Slides from 'When the dust settles', a keynote presentation for E-Learning 2.0, Brunel University, 2011.
N.b. there are speakers notes on each slide, which you'll see if you download.
Creative Commons attribution-share-alike.
MS4 level being good citizen -imperative- (1) (1).pdf
When the dust settles... exploring educational experiments past and present
1. When the dust settles… ~~~ Mira Vogel Goldsmiths Learning Enhancement Unit
2. “ And once the tweeting started, it simply became more fun to be in the stream than put up with the presentation … more about amusing each other by sharing and exaggerating the pain.” Michael Fienen (2009) The Great Keynote Meltdown of 2009 http://doteduguru.com/id3712-the-great-keynote-meltdown-of-2009.html More realistic twitter icon: http://dabbled.org/2009/04/more-realistic-twitter-icon-for-your.html
13. “ In the years to come, we will say that it was a quiet decade, with the existing system having remained largely unchanged, almost unsuspecting, even, of the major changes that were to follow.” (Downes 2008) “ Only the Catholic Church has been around longer.” (Davidson & Goldberg 2009)
19. “… that he may raise , and not rise out of , the class to which he belongs.” The Burning Question of Education http://socialsciencecentre.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/statement-of-values.pdf “… the inculcation of governing class ideas …” “… the Students, finding the teaching failing to square with the facts of industrial life … had in the main to fall back on themselves for their education.” 1908 – Ruskin
20. “… will be managed by consensus in the most open and democratic way possible.” “The management ... will take note of the views of all members.” “… efforts will be made to ensure that everybody can take part.” Lincoln Social Science Centre Statement of Values, http://socialsciencecentre.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/statement-of-values.pdf 2011 – Social Science Centre, a co-operative
21. 2011 – CCK11, a MOOC Massive – scales up, network of facts improves with numbers Open – diversity and numbers Online – distribution, autonomy Course – events in time, together
22. Lindsay Jordan, http://lindsayjordan.edublogs.org/2011/03/13/cck11-oppression-freedom-and-control-of-the-learning-experience/ 2011 – CCK 11, a MOOC “ This year, the CCK11 facilitators decided to do away with the Moodle forums and move to an entirely distributed model, primarily in an attempt to prevent a small number of dominant individuals from controlling the forums.” “ Having been liberated from this particular form of oppression, a proportion of participants felt that they were now being shoehorned into working in a more distributed way than they would have liked.”
23. Vic Lovell, Newsletter of the Midpeninsula Free University 2(11), 1968 http://midpeninsulafreeu.com/images/23.pdf 1968 – MFU “ In contrast, the rights of the majority , which constitute freedom for the community as an organic or collective unit, have not only been difficult to defend, but often even difficult to articulate … The problem is as old as social philosophy.”
26. http://socialsciencecentre.org.uk/faq/ 2011 – Social Science Centre “… Place is important to the SSC. Students and teachers meet face-to-face . The learning experience is supported by the use of technology at other times. ” “ We would like to encourage a network of relocalised higher education centres.”
27. “ I’m in the process of exploring the concept of a DIY Masters degree. This self-organised and experimental learning experience is taking place independent of formal learning institutions.“ Buchanan, c. 2008
28. “… there is something very different about being back in a formal university degree. It does seem to matter a whole lot more and carry a lot more weight than self-organised learning.” Buchanan, 2010
29. “ Kierkegaard would have hated the Internet” “… risk free anonymity and idle curiosity that undermine curiosity and commitment” Dreyfus, 2004
31. http://midpeninsulafreeu.com/images/68.pdf 2011 – CCK11, a MOOC “ reduce the friction” “ splice information together in different contexts” Pull in blog objects… … turn them into discussion objects… … feed them back to the original post.
33. Born in 1990 (Adapted from Randall R 2009) Motorola – first mobile phone that fits in a pocket 1989 -1 Wikipedia; the iPod 2001 11 Napster; Blogger 1999 9 Google 1998 8 Hotmail; pay-as-you-go phone tariffs; instant messaging 1996 6 Amazon and eBay launched 1995 5 First text message 1992 2 Tim Berners-Lee invents the www 1990 0 Internet; Nintendo games; Fuji launches digital cameras 1988 -2 Technological event Year Age
34. Born in 1990 cont’d (Adapted from Randall R 2009) iPad, Kindle price drop, mobile computing 2010 20 Early social networking services 2002 12 Technological event Year Age iPhone 2007 17 Twitter 2006 16 UK gets Google street view; Google digitising all books 2009 19 YouTube, Google Earth 2005 15 Facebook; Flickr; mainstreaming of wireless (‘untethered’) internet 2004 14 Skype 2003 13
35. “ A persistent theme in the information literacy literature is that we need a fully developed mental map to make effective use of Internet search tools.” Rowlands et al (2008) “ Engrained coping behaviours.”
36. “… often still at a loss when it comes to using their critical thinking and problem solving skills in a digital environment; a skill set identified as Information and Communication Technology Literacy " Guri-Rosenblit & Gross (2011)
38. Students want Learners also need Self/peer assessment, feedback, feed-forward Models; own critical approaches Communities of inquiry; coping with uncertainty Strategies To know why it went right or wrong To know where they are, the goals, next steps Marks Authority Reassurance Materials ‘ Feedback’ The facts, right answers
45. General epistemologies Schommer, 1990 Quick or never Gradual Fixed Can change Authority Reason Simple Complex Absolute Tentative Simple Sophisticated Speed Ability Source Structure Certainty Dimensions
46. "All learning is done in a context that constructs a scholarly and structured relationship between data, information and knowledge. It is the relationship between teachers and students that configures an interpretive matrix round and through students.” Brabazon, 2007
50. “… a whole new range of skills is necessary in our academic culture; the skills required to create online frameworks for collaborative, learner-led work.” Ipsos MORI (2008)
51.
52. Can Web 2 & HE be aligned? Dohn, 2009 Individualistic, isolated Distributed Top-down Bottom-up Standardised, obligatory Open-ended, voluntary Objectivist competencies Activity or product To graduate from higher ed Intrinsically meaningful Acquisitionist Individual credit Higher ed. - external goals Participationist Sharing Web 2.0 – internal goals
53.
54.
55. The challenge of creative friction Stahl & Hesse, 2009 Negotiating a consensus on artefact, problem, or goal Transferring, comparing - not necessarily changing Entails Shared object Shared mental representations Paradigm
58. Great Expectations (JISC Ipsos MORI, 2008) Familiar Unfamiliar Comfortable Not comfortable Instant messaging Text message admin updates Administrative materials online Using existing online social networks to discuss coursework Emailing tutors Course-specific materials online Posting questions Online to tutors Web CT Using social networks such as Facebook as a formal part of the course Submitting assignments online Using podcasts Making podcasts Making wikis
59. Great Expectations (JISC Ipsos MORI, 2008) Use Second Life Contact tutor Submit essays Social Networking Scholarly websites Non-digital resources Online library resources Discuss coursework Online course info University portal Course specific materials % Students using approach regularly Usefulness (Scale 1-4) 0 20 40 60 80 100 1 2 3 4
So I’d just like to ask that you go easy on me. It’s my first keynote. If I hear any sudden outbursts of laughter when I haven’t made a joke, I’ll know what you are doing, and I will not forgive you.
Last time we did a stock take Me the maverick in brown Currently 1.6 of me
We all work happily together in this idyllic tower
On what I think you’ll agree is a rather nice campus
Most of what I’m going to talk about today is going to be against an arts, humanities and social sciences background – ideas, critique, artwork, social interventions, commentary.
The other thing about Goldsmiths is where it fits in on Ray Land’s continuum of approaches that academic developers can take – so whether we view academic teachers according to the left hand side of the horizontal axis as functionaries who need to be domesticated within a system, with pre-defined ideas about best practice, protocols, templates, lots of management, lots of policy – that’s the domesticated end of the continuum - or whether we view academic teachers as autonomous individuals, with judgement to make good decisions – that’s the critique end of the horizontal continuum. And of course there is everything in between. And intersecting this is another continuum between systems orientation geared towards managers and managed systems and institutional practices, and at the other end person orientation geared towards the individual. And out of those four quadrants, staff development for e-learning at Goldsmiths is pretty firmly positioned within the liberating person oriented quadrant – so we work on changing attitudes and practices rather than designing domesticating systems. But that said, there are new or newish constraints in the form of the NSS and QAA and the fees are impelling us as an institution with reputation to maintain and a pretty urgent need for economies of scale, towards a more systems oriented approach, although still liberated and critical as far as possible,as befits an insitution that intends to be research intensive. romantic (ecological humanist): concerned with personal development, growth and well-being of individual academics within the organisation interpretive-hermeneutic: working towards new shared insights and practice through a dialectic approach of intelligent conversation reflective practitioner: fostering a culture of self- or mutually critical reflection on the part of colleagues in order to achieve continuous improvement
Cuts mean an end to most of our teaching funding, a consumer revolution with respect to something that in my view can’t be considered a commodity, and liberalisation of a higher education market. Although I won’t talk about cuts in detail here, everything I talk about will be against a background of cuts. And against a background of such deep cuts, an institution like mine, a mostly arts, humanities and social sciences institution, has to ask itself again, what we are for? What do we offer that people would go into debt for? If everything is to be subordinated to economic output then we’re in trouble. Judged in terms of economic output, as Martha Nussbaum points out, apartheid South Africa was is a success.
For some years now Stephen Downes has predicted that HE is on the verge of precipitous change, the natural progression from the avaiability of ubiquitous networked computing. And he may be right. But at the same time, as so many people say, only the Catholic Church has been around longer than our higher learning institutions which bear a striking resemblance to their mediaeval counterparts. But so far HE always seems to manage to cybernetically remake itself.
And part of that is because universities are places of continuity as well as radical thinking. They’re places where knowledge is passed on as well as discovered. And perhaps you even need a stable unchanging centre for the centrifugal imagination to spin off from. In any case, while this place will probably survive more or less unchanged, many other places – particularly those which are charging the full £9000 but don’t attract many AAB students – will face steep competition.
So what might the competition look like?
Toynbee Hall was the first of the University Settlements, which sent scholars and students to live among the poor – in this case in London’s East End - and do educational welfare work. They were in fact early public academics. The Workers Educational Association was an early example of the Extension movement in the late 1800s. Revolutionary socialists view both this an the Settlement movement as a means of creating a layer of class collaborationists and so preventing working class self-assertion along the lines of the chartists – they would take young men with the most intelligence and potential, and ensure that they came to share the interests of the establishment. (Needless to say I don’t think the founders of the WEA saw it like that) Oxford, Cambridge and London Universities developed networks of extension lectures, one of their attendees Alfred Mansbridge criticised this approach for disjointedness and invented the idea of what we would call the access course. MFU – a merger of The Experiment at Stanford and the Free University of Palo Alto – 1200 students in 1968-70. Most popular courses were in the area of something called Encounter/Sensitivity, and the least popular were in the area of (what? You guessed it!) Education. They were in different times from The Plebs, whose interests were majority interests and who therefore found it straightforward to decide what to do. MFU, on the other hand: “ In the Midpeninsula Free University, it has always been easy to defend the rights of individuals and minorities to do their thing within the free university community... In contrast, the rights of the majority, which constitute freedom for the community as an organic or collective unit, have not only been difficult to defend, but often even difficult to articulate… The problem is as old as social philosophy.” http://midpeninsulafreeu.com/images/23.pdf
So how do these experiments - past and present - fit with the things we value and uphold, or aspire to, today? Somewhat contentiously I’d like to pit self-organised learning against diversity – self-organised learning seems like an answer to many of our looming problems today – the need for active, independent learning, the need to scale up, the need to learn in a social setting. But as we will see, it’s not quite so simple.
This is Ruskin college in Oxford, independent of the university, part of the extension, staffed by quite a few Oxford dons, with a student body mostly comprising working men and trades unionists. And their time at Ruskin was largely governed by a single aim. Textile workers, railwaymen, miners and foundry workers. However … successful middle class graduates with different interests. And the thing about Ruskin is that there was certainly diversity in 1908 – it goes without saying – but it wasn’t enshrined in any policy or mission statements. And in fact what the students had a very strong ethos of was solidarity. And it is this ethos which allowed, or even compelled, the students at Ruskin to organise themselves into peer learning groups and keep at bay those dangerous competing class interests that their teachers represented.
Co-production
A further kind of self-organised learning is the MOOC. Has anybody experienced a MOOC? Open, unlimited numbers, the more the better, it’s only online, and it is a course organised round weekly events – activities and a webcast real-time lecture. Not knowing where everybody was, not knowing where the conversations were happening until after they’d happened.
Be-ins, psychodramas. Late 60s – awakening to the idea of minority groups with particular needs – so, the idea of diversity – but in contrast here’s Vic Lovel, one of the principle personalities of MFU:
I really enjoyed listening to Steven Downes and George Siemens’ final elluminate session where they reflected on what had gone right and what they wanted to change, and things centred on this RSS tool. Not only allow people to effortlessly pull in the contributions from their diverse sources, and repurpose them, cross reference them and so on, but also to pull in blog objects, turn them into discussion objects, and perhaps most ground breaking and important of all, to feed them back to the original post. I
Web 2.0 – the social, interactive, participatory web The US election campaigning 2008-9 Twitter and the Trafigura gagging injunction (2009) Civil society moving online - government’s ‘Twitter Czar’ Mobile, ubiquitous computing Openness; cultural commons (Boyle 2009) Competes with commercial interests (Digital Economy Bill) Democratisation of authoring Wikipedia; YouTube; Lulu (micro-publishing) Established media disrupted explosion of choice, individualisation: fragmentation Implications for education?
(From Bernadette) You cannot transmit, sell, or otherwise pass on understanding to students. To be able to apply the knowledge, adapt it, recall it and generate original perspectives on it – students need to assemble their own understandings. This includes working with their existing understandings. Uncomfortable – involves unknowing. Justice: what’s the right thing to do – Episode 1 – Michael Sandel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY 17min 14sec “Here I have to issue a warning, and the warning is this” To read these books in this way as an exercise in self knowledge … has certain risks. Risks that are both personal and political. Risks that every student of political philosophy must know. These risks spring from the fact that philosophy teaches us and unsettles us by confronting us with what we already know. There’s an irony. The difficulty of this course consists of the fact that it teaches what you already know. It works by taking what you know from familiar unquestioned settings and making it strange … Philosophy estranges us from the familiar not by supplying new information but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing. But … once the familiar turns strange it’s never quite the same again. Self knowledge is like lost innocence – however unsettling you find it it can never be unthought or unknown. What makes this enterprise difficukt and also rivetting is that moral and political philosophy is a story and you don’t know where the story will lead but what you do know is that the story is about you. Those are the personal risks. Now what of the political risks? One way of introducing a course like this is to promise you that by reading these books and debating these issues you will become a better more responsible citizen, you will examine the presuppositions of public policy, you will hone your political judgement you will become a more effective participant in public affairs. But this would be a partial and misleading promise … you have to allow for the possibility that political philosophy may make you a worse citizen rather than a better one, or at least a worse citizen before it makes you a better one. And that’s because philosophy is a distancing even debilitating activity and you see this going back to Socrates.
Uncomfortable – involves unknowing. Justice: what’s the right thing to do – Episode 1 – Michael Sandel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY 17min 14sec “Here I have to issue a warning, and the warning is this” To read these books in this way as an exercise in self knowledge … has certain risks. Risks that are both personal and political. Risks that every student of political philosophy must know. These risks spring from the fact that philosophy teaches us and unsettles us by confronting us with what we already know. There’s an irony. The difficulty of this course consists of the fact that it teaches what you already know. It works by taking what you know from familiar unquestioned settings and making it strange … Philosophy estranges us from the familiar not by supplying new information but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing. But … once the familiar turns strange it’s never quite the same again. Self knowledge is like lost innocence – however unsettling you find it it can never be unthought or unknown. What makes this enterprise difficukt and also rivetting is that moral and political philosophy is a story and you don’t know where the story will lead but what you do know is that the story is about you. Those are the personal risks. Now what of the political risks? One way of introducing a course like this is to promise you that by reading these books and debating these issues you will become a better more responsible citizen, you will examine the presuppositions of public policy, you will hone your political judgement you will become a more effective participant in public affairs. But this would be a partial and misleading promise … you have to allow for the possibility that political philosophy may make you a worse citizen rather than a better one, or at least a worse citizen before it makes you a better one. And that’s because philosophy is a distancing even debilitating activity and you see this going back to Socrates.
(From Bernadette) You cannot transmit, sell, or otherwise pass on understanding to students. To be able to apply the knowledge, adapt it, recall it and generate original perspectives on it – students need to assemble their own understandings. This includes working with their existing understandings. Uncomfortable – involves unknowing. Justice: what’s the right thing to do – Episode 1 – Michael Sandel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY 17min 14sec “Here I have to issue a warning, and the warning is this” To read these books in this way as an exercise in self knowledge … has certain risks. Risks that are both personal and political. Risks that every student of political philosophy must know. These risks spring from the fact that philosophy teaches us and unsettles us by confronting us with what we already know. There’s an irony. The difficulty of this course consists of the fact that it teaches what you already know. It works by taking what you know from familiar unquestioned settings and making it strange … Philosophy estranges us from the familiar not by supplying new information but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing. But … once the familiar turns strange it’s never quite the same again. Self knowledge is like lost innocence – however unsettling you find it it can never be unthought or unknown. What makes this enterprise difficukt and also rivetting is that moral and political philosophy is a story and you don’t know where the story will lead but what you do know is that the story is about you. Those are the personal risks. Now what of the political risks? One way of introducing a course like this is to promise you that by reading these books and debating these issues you will become a better more responsible citizen, you will examine the presuppositions of public policy, you will hone your political judgement you will become a more effective participant in public affairs. But this would be a partial and misleading promise … you have to allow for the possibility that political philosophy may make you a worse citizen rather than a better one, or at least a worse citizen before it makes you a better one. And that’s because philosophy is a distancing even debilitating activity and you see this going back to Socrates.
Uncomfortable – involves unknowing. Justice: what’s the right thing to do – Episode 1 – Michael Sandel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY 17min 14sec “Here I have to issue a warning, and the warning is this” To read these books in this way as an exercise in self knowledge … has certain risks. Risks that are both personal and political. Risks that every student of political philosophy must know. These risks spring from the fact that philosophy teaches us and unsettles us by confronting us with what we already know. There’s an irony. The difficulty of this course consists of the fact that it teaches what you already know. It works by taking what you know from familiar unquestioned settings and making it strange … Philosophy estranges us from the familiar not by supplying new information but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing. But … once the familiar turns strange it’s never quite the same again. Self knowledge is like lost innocence – however unsettling you find it it can never be unthought or unknown. What makes this enterprise difficukt and also rivetting is that moral and political philosophy is a story and you don’t know where the story will lead but what you do know is that the story is about you. Those are the personal risks. Now what of the political risks? One way of introducing a course like this is to promise you that by reading these books and debating these issues you will become a better more responsible citizen, you will examine the presuppositions of public policy, you will hone your political judgement you will become a more effective participant in public affairs. But this would be a partial and misleading promise … you have to allow for the possibility that political philosophy may make you a worse citizen rather than a better one, or at least a worse citizen before it makes you a better one. And that’s because philosophy is a distancing even debilitating activity and you see this going back to Socrates.
A certain way of interacting with ideas.
“ controlling those elements of the task that are essentially beyond the learner’s capacity, thus permitting him to concentrate upon and complete only those elements that are within his range of competence.” Wood, Bruner and Ross (1976) Shared understanding of the goal an ongoing diagnosis of the learner's changing knowledge and skills - the dynamic and adaptive support provided to an individual learner - a transfer of responsibility from the "scaffolder" to the "scaffoldee.“ - fading - scaffolding that is provided is based on an analysis of the process. Wood: Recruiting interest Constraints to simplify the task Maintaining direction Highlighting critical task features Controlling frustration Demonstration solution paths A matrix of interpretation Promotes disciplined, purposeful learning Intentional, self-aware (metacognitive) Hard scaffolds – built-in, predefined Soft scaffolds – contingent, continuous Making the terms of the course explicit “ Why are we doing x or y?” Orientating students within a course of study “ How does x relate to what y did?”
(From Bernadette) You cannot transmit, sell, or otherwise pass on understanding to students. To be able to apply the knowledge, adapt it, recall it and generate original perspectives on it – students need to assemble their own understandings. This includes working with their existing understandings. Uncomfortable – involves unknowing. Justice: what’s the right thing to do – Episode 1 – Michael Sandel http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kBdfcR-8hEY 17min 14sec “Here I have to issue a warning, and the warning is this” To read these books in this way as an exercise in self knowledge … has certain risks. Risks that are both personal and political. Risks that every student of political philosophy must know. These risks spring from the fact that philosophy teaches us and unsettles us by confronting us with what we already know. There’s an irony. The difficulty of this course consists of the fact that it teaches what you already know. It works by taking what you know from familiar unquestioned settings and making it strange … Philosophy estranges us from the familiar not by supplying new information but by inviting and provoking a new way of seeing. But … once the familiar turns strange it’s never quite the same again. Self knowledge is like lost innocence – however unsettling you find it it can never be unthought or unknown. What makes this enterprise difficukt and also rivetting is that moral and political philosophy is a story and you don’t know where the story will lead but what you do know is that the story is about you. Those are the personal risks. Now what of the political risks? One way of introducing a course like this is to promise you that by reading these books and debating these issues you will become a better more responsible citizen, you will examine the presuppositions of public policy, you will hone your political judgement you will become a more effective participant in public affairs. But this would be a partial and misleading promise … you have to allow for the possibility that political philosophy may make you a worse citizen rather than a better one, or at least a worse citizen before it makes you a better one. And that’s because philosophy is a distancing even debilitating activity and you see this going back to Socrates.
So let’s talk about what this means in practice, and here I’ll focus particularly on wikis since
Banning students from using wikipedia
Web 2.0 outcomes are not individualistic since they are a product of collaboration
it creates tensions regarding ownership, authorship, and requirements of individual contributions of comparative quantity and quality.
Shared mental representations may not necessarily challenge simple epistemologies because they are about transferring and comparing, rather than challenging and changing per se.
There are two axes here – one is a measure of comfort with particular technology to support learning and on the other is the degree of familiarity with the technology. As an example you see top right hand corner, instant messaging – comfortable using it for learning and familiar with the technology. Down here we have the Virtual Learning Environment Web CT… The interesting point is that they are familiar with using social networks such as Facebook, but not comfortable using them as part of their learning. Look at the bottom left quadrant. Learners aren’t comfortable with using newer technologies or established technologies in new ways, in their learning. There’s a perceived split between learning lives and social lives.
My general principle is that even if a practice is imposed top down, it helps if there is somebody interested in whether or not you are happy and supported doing it
Academics stand to lose if practice is standardised. Losses include professional identity, initiative, a sense of autonomy, personal and disciplinary principles and discretion to teach contingently. The ensuing sense of personal loss, anxiety and unfulfilment is a risk to academia.
Academics stand to lose if practice is standardised. Losses include professional identity, initiative, a sense of autonomy, and discretion to teach contingently. The ensuing sense of personal loss, anxiety and unfulfilment is a risk to academia.
