CSEDU Wrap-up (#csedu14 #AdelEd)
Posted: April 4, 2014 Filed under: Education, Opinion | Tags: academia, barcelona, blogging, community, computer supported education, conference, conferences, csedu14, education, higher education, learning, reflection, resources, students, thinking Leave a commentWell, it’s the day after CSEDU and the remaining attendees are all checking out and leaving. All that remains now is lunch (which is not a minor thing in Spain) and heading to the airport. In this increasingly on-line age, the question is often asked “Why do you still go to conferences?”, meaning “Why do you still transport yourself to conferences rather than participating on-line?” It’s a pretty simple reason and it comes down to how well we can be somewhere using telepresence or electronic representations of ourselves in other places. Over the time of this conference, I’ve listened to a number of talks and spoken to a number of people, as you can see from my blog and (if you could see my wallet) the number of business cards I’ve collected. However, some of the most fruitful discussions took place over simple human rituals such as coffee, lunch, drinks and dinner. Some might think that a travelling academic’s life is some non-stop whirl of dining and fun but what is actually happening is a pretty constant round of discussion, academic argument and networking. When we are on the road, we are generally doing a fair portion of our job back home and are going to talks and, in between all of this, we are taking advantage of being surrounded by like-minded people to run into each other and build up our knowledge networks, in the hope of being able to do more and to be able to talk with people who understand what we’re doing. Right now, telepresence can let me view lectures and even participate to an extent, but it cannot give me those accidental meetings with people where we can chat for 5 minutes and work out if we should be trying to work together. Let’s face it, if we could efficiently send all of the signals that we need to know if another human is someone we want to work with or associate with, we’d have solved this problem for computer dating and, as I understand it, people are still meeting for dinners and lunch to see if what was represented on line had any basis in reality. (I don’t know about modern computer dating – I’ve been married for over 15 years – so please correct me if I’m wrong.)
Of course, for dating, most people choose to associate with someone who is already in their geographical locale but academics don’t have that luxury because we don’t tend to have incredible concentrations of similar universities and research groups in one place (although some concentrations do exist) and a conference provides us with a valuable opportunity to walk out our raw ideas into company and see what happens. There is also a lot to be said for the “defusing” nature of a face-to-face meeting, when e-mail can be so abrupt and video conferencing can provide quite jagged and harsh interactions, made more difficult by network issues and timezone problems. That is another good reason for conferences: everyone is away and everyone is in the same timezone. The worst conference to attend is one that is in your home town, because you will probably not take time off work, you’ll duck into the conference when you have a chance – and this reduces the chances of all of the good things we’ve talked about. It’s because you’re separated from your routine that you can have dinner with academic strangers or hang around after coffee to spend the time to talk about academic ideas. Being in the same timezone also makes it a lot easier as multi-continent video conferences often select times based on what is least awful for everyone, so Americans are up too early, Australians are up too late, and the Europeans are missing their lunches. (Again, don’t mess with lunch.)
It’s funny that the longer I stay an academic, the harder I work at conferences but it’s such a good type of hard work. It’s productive, it’s exciting, it’s engaging and it allows us to all make more progress together. I’ve met some great people here and run into some friends, both of which make me very happy. It’s almost time to jump back on a plane and head home (where I turn around in less than 14 hours to go and run another conference) but I feel that we’ve done some good things here and that will lead to better things in the future.
A place for meeting people and taking the time for academic thought.
It’s been a blast, CSEDU, let’s do it again. Buenos dias!
CSEDU, Day 3, Final Keynote, “Digital Age Learning – The Changing Face of Online Education”, (#csedu14 #AdelED @timbuckteeth)
Posted: April 4, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: BBC Model B, computer supported education, correspondence course, Csíkszentmihályi, digital age, digital learning, distance learning, education, flow, higher education, learning, learning environment, learning management systems, on-line learning, Personal Learning Environment, Plymouth University, steve wheeler, student, the Plymouth Institute of Education, thinking, vygotsky, Zone of proximal development, ZPD 3 CommentsNow, I should warn you all that I’ve been spending time with Steve Wheeler (@timbuckteeth) and we agree on many things, so I’m either going to be in furious agreement with him or I will be in shock because he suddenly reveals himself to be a stern traditionalist who thinks blended learning is putting a textbook in the Magimix. Only time will tell, dear reader, so let’s crack on, shall we? Steve is from the Plymouth Institute of Education, conveniently located in Plymouth University, and is a ferocious blogger and tweeter (see his handle above).
Erik introduced Steve by saying that Steve didn’t need much introduction and noted that Steve was probably one of the reasons that we had so many people here on the last day! (This is probably true, the afternoon on the last day of a European conference is normally notable due to the almost negative number of participants.)
“When you’re a distance educator, the back of the classroom can be thousands of miles away” (Steve Wheeler)
Steve started with the idea that on-line learning is changing and that his presentation was going to be based on the idea that the future will be richly social and intensely personal. Paradoxical? Possibly but let’s find out. Oh, look, an Einstein quote – we should have had Einstein bingo cards. It’s a good one and it came with an anecdote (which was a little Upstairs Downstairs) so I shall reproduce it here.
“I never teach my students. I only provide the conditions in which they can learn.” Albert Einstein
There are two types of learning: shallow (rote) learning that we see when cramming, where understanding is negligible or shallow if there at all, and then there is the fluid intelligence, the deeper kind of learning that draws on your previous learning and your knowledge structures. But what about strategic learning where we switch quickly between the two. Poor pedagogy can suppress these transitions and lock people into one spot.
There are three approaches here: knowledge (knowing that, which is declarative), wisdom (knowing how, which is procedural) and transformation (knowing why, which is critical). I’ve written whole papers about the missing critical layer so I’m very happy to see Steve saying that the critical layer is the one that we often do the worst with. This ties back into blooms where knowledge is cognitive, wisdom is application and transformation is analysis and evaluation. Learning can be messy but it’s transformative and it can be intrinsically hard to define. Learning is many things – sorry, Steve, not going to summarise that whole sentence.
We want to move through to the transformational stage of learning.
What is the first attempt at distance learning? St Paul’s name was tossed out, as was Moses. But St Paul was noted as the first correspondence course offered. (What was the assessment model, I wonder, for Epistola.) More seriously, it was highly didactic and one-way, and it was Pitman who established a two-way correspondence course that was both laborious and asynchronous but it worked. Then we had television and in 1968, the Stanford Instructions TV Network popped up. In 1970, Steve saw an example of video conferencing that had been previously confined to Star Trek. I was around in the early 70s and we were all agog about the potential of the future – where is my moon base, by the way? But the tools were big and bulk – old video cameras were incredibly big and ridiculously short lived in their battery life… but it worked! Then people saw uses for the relationship between this new technology and pedagogy. Reel-to-reel, copiers, projectors, videos: all of these technologies were effective for their teaching uses at the time.
Of course, we moved on to computer technology including the BBC Model B (hooray!) and the reliable but hellishly noisy dot matrix printer. The learning from these systems was very instructional, using text and very simplistic in multiple choice question approach. Highly behaviouristic but this is how things were done and the teaching approach matched the technology. Now, of course, we’ve gone tablet-based, on-line gaming environments that have non-touch technologies such as Kinect, but the principle remains the same: over the years we’ve adapted technology to pedagogy.
But it’s only now that, after Sir Tim Berners-Lee, we have the World Wide Web that on-line learning is now available to everybody, where before it was sort-of available but not anywhere near as multiplicable. Now, for our sins, we have Learning Management Systems, the most mixed of blessings, and we still have to ask what are we using them for, how are we using them? Is our pedagogy changing? Is out connection with our students changing? Illich (1972) criticised educational funnels that had a one-directional approach and intend motivated educational webs that allow the transformation of each moment of living into one of learning, sharing and caring.
What about the Personal Learning Environment (PLE)? This is the interaction of tools such as blogs, twitters and e-Portfolios, then add in the people we interact with, and then the other tools that we use – and this would be strongly personal to an individual. If you’ve ever tried to use your partner’s iPad, you know how quickly personalisation changes your perception of a tool! Wheeler and Malik (2010) discuses the PLE that comprises the personal learning network and personal web tools, with an eye on more than the classroom, but as a part of life-long learning. Steve notes (as Stephen Heppel did) that you may as well get students to use their PLEs in the open because they’ll be using them covertly otherwise: the dreaded phone under the table becomes a learning tool when it’s on top of the table. Steve discussed the embedded MOOC that Hugh discussed yesterday to see how the interaction between on-line and f2f students can benefit from each other.
In the late ’80s, the future was “multi-media” and everything had every other medium jammed into it (and they don’t like it up ’em) and then the future was going to converge on the web. Internet take up is increasing: social, political and economic systems change incrementally, but technology changes exponentially. Steve thinks the future is smart mobile and pervasive, due to miniaturisation and capability of new devices. If you have WiFi then you have the world.
“Change is not linear, it’s exponential.” Kurzweil
Looking at the data, there are no more people in the world with mobile phones than people without, although some people have more than one. (Someone in the audience had four, perhaps he was a Telco?) Of course, some reasons for this are because mobile phones replace infrastructure: there are entire African banks that run over mobile networks, as an example. Given that we always have a computer in our pocket, how can we promote learning everywhere? We are using these all the time, everywhere, and this changes what we can do because we can mix leisure and learning without having to move to fixed spaces.
Steve then displayed the Intel info graphic “What Happens In an Internet Minute“, but it’s scary to see how much paper is lagging these days. What will the future look like? What will future learning look like? If we think exponentially then things are changing fast. There is so much content being generated, there must be something that we can use (DOGE photos and Justin Bieber vides excepted) for our teaching and learning. But, given that 70% of what we learn is if informal and outside of the institution, this is great! But we need to be able to capture this and this means that we should produce a personal learning network, because trying to drink down all that content by yourself is exceeding our ability! By building a network, we build a collection of filters and aggregators that are going to help us to bring sense out of the chaos. Given that nobody can learn everything, we can store our knowledge in other people and know where to go when we need that knowledge. A plank of connectivist theory and leading into paragogy, where we learn from each other. This also leads us to distributed cognition, where we think across the group (a hive mind, if you will) but, more simply, you learn from one person, then another, and it becomes highly social.
Steve showed us a video on “How have you used your own technology to enhance your learning“, which you can watch on YouTube. Lucky old 21st Century you! This is a recording of some of Steve’s students answering the question and sharing their personal learning networks with us. There’s an interesting range of ideas and technologies in use so it’s well worth a look. Steve runs a Twitter wall in his classroom and advertises the hashtag for a given session so questions, challenges and comments go out on to that board and that allows Steve to see it but also retweet it to his followers, to allow the exponential explosion that we would want in a personal learning network. Students accessed when they harness the tools they need to solve their problems.
Steve showed us a picture of about 10,000 Germans taking pictures of the then-Presidential Elect Barack Obama because he was speaking in Berlin and it was a historical moment that people wanted to share with other people. This is an example of the ubiquitous connection that we now enjoy and, in many ways, take for granted. It is a new way of thinking and it causes a lot of concern for people who want to stick to previous methods. (There will come a time when a paper exam for memorised definitions will make no sense because people have computers connected to their eyes – so let’s look at asking questions in ways that always require people to actually use their brains, shall we.) Steve then showed us a picture of students “taking notes” by taking pictures of the whiteboard: something that we are all very accustomed to now. Yes, some teachers are bothered by this but why? What is wrong with instantaneous capture versus turning a student into a slow organic photocopying machine? Let’s go to a Papert quote!
“I am convinced that heh best learning takes place when the learner takes charge,” Seymour Papert
“We learn by doing“, Piaget, 1960
“We learn by making“, Papert, 1960.
Steve alluded to constructionist theory and pointed out how much we have to learn about learning by making. He, like many of us, doesn’t subscribe to generational or digital native/immigrant theory. It’s an easy way of thinking but it really gets in the way, especially when it makes teachers fearful of weighing in because they feel that their students know more than they do. Yes, they might, but there is no grand generational guarantee. It’s not about your age, it’s about your context. It’s about how we use the technology, it’s not about who we are and some immutable characteristics that define us as in or out. (WTF does not, for the record, mean “Welcome to Facebook”. Sorry, people.) There will be cultural differences but we are, very much, all in this together.
Steve showed us a second video, on the Future of Publishing, which you can watch again! Some of you will find it confronting that Gaga beats Gandhi but cultures change and evolve – and you need to watch to the end of the video because it’s really rather clever. Don’t stop halfway through! As Steve notes, it’s about perception and, as I’ve noted before, I’m pretty sure that people put people into the categories that they were already thinking about – it’s one of the reasons I have such a strong interest in grounded theory. If you have a “Young bad” idea in your head then everything you see will tend to confirm this. Perception and preconception can heavily interfere with each other but using perception, and being open to change, is almost always a better idea.
Steve talked about Csíkszentmihályi’s Flow, the zone you’re in when the level of challenge roughly matches your level of skill and you balance anxiety and boredom. Then, for maximum Nick points, he got onto Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, where we build knowledge better and make leaps when we do it with other people, using the knowledgable other to scaffold the learning. Steve also talked about mashing them up, and I draw the reader back to something I wrote on this a whole ago on Repenning’s work.
We can do a lot of things with computers but we don’t have to do all the things that we used to do and slavishly translate them across to the new platform. Waters (2011) talks about new learners: learners who are more self-directed and able to make more and hence learn more.
There are many digital literacies: social networking, privacy management, identity management, creating content, organising content, reusing and repurposing, filtering and selection, self presentation, transliteracy (using any platform to get your ideas across). We build skills, that become competencies, that become literacies and, finally, potentially become masteries.
Steve finished with in discussing the transportability of skills using driving in the UK and the US as an example. The skill is pretty much the same but safe driving requires a new literacy when you make a large contextual change. Digital environments can be alien environments so you need to be able to take the skills that you have now and be able to put them into the new contexts. How do you know that THIS IS SHOUTING? It’s a digital literacy.
Steve presented a quote from Socrates, no, Socrates, no, Plato:
“Knowledge that is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.“
and used the rather delightful neologism “Darwikianism” to illustrate evolving improvement on on-line materials over time. (And illustrated it with humour and pictures.) Great talk with a lot of content! Now I have to go and work on my personal learning network!
This is not actually Socrates. Sorry!
CDEDU, Day 3, “Through the Lens of Third Space Theory: Possibilities For Research Methodologies in Educational Technologies”, (#csedu14 #AdelEd)
Posted: April 3, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: computer supported education, education, higher education, learning, lens, liminal state, students, teachers, third space theory, threshold concepts Leave a commentThis talk was presented by Kathy Jordan and Jennifer Elsden-Clifton, both from RMIT University. They discussed educational technologies through another framework that they have borrowed from another area: third space theory. This allows us to describe how teachers and students use complex roles in their activities.
HALlo.
A lot of educational research is focused on the use of technology and can be rather theory light (no arguments from me), leading to technological evangelism that is highly determinist. (I’m assuming that the speakers mean technological determinism, which is the belief that it’s a society’s technology that drives its culture and social structures, after Veblen.) The MOOC argument was discussed again. Today, the speakers were planning to offer an alternative way to think about technology and use of technology. As always, don’t just plunk technology down in the classroom and expect it to achieve your learning and teaching goals. Old is not always bad and new is not always good, in effect. (I often say this and then present the reverse as well. Binary thinking is for circuits.)
“The real voyage of discover consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” (Proust, cited in Canfield, Hanson and Zlkman, 2002)
“With whose eyes were my eyes crafted?” (Castor, 1991)
Basically, we bring ourselves to the landscape and have to think about why we see what we;re seeing. The new methodology proposed moves away from a simplistic, techno-centric approach and towards Third Space Theory. Third Space Theory is used to explore and understand the spaces in between two or more discourses, conceptualisations or binaries. (Bhabna, 1994). Thirdspace is this a “come together” space (Soja, 1996) to combine the first and second spaces and then enmesh the binaries that characterise these spaces. This also reduces the implicit privileging of one conceptual space over another.
Conceptualisations of the third space include bridges, navigational spaces and transformative spaces. Interesting, from an editorial perspective, I find the binary notion of MOOC good/MOOC bad, which we often devolve to, is one of the key problems in discussing MOOCs because it often forces people into responding to a straw man and I think that this work on Thirdspaces is quite strong without having to refer to a perceived necessity for MOOCs.
Thirdspace theory is used across a variety of disciplines at the moment. Firstspace in our context could be face-to-face learning, the second space is “on-line learning” and the speakers argue that this binary classification is inherently divisive. Well, yes it is, but this assumes that you are not perceiving these are naturally overlapping when we consider blended learning, which we’ve really had as a concept since 1999. There are definitely problems when people move through f2f and on-line as if they are exclusive binary aspects of some educational Janus but I wonder how much of that is lack of experience and exposure rather than a strict philosophical structure – but there is no doubt that thinking about these things as a continuum is beneficial and if Thirdspace theory brings people to it – then hooray!
(As Hugh noted yesterday, MOOC got people interested in on-line learning, which made it worth running MOOCs. Then, hooray!)
A lot of the discussion of technology in education is a collection of Shibboleths and “top of the head” solutions that have little maturity or strategy behind them, so a new philosophical approach to this is most definitely welcome and I need to read up more on Thirdspace, obviously.
The speakers provided some examples, including some learning fusion around Blackboard collaborate and the perceived inability of pre-service teachers to be able to move personal technology literacy into their new workplace, due to fear. So, in the latter case, Thirdspace allowed an analysis of the tensions involved and to assist the pre-service teachers in negotiating the “unfamiliar terrain” (Bhabha, 1992) of sanctioned technology frameworks in schools. (An interesting example was having t hand write an e-mail first before being allowed to enter it electronically – which is an extreme sanctioning of the digital space.)
I like the idea of the lens that Thirdspace provides but wonder whether we are seeing the liminal state that we would normally associate with a threshold concept. Rather than a binary model, we are seeing a layered model, where the between is neither stable nor clearly understood as it is heavily personalised. There is, of course, no guarantee that having a skill in one area makes it transferable to another because of the inherent contextual areas (hang on, have we gone into NeoPiaget!).
Anything that removes the potential classification of any category as a lower value or undesirable other is a highly desirable thing for me. The notion that transitional states, however we define them, are a necessary space that occurs between two extremes, whether they are dependent or opposing concepts, strongly reduces the perceived privilege of the certainty that so many people confuse with being knowledgeable and informed. Our students, delightful dualists that they are, often seek black/white dichotomies and it is part of our job to teach them that grey is not only a colour but an acceptable colour.
I think that labelling the MOOC discussion as a techno-determinist and shallow argument doesn’t really reflect the maturity of the discussion in the contemporary MOOC space and is a bit of a dismissive binary, if I can be so bold. We did discuss this in the questions and the speakers agreed that the discussion of MOOC has matured and was definitely in advance of the rather binary and outmoded description presented in the first keynote that I railed against. Yes, MOOCs have been presented by evangelists and profit makers as something but the educational community has done a lot of work to refine this and very few of the practitioners I know who are still involved in MOOC are what I would call techno-determinists. Techno-utopians, maybe, techno-optimisits, often, but techno-skeptics and serious, serious educational theorists who are also techno-optional, just as often.
The other potential of Third Space Theory is that it “provides a framework for destabilisation” and moving beyond past patterns rather than relying on old binary conceptualisations of new/old good/bad updated/outmoded. Projecting any single method to everything is always challenging and I suspect it’s a little bit of a hay hominid but the resulting questions clarified that the potential of Thirdspace is in being capable of deliberately rejecting staid and binary thinking, without introducing a new mode of privilege on to the new Thirdspace model. I’m not sure that I agree with all of the points here but I certainly have a lot to think about.
CSEDU, Day 2, Invited Talk, “How are MOOCs Disrupting the Educational Landscape?”, (#CSEDU14 #AdelEd)
Posted: April 2, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: Avalanche, cMOOC, computer supported education, CSEDU, csedu14, education, educational landscape, FutureLearn, higher education, Hugh Davis, learning, MOOC, moocs, Napster, Saints FC, Southampton, student, xMOOC 3 CommentsI’ve already spent some time with Professor Hugh Davis, from Southampton, and we’ve had a number of discussions already around some of the matters we’re discussing today, including the issue when you make your slides available before a talk and people react to the content of the slides without having the context of the talk! (This is a much longer post for another time.) Hugh’s slides are available at http://www.slideshare.net/hcd99.
As Hugh noted, this is a very timely topic but he’s planning to go through the slides at speed so I may not be able to capture all of it. He tweeted his slides earlier, as I noted, and his comment that he was going to be debunking things earned him a minor firestorm. But, to summarise, his answer to the questions is “not really, probably” but we’ll come back to this. For those who don’t know, Southampton is about 25,000 students, Russell Group and Top 20 in the UK, with a focus on engineering and oceanography.
Back in 2012, the VC came back infused with the desire to put together a MOOC (apparently, Australians talked them into it – sorry, Hugh) and in December, 2012, Hugh was called in and asked to do MOOCs. Those who are keeping track will now that there was a lot of uncertainty about MOOCs in 2012 (and there still is) so the meeting called for staff to talk about this was packed – in a very big room. But this reflected excitement on the part of people – which waving around “giant wodges” of money to do blended learning had failed to engender, interestingly enough. Suddenly, MOOCs are more desirable because people wanted to do blended learning as long as you used the term MOOC. FutureLearn was produced and things went from there. (FutureLearn now has a lot of courses in it but I’ve mentioned this before. Interestingly, Monash is in this group so it’s not just a UK thing. Nice one, Monash!)
In this talk, Hugh’s planning to intro MOOCs, discuss the criticism, look at Higher Ed, ask why we are investing in MOOCs, what we can get out of it and then review the criticisms again. Hugh then defined what the term MOOC means: he defined it as a 10,000+, free and open registration, on-line course, where a course runs at a given time with a given cohort, without any guarantee of accreditation. (We may argue about this last bit later on.) MOOCs are getting shorter – with 4-6 weeks being the average for a MOOC, mostly due to fears of audience attrition over time.
The dreaded cMOOC/xMOOC timeline popped up from Florida Institute of Technology’s History of MOOCs:
and then we went into the discussion of the stepped xMOOC with instructor led and a well-defined and assessable journey and the connectivist cMOOC where the network holds the knowledge and the learning comes from connections. Can we really actually truly separate MOOCs into such distinct categories? A lot of xMOOC forums show cMOOC characteristics and you have to wonder how much structure you can add to a cMOOC without it getting “x”-y. So what can we say about the definition of courses? How do we separate courses you can do any time from the cohort structure of the MOOC? The synchronicity of human collision is a very connectivisty idea which is embedded implicitly in every xMOOC because of the cohort.
What do you share? Content or the whole course? In MOOCS, the whole experience is available to you rather than just bits and pieces. And students tend to dip in and out when they can, rather than just eating what is doled out, which suggests that they are engaging. There are a lot of providers, who I won’t list here, but many of them are doing pretty much the same thing.
What makes a MOOC? Short videos, on-line papers, on-line activities, links toe external resources, discussions and off platform activity – but we can no longer depend upon students being physical campus students and thus we can’t guarantee that they share our (often privileged) access to resources such as published journals. So Southampton often offer précis of things that aren’t publicly available. Off platform is an issue for people who are purely on-line.
If you have 13,000 people you can’t really offer to mark all their essays so assessment has to depend upon the self-motivated students and they have to want to understand what is going on – self evaluation and peer review have to be used. This is great, according to Hugh, because we will have a great opportunity to find out more about peer review than we ever have before.
What are the criticisms? Well, they’re demographically pants – most of the students are UK (77%) and then a long way down US (2%), with some minor representation from everywhere else. This isn’t isolated to this MOOC. 70% of MOOC users come from the home country, regardless of where it’s run. Of course, we also know that the people who do MOOCs also tend to have degrees – roughly 70% from the MOOCS@Edinburgh2013 Report #1. These are serial learners (philomaths) who just love to learn things but don’t necessarily have the time or inclination (or resources) to go back to Uni. But for those who register, many don’t do anything, and those who do drop out at about 20% a week – more weeks, more drop-out. Why didn’t people continue? We’ll talk about this later. (See http://moocmoocher.wordpress.com) But is drop out a bad thing? We’ll comeback to this.
Then we have the pedagogy, where we attempt to put learning design into our structure in order to achieve learning outcomes – but this isn’t leading edge pedagogy and there is no real interaction between educators and learners. There are many discussions, and they happen in volume, but this discussion is only over 10% of the community, with 1% making the leading and original contributions. 1% of 10-100,000 can be a big number compared to a standard class room.
What about the current Higher Ed context – let’s look at “The Avalanche Report“. Basically, the education business is doomed!!! DOOOMED, I tell you! which is hardly surprising for a report that mostly originates from a publishing house who wants to be a financially successful disruptor. Our business model is going to collapse! We are going to have our Napster moment! Cats lying down with dogs! In the HE context, fees are going up faster than the value of degree (across most of the developed world, apparently). There is an increased demand for flexibility of study, especially for professional development, in the time that they have. The alternative educational providers are also cashing up and growing. With all of this in mind, on-line education should be a huge growing market and this is what the Avalanche report uses to argue that the old model is doomed. To survive, Unis will have to either globalise or specialise – no room in the middle. MOOCs appear to be the vanguard of the on-line program revolution, which explains why there is so much focus.
Is this the end of the campus? It’s not the end of the pithy slogan, that’s for sure. So let’s look at business models. How do we make money on MOOCs? Freemium where there are free bits and value-added bits The value-adds can be statements of achievement or tutoring. There are also sponsored MOOCs where someone pays us to make a MOOC (for their purposes) or someone pays us to make a MOOC they want (that we can then use elsewhere.) Of course there’s also just the old “having access to student data” which is a very tasty dish for some providers.
What does this mean to Southampton? Well it’s a kind of branding and advertising for Southampton to extend their reputation. It might also generate new markets, bring them in via Informal Learning, move to Non-Formal Learning, then up to the Modules of Formal Learning and then doing whole programmes under more Formal learning. Hugh thinks this is optimistic, not least because not many people have commodified their product into individual modules for starters. Hugh thinks it’s about 60,000 Pounds to make a MOOC, which is a lot of money, and so you need a good business model to justify dropping this wad of cash. But you can get 60K back from enough people with a small fee. Maybe on-line learning is another way to get students than the traditional UK “boarding school” degrees. But the biggest thing is when people accept on-line certification as this is when the product becomes valuable to the people who want the credentials. Dear to my heart, is of course that this also assists in the democratisation of education – which is a fantastic thing.
What can we gain from MOOCs? Well, we can have a chunk of a running course for face-to-face students that runs as a MOOC and the paying students have benefited from interacting with the “free attendees” on the MOOC but we have managed to derive value from it. It also allows us to test things quickly and at scale, for rapid assessment of material quality and revision – it’s hard not to see the win-win here. This automatically drives the quality up as it’s for all of your customers, not just the scraps that you can feed to people who can’t afford to pay for it. Again, hooray for democratisation.
Is this the End of the Lecture? Possibly, especially as we can use the MOOC for content and flip to use the face-to-face for much more valuable things.
There are on-line degrees and there is a lot of money floating around looking for brands that they will go on-line (and by brand, we mean the University of X.) Venture capitalist, publishers and start-ups are sniffing around on-line so there’s a lot of temptation out there and a good brand will mean a lot to the right market. What about fusing this and articulating the degree programme, combining F2F modules. on-line, MOOC, and other aspects.
Ah, the Georgia Tech On-line Masters in Computer Science has been mentioned. This was going to be a full MOOC with free and paying but it’s not fully open, for reasons that I need to put into another post. So it’s called a MOOC but it’s really an on-line course. You may or may not care about this – I do, but I’m in agreement with Hugh.
The other thing about MOOC is that we are looking at big, big data sets where these massive cohorts can be used to study educational approaches and what happens when we change learning and assessment at the big scale.
So let’s address the criticisms:
- Pedagogically Simplistic! Really, as simple as a lecture? Is it worse – no, not really and we have space to innovate!
- No support and feedback! There could be, we’d just have to pay for it.
- Poor completion rates! Retention is not the aim, satisfaction is. We are not dealing with paying students.
- No accreditation! There could be but, again, you’d have to pay for someone to mark and accredit.
- This is going to kill Universities! Hugh doesn’t think so but we’ll had to get a bit nimble. So only those who are not agile and responsive to new business models may have problems – and we may have to do some unbundling.
Who is actually doing MOOCs? The life-long learner crowd (25-65, 505/50 M/F and nearly always have a degree). People who are after a skill (PD and CPD). Those with poor access to Higher education, unsurprisingly. There’s also a tiny fourth cohort who are those who are dipping a toe in Uni and are so small as to be insignificant. (The statistics source was questioned, somewhat abruptly, in the middle of Hugh’s flow, so you should refer to the Edinburgh report.”
The patterns of engagement were identified as auditing, completing and sampling, from the Coursera “Emerging Student Pattersn in Open-Enrollment MOOCs”.
To finish up, MOOCs can give us more choice and more flexibility. Hugh’s happy because people want do online learning and this helps to develop capacity to develop high quality on-line courses. This does lead to challenges for institutional strategy: changing beliefs, changing curriculum design, working with the right academic staff (and who pays them), growing teams of learning designers and multimedia producers, legal matters, speed and agility, budget and marketing. These are commercial operations so you have a lot of commercial issues to worry about! (For our approach, going Creative Commons was one of the best things we every did.)
Is it the end of the campus? … No, not really, Hugh thinks that the campus will keep going and there’ll just be more on-line learning. You don’t stop going to see good music because you’ve got a recording, for example.
And now for the conclusions! MOOCs are a great marketing device and have a good reach for people who were out of reach before, But we can take high quality content and re-embed back into blended learning, use it to drive teaching practice change, get some big data and building capacity for online learning.
This may be the vanguard of on-line disruption but if we’re ready for it, we can live for it!
Well, that was a great talk but goodness, does Hugh speak quickly! Have a look at his slides in the context of this because I think he’s balanced an optimistic view of the benefits with a sufficient cynical eye on the weasels who would have us do this for their own purposes.
CSEDU, Day 1, Keynote 2, “Mathematics Teaching: is the future syncretic?” (#csedu14 #csedu #AdelEd)
Posted: April 2, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: blogging, community, computer science education, computer supported education, csedu14, design, education, educational problem, heresy, learning, student perspective, students, syncretic, teaching approaches, thinking Leave a commentThis is an extension of the position paper that was presented this morning. I must be honest and say that I have a knee-jerk reaction when I run across titles like this. There’s always the spectre of Rand or Gene Ray in compact phrases of slightly obscure terminology. (You should probably ignore me, I also twitch every time I run across digital hermeneutics and that’s perfectly legitimate.) The speaker is Larissa Fradkin who is trying to improve the quality of mathematics teaching and overall interest in mathematics – which is a good thing and so I should probably be far more generous about “syncretic”. Let’s review the definition of syncretic:
Again, from Wikipedia, Syncretism /ˈsɪŋkrətɪzəm/ is the combining of different, often seemingly contradictory beliefs, while melding practices of various schools of thought. (The speaker specified this to religious and philosophical schools of thought.)
There’s a reference in the talk to gnosticism, which combined oriental mysticism, Judaism and Christianity. Apparently, in this talk we are going to have myths debunked regarding the Maths Wars of Myths, including traditionalist myths and constructivist myths. Then discuss the realities in the classroom.
Two fundamental theories of learning were introduced: traditionalist and constructivist. Apparently, these are drummed into poor schoolteachers and yet we academics are sadly ignorant of these. Urm. You have to be pretty confident to have a go at Piaget: “Piaget studied urchins and then tried to apply it to kids.” I’m really not sure what is being said here but the speaker has tried to tell two jokes which have fallen very flat and, regrettably, is making me think that she doesn’t quite grasp what discovery learning is. Now we are into Guided Teaching and scaffolding with Vygotsky, who apparently, as a language teacher, was slightly better than a teacher of urchins.
The first traditionalist myth is that intelligence = implicit memory (no conscious awareness) + basic pattern recognition. Oh, how nice, the speaker did a lot of IQ tests and went from 70 to 150 in 5 tests. I don’t think many people in the serious educational community places much weight on the assessment of intelligence through these sorts of test – and the objection to standardised testing is coming from the edu research community of exactly those reasons. I commented on this speaker earlier and noted that I felt that she was having an argument that was no longer contemporary. Sadly, my opinion is being reinforced. The next traditionalist myth is that mathematics should be taught using poetry, other mnemonics and coercion.
What? If the speaker is referring to the memorisation of the multiplication tables, we are taking about a definitional basis for further development that occupies a very short time in the learning phase. We are discussing a type of education that is already identified as negative as if the realisation that mindless repetition and extrinsic motivational factors are counter-productive. Yes, coercion is an old method but let’s get to what you’re proposing as an alternative.
Now we move on to the constructivist myths. I’m on the edge of my seat. We have a couple of cartoons which don’t do anything except recycle some old stereotypes. So, the first myth is “Only what students discover for themselves is truly learned.” So the problem here is based on Rebar, 2007, met study. Revelation: Child-centred, cognitively focused and open classroom approaches tend to perform poorly.
Hmm, not our experience.
The second myth is both advanced and debunked by a single paper, that there are only two separate and distinct ways to teach mathematics: conceptual understanding and drills. Revelation: Conceptual advanced are invariably built on the bedrock of technique.
Myth 3: Math concepts are best understood and mastered when presented in context, in that way the underlying math concept will follow automatically. The speaker used to teach with engineering examples but abandoned them because of the problem of having to explain engineering problems, engineering language and then the problem. Ah, another paper from Hung-Hsi Wu, UCB, “The Mathematician and Mathematics Education Reform.” No, I really can’t agree with this as a myth. Situated learning is valid and it works, providing that the context used is authentic and selected carefully.
Ok, I must confess that I have some red flags going up now – while I don’t know the work of Hung-Hsi Wu, depending on a single author, especially one whose revelatory heresy is close to 20 years old, is not the best basis for a complicated argument such as this. Any readers with knowledge in this should jump on to the comments and get us informed!
Looking at all of these myths, I don’t see myths, I see straw men. (A straw man is a deliberately weak argument chosen because it is easy to attack and based on a simplified or weaker version of the problem.)
I’m in agreement with many of the outcomes that Professor Fradkin is advocating. I want teachers to guide but believe that they can do it in the constriction of learning environments that support constructivist approaches. Yes, we should limit jargon. Yes, we should move away from death-by-test. Yes, Socratic dialogue is a great way to go.
However, as always, if someone says “Socratic dialogue is the way to go but I am not doing it now” then I have to ask “Why not?” Anyone who has been to one of my sessions knows that when I talk about collaboration methods and student value generation, you will be collaborating before your seat has had a chance to warm up. It’s the cornerstone of authentic teaching that we use the methods that we advocate or explain why they are not suitable – cognitive apprenticeship requires us to expose our selves as we got through the process we’re trying to teach!
Regrettably, I think my initial reaction of cautious mistrust of the title may have been accurate. (Or I am just hopelessly biassed by an initial reaction although I have been trying to be positive.) I am trying very hard to reinterpret what has been said. But there is a lot of anecdote and dependency upon one or two “visionary debunkers” to support a series of strawmen presented as giant barriers to sensible teaching.
Yes, listening to students and adapting is essential but this does not actually require one to abandon constructivist or traditionalist approaches because we are not talking about the pedagogy here, we’re talking about support systems. (Your take on that may be different.)
There is some evidence presented at the end which is, I’m sorry to say, a little confusing although there has obviously been a great deal of success for an unlisted, uncounted number and unknown level of course – success rates improved from 30 passing to 70% passing and no-one had to be trained for the exam. I would very much like to get some more detail on this as claiming that the syncretic approach is the only way to reach 70% is essential is a big claim. Also, a 70% pass rate is not all that good – I would get called on to the carpet if I did that for a couple of offerings. (And, no, we don’t dumb down the course to improve pass rate – we try to teach better.)
Now we move into on-line techniques. Is the flipped classroom a viable approach? Can technology “humanise” the classroom? (These two statements are not connected, for me, so I’m hoping that this is not an attempt to entail one by the other.) We then moved on to a discussion of Khan, who Professor Fradkin is not a fan of, and while her criticisms of Khan are semi-valid (he’s not a teacher and it shows), her final statement and dismissal of Khan as a cram-preparer is more than a little unfair and very much in keeping with the sweeping statements that we have been assailed by for the past 45 minutes.
I really feel that Professor Fradkin is conflating other mechanisms with blended and flipped learning – flipped learning is all about “me time” to allow students to learn at their own pace (as she notes) but then she notes a “Con” of the Khan method of an absence of “me time”. What if students don’t understand the recorded lectures at all? Well… how about we improve the material? The in-class activities will immediately expose faulty concept delivery and we adapt and try again (as the speaker has already noted). We most certainly don’t need IT for flipped learning (although it’s both “Con” point 3 AND 4 as to why Khan doesn’t work), we just need to have learning occur before we have the face-to-face sessions where we work through the concepts in a more applied manner.
Now we move onto MOOCs. Yes, we’re all cautious about MOOCs. Yes, there are a lot of issues. MOOCs will get rid of teachers? That particular strawman has been set on fire, pushed out to sea, brought back, set on fire again and then shot into orbit. Where they set it on fire again. Next point? Ok, Sebastian Thrun made an overclaim that the future will have only 10 higher ed institutions in 50 years. Yup. Fire that second strawman into orbit. We’ve addressed Professor Thrun before and, after all, he was trying to excite and engage a community over something new and, to his credit, he’s been stepping back from that ever since.
Ah, a Coursera course that came from a “high-quality” US University. It is full of imprecise language, saying How and not Why, with a Monster generator approach. A quick ad hominen attack on the lecturer in the video (He looked like he had been on drugs for 10 years). Apparently, and with no evidence, Professor Fradkin can guarantee that no student picked up any idea of what a function was from this course.
Apparently some Universities are becoming more cautious about MOOCs. Really.
I’m sorry to have editorialised so badly during this session but this has been a very challenging talk to listen to as so much of the underlying material has been, to my understanding, misrepresented at least. A very disappointing talk over all and one that could have been so much better – I agree with a lot of the outcomes but I don’t really think that this is not the way to lead towards it.
Sadly, already someone has asked to translate the speaker’s slides into German so that they can send it to the government! Yes, text books are often bad and a lack of sequencing is a serious problem. Once again I agree with the conclusion but not the argument… Heresy is an important part of our development of thought, and stagnation is death, but I think that we always need to be cautious that we don’t sensationalise and seek strawmen in our desire to find new truths that we have to reach through heresy.
CSEDU Day 1, Session 1, “Information Technologies Supporting Learning”, Paper 3. (#csedu14 #AdelED)
Posted: April 1, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: computer supported education, csedu14, education, higher education, learning, learning environments, moocs, time, time factors Leave a commentThe final talk, “The Time Factor in MOOCs” was not presented because the speaker didn’t show up. So we talked about other things.
I can only hope that the problem with the speaker was not timezone related!
CSEDU Day 1, Session 1, “Information Technologies Supporting Learning”, Paper 2. (#csedu14 #AdelED)
Posted: April 1, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: computer supported education, csedu14, education, grey literature, higher education, learning, learning environments, MOOC, moocs, motivations, Southampton, Su White Leave a comment(I seem to be writing a lot so I’ll break these posts into smaller pieces. If I can fit these two talks into one post, I will. Apologies, dear reader, for the eye strain.)
The second talk was “MOOCs for Universities and Learners” presented by the irrepressible Su White (@suukii, material available here), from Southampton, who I have had the pleasure to meet before. Manuel Leon, the third author, is one of the PhD students who will be helping out and is also from Barcelona. Southampton has done MOOCs in the FutureLearn context. There’s quite a lot on offer in Future Learn and Southampton wanted something multi-disciplinary so they chose Web Science, which is also what MOOCs actually are so it was all somewhat self-referential in the good sense of reinforcement rather than the bad sense of Narcissus. The overwhelming lesson, not in the paper, is that getting academics to do stuff for this kind of environment is like herding cats once you start dealing with a team of excerpts. Goodness, they have a MOOC manager. (I don’t even know the poor person but I want to send them a nice calming box of chocolates.) There is a furious level of activity in an engaged on-line community and keeping up with this is very tricky – FAQs really help!
So where is FutureLearn today? There are nearly 30 institutions involved to date. Su sees a strong link with what went before, with OER and student desire for different learning approaches. The team wanted to know what motivated students and they wanted to be prepared and wanted to collect data from real live students. This includes the institution’s motivations and the student motivations. For the HEI, motivation was assessed by literature meta review and qualitative content analysis, with student motivations run with a survey on mostly qualitative grounds. The literature meta review was conducted over more than 60 articles including journal articles and “grey” literature, with a content analysis of the journals, using Herring’s (2004) adaption, after Krippendorf’s (1980) with categorising sources. (Grey literature includes magazine articles but are curated sources where authorship and provenance are both valued.)
I can’t draw the diagram but the perspectives were split between journals and grey literature, with open movements, evolution in distance education and disruptive innovation in the journal side, and sustainability (are MOOCs just a trend), quality (will they offer the same quality we get now) and impact (will the shake and change education) from the non-academic side including true believers and skeptics. A lot came out of this but Su noted the growing cynicism one develops reading the grey literature which appears to fall more into the zone of dinner party argument and that merit deeper exploration, while often not getting to that point. Are MOOCs the next stage in the slow progress from correspondence courses past flexible learning, Web 2.0 to MOOCs?
So what did they do? An online survey to find out the learners’ motivation to study: who are you, what is your education, what is your MOOC experience and (very importantly IMHO) what is your motivation? (I’m a big fan of Husman 2003 so this is very interesting to me.) In the motivations, the target communities were Spanish, Arabic and English, with wide dissemination and then the slide flipped so I lost it. 🙂 From the survey, they had 285 participants, with mostly male but that’s probably a cultural artefact because of the Arabic speakers being 77% male. Overwhelmingly, the platform was Coursera, followed by EdX, Udacity and Khan. They do it because it’s free, they have an interest and they are interested in the topic. Very few do it to get a taste of the University before enrolling – note to University administrators! Learners value free and open, convenience for time scheduling and moving, and over 60% are personalising the experience as part of planning their future.
So many issues and questions! Are there really pedagogic possibilities or is this an illusion? How do we deal with assessment? It’s notionally free but at what cost: reputational damage, cost of production and production values. Are we perpetuating old inequalities: are we giving them an illusion of value? Some stuff can’t be done online and you end up with unequal educators, with star performers creeping into local markets and undermining the value of a local and personalised experienced. Finally, we see the old issues of cultural imperialism and a creeping homogeneity that destroys diversity and alternative cultural perspectives. The last thing we want to produce is 99% the same and 1% other as the final step in a growing online community. The other never fares well inside that context. There are of course issues with the digital competency of the student, dropout issues and the spectre of plagiarism. Su’s take was that some people will just cheat anyway so focusing on this is wasted effort to some extent but certification changes when you make it something that the learner seeks, rather than the MOOC imposes.
MOOCs can be a great catalyst and engine for change – you can try things in there and fold them back into your curriculum. They’ve had 20,000 students and now have a lot of data on students. Hugh David will be talking on Wednesday about what they’ve discovered (taster for tomorrow). Institutions are going to have to become more agile and have feedback into the curriculum at a speed that we have not necessarily seen before. (In one generation, we’ve gone from courses that last for decades to courses that last for years to courses that last for one instance and then mutate? No wonder we’re tired!)
Learners are doing the learning: if they want to be a tourist, then that’s what is going to happen. You can’t force someone to finish a book – we wouldn’t call a book a failure if some people didn’t finish it! Are we being too harsh on the MOOC in how we assess the things that we can measure?
Ok, I can’t keep this short, sorry, readers! The next talk will be in another page.
CSEDU Day 1, Opening Panel, “Shaping the Future Learning Environment – Smart, Digital and Open?”
Posted: April 1, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: cognitive psychology, computer supported education, constructivist, CSEDU, CSEDU2014, education, future learning, higher education, learning, learning environment, open approaches, students, syncretist Leave a commentOnly 32 papers out of 250 were accepted for the conference as full papers (12.8% acceptance, highly respectable) and were identified as being of “outstanding quality” – good work, PhD Student T and the CSER team! After the opening address, we went to the first panel, chaired by James Uhomobihi and Markus Helfert. The four keynote speakers are also on the panel but I’ll add more on them during their sessions.However, in summary, we had an academic, a maths instruction evangelist, a psychologist and a representative of engineering society bureaucracy (not as bad as it sounds). Everyone was saying how happy they were to be in Barcelona! (And who can blame them? This is one of my favourite cities and should be on everyone’s bucket list.)
Larissa Fradkin: “Mathematics Teaching: Is the future syncretic?”.
From Wikipedia: Syncretism /ˈsɪŋkrətɪzəm/ is the combining of different, often seemingly contradictory beliefs, while melding practices of various schools of thought.
Everyone was asked to give a position statement, which is a different take on panels for me, very interesting. Larissa had slides and she identified the old problem of the difficulty of teaching mathematics, alluding to the US mathematics wars. Are MOOCs the solution? We were promised a great deal yet much of it has not yet appeared. Well, Coursera materials appear to be useful, or useful in principle, but they don’t work in some classroom so they have to be localised. What is the role of the faculty member in this space? It’s a difficult question and the answer depends on time, teacher interest and student sophistication. We inherit the students that our preceding teachers have produced so text books and curricula have a big impact on the students that get turned out, if educational resources are presented in an unquestioned way. Trudging through exercises and content is one way to get through but what does it do? Does it teach? Does it prepare students for tests? Texts and resources are often, despite what publishers and authors claim, unaligned with the curriculum.
Schmidt’s last study (ref?) shows that quality teachers and quality materials are the top two considerations for inhaling student learning. We can produce well-crafted eBooks and MOOCs with editable and updatable content to give a flexible product – but the “rush to market” product doesn’t meet this requirement. The cognitive tutor was mentioned as AI-enriched educational software, under John Anderson’s model, but they are incredibly difficult to develop. There are tools out there that combine cognitive psychology and AI, CIRCLE and AutoTutor. However, most tool development is driven by psychologists and cognitive scientists rather than discipline experts and this can be a problem.
The speaker finished with a discussion on a semi-traditionalist semi-constructivist approach to rigorous instruction that required much less memorisation, focusing on conceptual understanding and developing more master than a straight constructivist approach. (Not quite sure of the details here but this will be extended in a later talk.)
Erik de Graffe gave his first slide from tomorrow on Team Learning in Engineering Education, starting with the statement “people are not born to work in a team”, which is an interesting statement given the entirety of human society. Students do like working together but the first meeting of the group can be challenging and they don’t know how to start. (Is this a cultural artefact based on the isolation and protection inherent in privilege? Time to get our Hofstader’s cultural dimensions hats on because this sounds a lot like a communal/separate categorical separation.) Erik noted that “team” is a word for animals harnessed together to apply more force in one direction – which is not what we want in a human team. (Although this is perhaps another cultural insight). Erik’s second statement is that communication is highly inaccurate: cog scientists estimate that the amount of information we process from the potential information around us is less than 1%. Most of the information that reaches our sense are ignored and yet we still make decisions. (Given I’m listening to the speaker while summarising another discussion and some slides, I’m wondering if this is the best way to express this while not identifying the difference in task focus and activities that are relevant to the task at hand.) Erik believes that on-line will make this worse. (I really need to go to his talk to see the evidence and caveats in all of this.) Erik then projected his own behaviour in on-line meetings and low attention to the general case – if Erik is in a meeting with you, get him to leave his camera on or he will be off making coffee. 🙂 Erik then moved on to virtual identities that allow people to do things in the alternative reality that they wouldn’t do in real life. Urm. I need to see the talk but this all seems a little dated to me but, hey, what do I know until I’ve seen the talk?
The next speaker, Steve, asked us if we shut the door while teaching (I don’t usually unless the noise get stop bad because it improves air flow, rather than for pedagogical or privacy reasons) but segued into a discussion on openness. Steve then referred to the strange issue of us providing free content to journal publishers that we then pay for. (I wrote a little something on this years ago for SIGCSE.) Steve then referred to the different time in closed and open access journals – the open access journal was “in print” in four weeks, versus the 18 months for the closed access, and the citation counts were more than an order of magnitude different. You can also measure the readers in an open access format. Open access materials are also crucial to scholars – Steve licenses all of his materials under Creative Commons so you can use his work and all you have to do is to acknowledge the source. When you open your content, you become an educator for the world. If people need education, then who are we to not provide the materials that they need? When you become an open scholar, you must prepare for criticism because many people will read things. You be also be ready for dialogue and discourse. It’s not always easy but it is very valuable. (I agree with this wholeheartedly.)
The next speaker, José Carlos Quadrado, President of IFEES, tries to infect people with good ideas about Engineering Education as part of his role. Is the future learning environment smart, digital and open? Talking about smart, an example is the new smart watch, a watch that is also a phone or linked to a device – what do we mean? When you have a smart phone, you have approximately 1.4 tons of technology from the 1980, which makes us wonder if smart means leaner? When we are going digital is this replacing paper with silicon? How do we handle factual authority when we have so much openly available where the traditional peer review and publishing oversight mechanisms are eroding and changing rapidly. (Another slightly creaky perspective although with a great deal of self-awareness.)
Teaching and learning tools have changed a great deal over the same time but have our pedagogical approaches also changed or been truly enhanced by this? There were some pretty broad generational (X vs Z) comparisons that I question the validity of. The notion that students of today couldn’t sit throughout this session is not something I agree with. Again, the message from the panel, with a couple of exceptions, is pretty dated and I have a bit of an urge to get off a lawn. Oh, and we finished with an Einstein quote after a name drop to a famous scientist. Look, I accept a lot of the things that are being said on the stage but we have to stop acting as if natural selection works in 18 months and that the increasing sophistication of later generations is anything more than an ability to make better choices because more and better choices are available. Oh, another Einstein quote.
I realise that I have started editorialising here, which I try not to do, but I am being bombarded with position statements that are leaden in their adherence to received wisdom on young people and those smart young. These issues are just clouding the real focus of the systems that we could use, the approaches we could take and the fact that for every highly-advanced Z Westerner in a low power-distance, highly self-centred approach, we have 100-1000 Pre-X non-Westerners in a high power-distance and communal environment.
We’re in question time. Erik asked about the ship analogy – when ships were made of wood, men were made of iron, and by moving to iron ships, we weakened people. Erik then went on to the question “Do smart phones make stupid people?” which basically nails down the coffin lid on all of the problems I’ve had with this opening. Steve, in response to another question, raised the connectivist argument for networking and distributed knowledge storage, which smart phones of course facilitate. Sadly, this foray into common sense was derailed by some sophistry on young people trying to be smart before they are clever.
There was a good point made that Universities will continue to be involved in quality education but they are no longer the bastions of information – that particular ship has sailed. Oh, there we go, we’ve dipped down again. Apparently we have now changed the way we buy things because we are now all concerned with perception. People are buying smart phones, not because they are smart, but because they want instant gratification. Generation Z are apparently going to be the generation that will reject everything and walk away. Eh, maybe.
Perhaps I shall come back to this later.
CSEDU 2014, Day 1, (6th International Conference on Computer Supported Education) (#CSEDU #CSEDU2014 #AdelED)
Posted: April 1, 2014 Filed under: Education | Tags: computer supported education, computers, CSEDU, CSEDU2014, education, higher education, learning, thinking Leave a commentHello again, fearless readers. I’m in Barcelona to present a paper on behalf of the CSER (I’ll talk about this a bit more later but we’re very happy to be here). It’s very early for Barcelona, which is far more of a late night town, but we’ll see how we go with getting delegates into the room. It’s 9 minutes to the session and there are 8 people here. 🙂
As per my recent practice, I’m going to try and live blog the sessions if I can, except for my own, and I hope you find it useful. Here we go again!
Ahhh, Barcelona!
Nick Falkner 