ITiCSE 2014, Day 3, Keynote, “Meeting the Future Challenges of Education and Digitization”, #ITiCSE2014 #ITiCSE @jangulliksen

Posted: June 25, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

This keynote was presented by the distinguished Professor Jan Gulliksen (@jangulliksen) of KTH. He started with two strange things. He asked for a volunteer and, of course, Simon put his hand up. Jan then asked Simon to act as a support department to seek help with putting on a jacket. Simon was facing the other way so had to try and explain to Jan the detailed process of orientating and identifying the various aspects of the jacket in order. (Simon is an exceedingly thoughtful and methodical person so he had a far greater degree of success than many of us would.) We were going to return to this. The second ‘strange thing’ was a video of President Obama speaking on Computer Science. Professor Gulliksen asked us how often a world leader would speak to a discipline community about the importance of their discipline. He noted that, in his own country, there was very little discussion in the political parties on Computer Science and IT. He noted that Chancellor Merkel had expressed a very surprising position, in response to the video, as the Internet being ‘uncharted territory‘.

Professor Gulliksen then introduced himself as the Dean of the School of Computer Science and communication in KTH, Stockholm, but he had 25 years of previous experience at Uppsala. Within this area, he had more than 20 years of experience working with the introduction of user-centred systems in public organisations. He showed two pictures, over 20 years apart, which showed how little the modern workspace has changed in that time, except that the number of post-it colours have increased! He has a great deal of interest in how we can improve the design for all users. Currently, he is looking at IT for mental and psychological disabilities, finder by Vinnova and PTS, which is not a widely explored area and can be of great help to homeless people. His team have been running workshops with these people to determine the possible impact of increased IT access – which included giving them money to come to the workshop. But they didn’t come. So they sent railway tickets. But they still didn’t come. But when they used a mentor to talk them through getting up, getting dressed, going to the station – then they came. (Interesting reflection point for all teachers here.) Difficult to work within the Swedish social security system because the homeless can be quite paranoid about revealing their data and it can be hard to work with people who have no address, just a mobile number. This is, however, a place where our efforts can have great societal impact.

Professor Gulliksen asks his PhD students: What is really your objective with this research? And he then gives them three options: change the world, contribute new knowledge or you want your PhD. The first time he asked this in Sweden, the student started sweating and asked if they could have a fourth option. (Yes, but your fourth is probably one of the three.) The student then said that they wanted to change the world, but on thinking about it (what have you done), wanted to change to contribute new knowledge, then thought about it some more (ok, but what have you done), after further questioning it devolved to “I think I want my PhD”. All of these answers can be fine but you have to actually achieve your purpose.

Our biggest impact is on the people that we produce, in terms of our contribution to the generation and dissemination of knowledge. Jan wants to know how we can be more aware of this role in society. How can we improve society through IT? This led to the committee for Digitisation, 2012-2015: Sweden shall be the best country in the world when it comes to using the opportunities for digitisation.  Sweden produced “ICT for Everyone”, a Digital Agenda for Sweden, which preceded the European initiative. There are 170 different things to be achieved with IT politics but less than a handful of these have not been met since October, 2011. As a researcher, Professor Gulliksen had to come to an agreement with the minister to ensure that his academic freedom, to speak truth to power, would not be overly infringed – even though he was Norwegian. (Bit of Nordic humour here, which some of you may not get.)

The goal was that Sweden would be the best country in the world when it came to seizing these opportunities. That’s a modest goal (The speaker is a very funny man) but how do we actually quantify this? The main tasks for the commission were to develop the action plan, analyse progress in relate to goals, show the opportunities available, administer the organisations that signed the digital agenda (Nokia, Apple and so on) and collaborate with the players to increase digitisation. The committee itself is 7 people, with an ‘expert’ appointed because you have to do this, apparently. To extend the expertise, the government has appointed the small commission, a group of children aged 8-18, to support the main commission with input and proposals showing opportunities for all ages.

The committee started with three different areas: digital inclusion and equal opportunities; school, education and digital competence; and entrepreneurship and company development. The digital agenda itself has four strategic areas in terms of user participation:

  1. Easy and safe to use
  2. Services that create some utility
  3. Need for infrastructure
  4. IT’s role for societal development.

And there are 22 areas of mission under this that map onto the relevant ministries (you’ll have to look that up for yourself, I can’t type that quickly.) Over the year and a half that the committee has been running, they have achieved a lot.

The government needs measurements and ranking to show relative progress, so things like the World Economics Forum’s Networked Readiness Index (which Sweden topped) is often trotted out. But in 2013, Sweden had dropped to third, with Finland and Singapore going ahead – basically, the Straits Tiger is advancing quickly unsurprisingly. Other measures include the ICT development Index (ID) where Sweden is also doing well. You can look for this on the Digital Commisson’s website (which is in Swedish but translates). The first report has tried to map out the digital Swedend – actions and measures carried, key players and important indicators. Sweden is working a lot in the space but appears to be more passive in re-use than active in creativity but I need to read the report on this (which is also in Swedish). (I need to learn another language, obviously.) There was an interesting quadrant graph of organisations ranked by how active they were and how powerful their mandate was, which started a lot of interesting discussion. (This applies to academics in Unis as well, I realise.) (Jag behöver lära sig ett annat språk, uppenbarligen.)

The second report was released in March this year, focusing on the school system. How can Sweden produce recommendations on how the school system will improve? If the school system isn’t working well, you are going to fall behind in the rankings. (Please pay attention, Australian Government!) In Sweden, there’s a range of access to schools across Sweden but access is only one thing, actual use of the resources is another. Why should we do this? (Arguments to convince politicians). Reduce digital divide, economy needs IT-skilled labours, digital skills are needed to be an active citizen, increased efficiency and speed of learning and many other points! Sweden’s students are deteriorating on the PISA-survey rankings, particularly for boys, where 30% of Swedish boys are not reaching basic literacy in the first 9 years of schools, which is well below the OECD average. Interestingly, Swedish teachers are among the lowest when it comes to work time spent on skills development in the EU. 18% of teachers spend more than 6 days, but 9% spend none at all and is the second worst in European countries (Malta takes out the wooden spain).

The concrete proposals in the SOU were:

  • Revised regulatory documents with a digital perspective
  • Digitally based national tests in primary/secondary
  • web based learning in elementary ands second schools
  • digital skilling of teachers
  • digital skilling for principals
  • clarifying the digital component of teacher education programs
  • research, method development and impact measurement
  • innovation projects for the future of learning

Universities are also falling behind so this is an area of concern.

Professor Gulliksen also spoke about the digital champions of the EU (all European countries had one except Germany, until recently, possibly reflecting the Chancellor’s perspective) where digital champion is not an award, it’s a job: a high profile, dynamic and energetic individual responsible for getting everyone on-line and improving digital skills. You need to generate new ideas to go forward, for your country, rather than just copying things that might not fit. (Hello, Hofstede!)

The European Digital Champions work for digital inclusion and help everyone, although we all have responsibility. This provides strategic direction for government but reinforces that the ICT competence required for tomorrow’s work life has to be put in place today. He asked the audience who their European digital champions were and, apart from Sweden, no-one knew. The Danish champion (Lars Frelle-Petersen) has worked with the tax office to force everyone on-line because it’s the only way to do your tax! “The only way to conduct public services should be on the Internet” The digital champion of Finland (Linda Liukas, from Rails girls) wants everyone to have three mandatory languages: English, Chinese and JavaScript. (Groans and chuckles from the audience for the language choice.) The digital champion of Bulgaria (Gergeana Passy) wants Sofia to be the first free WiFi capital of Europe. Romania’s champion (Paul André Baran) is leading the library and wants libraries to rethink their role in the age of ICT. Ireland’s champion (Sir David Puttnam) believes that we have to move beyond triage mentality in education to increase inclusion.

In Sweden, 89% of the population is on-line and it’s plateaued at that. Why? Of those that are not on the Internet, most of them are more than 76% years old. This is a self-correcting problem, most likely. (50% of two year olds are on the Internet in Sweden!) The 1.1 million Swedes not online are not interested (77%) and 18% think it’s too complicated.

Jan wanted to leave us with two messages. The first is that we need to increase the amount of ICT practitioners. Demand is growing at 3% a year and supply is not keeping pace for trained, ICT graduates. If the EU want to stay competitive, they either have to grow them (education) or import them. (Side note: The Grand Coalition for Digital Jobs)

The second thought is the development of digital competence and improvement of digital skills among ICT users. 19% of the work force is ICT intensive, 90% of jobs require some IT skills but 53% of the workforce are not confident enough in their IT skills to seek another job in that sphere. We have to build knowledge and self-confidence. Higher Ed institutions have to look beyond the basic degree to share the resources and guidelines to grow digital competence across the whole community. Push away from the focus on exams and graduation to concentrate on learning – which is anathema to the usual academic machine. We need to work on new educational and business models to produced mature, competent and self-confident people with knowledge and make industry realise that this is actually what they want.

Professor Gulliksen believes that we need to recruit more ICT experience by bringing experts in to the Universities to broaden academia and pedagogy with industry experience. We also really, really need to balance the gender differences which show the same weird cultural trends in terms of self-deception rather than task description.

Overall, a lot of very interesting ideas – thank you, Professor Gulliksen!

Arnold Pears, Uppsala, challenged one of the points on engaging with, and training for, industry in that we prepare our students for society first, and industrial needs are secondary. Jan agreed with this distinction. (This followed on from a discussion that Arnold and I were having regarding the uncomfortable shoulder rubbing of education and vocational training in modern education. The reason I come to conferences is to have fascinating discussions with smart people in the breaks between interesting talks.)

The jacket came back up again at the end. When discussing Computer Science, Jan feels the need to use metaphors – as do we all. Basically, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking you can explain something as being simple when you’re drawing down on a very rich learned context for framing the knowledge. CS people can struggle with explaining things, especially to very new students, because we build a lot of things up to reach the “operational” level of CS knowledge and everything, from the error messages presented when a program doesn’t work to the efficiency of long-running programs, depends upon understanding this rich context. Whether the threshold here is a threshold concept (Meyer and Land), neo-Piaegtian, Learning Edge Momentum or Bloom-related problem doesn’t actually matter – there’s a minimum amount of well-accepted context required for certain metaphors to work or you’re explaining to someone how to put a jacket on with your eyes closed. 🙂

One of the final questions raised the issue of computing as a chore, rather than a joy. Professor Gulliksen noted that there are only two groups of people who are labelled as users, drug users and computer users, and the systematic application of computing as a scholastic subject often requires students to lock up more powerful computer (their mobile phones) to use locked-down, less powerful serried banks of computers (based on group purchasing and standard environments). (Here’s an interesting blog on a paper on why we should let students use their phones in classes.)

CSEDU, Day 3, Final Keynote, “Digital Age Learning – The Changing Face of Online Education”, (#csedu14 #AdelED @timbuckteeth)

Posted: April 4, 2014 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Now, 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!

Vatsoc

This is not actually Socrates. Sorry!