Pass the SoLT

I thought is was about time that I posted my first blog entry for 2012. I took an extended break from work over January and it's now time to get back on the horse, especially since I now have a new job... well actually two.

On Friday it was formally announced that I have accepted the positions of Director, National Centre for Teaching and Learning along with the Director of the Distance Education and Learning Futures Alliance (DELFA). The new roles come with a promotion to full professor after an externally contestable selection process. Suffice to say I'm now looking forward to the challenges and opportunities that these directorships offer over the next few years.

In the meantime, a few days ago I came across this video by Corning Incorporated entitled "A Day Made By Glass". It provides a futuristic insight into how lives will be different and potentially transformed through the ways we decide to design, develop and ultimately use new technologies. The video has some stunning examples of new technology applications enabled through glass and it makes you realise that the iPad is just the tip of a new wave of mobile and ubiquitous technologies. The 'class community activity table' looks really valuable as a means of harnessing the social, interactive and collaborative nature of learning. And the large information wall in the Redwood State Park shown during a class field trip is fairly cool.

This is the second version of the original 'A Day Made By Glass' which was a major hit on Youtube with over 17 million hits. I predict it won't be long before this even longer second version of the video surpasses this figure. I'm just a little worried about all the finger marks on the inside of the windscreen as I drive to work reading an electronic newspaper and answering my email... all at the touch of a finger. Sales of Mr Muscle glass cleaner might skyrocket in the future.

This week I came across the Curriculum Reform Manifesto: Principles for Rethinking Undergraduate Curricula for the 21st Century which comes out of a working group of scholars spread across several countries. I was alerted to this initiative in a blog positing by the UNESCO Chair in eLearning which begins with the following thought-proking statement:

"The current crisis of the university is intellectual. It is a crisis of purpose, focus and content, rooted in fundamental confusion about all three. As a consequence, curricula are largely separate from research, subjects are taught in disciplinary isolation, knowledge is conflated with information and is more often than not presented as static rather than dynamic. Furthermore, universities are largely reactive rather than providing clear forward-looking visions and critical perspectives."

This opening comment is particularly relevant to the work I'm involved in at Massey University as we continue to navigate our way through a major Curriculum Reform Project in parallel with the general digitization of teaching, learning and curriculum delivery. The question that we sometimes fail to keep in mind, especially as we get bogged down in detail, is: why are we doing this? Put another way, what do we really want to achieve beyond a more focused academic portfolio and the challenges of helping to get staff online?

We often talk about developing a defining curriculum that produces 'creative, innovative and connected' learners but I suspect this language has yet to find its way into the academic heartland of the University. More conventionally, in other contexts, we sometimes refer to Chickering and Gamson’s (1987) well established seven principles of effective practice for university-level teaching:

1. Encourages contact between students and faculty;

2. Develops reciprocity and cooperation among students;

3. Encourages active learning;

4. Gives prompt feedback;

5. Emphasizes time on task;

6. Communicates high expectations;

7. Respects diverse talents and ways of learning.

These principles inform the basic structure of our Peer Review Framework for course design and teaching development. However, in many respects, Chickering and Gamson’s work is disconnected from the above mentioned 'intellectual crisis' and when read in a wider context of the Curriculum Reform Manifesto their principles are overly instrumental. They sit on the surface of 21st century pedagogies in contrast to the deeper principles for rethinking undergraduate curricula proposed in the Curriculum Reform Manifesto. According to the Manifesto the eleven principles involve:

1. As a central guideline teach disciplines rigorously in introductory courses together with a set of parallel seminars devoted to complex real life problems that transcend disciplinary boundaries.

2. Teach knowledge in its social, cultural and political contexts. Teach not just the factual subject matter, but highlight the challenges, open questions and uncertainties of each discipline.

3. Create awareness of the great problems humanity is facing (hunger, poverty, public health, sustainability, climate change, water resources, security, etc.) and show that no single discipline can adequately address any of them.

4. Use these challenges to demonstrate and rigorously practice interdisciplinarity, avoiding the dangers of interdisciplinary dilettantism.

5. Treat knowledge historically and examine critically how it is generated, acquired, and used. Emphasize that different cultures have their own traditions and different ways of knowing. Do not treat knowledge as static and embedded in a fixed canon.

6. Provide all students with a fundamental understanding of the basics of the natural and the social sciences, as well as the humanities. Emphasize and illustrate the connections between these traditions of knowledge.

7. Engage with the world’s complexity and messiness. This applies to the sciences as much as to the social, political and cultural dimensions of the world. Such an engagement will contribute to the education of concerned citizens.

8. Emphasize a broad and inclusive evolutionary mode of thinking in all areas of the curriculum.

9. Familiarize students with non-linear phenomena in all areas of knowledge.

10. Fuse theory and analytic rigor with practice and the application of knowledge to real-world problems.

11. Rethink the implications of modern communication and information technologies for education and the architecture of the university.

How do these principles differ with your own experience of university education? I certainly like the emphasis on designing the curriculum of the 21st century around the types of wicked problems we face. So far the Manifesto has been endorsed in principle by the following three universities who are implementing specific case studies based on this curriculum ethos:

• Arizona State University
• Jacobs University Bremen
• Leuphana Universität Lüneburg

The takeaway message for me is to ensure we engage a critical mass of Massey staff in deeper discussions about the types of curricula they are designing at the individual course and qualification level. Only then might our efforts at curriculum reform truly help to prepare well educated citizens for an unpredictable future in uncertain times. Put another way the above principles provide a useful benchmark against which to judge whether our redesigned undergraduate technology-enabled curricula are wrapped up in critical perspectives with a clear forward-looking vision, which produces more creative, innovative and connected learners capable of solving the great problems facing humanity.

Acknowledgement

Image from...
http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5126/5243382007_f407424a4e.jpg

I recently came across an amusing video on distance learning in the context of the potential of WebCT. Although the spoof video is a little harsh on the product itself as this has to be seen in an historical context, I suspect most of the top five ways to survive a WebCT course are just as applicable today to learning with Moodle, Blackboard, Desire2Learn, etc. Here are the top five:

1. Not just one medium
2. You are being watched
3. Make friends
4. Download everything
5. Manage your time

In theory the dark days of WebCT are over but one could argue that the future still lives in the past. For example, the number one way to survive--not just one medium--was well ahead of its time as the social media revolution was only just getting underway when WebCT was in its prime. In a similar vein, with the recent emergence of the field of learning analytics there are good reasons to be cautious about who is watching you. Making friends and managing your time are enduring strategies but perhaps in the age of cloud computing we have moved on from the need to download everything, although I stand to be corrected. At least it is reassuring to see that the WebCT experience was unable to stifle the flair, creativity and humour displayed throughout the video and the serious message has not been entirely lost on the education community.

Enjoy the video

As a member of the Australasian Horizon Report Board, a recent article entitled "New technology trends in education: Seven years of forecasts and convergence", in the latest issue of Computers & Education, attracted my attention.

In brief, the paper analyzes the evolution of technology trends from 2004 to 2014 that correspond to the long-term predictions of the most recent Horizon Report. More specifically, 'the study analyzes through bibliometric analysis which technologies were successful and became a regular part of education systems, which ones failed to have the predicted impact and why, and the shape of technology flows in recent years' (Martin, et. al., 2011, p.1893).

A novel methodology is adopted in order to assess the level of technology adoption by searching in bibliographic databases the number of paper published every year around the predicted technologies. According to the results, social networks had the deepest impact on education-related research, with a very high rate of academic articles. In several cases the findings of the bibliometric analysis show that the predicted impact of emerging technologies were delayed one and two years.

Overall the paper claims to provide evidence that some of the predictions were right (e.g., social networks, user-created content, games, virtual worlds and mobile devices). In other cases there does not appear to have been a major impact based on the number of educational publications. (e.g., knowledge Web, learning objects and open content, context-awareness and ubiquitous computing). However, the terminology adopted in the original Horizon Reports may have a bearing on these data as examples like 'open content' have evolved and is better known now as the Open Educational Resource (OER) movement.

The other problem I have with the Horizon Report predictions is they are inherently technologically deterministic and take insufficient account the potential social or human impact on technology. For this reason I'm not convinced by Martin et. al., (2011, p.1905) claim that 'this work can help researchers to understand the past, current and future technology metatrends in education'.

We know from history that predictions of the future are highly problematic, as illustrated by the above video clip from the 1960s on the future of the computer. The video gets some things right but it also underscores how the social-politcial context of the time shapes and influences the nature of our predictions. We might laugh now about the way in which women were portrayed in the 1960s but future generations are just as likely to judge the inequities and power imbalances that are still deeply ingrained in today's society.

With this point in mind it might be a useful exercise for the authors to look at the gender and cultural representation of the respective Horizon Report boards around the world as the question needs to be asked: whose view of the future is being presented in these predictions?

The easy answer to the question of 'where is eLearning heading?' would be to report the findings of the recent Horizon Report. If you’re not familiar with this report then I encourage you to take a look at the predictions. The 2011 edition was released about a month ago and the Report makes the following predictions:

Time to adoption: One Year or Less

• Electronic Books
• Mobiles

Time to adoption: Two to Three Years

• Augmented Reality
• Game-based Learning

Time to adoption: Four to Five Years

• Gesture-based Computing
• Learning Analytics

Here is a useful link to a presentation which elaborates on these predictions.

Although I’m on the Horizon Report Board for the Australia and New Zealand edition, I find many of the predictions imply that technology is an entity and influence independent of external forces—a classic example of technological determinism. The predictions would benefit from taking a wider societal view of technology which recognises in the words of Postman (1993, p.5) that “Every technology is both a burden and a blessing; not either-or, but this-and-that”.

Having said that, I'm not advocating for a socially deterministic or technological nightmare perspective as this is equally problematic. Such a view often reflects a level of moral panic about the influence technology is having on our lives. In unpacking the tension between competing conceptions of technology and views of the future, I often talk about the importance of thinking about Education for change rather than Education in change. Put another way, educators have a key role to play in being future makers rather than future takers.

Enough slogans for now! You may find the following video is a useful discussion piece in thinking about where eLearning is heading (or not heading). It was produced for the book the Tower in the Cloud: Higher Education in the Age of Cloud Computing.

The few months have been fairly hectic for me as I've been juggling the additional roles of acting Assistant Vice Chancellor (Academic & International) for all of September along with the position of Acting Stream Project Manager. Hence the long gap since my last blog posting.

Hopefully I can pick up my musings from where I left off as we count down to the busy Xmas period. To get the ball rolling here is the link to the last Horizon Report which I contributed to a few months ago as one of the expert panel members. Amongst other things the report identifies the rapid growth and impact of ebooks as I've discussed over the last six months.

http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2010-Horizon-Report-ANZ.pdf 

Further musings and thoughts on other trends and implications as time permits over the next week or so.