and there is the disruption that enables you to get somewhere new. The first is the kind of disruption that throws your day, your routine, your schedule, out of the window. This is the kind of disruption that causes you stress and anxiety, loss of earnings, and wastes your time. This is the kind of disruption we all experienced yesterday in London when the Underground staff went on strike. Anyone who was caught up in it will tell you that nobody could find a 'for hire' taxi cab for love nor money, the buses were stacked full to overflowing (some would say dangerously so) and people were actually seen scuffling (what fisticuffs?) for the few available Boris bikes that remained in the racks. Many resorted to walking to work, and the streets became a milling, grumbling, but somehow resolute throng of Londoners and visitors, who somehow, against all the odds, battled it through the gridlocked traffic and crowded pavements and eventually made it to their destination.

The same scene was replayed in reverse that evening, where we were all caught up in the same frustrating gridlock of traffic and pedestrians, all trying to make our way home. Many businesses and individuals (including me) lost a lot of earnings and time, and some probably suffered adverse health effects.  It was incredibly stressful. I am just very, very thankful that I don't have to experience this kind of disruption on a daily basis. I'll take the idyllic rural life of the Westcountry any time - even with its violent winter storms, flooding, crumbling sea walls, and cancelled rail services.

There is another kind of disruption. It is a good kind of disruption, an enabling kind, although those who find themselves caught up in it might not agree with that sentiment. Disruptive innovation - the introduction of new ideas or technologies - that change forever the way we do something, can and often is, a good thing. It is good because it takes stagnating businesses and organisations out of their slough of despond, and propels them into a new and more vibrant world where things are done differently. This is a real challenge for many businesses, but in order to survive, disruption of this kind is not only desirable, it is often essential. Take the case of Kodak, a once indomitable giant of the photographic industry, now a sad, washed up husk of its former self. Kodak failed to move with the times, failed to innovate, and did not adapt to the new digital trends. Its managers thought Kodak could survive on its old, tried and tested business model, but this was a false hope. The same can be said for many other former household names, now either no longer trading, or on the verge of expiring. In the UK we have seen the sudden, sad demise of many familiar highstreet names such as Woolworth, Blockbuster, Clinton Cards, Jessops. These and similar organisations have either fail to diversify, adapt to adverse climates or globalise their operations. They didn't see the killer application that was lurking in the wings, waiting to decapitate them.

Innovation is unfeeling. It waits for no individual, and respects no organisation. It relentlessly flows ahead, washing those away who oppose it, dragging the remainder into its strong undertow. Those who manage to surface and reach the crest of its wave find themselves as industry leaders. They are the ones, who in a Darwinian feat of self engineering and reinvention, have harnessed the power of the disruption, adapted to new and challenging environments, and have survived, as the fittest of their corporate species.

Harvard Professor of business Clayton Christensen has a great deal to say about disruptive innovation and how to survive and even thrive as a business through hard times. He warns that sometimes companies innovate too quickly, and end up trying to ship products that nobody is interested in. The Sinclair C5 electric car was a classic example of over specification. It failed to sell because we simply weren't ready for it. (The fact that it was also launched to the press during a particularly awful spell of cold weather also did little to endear it to our hack brigade). Businesses continues to peddle such overspecified sustaining innovations, usually because managers believe this is why they have succeeded in the past. This is a high stakes game. Retailing high cost products to meet the demands of the most affluent customers may not be enough to sustain a business. Businesses that do this inadvertently make way for disruptive innovation at the lower end of the market, says Christensen. An innovation that is disruptive allows a entirely new population of consumers at the bottom of a market to afford a product that previously only the richer population could afford. This is why Amazon has succeeded where many other large retailers have failed. Amazon has tapped into the zeitgeist of the digital age, making all its products available online, delivered directly to your door, whatever the weather. Other companies are also thriving, and in doing so, are putting the traditional companies, who have failed to change, in the shade.

But what of the world of learning? Disruptive innovations are already appearing in education. Arguably, concepts such as the flipped classroom, mobile learning and Massive Open Online Courses, have a disruptive capability that is beginning to challenge the traditional universities and colleges. Perhaps it is the age old irresistible force meeting the immovable object. Time will tell, but already we are witnessing the demise of many of the smaller more vulnerable universities, who are falling by the wayside, because they have failed to innovate correctly. So as the waves of disruption crash with increasing force upon the shores of our experience, will we see our sea defences crumbling? Or will we adapt quickly, and go with the flow?

Tube Strike photo by CP Grey


Disruption! by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Any colour you like: Learner autonomy and choice

'You can have any colour you like, as long as it's black' - Henry Ford

Some of the best work American author Daniel Pink has done has been around intrinsic motivation. In his book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Pink argues that the strongest urges to do anything significant come from within. The secret to motivational success lies in autonomy, and our desire to be self directed. The Venn diagram (below) illustrates what Pink believes to be the three prime motivators or drives that cause us to try out new things, attempt to surpass our previous achievements, and succeed in life. Autonomy figures strongly, as does our desire for mastery. However, at the top of the diagram is something we all need to be able to do anything successfully - a purpose. In course design this is often stated as an aim, or an objective, or even in some quarters, a goal. But this is not the full picture. Often, a stated objective might be better represented as a process. Purpose has no end. It is an ongoing proposition that learners aspire toward. This is why it is inextricably entwined with autonomy and mastery.

Autonomy, in the strictest sense of the word, can be defined as an individuals capability to make rational and uncoerced decisions. In the wider educational sense, autonomy has connotations of choice, including decisions about what one learns, where one learns it, and at what pace it is learnt. For too long, state funded educational systems have been removing this autonomy. Now that is all about to change. The advent of personal technologies (tablets, smart phones, games consoles, e-readers) and social media (social networks, discussion sites, media sharing platforms) coupled with emergent trends such as flipped classrooms and Massive Open Online Courses, are at the vanguard of a social movement that will provide anyone, anywhere, regardless of their condition, with access to quality learning experiences.

Autonomy is often misconstrued. I asked some of my students recently whether they were truly autonomous. I asked some whether they had chosen their own lunchtime meals. Of course, they responded. But that is autonomy only at one level. Their choices were almost certainly restricted to what was available in the refrigerator or cupboard, or what was left on sale in the local shop. The same applies to the clothing we wear, our technology, and just about everything else we possess. Our choices, even though we make them, are often constrained, unless we have the resources (purchasing power) to demand personally designed or created goods. Choosing courses at college or university has a semblance of autonomy, but traditionally, this has never really been the case. There is choice at a superficial level, but to use a culinary metaphor, choice is only from what is on the menu, and there are often only limited ingredients available. Now, with the new technology wave, all that is about to change. If the current trends continue, we can expect to see personalised learning finally realised, and any time, any place learning becoming a reality for millions.

Photo by Scribe
Graphic by Steve Wheeler, adapted from Pink (2009)


Any colour you like: Learner autonomy and choice by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

A day in the life: The quantified self

Much has been written recently about personalised learning. Many educators agree that one size does not fit all and that student centred learning is what we should all aspire to. It will be of great interest then, for anyone who subscribes to the notion of personal learning, that the latest Higher Education version of the Horizon Report lists 'The quantified self' as a trend we can expect to see adopted in the next 4-5 years.

What is the 'quantified self'? The Horizon report describes it as 'the phenomenon of consumers being able to closely track their daily activities through the use of technology. The emergence of wearable devices ... such as watches, wristbands and necklaces that are designed to automatically collect data that are helping people to manage their fitness, sleep cycles, and eating habits.' 

Essentially, the quantified self is all about personal metrics in the form of bio-data and other information we generate each day. These data are gathered via wearable devices (or other technologies nearby) and provide the individual with a 'big picture' of their daily routines, health state and other information they will find personally useful. The Horizon team predict that a widespread adoption of these technologies - in the context of higher education - is no more than 4-5 years away. It is not hard to see that other wearable devices, such as spectacles and headbands might also appear in the mix, as we move toward a time where personalised data are as valuable to us as our bank accounts.

The report goes on to develop this theme, providing a brief list of universities that have recently implemented small scale versions of personalised data gathering. The use of life-logging technologies is one emerging aspect of the quantified self. Another is the beta-testing of Google Glass. In medicine, accelerometers are already in use to monitor the health conditions of at risk patients. Such tools are capable of recording any and every second of our day, presenting it later as a comprehensible summary of our lives. Questions are raised though, around issues of privacy and safety. What if the data fell into the wrong hands, or more likely - what if people indiscriminately share their intimate, personal data on social media sites, as they already do with images and other personal information? Will this not make them vulnerable to as yet undetermined threats? What if such big data were to be used unscrupulously as a part of surveillance campaign? Will we need additional legislation to protect us? Clearly there are several concerns that have yet to be addressed around this emerging concept.

The Horizon team are speculative about exactly how 'the quantified self' might materialise in authentic academic contexts. They simply don't know, and admit as much: 'Educators at the moment can only hypothesize about a new era of the academic quantified self, but interest is strong and growing.'  It may only be a short time though, before we discover new ways to measure learning through 'big data' acquisition tools, and then apply them to improve pedagogy. There are already indications about how data logging our environment could promote better learning. Is it now time to quantify ourselves? What are your views?

Cyborg eye image by Vern Hart
Google Glass image by Loic Le Meur


A day in the life: The quantified self by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Altered perceptions

It's not every day you see the witty and urbane Donald H Taylor, chair of the Learning and Skills Group, looking like a member of Daft Punk. But that's exactly where the Day 2 keynote session of Learning Technologies ended up. Don had no-one to blame but himself for his blushes, mind. The keynote had ended and we were into question time when Don pointed to the hard hat and headphone contraption on the spare seat and asked what it was for. Our keynote speaker, Professor Beau Lotto, said he had only intended to use it if he had time. Don's curiosity got the better of him, and he said there was time, and so Beau used it... on Don. The idea behind the contraption was to show that perception could be manipulated. By adjusting the headphone pipes, he fooled Don into thinking he was hearing noises from one direction, when in fact the reverse was true.

The entire keynote presentation was a little like that. Confusing and intriguing. None of us really knew what was coming next from Professor Lotto, and as he talked, much of what we thought we knew, we began to doubt. Through a series of optical illusions and challenges, Lotto demonstrated that our eyes and brains can be fooled. Visual perception is everything, he declared, and it is made up completely from the light that falls on our retinas. We use not only light but also colour, to perceive our environment around us and extract enough information from it to act decisively. Perception is grounded in our experience, he says, because our brains take meaningless information from the real world and make meaning out of it. This is filtered by our perception, which means that we never see everything that is actually there, we only see what was useful to us in the past. Everything, all of our experience, says Lotto, begins with individual perception. But there lies the problem. If we are only ever behaving according to our perception of previous experiences, he asked, how can we ever learn to behave differently? Participating in science, he believes, changes our perceptions by challenging our beliefs, previous experiences and expectations.

Beau Lotto has been working in schools, getting children involved in research into learning through science experiments. He presented this work alongside one of the school children, Amy O'Toole (one of the youngest published scientists in the world - big up to Blackawton Primary School in Devon!), in a recent TED talk on children as scientists. The bottom line here is that science is for everyone, and there's nothing wrong with starting a scientific puublication with the words 'Once upon a time...' Here's the video below:



Lotto went on to discuss learning through uncertainty. All learning begins with questions, which arise from uncertainty. The only way we can ever do anything new, is to step into uncertainty, and ask questions - this is the basis of science. It is also the basis of play - and learning through play is a very powerful activity. It is intrinsically motivating, because it celebrates uncertainty (if you don't know who's going to win, it's exciting), it's open to all possibilities, and it helps us to become more adaptable to change. Games are just like scientific experiments, and we can change our perceptions, learning from both. The benefits of this for educational practice are undeniable. Small questions can lead to big discoveries.

Photo by Nick Shackleton-Jones


Altered perceptions by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.