CETIS 2008 conference opening session: Oleg, Adam and Andrew Feenberg

I am attending the CETIS conference in Birmingham – the first morning is arranged as a plenary keynote by Andrew Feenber. [Need to update this with links.]

Oleg Liber set the scene. He described it as a recession special. Reminding us that in this time of change we can spot new opportunities, or the need to entrench and close in around options.
Key reference points influencing the UK:

Leitch report – need to think about value.
Burgess report – how do we assess/accredit.

With decisions such as the non-funding of second degrees causing pause for thought – will it focus minds and impact on humanities? Big impact on OpenU. Demographic changes making everyone think about new sectors.

Technology changes – mobile computing finally (asus, iphone, Google android).
Web as platform – finally coming true as well
Cloud computing – but we should not abandon the ideas of elearning (even if we do abandon the term).
Lifespan of information is longer than the life of applications and devices.

These are challenges for all of us – but worth looking at IT services in particular. IT services are becoming important.

JISC CETIS describes itself as a place where it is ok to talk technical details. It is newly divided into two parts systems and content/peoples and activities. Over the next year will hole one event per month. Plus working groups – output oriented around specifications.

Format
- achievements of previous year
- Areas of actions for year ahead
- Special focus on demand on IT services.

Adam Cooper then took over to describe the “CETIS connections” linked connections similar to BBC’s comedy connections. He has put up his powerpoint with links through to the blog posts.

Oleg introduced Andrew Feenberg – a Canadian philosopher to talk about “The online education controversy”. An historical and analytic talk.

He took the approach of reading his talk – describing Educational Technology as an oxymoron (in some hands). He led with a quote (from Brody President of John Hopkins University) about the way that education has not recognised the opportunities that it has to lower cost. This view reflects a performance view of Higher Education (with salary costs half of education costs). He referred back to “Executive Computing U” using computer conference system to support distance learning. Startup problems – how to teach and learn online, developed dialogic pedagogy. Text based online discussion can be effective and should not be overlooked today.

Distinguished online from face-to-face. Encourages slower pace, better recognition
“little doubt that good teachers can achieve good results”. Question though whether there is greater value in multimedia over text. David Noble took a contrary view. Compared with Plato on writing – and the lack of ability for written text to adapt and converse. A humanistic bias against technology.

Key is that technology can replace dialogue with interacting with technology – but it does not necessarily follow. And perhaps the Internet is the technology that liberates.

Division of labour (John Smith) illustrated by the image on the £20 note. Andrew Yure? – quote about reducing the skills required from individuals to avoid intractable people needed in the system.

Image from army training manual depicting technology as a delivery mechanism to deliver ideas into the human brain.

Pinch? & Bijker – “…different inerpretations by social groups … lead to … different further developments”. The interlinked and co-consructed nature of social use of technology can be Illustrated by Escher’s drawing hands. There is no clear way to say what is the starting point.
Terms of relevance:
technical underdetermination
actors influence design
interpretive flexibility
closure on a successful design
co-construction.

Suggested rival models for how technology might function include the “factory model” or the “the urban ideal”. Factory implies control and narrowing, city view looks at potentials, communication and openness. While it seems obvious that the city view is more desirable – however viewing technology as cost cutting and automating means that the factory model could dominate.

Inviting email response and visits to his web page on early online education and online pedagoy. At wwwords.co.uk. He also mentions that he has developed an annotation tool for Moodle
www.geof.net

Q&As:
Online can support most activities that go on in the classroom.

Oleg Liber asked a key question prompted by the classic experience of listening to a lecture v watching the video. The key is that the live version is a performance that could change while the video cannot change. Bill Olivier made the point that this fits with Piaget that there is a point where you need to adjust mental framework and dialogue will enable people to cross that point better than anything else.
Andrew Ravenscroft – what does the recession change. In the first instance nothing needs to change – but it could be the end of the obsession with making money and greed. People may develop interests beyond making making money which drives people to do the same thing. How this impacts on technology is unclear but efficiency and output focus is part of Thatcher/Reagan era that may not carry forward.

Children have to go to school to gain the models for interactions and vicarious learning to learning. Then can progress to online. Text base can then offer enough engagement to allow construction of connections.

OLnet – proposal to Hewlett

I have just submitted a proposal to the Hewlett Foundation to develop an Open Learning network. This has involved working with Candace Thille at CMU and several people here at the OU including Grainne Conole, Andy Lane and Simon Buckingham Shum. Much of the drafting took place in a public wiki which was an interesting process.

Anyway this short post is just to point to the earlier draft on the wiki and the later PDF submitted version that can be reached from there.

Anarchy in the OER

My colleagues Tony Hirst and Martin Weller have been busy moonlighting at being Video Jockeys making remixes as original (very original!) art. The results are a couple of really instructive and entertaing short videos now on YouTube . Tony kicked off with the need to make a presentation to some educational publishers and rather than explain he went with a show and tell. Watch the video – it shows the reality of sharing what is out there.

Now that Tony has created the new position of eduVJ, Martin joined in – with (in my opinion) a better choice of music “Anarchy in the UK” to bring together some of the current discussion around edupunk and the need to through away some of how stored up beliefs. Just as Punk broke through the music industry, openness needs to break through the education industry.  Martin has gone further and as he describes on his blog he has now produced the “Director’s commentary” version of his video on YouTube. Looking at that was genuinely revealing to me, and helped me make a few connections that I had missed. So for entertainment go and see Martin’s original on blip.tv. Otherwise click on the video below (not the embedded play button) to go through to watch the annotated version on Youtube.

What Martin has managed here is to show reuse in action – if you track down his academic papers you will see that he was part of a team (with Chris Pegler and Robin Mason) that showed how learning objects work well as a basis for reuse with the original authors still involved. Martin points out that YouTube only seems to allow the owner’s of videos to annotate at the moment – but maybe we can see the starting point for some neat reworkings. Several components all falling into place:

1. Some content released with nice creative commons licence that says you can do this
2. RSS letting you pull content from one place to another
3. Annotation and media tools that everyone can use
4. The rise of the mashup educators

Just now this is in the hands of the rebels and the anarchists that are prepared to go past a few rough edges. Will the rest of us follow? 

European open universities share ideas on open education

Last week there was a gathering of people from EU distance teaching universities at Milton Keynes organised by EADTU. The slides and ideas have been placed in the Research Zone of the OpenLearn LabSpace. The 2-day meeting was a great chance to share ideas and I felt there was a real buzz at the end of the meeting. There seemed to be complete commitment from everybody to a new world where the core content was free – but there was plenty of new opportunities to work together, help people learn and play an important role. Saying that good resources help people learn, but are only part of what is needed is the model and genuine strength of the open universities.

This meeting was part of the Multilingual Open Resources for Independent Learning MORIL project and one of the challenges for bringing people together is how to build on the result and excitement of the meeting. In this case a team working on the research side of OpenLearn captured activity on audio recording, prictures, videod sessions, video inteviews and knowledge maps. We plan to do more with some of the videos but Alexandra Okada has created a fantastic knowledge map built in Compendium. Worth a look as an example of how to get the best out of that free concept mapping tool as well as for the ideas it captures.

Open University on iTunesU

As part of the launch of iTunesU in Europe the OU is one of a few universities in the UK offering content for free through iTunes. I think the team at the OU that carried out the work have done a great job – and there is more about that on blogs from Martin, Doug & Tony. What this shows for us working on Open Content are a couple of things:

1. Content for free is part of university mission not just intitiative

2. The resources that are the raw materials for mix and match are now out there (over to Tony at OUseful to work out the best mashup to carry out!)

3. Routes to mass users are finally escaping from our own systems

These are interesting times.

Great ideas at SideCAP kick off workshop

Today I joined in a workshop that marked the start of the SideCAP project – Staff improvement in distance education for Carribean, African and Pacific universities. There were representatives from Mauritius, West Indies and Fiji reflecting work in supporting distance education. Those involved have links to the Commonwealth of Learning supported Virtual University of the Small States of the Commonwealth, a great idea to build enough effort jointly to offer a range of subjects. SideCAP though is a separate project led from the OU by Prof Robin Mason and she has created an EU supported project that focuses on capacity building.

At the stage I joined the kick off meeting there seemed consensus around a real need – to develop as an open resource guidance and materials about the finding and reuse of open resources. Other people have also seen this as a gap but the SideCAP plan has strengths in the diversity of the the group involved, the skills they have and also the plan to build up from OpenLearn and similar OER bases to be able to present concreted examples. 

In showing OpenLearn I showed the now award-winning free FM videoconferencing that can be used to arrange flashmeetings that are recorded – for this particular group it could represent a chance to reduce their carbon-footprint as they stay in touch with each other.

Making Connections – closing panel

The panel had split up to summarise the different strands of the conference. I didn’t know everyone on the panel and should have noted the names as they were introduced by Will Swann so apologies to Lindsay and Becky, though I caught Liz Hall who is leading the development of the OU’s National role, and I know Bob Lambourne leader of the piCETL, Chris Pegler, and Martin Weller.

Lindsay reported on the student experience – and the issues of how we measure it – and the way we try to intervene to change it.

Becky (working with employers strand) – employer engagement is an opportunity and threat. Bringing together activity like this shows the range of existing activity.OU does still have USP around consistency, excellence in teaching, technology, and expertise in the learner experience. We are also learning a lot by working with employers and listening to them.

A quick hands up in the hall led to all but one person seeing it as an opportunity (what does he know that we don’t!).

Liz Hall had looked at the academic work on employer links, while Bob talked about the way in which the CETL work had impacted across the conference: with good work on synchronous links, past use of Lyceum and future use of elluminate. Bob deliberately ended on a couple of negatives – the problems of technology (illustrated in the way it even impacts on presentations in the conference and so we can expect this to hit students). The other negative is the lack of academics in the audience.

 

Poll: ALs, students, Regional, Central academic. Majority were central academic but I still take Bob’s point that we are talking to the converted.

 

Chris: lots of interesting things going on but we must disseminate (repeating a quote Phil Candy had used – “research not published = research not done”). Chris talked about sessions that I had missed where FlashMeeting (another OpenLearn technology) had been used for joint project work. She described  delighters and exciters.

 

Martin presented both a tag cloud (in fact two – the abstracts and the discussions) and the crowdstatus of the twitters we made.

 

So to finish these notes and inspired by Martin here is the tagcloud for my own notes:

 

Making Connections – Recognising achievements

Terry Di Paola talked about an online assessment light course (U122) from or Centre for Outcomes Based Learning. The course was trying to bring in people who are not embedded in education. The authoring was through good practice, case studies and then building into reflection on past learning. Work contexts and futures. There is a clever approach of verification – perhaps not that different from how we need to get people to verify passport applications. The way in which this would scale is a challenge but the portfolio approach (using the OU’s mystuff), an interesting question is how we could accredit the accreditors (verifiers). Terry responded to a question from me that this would be an ideal course to look at operating in an open way – recognising though the vital role of the tutors at the beginning and end of the process. There are some awkward issues about the assessment but probably not unsolvable.

Making Connections – User Generated Content

John  Woodthorpe also talked about user-generated course content. Their product is fOUndIt at http://foundit.open.ac.uk – while it crosses over with similar tools (digg and perhaps a bit of del.icio.us) the use is around a community and the way in which a course “stub” gets extended to gain content through learner activity. The rating and commenting looked good. Suggestions were to rapidly scale this up, and how to manage the competitive and collaborative elements in recommending sites. As long as finding the resources is not the main point (analysis is). The site is separate from OU systems that releases some control but gains in terms of how people interact. The work on Openid that was part of OpenLearn and now needs to feed into the BioDiversity lab could well help this mix of OU and open systems.

Making Connections – Let the students do it

Darrel Ince, Head of Computing talked about a project “Let the students do it” to produce a student generated course. He said that this was part of an approach to challenge the OU.

The particular course he described introduced elearning to the students, where the main output is 10 weeks of producing a course – with the best of the assignments becoming an OU course. A wiki will be used as the authoring environment – though at first on an individual basis (collaboration may follow). The course will be finished in May – delivered in October 2009. The courses to be generated at first was suggested as “Computational Intelligence”, “Computer music” or “Web 2.0” –intention at the moment to look at Web 2.0. Funding now for 120 students to write a book on Computer Music together with Oxford University Press and AuthorWorks print on demand.

Overall approach 20 weeks in e-learning. Select and agree topic. Work with one other student. With a focus on the chucks that are produced. The output could be on OpenLearn, with the aim that output is Creative Commons. Interest also in OU staff taking the course in the first phase. In tune with companies like 37signals where there is a switch to consumer production.