Learning, teaching and research

It is rumoured that blogging running out of steam. Several colleagues in the educational bloggersphere have reported that they are not blogging as much as usual and are tending to be more active in Twitter. I am also aware of a few bloggers who have stopped blogging as they feel pressurised by the reputation and expectations they have built up with their readers. One or two have since returned having established more realistic ‘rules of engagement’. The article in today’s Guardian in the New Media section, a cut down version of a blog post by Andrew Keen, touches on this - Blogs are dead. Long live the blog. It seems blogging is transforming itself and in the process becoming more like the hub of a personal learning/research environment rather in the way some envisiged from the start.

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The future size and shape of the higher education sector in the UK: threats and opportunities is a report just released by Universities UK that assesses the impact of projected demographic changes for universities, as described in their press release.

The demographic changes forecast say that the majority age group – 18 to 20 - UK universities recruit from will diminish sharply over the next 10 years and, according to one of the 3 scenarios offered, a smaller number of HE institutions will survive to enjoy a renewed growth of this age group from 2019 to 2027. Increased competition for students may lead to a privatised cherry-picking sector emerging and increased involvement of corporate sector initiatives. Competition is likely to focus on over-seas and non-traditional work-based students. There is much to ponder on in the report and hopefully our top bananas and grandes fromages are on la case. The general position is a distinction between two possible impacts of technology in teaching and learning. The revolutionary potential is for the growth of global, online independent study with little or variable institutional affiliation. The evolutionary trajectory would lead to the increased use of information and communications technology (ICT) in delivery and learning management but without threatening institutional patterns. The report offers 3 possible scenarios and I have just picked out the implications and possible role for e-learning.

The first scenario, ’slow adaptation to change’ states that “There is only modest investment in e-learning so that it remains a relatively small part of the total learning experience for most students”.

The second scenario, ‘market driven and competitive; is where “non-traditional providers identify market opportunities and essentially cherry pick in those areas with low entry costs, sometimes in partnership with established HEIs”. Here there may be “more widespread investment in e-learning particularly by larger institutions in partnership with private sector organisations with a much increased requirement on staff to provide academic support for students on a flexible basis”.

The third scenario, ‘employer-driven flexible learning’ is characterised by “the coming together of a serious squeeze on funding for higher education with increased regulation of the purposes of the public funding element; the full development of technologically based learning through significant public and private investment; and the triumph of employer-led demand for part qualifications”. In this scenario “HE institutions develop partnerships with major commercial players to become leaders in the technologically-based learning field”.

With its considerable investment in the new VLE and a commitment to blended learning that fits very well with markets for part-time, flexible, work-based and non-traditional students, several leading UK universites seems to be positioning themselves for the second and third scenarios. If considering developing partnerships with the corporate sector we will need to look carefully at the staff development and training strategies they are already developing, often well in advance of anything that is going on in the UK HE sector, and what technology platforms and applications they are using. It is unlikely they will be the standard fair of VLEs and MLEs favoured currently by Universities. Interoperability and universal standards will be key and the ability to integrate different systems seamlessly. Many current and developing web 2.0 technologies are well ahead of what is offered by most conventional and proprietary VLE and MLE offerings.

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I have been wrestling lately to understand the difference between knowledge and information. I am finding this very difficult. What adds to the difficulty is that, of course, both terms are social constructs. There is nothing in the world that is either knowledge or information outside of what individuals or groups so label.This doesn’t make them unreal of course. The prompt for this is a couple of observations on the nature of the so-called Google generation. One in particular is by Sir Ron Cooke.

3.14 But there is reason to believe this ready access to content is not matched by training in the traditional skills of finding and using information and in “learning how to learn” in a technology, information and network-rich world. This is reducing the level of scholarship (e.g. the increase in plagiarism, and lack of critical judgement in assessing the quality of online material). The Google and Facebook generation are at ease with the Internet and the world wide web, but they do not use it well: they search shallowly and are easily content with their “finds”. It is also the case that many staff are not well skilled in using the Internet, are pushed beyond their comfort zones and do not fully exploit the potential of Virtual Learning Environments; and they are often not able to impart new skills to students. (On-line Innovation in Higher Education Professor Sir Ron Cooke).

The gist of the argument I am following up is that in the new ‘free market’ in information offered by the web does not translate unproblematically into a free education or to the process of building knowledge. Access to information is one thing. Having the information literacy skills to turn the information into knowledge is quite another. Information needs a context to inform what counts as information and a context for evaluating available information.  That context is provided by knowledge. So I’m getting a picture of the relationship between information and knowledge that sees information as feeding the knowledge construction process. There seems to be a movement from existing knowledge to the setting of a problem or defining an objective that requires information. The information is specified and evaluated on the basis of knowledge and integrated into the knowledge building process accordingly.

Of course the distinction between information and knowledge (where does data fit in?) may be too crude. And as was noted at the beginning, they are both social constructs of one sort or another. There is nothing in ‘nature’ that is prelabeled as one or the other. It’s ‘us’ constructing the concepts and looking for the demarcation criteria. If this is the case then perhaps an analysis of common usage would be a clue. What distinguishes the terms in actual use? As a preliminary contribution to this, it seems to make sense to talk of information processing but the notion of knowledge processing doesn’t sound quite right. Perhaps knowledge is the outcome of information processing. But this would suggest a dialectical relationship between information and knowledge not dissimilar as that between facts and theory. Information is only information to the extent it is pre-specified in some way by a knowledge context. Knowledge is the outcome of information processing but not just information processing.

Another approach would be to think of the current focus in Higher Education on knowledge transfer. We don’t advertise these endeavors as information transfer. What is it that the notion of ‘knowledge transfer’ captures and promises that ‘information transfer’ doesn’t?

My main interest in this is what it implies for how we understand learning and the role of professional educators. If knowledge is simply information we have it in abundance and its out there for any one that wants it. But I wouldn’t want surgery conducted on the basis of Googled information or social policy made on the basis of Googled undergraduate essays. Clearly information is a precondition for knowledge but knowledge is required to make judgments and build on experience, our own and others. Knowledge provides the context for giving significance to information and for connecting it to decision making processes and action. The model that seems to be emerging here is that of students + information + teachers = knowledge creation. This sounds like a community of learners and learning objects. The specific role for teachers seems to be a combination of a model of professional learning (i.e. an expert learner), a learning mentor and a knowledge broker. This doesn’t seem to be far away from the model of apprentices and master practitioner. A key characteristic of an apprenticeship is membership of a community of practice where formal, informal and vicarious forms of learning are available. What would the process of module design, learning and teaching and assessment look like on this model?

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Over Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of this week I attended the Emerge online conference Digital Communities & Digital Identities. (Josie Fraser, who did a great job organising it, has posted on this in more detail). I contributed as a presenter some time ago to a JISC Webinar on Web 2.0 applications for HE but this was the first full-on on-line conference I have attended and it worked very well. The sessions were run in Elluminate and all the features were used, breakout group sessions, whiteboard, slides, video etc. The audio quality was pretty good (once speakers got their levels right and everyone turned their speaker off in open mic sessions!).

I was surprised how useful the chat window was for sharing ideas, making comments and asking questions. There was some real brainstorming going on. It contributed significantly to the value of the presentations and is an aspect of on-line conference sessions that would be difficulty to replicate in a ‘real’ conference (unless everyone had a laptop and used a web service like Cover It Live – now there’s a thought). The chat really enhanced the sessions, made it easy for the presenter to see what was interesting the audience and helped give a focus to the audio and text discussion at the end and the summing up. It also was very sociable and entertaining! At times it was a bit like a group of naughty school kids chattering, swapping jokes, and winding up each other and the presenter. Personally I felt the sense of community grow throughout the 3 days and felt this made a significant contribution to ambience of the serious discussion too.

I felt pretty comfortable in the environment quite quickly once I got the hang of all the bells and whistles and there was quite a lot of spontaneous mutual support and advice as the community sorted itself out. One of the ‘old hands’ at this sort of thing remarked how better we had become operating in this sort of environment, not just the techical issues of knowing how the functions and tools work but how to make effective use of them in the presentations and the peripheral activities around them. I guess we will all be experts at this in a few years time, and hopefully our students will learn good and effective practice in these environments while they are with us.

I am attending the Next Generation Environments JISC conference next week as a member of a discussion panel but this is a normal face-to-face conference. Several people who were ‘at’ the Emerge on-line conference will be there and I am looking forward to comparing notes. I think on-line conferences will never replace f2f for many reasons but as additional and in-between events I think they are enormously valuable and effective. There can be more of them, they can be highly focussed (mini-conferences) with more targetted agendas, they are cheap (often free) and do not require travel and accommodation. And of course, the 2 modes can be merged when f2f conferences also run Elluminate (or another suitable system) and provide wikis, social networking and blogging. This opens up conferences to individuals who cannot other wise make it. And often the sessions can be recorded.

There is a growing understanding of the main differences and the main pros and cons of each conference mode. One disadvantage of the on-line mode is that I had to buy my own beer. On the otherhand I didn’t make a fool of myself at the disco. Actually the Emerge conference did have a very successful social event in Second Life with a DJ and fashion show. Sadly I couldn’t make it because I found my home PC was under spec for the new SL client and it wouldn’t install.

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True, I had had a couple of glasses of Rioja but this news video brought a tear to my eye. What’s that all about then?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7468832.stm

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