Pete Radcliff’s

‘How many people here work in a central support service for e-learning at a university?’ (about half the people put their hands up) ‘Oh dear, I’m afraid what I am going to say you may find very offensive’. So started Jonathan Darby’s short paper at the Alt-C 2006 conference.

What Jonathan then said was indeed uncomfortable to listen to. Reporting on his observations of the workings of traditional, mainly Russell group, universities he argued that central e-learning support services simply were not working. Well funded national projects hardly connected with the majority of the academic community; things were changing only very slightly; we needed to be honest about what is going on.

Jonathan is a well-respected figure in the university e-learning community. He has visited and spoken at UoD. But is he right?

It is difficult to know what Jonathan was proposing other than that things weren’t working. There was an implicit suggestion that we have bitten off more than we could chew, or as Jonathan put it e-learning is a discipline in its infancy. Maybe we shouldn’t be making such grand plans? But isn’t a bigger problem the lack of vision, that we are using outdated methods of learning and assessment; that our students see an education system that is increasingly archaic whilst they see continuing revolutions in technology in every other area of their social life?

For me the existence of grand e-learning schemes is not the major problem, neither is the existence of infrastructures and services in can act on them. The problem is that these visions and plans belong to either the exclusive set of people who are specialists or the set of people in senior management whose functional focus isn’t directly on learning needs on a day-to-day basis.

I’m not saying that the latter have no concerns for learning needs, it is just that those concerns are mediated through institutional plans and the ultimate requirement to keep the ‘customer’ satisfied. The chalkface, or graphical user interface, academic who may know least in a university about business is consequently marginalised in the decision making process in every way including e-learning plans.

Our learners and academics are desperate for ‘grand plans’ and the support services that can really help them meet the huge demands on them and their students. What we need is a little more democracy, accountability and better alignment of the grand plans with the wider community.

A thought occurred to me during a discussion about problems about building up repositories of learning objects, ‘Would you care to share?’ At Alt-C 2006 Conference.

The thought was this –

1. We have had the learning object economy repositories and Wikipedia for a similar(ish) time
2. These repositories have not been a huge success at getting sharing. In the early days Google was the problem, but now also Wikipedia. If students want to get quick hyperlinked definitions (especially if their lecturers approve which I strongly believe they should) Wikipedia is where they will go.
3. At a wild guess, tens of thousands of academics will be contributing, amending material to Wikipedia.
4. Despite exaggerated fears, the quality of material on Wikipedia is remarkable high and very up-to-date.

So why has Wikipedia been such a success and the learning object economy, well…, been not particularly successful? Usually (and as repeated at Alt-c 2006) the reasons given for the difficulties in getting the learning object economy moving is that academics are for some reason uncollaborative or even secretive. I have never believed that. The reasons for lack of collaboration are primarily technological, institutional and developmental. The interface to the repositories are too complicated for the group of people (all academics) that we want to use them. Institutions (and the governments that control them) do not encourage cross-institutional collaboration because they are competitively positioned. Developmentally we haven’t found a way of getting collaboration to work.

But I think the success of Wikipedia proves that people (and academics) are far more collaborative then they are given credit for.

Wikipedia has collaboration and iteration built into its very structure, each major article will be the result of dozens or even hundreds of addition or iterations. The quality of the material on Wikipedia is not controlled by a rigorous time-delaying quality control procedure. If people think it is wrong they change it and because there is such high usage, quality is generally good.

So what can the learning object development learn from Wikipedia?

Find a way of making design and implementation iterative. OK, that’s not so easy if you want learning objects that are interactive. It will mean making iterative tools that everyone can get hold of and use (ideally web-based tools like wikis).

At the design stage, take away from the academic author the need to make the all-in-one definitive learning object on … whatever it is. Take away the fear from the author that what they produce has to be very good first time… or their reputation will be put to question. (For that matter why does the author have to be an academic anyway?). Find a way of designing collaboratively, through story-boarding or some other means, feeding off the widest expertise possible and in the widest forum. And why shouldn’t the forum be as wide as Wikipedia? No-one need spend more time contributing to a design of a learning object than they might spend editing Wikipedia.

At whatever stage people can run with whatever design they see and those various implementations of the design are linked to the evolving and bifurcating designs. Ultimately I don’t see any reasons why we shouldn’t have the tools to implement those designs through various templates of interactive material.

So instead of having an object suddenly appearing (or not appearing as is more usual now) with an invisible history, we have a shared and open history of the refinement of learning ideas.

A learning ideas repository. Must get the patent in, before Blackboard hear about it.

I have never seen Stephen Heppell speak but he was, as he was introduced, the best speaker you could wish to hear on e-learning.

With no pomposity and with great humour he took apart many of the assumptions that are made about learning and elearning. His comments contrasted sharply from the presentation made the previous day by Professor O’Shea of Edinburgh University
O’Shea had argued that:

1. …’content is king’
2. …traditional universities, as repositories of knowledge and expertise over centuries, would retain that position of excellence in e-learning.
3. …new universities might model their educational paradigm on army training, teaching the troops to be precise in their use of lower level skills (someone amusingly shouted at that point in the presentation ‘abolish the polytechnics, bring back national conscription’)
4. …the best new universities (and presumably FE institutions) could do is to get some reflected shine off the traditional universities excellence by arranging partnership arrangements.

On the other hand, Heppell made a sharp attack on the governmental’s conservative record in this area, which is significant in that he played a role in defining that policy for the 1997 election and advises numerous government’s throughout the world (although a dissident voice as far as the current UK government is concerned).

Heppell’s was the only presentation that didn’t use the standard linear Powerpoint delivery. This may be a small point but indicative.

He challenged the argument that large educational institutions like schools and universities will even need to exist in future decades. He showed a primary school in existence with an enrolment of only 3, functioning effectively wth their bemused students watching webcam images of gridlocked traffic of the other world.

He demonstrated the government’s damaging preoccupation with control rather than meaningful education by analysing government policy pdfs by searching for frequency and incidence of certain key words such as creativ*** and standards. (Acrobat lends itself to this use very well). He gave practical demonstrations of how students of every age (even those excluded from schools) are using the creative tools that are now available to connect, communicate, express themselves and learn.

Truly inspirational stuff.

I am not dead, merely sleeping. My contributions have been going to our blog http://uodstaff.edublogs.org until that develops a life of its own I’ll be posting there. 

New Year picture

Originally uploaded by Pete Radcliff.

A flickr picture may appear. Nothing educational. Just etsting privacy and tagging features of the popular Yahoo tool

One of the important jobs of an e-learning technologist, or academic author (or whatever we describe ourselves as) is to translate textual learning material to effective diagrammatic or other visual representations; if at all possible integrating them with animations’ learner-control and interactivity that enhance their meaning and use.

I don’t think this job is done at all well in general and as I’ve said earlier in this blog, there seems little research going on. (Apart from Robert Horn who I will give another plug – what do others think of his work?)

But a computer’s graphic capabilities can transform learning.

Take statistics for example, historically it has been a notoriously opaque subject with complex formulas and concepts. Computer graphics have transformed the way it is now taught and investigated, indeed a whole new area of statistical analysis, Exploratory Data Analysis, has come into being as a result. In learning, simple concepts such as dispersion can be easily grasped through a graph and more complex ideas such as the Central Limit theorem or the Gaussian distribution can be illustrated and validated by graphs of the results of simulations.

But, in most subjects where there have been developments, most informational visual learning materials are the products of individual publications. Some have gone into the public domain but the reuse of informational graphics seen in books cause copyright concerns. There are even greater copyright concerns when we attempt to build on and reversion a static graphic first seen in a book into an animated or interactive one.

Hopefully metadata, repositories will resolve some of these questions (eventually).

But to go back to my original point we need more discussion and research into what makes a good visual learning object. Does anyone know where there is being discussed in the e-learning community?

One of the problems is knowing what other people may have posted (especially whilst I’m awaiting authorisation to integrate RSS feeds).

But there is/was a useful discussion on moodle on blogs and discussions in education, a lot of critical stuff.

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=27338
A challenge to all of us?

I’m going to try and put something on this blog every day. Not necessarily with any pretensions of being profound or interesting but, if not that, hopefully controversial.
So point 1 (Intentionally controversial) and link to title
I remain seething about the repression of the wonderful show Jerry Springer: the Opera show.
For those outside the UK it is a satirical comment on the chat show of the same name, that was scripted by the comedian Stewart Lee, formerly of the comedy duo Lee and Herring. The BBC showed it after the watershed hour last January after 2 years of successful performances in London as well as Edinburgh leading to much protest.
Having seen it both performed in London and on the BBC, I consider it to be very funny, innovative and insightful on the state of the media and the contemporary use of language (and obscenities).
I was unable to see it performed locally when a tour of the country had to be cancelled because of the repressive religious lobby, increasingly strong in the UK, took exception to it on alleged grounds of obscenity. Even going so far as to try and stop children charities accepting the proceeds of charitable performances.
I can’t make a link to the principles of open source (although I’m sure there is one) but I object to such repression. So comment on that anyone who supports the attempted ban.
Point 2 (Non-controversial)
The e-learning community needs to give more consideration to the principles of visual language theory IMHO. Text books have been transformed over the last 40 years with the use of graphical representations of material. But not much discussion about how we should take a systematic approach to this in e-learning. I personally have found Robert Horn’s work interesting. But there needs to be more discussion of these ideas. Anyone?

I have been reflecting on why I haven’t considered before whether blogs could be much use in education, except as an occasional off-task thought. After all I have been blogging, on political websites and others for some time.

Shamefully, I find myself coming to the conclusion that I often now down-play the significance of new technologies.
My excuse? Internalisation of institutional negativity.

Professionally, as learning technologists or academics, I think we have so many demands on us that we don’t look ahead enough into the possibilities of new technologies. We bang away hoping that our technical teams will somehow streamline existing technologies…’Why can’t VLEs integrate the discussion boards better within content?’, Why can’t I get to ‘A’ from ‘B’ in one click instead of 5?’ etc.

We get locked into expectations of incremental technological change because we are usually locked out of decisions on developing new technologies. Maybe that is just a personal view. But the separation of ‘technologist’ and ‘educationalist’, both institutionally and individually, I would insist, is the biggest obstacle to e-learning developments; leading again and again to inadequate and inappropriate technologies and poor learning.

That is why I have always looked, in theory if not in practice, to the open source community engaging with an enthusiastic, mutually reinforcing, educational community, as little constrained by commercial principles as is possible to provide potential solutions and progress.

If we can get commercial organisations and large educational organisations (which usually base themselves, unnecessarily, on commercial models) to contribute to this then … fine. The UK educational establishment shows some signs of shifting towards collaborative open-sourced solutions with the e-Learning Framework (ELF).

But we need to ensure that such solutions are both pursued and utilised effectively. And by we, I mean here, the educational practitioners and not educational suppliers or businesses. Any supporters of Public-Private Partnerships want to give an alternative view?

So long live the community and edublogs contribution to it! Or should I use ‘Viva’