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Scholarship in the digital age

Liveblog from the OU Vice-Chancellor’s speech to Council, 26 Sep 2008

Largish audience heading in – interesting to be watching from outside rather than the inside.

Introduction from the Pro-Chancellor, Chair of Council.

Title chosen carefully – could’ve been “Why the web matters to scholars everywhere”. But the web and enormous computer power does make a serious difference to what defines scholarship – at every level.  For academics and students, and professionals.  Scholarship in each of Boyer’s classification.  Each are weighted differently.  Dr Johnson – scholars are bound for toil, envy, want, the garret, and the jail.  Not sure about the jail but the rest apply. Can you be a scholar and ignore all this?

Stephen Downes – shift is from web being a medium to a platform: remix, repurpose, stuff gets better the more people use it. Web 3.0 – the semantic web – harnessing the power of artificial intelligence.  Community of scholars takes on a whole new meaning, dimension, in this context.

Our students are the net generation: they expect to be engaged, with opportunities for input.  More visual, prefer to learn by doing than telling or reading: discover, not be told.  John Thompson, “Is education 1.0 ready for Web 2.0 students?”

Argue that it’s not possible to ignore this.  The Internet and social changes wrought require us to rethink what we expect of academics.  And reconceptualise policies to respond to that.

Scholarship of teaching and learning

Universities taking this more seriously than in the past. Staff refocused on student learning; students becoming more demanding – e.g. ratemyprofessors.com.  Curriculum demand too.

We have always known that the process is more important in education than content, but it’s especially so now.

John Seely-Brown and Richard Adler “Minds on Fire” – learning 2.0 is active and passion-based.

The real world is more like this too: the real world doesn’t divide in to disciplines.  Requirement of all students to be able to evaluate research outputs.

There are negatives and positives.  Negatives – erosion of time for reflection.  But we can’t scrimp on pedagogical research: need solid research on what works and what doesn’t.

What can we see happening in HE?

Six technologies – Horizon report – likely to have an impact (very Web 2.0): 

  • Grassroots video – anyone can be a broadcaster with video.
  • Collaboration webs – no longer expensive to network
  • Mobile broadband – dramatic price drop, capability up (pervasive net)
  • Data mashups – large amounts of data with APIs, integrate and transform information
  • Collective intelligence – knowledge emerges when many people interact with much data
  • Social operating systems – next gen social networking systems, around people, not content

Four main responses.

Faculty are often unaware of technologies or unable to integrate them.  (We have a mountain to climb!)

Consequences for staff time.  

Shuster and Finkelstein: The American Faculty. Real changes in roles of faculty staff: including unbundling content preparation from presentation/supporting of learning. Accelerates trend towards teaching-only functions, whatever you think about that.

Faculty role in design of learning experience. Role reduced a bit by the amount of content out there. But libraries have been full of stuff for ages, and nobody argued that there was no role for a navigator through the sea of resources.  And we need training for navigator.

One member of a team can be more expert, but an academic not engaged will not fully understand the implications for learning, and the design will be worse as a consequence.

Impact on research?

Profound. Every stage in lifecycle can be improved and/or complicated by technology.  Can collaborate across the world.  Data as research capital.  Mass digitisation of books leads to all sorts of possibilities. Christine Borgman work cited.

We’ve never had quite to many research questions live at the same time: even the most jaded must be energised.

Consequences for institutions

John Tompson, Clayton Christiansen Disrupting Class – It’s a disruptive technology: asynchronous, 24/7.

But not so disruptive to the OU: we have a short/medium term advantage here, which we must build on. We can remake our leadership on the world stage through our deployment of digital scholarship.

Migrate innovation across the university more effectively – we will stand or fall on our use of innovation.

Need new business models.  Research strategy, IET, Student Support all under review.

Five things we need to look at:

1. Incentives and reward. Financial markets – only counting articles in certain articles may disadvantage web-published academics.

2. Need systematic response; staff development is a strategic priority.

3. Assessment of what students need to know and how they learn.  Move this research to the centre.

4. Look at what constitutes quality. We’ve always pushed the boundaries.

5. Research management. Not just playing RAE game: smart university maximises the potential of research in this new environment.

Conclusion:

Argument: Scholarship has to be tied to these technologies. They reflect our (OU) distinctive mission and can enhance it. Staff understand that we need to engage with it, but are a little worried about the impact. And recognise this is a key part of the quality of what we do.  Everyone here strongly identifies with the mission: if technology helps us do this, it’s warmly embraced.  We aim to be the best.  Why not the best? 

The Upside of Down

We can be the leader here, now.

Medium and message (liveblogging debate round 2)

Today, the OU’s Vice Chancellor, is giving a speech to Council (the OU’s governing body – like the Board of a company) and an internal audience on ‘Scholarship in the Digital Age’.  She will be speaking “about the impact of new technologies, including Web 3.0, on the University’s business: how it affects teaching, research and the student learning experience”.

I’m really encouraged: this is exactly the focus we as a University need to be taking.  And I’m not just saying that because it’s my area and so I obviously think it’s important. (Although there probably is an element of that.)  I’ve said before that the VC is reading the right stuff (e.g. Here Comes Everybody) and there was further proof in the internal publicity for the talk – it was accompanied by a big copy of the xkcd Online Communities map:

But I’m also worried about whether to bring my laptop or not.  Last time I liveblogged from a talk by the VC, people complained – entirely reasonably – that I was disturbing them with my typing – which I was.  I did a post arguing (not entirely clearly) that the fact that such typing was disruptive showed that we have a mountain to climb in getting the OU to where we need to go. The discussion generated more traffic – and blog links – on here than anything else I’ve written, and ended up with me realising that by (inadvertently) reinforcing the stereotype of laptop users as antisocial inconsiderate types, I’d set things back, not forward.

Just to be totally clear: I am not saying that people are wrong when they say they are being disturbed.  They are being disturbed, and that impairs their ability to hear and understand what’s going on.  And with this particular presentation, people who aren’t (yet) natural laptop users and bloggers are the ones who really need to hear it: us techies are the choir the VC is preaching to here.

So do I bring it or not?  If I do, it’ll disturb people.  If I don’t, we lose (some of) the benefits of doing just what (I expect) the VC will be exhorting us to do.

Happily, our Comms team have come up with an excellent compromise: there’ll be a blogger area outside, with a screen showing the VC, and we can hammer away on keyboards to our hearts’ content without disturbing people who find such things distracting.  (There may even be sufficient power sockets!)

It’s not ideal – to exclude this group from the room itself is a little unfortunate.  But I’d rather leave the people inside free of distractions from technology so that they can come to love (appropriately used) technology.

… and I’m also going to try to keep the meta-discussion about liveblogging separate from the actual stuff, at least on here.  I’m sure there’ll be all sorts of stuff on Twitter.

The sky is not falling in

Good, well-grounded article by language legend David Crystal in The Guardian this weekend, on texting.  Countering doom-mongers like John Humphrys, who claimed (in the Daily Mail!) to hate texters:

They are destroying [our language]: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped.

David Crystal explains that the distinctive SMS orthography (‘txtspk’) found in SMS messages is not new, not restricted to the young, is a small fraction of the text found in SMS messages, and alludes to evidence that it helps rather than hinders language development.

Some people dislike texting. Some are bemused by it. But it is merely the latest manifestation of the human ability to be linguistically creative and to adapt language to suit the demands of diverse settings. There is no disaster pending. We will not see a new generation of adults growing up unable to write proper English. The language as a whole will not decline. In texting what we are seeing, in a small way, is language in evolution.

It’s great stuff.  I couldn’t help thinking, though, that his argument would have been much stronger without this section:

Sending a message on a mobile phone is not the most natural of ways to communicate. The keypad isn’t linguistically sensible. No one took letter-frequency considerations into account when designing it. For example, key 7 on my mobile contains four symbols, pqrs. It takes four key-presses to access the letter s, and yet s is one of the most frequently occurring letters in English. It is twice as easy to input q, which is one of the least frequently occurring letters.

… which makes me worry he’s never encountered one-tap/predictive text systems (like T9 and iTap), which have been standard on mobile phones for … what, five years or more?  I’d certainly expect that the introduction of predictive text dramatically reduced the usage of the distinctive SMS orthography.

(Edit: Stephen Downes points to it too, linking to a longer discussion by Graham Attwell at Pontydysgu.)

More Wiimote goodness from Johnny Chung Lee

If you’re at all interested in new ways of interaction with computers, have a look at Johnny Chung Lee’s latest brain-dump post about low-cost interaction technologies.  Throwable displays, cheap 3D motion capture, universal remotes and more.  The video demos in particular are great for helping you understand what he’s talking about and seeing the potential.  (I also like the way the Cambridge one reminds me a lot like old-school OU TV programming/Look Around You.)

No, Google isn’t making us stupid

There’s been a lot of commentary about Nicholas Carr’s article in The Atlantic, Is Google Making Us Stupid?  Carr is worried that, like HAL in 2001, he can feel his mind going.  He used to read for long stretches, but:

Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. […] The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.

The article then goes on in quite a thoughtful way to explore the complex relationship between what you might call thinking tools and thinking.  He’s not a thoughtless Luddite (as he has been unfairly portrayed in some places), and points out that this sort of thing is not a new concern: Socrates bemoaned the introduction of writing, and there was much criticism of the introduction of the printing press.  However, he does seem to think we’re losing something valuable:

The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

I really don’t agree.  Sure, time to think is important – which is why I think it’s important to be offline some of the time.  The Internet makes it so much easier to see other people’s associations, inferences, analogies and ideas.  But it doesn’t make it so much harder to make or foster our own.

There’s another, more fundamental point here.  To me it feels like new technology makes me cleverer, not stupid.  Sure, if I was cut off from the Internet and computers I’d need to relearn the compensatory skills one needs to manage without ejournals, blogs and the whole wide world of useful information you can find within a minute of wanting it.  But I’m not cut off, and I can think better with all that stuff than I ever could without it. For me, the technology feels like an extension to my self, so it’s easy to include it in the “me” that I’m considering when I say “makes me cleverer”.  To take the systems view of Searle’s Chinese Room argument a little askew, the system that includes the pure unextended biological “me” acts as if it is cleverer, so we might as well call it cleverer.

To draw my own analogy (!) with another tech, my distance vision is rubbish without my contact lenses (or glasses).  If I didn’t have them for a prolonged period of time, I’d develop ways of managing (squinting and compensatory behaviours) that would enable me to see better than I can at the moment when I whip the lenses out at the end of the day.  So one could say that I would see better if I didn’t have the lenses.  This would be true in a certain sense – which I think is the same sense in which it is true that “Google is making us stupid”.  But it’s patently false in most broad senses.

If I want to see better, I should use the lenses.  If I want to think better, I should use the Internet.

TEL Away Day: learning activities

Grainne – learning activity competition – we all write learning activities on bits of paper, stuck up on wall around the outside of the room. Everyone rate them *, **, ***. Ask is this giving you good ideas? Online? Web2.0? (All learning activities will go in to Cloudworks.)

Interesting real-world process process similar to social networking/Digg etc – I came late to looking at them and noticed which were the ones with a lot of annotations and paid more attention to those. Which is what the conversation is centring around.

Interesting stuff about appraising ideas about learning activities. Issues about scale and reuse. They are context free, though, which makes it hard to make concrete. As an array of things without a purpose makes it hard to sort or select.

More feedback collected on the IET WetPaint site. 3rd place was Tina about blogs. 2nd was Patrick with the instant video vox pops. 1st was Canan with discrepant events – she gets a box of chocolates.

TEL Away Day: Social Learn

[Stephen Godwin has also blogged about the morning session.]

Martin Weller on SocialLearn – movie developed for mtg this afternoon, will go to VCE later.  We get an early draft still in Camtasia.  Microlearner – Move from expressed goals to relevant OERs via a Google CSE?

Then we get it again as a conventional PowerPoint.  Usual outline – part of response to Web 2.0 disruption in education.

SocialLearn is a profile, an API, a suite of learning applications, a site.

New tool called Microlearner – “Little snippets of learning that lead to a vast mind” – writes to and imports goals, resources, stream.  Also 2Learner – create/import goals, tasks, aggregate.  Pull in and publish relevant content (OpenLearn), relevant courses/designs (Cloudworks – “Flickr for learning designs”), publicise what you’re doing via Facebook apps, make connections with Cohere.

For – informal learners, students, educators (create your own PSE), partners, geeks, vocational learners.

Beta (invites) in July.

Business models hard – still don’t know how it’s going to make money, more work needed.  Use as springboard to get research in.  Then at end Feb appoint a ‘grown up director’ and make it all official.

The learner’s profile is held in one place, which is how you pull together everything together.  Though it’s an open API so you could read/write it from elsewhere.

Partnerships – could be e.g. Pearsons, Microsoft, etc.  Critical mass is key and hard to get.  Target two close-to-home groups initially – CPD and potential students who are ELQ and hence put off by high fees.

Is SocialLearn a Creepy Treehouse?  Less so since you give the choice/portability to the student, so they can make the decision about what’s work and what’s fun.    Clash between HE culture – we decide what you learn, and how – vs Web 2.0 where everyone does it.  Martin thinks SocialLearn should sit in the productive middle ground – students appreciate structure but it’s bottom-up – filter on the way out, not the way in (David Weinberger).

Most of Pearson’s money is from accreditation.  Tools For Change meeting – publishers’ get-together.  Trying to push aside HEIs from the business.  The point of SocialLearn is to create the nightmare competitor that puts them off.  A disaggregated education market place.

Relationship between SocialLearn and the OUVLE?  Duplication of MyStuff and profile?  MyStuff is an application that could plug in to the architecture.  SocialLearn could be seen as the VLE-killer (in the far future) – but more likely to be a tool that feeds in to the VLE, but comes with you after you leave university.  Need Eduglu to stick this all together, Microsoft, Cisco are all trying to build this stuff too – so clearly an idea whose time has come.

TEL Away Day: Content

Martin Weller presentation – showing us his Broadcast Strategy Review video [Flash, behind OU firewall]. And his Edupunk Youtube vid. And his Future of content vid. And his Everything is Miscellaneous Slideshare.

You can do all this yourself.

The future of work/learning/recreation is the sweet spot is the overlap between personal/fun/informal and the professional/work/formal.

(Side point – Martin’s created a TEL internal wiki on WetPaint.)

So we – TEL – should get away from doing reports/papers for everything. Broadcast stuff may get reused.

Small groups: think of one thing you do now that could become ‘broadcast’ – what would it look like, how would that be better/worse, what skills/help would you need?

Discussion:

Tension between OU model/skills/unique talents and low-entry barrier/anyone can do it. Scale/QA issues. Good to get students to do it. Tension between fun/social and ‘serious education’ – is the former somewhere we can go? PhD students doing a sales pitch video for what-their-thesis-is – to help develop their fundamental argument. Fundamental skill of being able to identify the main point – and that is a fundamental educational skill, whether in an essay, a blog post or a short mashup vid. We all find it difficult. Being open to creativity through another way. Writing ability and thinking ability and mashup vid ability – are separate skills. So could be a useful extra item in the repertoire for assessment. (A conceptual theremin?!) [This report videoed by Patrick – available later?]

Other feedback – time is a recurrent theme, both how you find the time to do new things, and how much time it takes to produce things like videos when you’re not very skilled. (One group went off task and did things on the TELSNS Ning/blog/Twitter instead.) Low quality is Ok if tradeoff for immediacy.

Digital literacies is a real thing. Martin says it’s not that difficult, but you learn by playing, so it has to be fun to do that. (Hence his sweet spot.) RobinM says it’s a little harder than we might think. Competitions in YouTube/Slideshare for world’s best X – then literacies people coming along to explore why they’re good.

TEL Away Day: second session

The meeting accounting is running at nearly £2600 as we return from coffee.

Instant feedback from the small groups captured by Patrick’s little video tool as talking heads over coffee. (May be available later online?) There’s a general feeling of skepticism bordering on cynicism about some of them but some enthusiasm. Boundaries between the personal and the professional/work worlds – some people mix them seamlessly (apparently) but some people experience a lack of separation between work and other life as very problematic already.

Patrick is going to suggest things we should do:

  • Let’s give Twitter a try. No compulsion but that’s where people will gather. Follow PlantOUTEL if it’s not already following you (so we can see all the TEL people’s Twitter accounts).
  • Wikis – I did a (private) wiki for last year’s conference – but we can use WetPaint, pbWiki, etc, and there is an IET wiki again. Should use for monthly and quarterly reports.
  • Blogs – encourage people to try – let Juliet/Will know and they’ll put it in to the aggregator.
  • KMi tools – do play with them.  Can we occupy Cohere (Compendium?) to support IET’s ideas?
  • Ning – have a look at the Ning Anesa and Rebecca have set up.

TEL Away Day: New ways of working

At an internal conference thingummy – the TEL group (Technology Enhanced Learning) is my organisational bit of IET (for now).

Patrick is encouraging us to use our laptops and do what we want to do, and he knows (and doesn’t mind) that we’re not all paying complete attention all the time (Martin is deep in something). About 24 people, with about 19 laptops (some have none and some have more than one). Wants us to work in new ways.

Has Tony Hirst’s meeting cost counter running – £1690 already just getting coffee (although £1500 is the meeting room hire). Many techies in one room gives plenty of people who can fix tech issues … but also creates more tech issues to fix. (Sound issues, projector not showing whole screen, etc.)

Grainne: Write down a really great teaching and learning idea – on slips of paper. Pin up on wall, tick ones you like, the winner will get a box of chocolates. Link to Learning Design work and CloudWorks.  (Except lots of people don’t have accounts and Juliet who issues them is off on honeymoon … another tech issue. And Twitter is intermittently giving the FailWhale.)

Patrick: Wikinomics is widely read in the OU.  Lots of people in the room have blogs; only about two have one on the official internal OU blog hosts.

Groupwork – four or five groups, way in which we can adopt open technologies to help us work, what are our preferred ones.

Extensive small group discussion about tools and their use – distinguishing between social, organisational, and purposeful/educational use.  Then a lot of discussion about our experiences of using stuff as diverse as Twitter and Cohere.