Seems to me the fundamental issue with VLEs is how to create systems that enhance all the good aspects of 'control' (quality, reliability, brand protection, intellectual property rights etc) without disempowering the learners and removing their ability to use and adapt tools flexibly.
Web 2.0 tools are all about user-control and adaptability - so the challenge for any institution that wants to be large scale is how to strike this balance between control and empowerment in their VLE.
Thursday, 7 July 2011
How to Encourage Faculty Adoption
Sclater has some interesting things to say here about the need for communication, evidence-gathering of success stories, skills development for staff, providing incentives, and skewing funding so as to encourage development of elearning.
As regards Evidence Gathering of Success Stories – this is great in theory but in my experience is extremely difficult in practice because people just don’t have the time to consolidate their thinking and share it when they have achieved something.
On incentives, Sclater suggests that offering financial incentives to staff to engage with elearning development may be part of the solution – I’m not sure that all academic staff would necessarily be that incentivised by financial reward, and for some people they may actually be demotivated by having their academic endeavours directly tied to financial incentives.
Funding of Module Development
Fascinating that most funding goes towards the initial development of a module, with very little budget allocated for ongoing enhancements.
Seems to me there is a big opportunity for Continuing Professional Education for some subject areas, where students may be happy to pay an ongoing fee to an institution for top-quality updates on how their professional area is developing.
So maybe the OU needs to switch a lot of funding towards continuous module update and evolution.
[H800 week 21 activity 2]
VLEs – does scalability increase the risk of structural rigidity?
I have an aversion to centrally-planned systems. My experience of the OU system is that there are some parts that work really well (the forum pages, the calendar, the assessment-submission system) and other parts that are ‘clunky’ (the blogs, the wikis, the quiz page).
In our tutor group, none of us have adopted the OU blog format, we have all instead chosen Wordpress or Blogger and linked these to the OU site.
Some tech-savvy tutors are guiding their learners to using Web 2.0 tools – this makes a lot of sense to me. But Sclater argues that this approach is unsustainable and impractical if elearning is to be delivered at scale.
There is a big issue here – effective learning requires empowerment at the learner level, and systems that learners can adapt for themselves. Yet organizational scalability requires a degree of homogenization and rigidity. There is a fundamental contradiction here.
[H800 week 21 activity 2]
Open Source Systems vs Commercial Systems
I am amazed to discover that Moodle is an open source system, depending on a community to support it rather than a commercial organization.
I’m also amazed that the OU had the courage to decide to use an open source system.
Market-competitiveness and commercial imperatives are supposed to result in the most efficient allocation of resources – so I find it really surprising that the OU’s experience has been that commercial systems were less customizable and inflexible.
The OU’s experience seems to have been that using an Open Source System was cheaper and more flexible, and that Moodle has proved to be robust, with minimal periods of downtime – this would seem to really challenge many current views about the efficiency of the market.
I also can’t understand why this worldwide community of developers and users are happy to offer their services for free.
Is there a requirement for ‘critical mass’ here? IE if a piece of software is big enough in terms of the size of the insitutions using it, then there will be sufficient, altruistic and interested developers around the world who will want to support it.
IE if a smaller institution, like a single school, wanted to adopt an Open Source System, would that work in practice?
[H800 week 21 activity 2]
Tuesday, 5 July 2011
Reading Conole
Week 21 Activity 1b
About an hour (optional activity)
Read the first half of the chapter by Conole (2011), ‘Stepping over the edge: the implications of new technologies for education’; just up to the section entitled ‘Making sense of the complexity’.
Consider to what extent you agree with the arguments Conole makes.
I liked the article, and there is a lot in it that I agree with. I thought that Pea’s description of how progressive waves of technology have changed the ‘ether’ of mediation was really interesting.
There were some aspects I did not fully agree with.
“…fostering these new skills suggests a need for a radical transformation of the educational curriculum.”
I’m not sure I agree. I think it is right that institutions’ systems and processes will tend to block change, but I’m not sure that they can’t gradually evolve rather than needing to radically transform. The essence of Web 2.0 is that it is user-led, and that the tools are intuitive to pick up and will be appropriated and adapted by the users to suit their needs. IE I think that change will be driven by learner practices, and institutions will need to evolve accordingly. But an effort to try and re-write curriculums to ‘fit’ them better to the new Web 2.0 world is likely to fail.
To use an analogy, re-writing the curriculum is akin to trying to centrally plan an economy rather than letting the market operate freely in determining the best allocation of resources.
Conole describes a world where institutions and systems are in place, with strong cultural norms around ‘what education is’ (still largely in most people’s minds a matter of transfer of knowledge) and its value. We can theorise about new potential education models, but I can’t see that the existing structure of schools and universities could be replaced overnight. What is more likely is that there will be new types of institution offering learning in new ways, and over time the existing institutions will evolve or die.
Conole seems to share Wesch’s view that the Lecture Hall is fundamentally ill-suited to the Web 2.0 approach to education – but why can’t the Lecture Hall be complementary, one part in a suite of tools that learners can use? I understand that we need to leverage the new things that we can do with Web 2.0, but does that necessitate rejection of all the old approaches to education?
And is the teacher/student nexus really under such threat? Why isn’t the teacher’s role as an expert guide and facilitator still a valid one, with plenty of authority?
Reflect on your own experience and how technologies have changed the way you do things and how you work.
· I can access up-to-date research and information far more easily now.
· I can work from anywhere, and at times to suit me.
· Word processing allows me to draft documents and shape them in a much more flexible way that suits how I assemble information from different sources and then do a lot of iterations and re-writings and re-orderings
· I have a variety of communication options – mobile phone, skype, email, Facebook, Twitter.
· Broadly, technology has enabled me to allocate work and non-work activities when I want to (and I can opt to compartmentalize work and non-work, or to blur the boundaries when I feel like it), and to choose the time and duration I devote to a task. I can have a more flexible and personalized lifestyle.
What changes have occurred in your own institution over the last decade in terms of the use of technologies?
· Globalised internal phone system – has hugely increased rapport levels.
· More telephone conference calls.
· Increasingly sophisticated use of video-conferencing – has reduced the time needed for face-to-face meetings.
· Blackberries – continuous access to email (and the need to learn skills of ‘switching off’ from work when necessary).
· Coordination of group work between different countries by way of e-mail control summaries and conference calls – allows us to move faster.
Catalytic Triggers for Organisational Change
Conole argues that a number of catalytic triggers can be identified in terms of the impact of technology on organisations.
Is this your experience?
The norm, unfortunately, is for high-spend IT projects to fail completely. ‘If you build it, they will come’ is the underlying philosophy for a lot of technological initiatives, but this rarely works in practice. Organisations have strong norms and routines in place (often informal ones that people may be unconscious of) – trying to introduce change without tuning in to these will never usually work.
Can you think of examples of when technologies have had a radical impact on your own practice – either personally or professionally?
Some of the most radical changes are seemingly small but, if well focused, can be very profound. So for example, when my company created a global ‘internal phone system’ with everyone around the world searchable and with just a four digit extension, that really had a profound impact on rapport levels.
What do you think are some of the key barriers to the uptake of new technologies?
I think the main one is a lack of focus on implementation. There is a strong underlying expectation that people will intuitively adopt technology, so you see a lot of investment going into design and capex spend, but no one thinks it necessary to invest time and resources into implementation. We are at point ‘A’, we can design and visualize the technology we need to get to point ‘B’, but we do not assign any specific planning or responsibility to people whose job it is to get us from ‘A’ to ‘B’.
There’s also the issue of the sheer volume of change – no one is ever at a position to consolidate the usage of a technology because the technology keeps evolving, so organisations are in constant state of catch-up. That means that no-one has the bandwidth to sit still and think deeply around how best to make a technology ‘bite’.
From your own experience, can you think of change processes you have been involved with – a new technical system, restructuring of your department, a change in job functionality?
How was the change process managed?
Typically there is a champion who coordinates a diverse team of representatives from around the organization.
What was the impact on individuals?
Change of any sort is normally stressful for all the individuals concerned.
What was the impact on day-to-day operations?
If the senior leadership of the firm is deeply aligned to the changes that are being implemented, they will happen. If the senior leadership are not aligned, then the changes will tend not to bite – organisations will revert to ‘norm’.
As Mayes, Puttnam and others have argued, education seems to have been slower than other industries in embracing the potential of technologies.
Can you think of reasons why this might be the case?
If you are in the bean-counting business then Microsoft excel will have revolutionized your ability to add up numbers and perform calculations. If you are in the teaching business, where the level of human mediation is much higher, then the impact of technology will be less.
Is there anything significantly different about the nature or culture of education that has had an impact?
The fact that education is traditionally a ‘not-for-profit’ activity will have had an impact. Necessity is the mother of invention, so in cultures that have a brutally simplistic ‘profitability’ target, along with continuous pressure to cut costs and maximize profits, it is more likely that technology will be exploited to increase productivity and effectiveness.
Do you think this is also true for Web 2.0 technologies?
The more we have tools that empower the user, the less we will have obstacles caused by the natural tendency of organisations to resist change.
Do you think that the hype about Web 2.0 tools is justified?
I think the empowering nature of Web 2.0 tools is radically different from much of what we have had before. It has transformed our ability to communicate. Its impact on the quality of creativity may be less than the hype would suggest, but it has definitely made it a lot easier for people to communicate with eachother.
Do you think there is any evidence yet that Web 2.0 tools are having a significant and increasing impact on how teachers teach and learners learn?
Not that I’m aware of yet, but I would like to know what the teachers in our tutor group think.
Are we on another ‘groundhog day’ cycle or is there something significantly different this time?
If we are expecting a revolution, we are probably going to be disappointed. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t profound incremental change happening over a long period of time.
If your conclusion is broadly that each technology is just another cycle of change, with promises not matching reality, is the perspective any different if the lens on this is over a longer time frame? In other words, has there been a significant change in practice when you take a longer-term, cumulative account of a range of technologies?
I think we need to be very granular in assessing ‘what is different’ and ‘what is changing’. And we need to respect the fact that seemingly small changes can be highly impactful. For example, I get the sense that people do not rate the existence of online research libraries as being representative of a profound change – but to me these are incredible. When I did my Masters’ degree in 1992, every resource I researched had to be in hard copy and sourced through the physical library system. My ability to locate new research was limited. I can now research worldwide from a laptop in my kitchen, and download all the articles and latest research that I want. This is revolutionary.
Monday, 4 July 2011
Reflections on Week 18 Activity 2
· I thought this was a great activity.
· The report ‘Web 2.0 for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education’ is extremely rich in interesting and thought-provoking content.
· The questions in the activity are good prompts for constructive reflection and for drawing together the different issues and strands of thinking, and also for creating new learning – for example, my thinking around the issues of formation of identity and how these may impact students’ adoption of Web 2.0 technologies just bubbled up in my mind as a piece of new learning for me.
· The thing that mystifies me is - how come only an hour and a half has been allocated to this activity? It has taken me at least eight hours.
· I’m also not yet clear as to the value of writing my answers in my blog – I would recognize that as a personal space for reflection, doing it this way may have created some new learning for me that may not have eventuated if I had used the online forum. Maybe, but I’m not sure. I’m also missing the interaction from my fellow students – no one has posted anything on this activity to the forum, nor in their blogs. And if they had posted to their blogs, I haven’t yet learned how to avoid needing to open all of them one by one to read them, which seems very time-consuming.
How are Universities using ICT?
The report ‘Web 2.0 for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education’ by Tom Franklin and Mark van Harmelen on behalf of the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education looks at case studies from the universities of Warwick, Leeds, Brighton, Edinburgh and Klagenfurt.
University of Warwick – own blogging system, largely used by students (15% of them) for social contact and interaction.
University of Leeds – Elgg for blogging, pushed mainly at staff for trying new ways of teaching and disseminating information.
University of Brighton – Elgg plus separate VLE, students and staff are using for online socializing and sharing academic interest. Interesting that the tools are being used formally and informally (contrast this with the OU VLE, which our tutor group has not used much for informal interaction). Students are starting to use Elgg for personal development planning and the creation of e-portfolios. Elgg is also providing new forms of student support – e.g. one student blogged about wanting to quit his studies, and was offered direct support from the university – slightly scary I think! Big Brother is watching you. Note that although the write-up suggests good take-up, in practice the numbers are low – only 4.5% of students in May 2007.
University of Edinburgh – the only UK university to have a formal Web 2.0 strategy. Uses blogs and RSS feeds instead of newsletters, uses Google Maps for campus maps, uses social bookmarking technologies to manage reading lists, provides podcasts of public lectures.
University of Klagenfurt (Austria) – hosts Elgg for social networking, file sharing and e-portfolios, and Moodle as VLE. There are no indications of any strong effect on teaching or learning yet, although there are emerging signs that Web 2.0 facilities may be helping to make learning more student-centred. Students are taking greater control of managing, documenting and reflecting on their own learning.
Most of these case studies support Weller’s view that universities are creating a centralized and top-down version of technology in current applications to teaching and learning.
Klagenfurt feels like it is most advanced in the changing of traditional roles, giving more control of learning to the students.
[H800 Week 18]
The experience of Web 2.0 that most users have
Most users are still having a Web 1.0 experience – IE they are largely just viewing content.
Some other statistics from Hitwise (see Trainer, B. 2007, Measuring the Participatory Web)
· Web 2.0 traffic was 2% of all web traffic in April 2005
· Web 2.0 traffic was 12% of all web traffic in April 2007
· YouTube – 0.16% of site visits are to add video content
· Flickr – 0.2% of site visits are to upload photos
· Wikipedia – slightly more participation, 4.59% of site visits are to edit entries
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What proportion of people in different age groupings are doing more than reading the Web?
| 12 - 17 | 18 - 21 | 22 - 26 | 27 - 40 | 41 - 50 | 51 - 61 | 62+ | |
| Creators | 34% | 37% | 30% | 19% | 12% | 7% | 5% |
| Critics - making comments or adding ratings | 24% | 37% | 34% | 29% | 18% | 19% | 11% |
| Collectors - RSS aggregators, bookmarkers | 11% | 16% | 18% | 19% | 19% | 16% | 11% |
| Joiners - joiners of social media sites | 51% | 70% | 57% | 29% | 19% | 8% | 6% |
| Spectators - watching and reading | 49% | 59% | 54% | 41% | 31% | 26% | 19% |
| Inactives - use computers but no social media, e.g. e-mail only | 34% | 17% | 21% | 42% | 54% | 61% | 70% |
Is the primary educational significance of social networking its informal use?
As things currently stand, social networking is only having any impact on student life when it is used informally – for peer communication and support. Students have fed back that they don’t want social networking sites to be used for education – because they like its informal, social nature and see this as a distinct ‘zone’, separate from their studies.
But my view is that this is just because the tools for social networking are still evolving. Facebook is largely social in nature, but perhaps Elgg, which is more targeted at learning communities, could work better for education. Over time, we will be able to identify more clearly the aspects of social networking sites that could be utilized more in education. For example, Facebook has the ‘bookshelf’ app that aggregates user feedback on different books and then recommends similar books for people to read based on correlations in their preferences. This app could be used for reading lists for university students.
[H800 Week 18]
Second Life – an opportunity to counter the fears around Web 2.0?
Second Life is creating opportunities for a new kind of socialization, so in a sense may help to reduce the fears over heightened disengagement.
Second Life won’t help counter the fears around the changing power relationships between teachers and students, however. If anything, it could have the opposite effect – Second Life is encouraging the ‘rendering strange’ of the norms of teaching, making people think in new ways about their relationship to their own learning.
[H800 Week 18]
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