Game changers

I was in Spain in early March to keynote the 9th International Conference on Technology, Education and Development (INTED 2015). The event, held in Madrid, is one I have previously written about on this blog. Over 600 people attended from more than 75 countries, and over several days, they explored a range of ideas around new approaches to education, new and emerging technologies and of course professional and personal development. It was a great event, and I remember wishing that I could have stayed for more than one day to join in with the entire conference. I was quite busy on the first and only day I attended, giving one of the two opening keynote addresses, before doing a book signing and then participating in a one hour panel discussion. After this I remember being whisked away by the conference organisers to sit under the lights in a make-shift studio somewhere in the bowels of the hotel for a television interview. The questions were well thought through. I was asked for example, what I thought would be the key game changers in education technology in the coming years, what the perfect school might look like, and what was the best experience in my entire school career. Below is the entire interview - I hope you enjoy it.




Game changers by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Social, mobile, and personal learning futures

Many of my public presentations have the prefix: Digital Learning Futures, because for me, the future of education and learning will be greatly influenced by digital technologies.

The presentation below was for the ELI 2015 (4th international conference on e-Learning and Distance Education) event in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where education and learning professionals from the entire gulf region and beyond came together to discuss the possibilities of future education scenarios.

The key argument of my presentation was that social learning, the use of mobile devices, and personal learning environments will all be vitally important components of any future learning ecology. I advised that technology is not a silver bullet, and cannot solve all the problems education is currently experiencing. Nor can it replace good pedagogy. However, once those concerns are settled I said - technology, especially the personalised, mobile devices student now own - can and often does make a huge difference in how people learn, and can neither dismissed nor omitted from any future pedagogical discourse.

Digital Learning Futures: Social, Mobile and Personal Technologies from Steve Wheeler

Photo by Victor Grigas on Wikimedia Commons


Social, mobile, and personal learning futures by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Battle lines

In yesterday's post entitled 'The Battle for Education', I showed a chart that characterised two opposing educational philosophies - traditional and progressive. I argued that educators are in a battle over how education is conducted, and this will determine our children's futures. Often, the differences between the two philosophies determine how students are treated, how they are assessed and ultimately, how they view their education and their own achievements.

Some comments on Twitter and on my blog have suggested that the binary between the two positions is unhelpful. There have been arguments that teachers switch between the two positions according to context. I'm not denying either of these two kinds of argument. But I will say this: it matters not whether or not individual teachers switch between modes, what matters is that there are indeed two opposing philosophies, and they both heavily influence the way schools are run. The tension between the two stances has previously caused disagreement, and will continue to do so, among educators. A binary does exist, and if leaders of schools subscribe to say a traditional approach to education, generally the school they manage will tend to follow that pattern of delivery. I have visited schools that are fully traditional in their approach and I have also been to schools where the ethos is wholly progressive. The differences are stark. Individual teachers do have a choice to determine their approach in the classroom, but realistically, these choices are limited, particularly if they are expected to tow the party line of their leadership.

One of the most marked distinctions between traditional and progressive approaches - and a battle line that will play increasing importance as the debate continues - concerns the role of the teacher. In the purest format of traditional education, teachers act as experts who deliver content to their students. They generally take a position at the front of the classroom and this is where all the action takes place. The whiteboard and other teacher resources are located here. Students are physically oriented toward this position by carefully planned seating. They are expected to pay attention to the expert, and learning is largely passive. The teacher's responsibility is to ensure that all students receive the same knowledge, at the same time. Later they are assessed on what they have remembered, and are given a grade to show how well they have been able to do so.

By contrast, progressive education views the role of the teacher as a co-learner. The teacher may be a content expert, but the most important part of their role is to facilitate learning of that content rather than simply to present it. This might involve active forms of learning where students discuss, explore through making and through solving problems. In progressive education approaches, teachers stand back and avoid the delivery of content as much as possible, creating an environment within which enquiry can be undertaken and where students generally assume more responsibility over their own learning. Assessment of learning in progressive education is more likely to be assessment for learning. This focuses more on individual progress than to measuring performance against a specific set of norm referenced criteria.

Again this is a simplistic characterisation of the two positions and there are bound to be more objections, but the definitions of roles above resonate with my experiences of recent school visits. This is by no means a complete argument. You can see them as notes in an ongoing series of thoughts about how education is being shaped and how this will play out in the continuing battle over our children's futures.

Photo by Shakata Ga Nai on Wikimedia Commons


Battle lines by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The battle for education

Education is underpinned by several philosophies, some of which are incompatible. As a result, there are many educational approaches, a myriad of theories and a bewildering number of perspectives. My students are currently grappling with this problem, as they seek to answer the essay question: 'who should define the curriculum?' To answer such a seemingly simply but deceptively complex question, they need to spend time exploring a number of philosophical positions, and two in particular. Here's my personal interpretation:

Socrates was an idealist, believing that reality is subjective, and that it is represented differently in each human mind. In the idealist perspective, reality is personally constructed by the individual, learning is also believed to be constructed, and all meaning is therefore negotiable. In Socratic discourse, no destination can be arrived at, nor can a definitive answer be found to any question, but other questions are generated and discussed. Social constructivist theory clearly derived from this set of tenets.

Alternatively, Aristotle, an acolyte of Socrates' student Plato, subscribed to the realist perspective, believing that reality is objective. From these ancient roots grew two separate and opposing philosophies on how education should be conducted. Aristolean realist theory became the basis for behaviourist beliefs that content was central to education, under the control of experts. Adherents of behaviourism also argued that observable and measurable behaviour was central to understanding learning, giving rise to standardised testing.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Socratic idealist philosophy heavily influenced constructivist and humanist approaches to education, which privileged the learner at the centre of the process, and emphasised the importance of the student making meaning. Progressive educators see teachers as co-learners who work alongside their students, rather than experts who control content. A battle of words and ideals is raging about which is the most effective, and indeed, the most appropriate approach to adopt for the needs of today's society.

The chart above (my design), comes courtesy of Wingra School in Madison, Wisconsin is derived from the work of a number of educational theorists. It highlights several key counter views between the two positions, and is quite revealing. It shows where the battle lines have been drawn. Have a look at the list and see which one you subscribe to the most - are you a progressive or a traditionalist?

Photo by Stuart Pilbrow on Flickr

NB: I acknowledge that this is a binary, and that these positions represent extreme ends of a very wide spectrum of teacher beliefs, but hopefully it will provoke some useful dialogue.


The battle for education by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Making connections

One major phenomenon of the last decade has undoubtedly been the global and exponential rise of social media. Seeded at the turn of the century, the social web phase of Internet development promoted connections, participation, networked sociality. It didn't take long for the emerging social networking services to gain massive worldwide subscriptions. To be able to connect to others and to share ideas and content instantly, caught the imagination of many. Van Dijck (2013) calls this phenomenon the culture of connectivity, but it has been spoken of by many others including Jenkins (2006) who argued that the prevailing culture was convergence - where old and new media combined to create new and distinctly different social contexts. Manuel Castells (2012) remarked on the autonomous nature of social media, and how ideas and other content can be amplified across vast networks, reaching huge audiences in seconds. News of world events on Twitter and other large social media platforms have often stolen the march of the mainstream media, reaching hundreds of millions of people several hours ahead of any major media breaking news announcements. The social web truly is a powerful communication technology.

This is one reason why teachers and other professionals should get involved. We are no longer in the age of isolation. Professionals should never be isolated, and that is why, in the past, conferences and symposia were organised, professional societies and associations were established. Now, in the social media age, anyone can connect to a worldwide network of professionals with similar interests to their own. They can share their ideas, concerns and triumphs, and gain feedback. A vast array of user generated content, much of it very useful, is available for free use on numerous sites, including YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo and Slideshare. Teachers need not feel isolated any longer. Simply connecting into the appropriate community of practice is enough to assuage any feelings of loneliness. You are no longer alone, but it's a matter of choice for each of us as to whether, or how, we engage. As Carl Jung eloquently put it: 'Loneliness does not come from being alone, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important.'

References
Castells, M. (2012) Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Jenkins, H. (2006) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.
Van Dijck, J. (2013) The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Graphic by Ashley Knight


Making connections by Steve Wheeler was written in Istanbul, Turkey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Unevenly distributed

It was a great pleasure to speak at the opening plenary session of INTED 2015 in Madrid earlier this month. Over 600 delegates from more than 70 countries attended, and I shared the platform with TED Talks veteran and technology innovator Charles Leadbeater. Below is the video of my presentation, entitled 'Digital Futures; Mind the Gap!' I have given a similar talk before, notably at the FOTE Conference held last year in London, but I have added some new content and discuss the perceptual gaps between teachers intentions and student expectations. I believe that this will become an important gulf to bridge in the coming years, as new learners enter the gates of universities and demand more in terms of technologies, new pedagogies and support. Topics dealt with include mobile learning, new communication cultures, the flipped classroom and change management. Best quote of the presentation has to be that of Canadian author William Gibson who once said: 'The future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed.' The many divides in society, especially the digital ones, tend to maginalise some as others benefit. But for me, the greatest uneven distribution is that teachers and students think differently. They often have different agendas, power structures and contexts, and within some form of reconciliation, education will never be fully equitable.



Photo courtesy of INTED 2015


Unevenly distributed by Steve Wheeler was written in Istanbul, Turkey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

10Q: Martin Weller - the battle for open

Now and then, I have the privilege to interview some great thought leaders in the field of education. I usually feature them on this blog under the banner of 10Q - ten questions. This time, I'm very happy to interview two of the keynote speakers for the EDEN 2015 conference, which will be held in Barcelona. In a few days I'll post my interview with Jim Groom, but first, here's the conversation that ensued when I caught up with The British Open University's Martin Weller.

1)      You’re currently professor of educational technology at the British Open University. What first attracted you to working in education/teaching/research, and why are you still there?

I joined the OU in 1995 just as the web was taking off. It was a very exciting time, as we were exploring the possibility of using the internet, particularly in distance education.  My field was ArtificialIntelligence, but I started experimenting with online tutor groups, producing web pages, etc and migrated into educational technology (as many people did). I chaired the OU's first big elearning course in 1999 with 12,000 students which really demonstrated the potential for elearning. I've stayed in it because it changes a lot and there are always new developments, eg I've been through VLEs, web 2.0, blogs, social media, learning objects, OERs, MOOCs, etc in this period.

2)      You wrote a book on being a digital scholar in 2011. What is digital scholarship, and why is it so important for educators?

 I see digital scholarship as a shorthand really for the intersection between digital technology, the internet and open practice. The intersection of these three offers many opportunities for changes in every aspect of scholarly practice. In the book I took Boyer's 1990 categorisation of scholarship as being discovery, integration, application and teaching, and demonstrated how each of these scholarly functions could be transformed by digital scholarship.

3)      In your experience, how has education changed over the last ten years - and have those changes been good?

I think it's a good news, bad news story. Sometimes it can seem that not much has changed and education (higher education in particular, which is my area of focus) has been very slow to realise the potential of new technologies. Sometimes this is appropriate, for instance not getting swept up in the latest silicon valley hype, but other times it's just a dismissal of any change. But I think this can underestimate a lot of the change that has taken place. It's gradual, and occurs alongside traditional practices - so we still have lectures and campus universities, which might lead you to think nothing much has changed, but parallel with this the role of blended and elearning has become mainstream practice. And we've seen a lot of innovation in the area of open education.

As to whether it's a good thing or not, I've just written a whole book exploring some of this in The Battle for Open, so it's difficult to say in a short answer. Generally I think the use of new tech has allowed education to be more flexible, and opened it up beyond the traditional notion of what constituted a university student. But there has also been some terrible hype about new developments, and technology can also been seen as a route for commercial interests to undermine the role of the university. So, it's a mixed picture. 

4)      Open online provision of courses has seen a surge in popularity around the globe with Openlearn, Futurelearn, and others. Will the bubble burst, or will this momentum be sustained? What are the success factors?

I think the hype is definitely over. But that is often when things get interesting. I think many MOOCs (and MOOC providers) will struggle to find a sustainable financial model in their current guise. But also the genie is out of the bottle in some respects. We will see them adapted and modified, but what the MOOC interest has done is raise the profile of open education and elearning in general, so increasingly universities and governments will look to this as a model.

5)      What is your response to the criticism of MOOCs (e.g. large scale dropouts, superficial learning)?

I think it is easy to be snobbish about MOOCs. It's nearly always a good thing to have people engaged with learning - it's better than having a population sitting around watching reality TV for instance. But equally the MOOC proponents have to take those criticisms seriously. MOOC dropouts are a real issue - at the Open University we've known for a long time that students really require a lot of support if they are to succeed. This is particularly true of the sort of learners you might want to reach with MOOCs (people who cannot access normal higher education for instance). If MOOCs are only good for experienced learners then they won't offer much of a solution.

6)      There has been at least 20 years of research into online learning, and over 40 years of research into distance education. How much of this is relevant to MOOCs, or are they a game changer?

They're a game changer in that they have made people who make decisions and have funding pay attention, but in teaching and learning terms they offer very little that we didn't know already. Apart from some of the more experimental ones that employ connectivist or rhizomatic approaches for instances, they are fairly limited in terms of pedagogy. It has been mildly entertaining to see many of the MOOC companies making 'discoveries' of things that we have known for ages (eg that students require support). But I think they have raised the profile of elearning, particularly with the entrance of prestigious universities into the area, and that changes the whole landscape.

7)      What do you think will be the next big thing in education? Will we see something new that will transform the learner experience, or simply more of the same?

I don't do predictions anymore! I think it's been a while since we've had a real 'big thing'. MOOCs made a lot of noise, but compared with the impact of the web 2.0/social media developments of the late 00s this was quite small scale. I think we are entering a phase of many different technologies becoming more sophisticated and more integrated into education eg mobile learning, social media, learning analytics. 

8)      What three things should educators be made aware of right now?

I think the general move to openness - MOOCs, OERs, open access, digital scholarship, open data - all these things are part of a bigger picture.  Related to this the nature of academic identity online, and how that relates to traditional practice. Analytics - good and bad uses of this.

9)      What will be the main theme(s) of your keynote at EDEN Barcelona?

I'm going to explore some of the issues around the battle for openness.  

10)   What gets you out of bed in the morning?

My two dogs need to go out the back garden and let me know :)

I feel very fortunate to be in a field (educational technology) and living through a period that it witnessing such rapid and large scale change. Regardless of what you think of MOOCs for instance it was fascinating to watch how they came from nowhere and saw such rapid growth, and then criticism. Being able to both participate in this field and be a recorder, researcher of it is exciting.

Read Martin's blog, the EdTechie.

Photo courtesy of Martin Weller

This interview is mirrored on the EDEN Conference Website

10Q: Martin Weller by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The labelling game

Last week I arrived at London Heathrow's Terminal 5, dragging my luggage behind me. It was early morning. I paused to look up and check the flight board. Yep. My British Airways flight to Madrid was listed - with the available check-in desks right next to it. It's always reassuring to see your flight listed on the board. Then you know you've arrived at the correct terminal.

So I ambled across the great Terminal 5 concourse to the check-in desk and presented my passport to the clerk. She looked me up and down, checked my passport, looked at me again... and then printed out a label, peeled back the sticky part and slapped it onto my bag. I looked at it. It said 'MAD'. I looked at her. I felt mildly offended. How does she know me? I thought.

I'm a psychologist you see. They say you're either mad before you start a degree in psychology, or absolutely insane by the time you finish. But how did she know? Perhaps it was just co-incidence, I said to myself. Then she stuck another 'MAD' label on my other piece of luggage.

Damn it, I thought - it's no mistake. This is a trend. She really thinks I'm mad. In a moment she's going to stick one on me too.

And then it dawned on me ... Airlines have a propensity to make the first three letters of your destination city into abbreviations and use them as labels on your baggage. Now I know this, I feel better. In fact I'm very much looking forward to travelling to Singapore later in the year. If I get into trouble with the authorities there, I'll simply point to my baggage labels and claim that the airline company gave me explicit instructions. What could possibly go wrong?

How often do we label our students? He's very bright, she's brilliant.... he's not such a hard worker, and that one over there is a real trouble maker.... Often we spend just a short amount of time with our students before we build an impression of their characters. Then we begin to label them. And then we think we know them. Our attitudes towards each student begins to harden and we think we can predict what they will do next. I hate hearing from other teachers what my new group of students is like. I would rather find out for myself what they can do, without any preconceived expectations or prejudices.

An interesting psychological study by Rosenthal and Jacobson back in the 1960s showed the problems and benefits that can occur in education when we label children. The Pygmalion effect, as it's known can be beneficial. If teachers ascribe great expectations onto their students, those students tend to perform better as a result. Perhaps this is because when teachers believe students are bright or hard working, they tend to lavish a little more time on supporting them than they do students who they believe to be less able or less hard working. And there's the rub. The reverse (or the Golem effect) can also occur. When teachers see students as time wasters, and expect less from them, those students tend to under perform. This kind of self-fulfilling prophecy has been shown time and again to emerge because of the way teachers perceive the potential of various students. I know personally that this can happen. Some of my previously failing students have come to me (several of whom have been thrown out of other courses) and have asked me to support them, to give them a second chance. I have seen these 'failing' students transformed into people who love learning, and who will go that extra mile or two, simply because someone has believed in them. They have ended up becoming great successes.

So next time you start off with a new group of students, don't jump to any quick conclusions. Don't label your students. Believe in them all. Treat each one as if they have the potential to succeed. Because if you believe they do, and you tell them, they are likely to believe it too. ... and they will be relying on you to support them.

Photo by Eddie Codel on Flickr


The labelling game by Steve Wheeler was written in Istanbul, Turkey is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Mind the gap!

Teachers should listen to children more. When children ask questions, they are seeking understanding, but sometimes the teacher can be too busy to listen to the meaning behind the question. They fail to 'read between the lines'. I have several horror stories I could tell about how asking questions in class ended up in ridicule for the child and a subsequent 'switching off' from learning - but I won't go down that road today. Read my blog post 'Pay attention at the front!' and you'll get the general idea. Instead, let me say that the 'listening but not hearing' problem is just one of the 'gaps' teachers and students experience just about every day in education - chasms and transactional distances that can open up between intentions of one person and misrepresentations of another.

It's a serious problem. It can lead to war.

In online/digital learning environments, my own research has shown that the gap can be amplified or reduced, depending on a) the skill of the teacher b) their attitude and c) how the technology is being used. Sounds like a no-brainer, I know, but it's actually a lot more complex and nuanced than that. There are gaps in perception about the purpose of education, gaps in how we interpret the problems we encounter each day as educators, digital divides between the haves and the have nots, the cans and the cannots, even the wills and the will nots... We could be here all day discussing these perceptual gulfs in our understanding. A song written by Beatle George Harrison contains the lines 'I was thinking about the space between us all, and the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion...' (Within You, Without You). He was right. There is a psychological space between each of us, and although it is impossible to bridge completely, we need to do our best as educators to know and understand our students as well as we can.

Below is a slideshow I presented at last year's Future of Technology in Education Conference (FOTE 2014), at the University of London. The video that accompanies the keynote speech is also available below with the abstract.

2014 fote conference from Steve Wheeler

Digital Learning Futures: Mind the gap!

When I gaze into the future I hurt my eyes. It’s not an easy thing to do, because the future is imaginary and is therefore unpredictable. One of the key variables of unpredictability is human issues such as teacher attitudes and student perceptions. Increasingly, with the proliferation of new technologies in learning spaces, the gaps are widening between teacher intentions and student expectations. This is partly down to social, cultural and demographic differentials such as values and beliefs, but also the result of changes in pedagogy and differing uses of technology. In this presentation I will outline what I see as the key human issues that will impact upon the design of future learning environments.

Images from various sources


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

Visions and values #EEVV351

One of my students @sophiefownes developing an essay response

Someone, somewhere in the mists of time - possibly a genius (so it couldn't possibly have been me) - wrote a final year teacher education module called Visions and Values. It's genius, because it focuses on the purpose of education, and with deceptively simple essay questions such as 'who should define the curriculum?' it exposes students to the delicious complexities of pedagogy and schooling. It's a timely module that taxes their intellect and academic skills like no other module, just at the point they are about to leave to take up their first teacher posts in the big bad world outside. The module is designed to get them thinking more deeply and critically than they have ever done previously, and it helps them to develop their academic writing and arguing skills to a very high level. It also encourages them to revisit their own motivations for becoming a teacher, and challenges them reappraise their personal and professional beliefs, values and attitudes. I believe it's the toughest thing many of them have had to face in all of their time at the Plymouth Institute of Education. I'm very fortunate to be the module leader of this presentation, and although it was initially a daunting prospect to manage a final year module for 200 students and an excellent team of around 15 lecturers and seminar leaders, I'm really warming to the task.

This past few months we have seen several lectures and seminars that have explored the nuances, implications and impacts of a variety of curricula, philosophies, ideologies and cultures. The students have been highly engaged, and have paid the price, often leaving the sessions saying 'my head hurts' or 'I'm really confused now', and other hearty expressions of deep learning we lecturers just love to hear. This week we also had a BBC Question Time style panel, where several courageous lecturers from the team sat on a panel and took questions from all angles, around politics, the media, cultural and historical issues, philosophy (both personal and general), societal and psychological perspectives, teacher roles, and a whole host of other, unpredictable questions that are hard to answer and even harder to articulate in short sentences (it's the supplementary question that's the killer!) Questions came from both inside and outside the lecture hall, as educators around the globe joined in and eavesdropped on the conversation through the module Twitter hashtag #EEVV351. I have been pleasantly surprised and gratified by the level of participation of those from outside the group, but of course, with tools like Twitter, the community of learners can be widened significantly beyond traditional boundaries. So much so, I believe, that the live webstreaming next year's delivery of the module (including the lectures and discussions) is an absolute must. More on the plans for this in a later communication.

Student mind map

Here's just a sample of some of the questions that were tackled during the panel session: If you each had the power to design a curriculum, what would you put at the core? How would education change if it were free of political influence and control? How much respect do you think teachers have in society? Is the answer maybe the reason why we are not defining the curriculum? Does education really change? Does a curriculum define the most important things children learn? Do we need a curriculum at all? Would there be chaos or creativity? What are the worst (and the best) changes you have seen in schools over the past decade? Who should not be allowed to define the curriculum? and finally the most pithy: If children are our future and the reason for education, how far should they be allowed to define the curriculum?

Debates around the tension between traditionalist and progressive education methods, the political implications of education, comparisons between international education systems, and the influence of media, industry and local communities on children's education raged continuously throughout the module. My students now have to unpick all of this. They need to make sense of it. They will struggle, and they will agonise about what to put in their 5000 word assignments, and what to leave out. They have already learnt a lot. But their biggest lesson will come when they attempt to follow one particular line of reasoning, only to realise that there are multiple layers of explanation, a whole host of lines of reasoning and an entire spectrum of ways of understanding the business of learning. I wish them every success and hope their heads hurt just a little bit more as they try to make sense of all this.

Photos by Steve Wheeler


Visions and values #EEVV351 by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The interview

I've been doing a lot of interviews recently, live at conferences, by text, and on video and audio. Interviews are great ways to get ideas across, and the more informal they are the better. Generally, I prefer to be unaware of what questions will be asked, so I can speak freely and not be concerned about preparation beforehand (frankly I don't have the time).

I recently had the pleasure to be interviewed by Bonnie Stachowiack for the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast series. It was wide ranging. We talked about the latest developments in technology supported education and discussed the contents of my new book. We shared some useful resources, talked about our favourite blogs and books, and discussed the concept of 'e-learning 3.0', the digital natives and immigrants theory (don't miss that bit!), reasons why I use Twitter, and why teachers should adopt blogging as a professional practice. We also tackled the thorny issue of privacy in the digital age. The interview in full is available by clicking here (sorry, the embed function isn't working for this one).

Graphic courtesy of Bonnie Stachowiack


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

PLEs, MOOCs and connectivism

'Students should be at the centre of learning', declared Stephen Downes, 'because there is no other place they could possibly be.' Downes was speaking at the ELI 4th International Conference on e-Learning and Distance Education held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This was one of several sound bites that exemplified the theme of his speech, Design Elements in a Personal Learning Environment.

Although it's a fundamental principle of progressive education, keeping the student at the centre seems to be something that not many schools, colleges and universities are good at. Rows of seats still persist in the classrooms of many schools, and direct instruction still holds sway. Standardised tests are administered by schools who ignore the fact that all students are different, and bells continually punctuate the timetable, dividing the school day up into an unconnected parade of subjects, each delivered in content heavy lessons. One size never did fit everyone.

Stephen Downes was adamant in his view that personal learning is the way forward for all forms of education. He argued that in the new learning ecology, where technology can connect students to any others, and any content, any where in the world, is one in which content must change. Content, he said, should not be delivered by experts to passive recipients, but in a connected world where personal learning environments are controlled by the learners, content is actually a signal between one student and another.

We learn through collaboration, interaction and sharing he said, citing the formula for connectivist learning approaches he said: Aggregate, remix, repurpose and feed forward. Generally, this aligns to that held by many educators who subscribe to connectivist theory - that students not only consume content, they now have the capability, through their personal learning environments (PLEs), to mash it up with any other content, to create new content, extend it, remix it and share it across their network of friends and other connections. The learning comes not by memorising it, said Downes, but by using it, applying it. And this was exactly the guiding principle of the earliest MOOCs.

Downes bemoaned the fact that the original Massive Open Online Courses, run in free and flexible, student led ways and owned by students, had been sadly misappropriated by the large consortia, and now hardly resembled at all the first MOOCs of the last decade. The cMOOCs, connectivist (or some would argue Canadian) courses had been overtaken by the xMOOCs, and were now unrecognisable from their first form. cMOOCs still exist of course, but the popular format is now that of the mega-courses run by the likes of consortia such as Coursera and EdX. When asked by a member of the audience to comment on the huge non-completion rates of MOOCs, Downes said that most people do MOOCs because they are interested in the content and the interactions rather than gaining a qualification.

Photo from JISC Website


PLEs, MOOCs and connectivism by Steve Wheeler was posted from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Constructionism 3.0

Listening to MIT's Vijay Kumar speaking is always informative. Kumar has vast experience in research in online and digital learning environments, and he conveys his knowledge in an accessible style. He was keen to argue that the future of education has two fundamental characteristics - open and digital. His previously published book Opening Up Education explains the first in plenty of detail, but the second, digital, was uppermost in his keynote presentation at ELI 2015, the Saudi Arabian premier e-learning event. He said that it is at the intersection of digital and open that learning innovation occurs, and that education will be transformed if attention is paid to them both. He showed through several examples of his own work with online learning how visualisation and animation are vitally important for students. Visualisation takes the abstract, and makes it concrete he explained. Kumar went on to discuss the role of assessment in online learning. He maintained that assessment should be embedded within the digital learning environment, and should be frequent, because it provides constant feedback to students on how well they are doing. He showed that the completion rates of MIT online programmes has improved dramatically because of these features in their provision.

The most intriguing aspect of his keynote were his remarks about constructionism 3.0. Contructionism is a theory of learning by making. I asked him how this could be defined as 3.0, and how it might be different to 2.0 or even 1.0. Alluding to the early work in educational programming by Seymour Papert (LOGO), Kumar suggested that this equated to constructionism 1.0 because it was largely a solo led form of learning, with students interacting directly with the machine. Constructionism 2.0, was learning by making using tools such as Scratch, which became quite a social form of learning. Constructionism 3.0 he explained, was where this form of learning by making was distributed widely, and could be witnessed in movements such as Fab Labs and makerspaces. Constructionism of this form does not necessarily require a space, but often does, where makers meet and learn from their problem solving endeavours and through challenge based approaches to fixing, hacking, modding, designing for 3D printing, and a whole host of other forms of making by adjusting existing structures and tools.

Photo by Paul Keheler on Wikimedia Commons


Constructionism 3.0 by Steve Wheeler was posted from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.