Technology: an enhancer or enabler of learning?

(An online discussion at the Open University recently posed the question: is technology an enhancer or an enabler of learning? Here is my answer.)

Technology, according to Danny Hills and Douglas Adams, is everything that doesn’t work yet: when it starts to work reliably, it becomes part of the background and we cease to see it as technology. So when we talk about technology-enhanced or technology-enabled learning, it’s to give people a reason why they should put up with something that doesn’t yet work properly: despite the problems, we’re saying, it’s worth persevering with the technology because it will allow us to do better or more efficiently something which we’re already doing (technology-enhanced) or to do something which we currently can’t do at all (technology-enabled).

I can only think of three things in learning and teaching which are genuinely enabled, rather than enhanced, by technology. Learning at a distance is not one of them, because you can (as the OU did for many years) operate through postal and courier services for the delivery of materials and messages. Remote co-presence, however, is really only achievable through audio or video conferencing, such as we regularly use in online tutorials. This is more than a simple matter of communication: the synchronous nature of the medium supports the constant and continuous engagement of participants, which allows a different kind of conversation, not merely a faster one. Even participants who are not actively communicating can have their motivation and relationship strengthened, simply by being present at the virtual event.

The second thing enabled by technology is automated rapid feedback, such as is provided by computerised tests. The promptness of feedback, we know, is massively important for learning, and it also increases motivation when it provides immediate sense of progress or achievement. Automation can also bring the testing more under the learner’s control, allowing them to take it at a time of their choosing, to repeat it if they wish until they are successful, and to interpret and act on the result as they wish. Students, we know, like on-screen tests for precisely these reasons, though unfortunately they are only really effective in areas of knowledge and skill which are capable of being broken into discrete elements and for which questions can have closed answers.

The third aspect of learning and teaching enabled by technology is encounter with authentic situations, which is critical for the learning of many practical situated skills, especially the interpretation of complex situations, such as those involving people. While audio and video can enhance learning of all kinds, by providing illustration or amusement, their richness is essential for allowing the development of holistic understanding, in which the presence of micro-cues allows learners not to be limited by what can be consciously articulated. Listening and speaking in a foreign language, for example, unlike reading and writing which can be taught through text alone, require actual aural models and authentic situations in which to practice, and one can trace the use of successive technologies for sound recording and reproduction as they were developed: gramophone records and language laboratories in the 1960s, cassette tapes in the 1970s, CDs in the 1980s, multimedia DVD-ROMs in the 1990s, internet delivery in the 2000s, and mobile apps in the 2010s. The distance learning of people skills, such as is relevant to many professional practice disciplines, has also been I would say enabled (rather than enhanced) by audio and video. It remains to be seen how far virtual reality technologies, hitherto too clumsy and low quality to compete seriously with remote audio and video or with face-to-face role play, may allow these possibilities to be expanded in the future.

Talking on the radio or on the web

Reading Charlotte Higgins' excellent history of the BBC, and its accompanying articles in The Guardian, I've been struck by the analogies between the early broadcasters, working out how to use the new medium of radio, and those of us in universities working out how to use the online medium.

This passage from a letter by Hilda Matheson, BBC Director of Talks between 1926 and 1931, seems particularly relevant to our making of audio and video in which academics talk to students.

The thing broadcasting does, or can do, its chief claim as far as the spoken word is concerned, is that it provides not a silent-printed word, a dead word if you like, but a living and very personal contact with an individual. The crucially affectionate link that grows between listeners and announcers, between listeners and regular broadcasters ... is something quite peculiar to broadcasting. [p 35]

If a lecturer's audio or video is doing nothing more than delivering information, then we might as well have put that information in text and saved some money, as well as improved convenience for students. But of course, we are not in the business of content delivery: we are in the business of education, for which the relationship - the personal relationship - between teacher and student is a vital part of the magic, the spell, the spiel.

Learning as assimilation: a passive activity?

To take in something external and make it part of oneself: assimilation or digestion is a powerful metaphor for learning. It's a long-established one too; the Anglican 1662 Book of Common Prayer famously asks that believers should "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest" the holy scriptures.  Today, "assimilative tasks" are one of the categories of learning activities in the classification system used by learning designers at the Open University. According to this system, the characteristic "assimilative tasks" are reading, viewing and listening, which even in the digital world remain the core activities of a university student.

But there's something slightly pejorative about the label "assimilative" in that classification, especially when set alongside the other categories: experiential, information-handling, communicative, productive and adaptive (simulations to you and me). Grainné Conole puts her finger on it when she describes assimilative tasks as "essentially passive in nature" (Conole 2007, p 84). Taking it for granted that we're all aiming to get students to be active in their learning, the implication is that reading text, watching video or listening to audio is somehow less active than, say, communicating, handling information or getting new experiences.

Now it's certainly possible to listen passively to a lecture or a podcast, or to read through written words passively without thinking about their meaning. But that's not assimilation: that's swallowing. To take in food takes minutes, or seconds; to digest it takes hours, and that digestion is a very active process, involving peristaltic movement, gastric acids, enzymes and so on. If we're to take assimilation as a model of learning, then the important part isn't putting the stuff in the mouth, or eyes or ears, but working on it to break it down and make it part of oneself. And that's the part on which a good teacher will focus.

This is something in which the Open University has excelled for the past forty years. The reasons its course materials are so good is not that the information is well-organised or that the explanations are clear - although they are - but that they're always accompanied by learning activities to help students build their own understanding of the subject. It's these activities, rather than the reading, viewing and listening, which are the real assimilative tasks. Here are some of the most common types, divided for convenience into three levels:

Basic

• summarising - for example: "List the three most important characteristics of theory X." "Write a single sentence explanation of concept Y."
• representing diagrammatically - for example: "Draw a mind map to show the relationship between the concepts of theory X., including examples from case study Y."
• organising - for example: "List the different aspects of this topic, and create a system for arranging them."
• classifying - for example: "Sort the instances A., B., C.… into the categories / concepts X., Y., Z.."
• comparing and contrasting - for example: "List points of similarity and difference between X. and Y."
• identifying - for example: "Identify the features of concept X. which make it an instance of concept Y."
• exemplifying - for example: "Find an example of concept X. in material Y., or in your own experience."

Intermediate

• interpreting - for example: "Describe the most important features of case X., according to theory Y."
• analysing - for example: "Outline the structure of case X., according to theory Y."
• applying - for example: "Describe what you would do in case X., according to principles / procedure Y." "Identify the salient features of case A., according to theory B."
• reflecting - for example: "Interpret your experience of X. according to theory / framework / protocol Y."

Advanced

• contextualising - for example:  "Relate case X. to its theoretical / social / historical / political / environmental etc. context."
• evaluating - for example: "Say how far case X. meets standards Y., and give reasons for your judgements."
• discussing critically (in the academic sense) - for example: "Argue for an interpretation of case X., and give reasons for preferring this over other possible interpretations."

A better name for this category of tasks might be "comprehension and application", rather than "assimilative", if assimilation is going to be mistaken for simple reception of material. But whatever we call it, properly conceiving the acquisition of knowledge and understanding as an active process is vital to higher education, since every academic discipline requires it to a greater or lesser extent. In the face of subject matter experts' tendency to teach a subject just by expounding it, the reminder which we need is that good teaching requires not only clear exposition but a process for learners to assimilate it.

References

Book of Common Prayer (1662), Collect for the Second Sunday in Advent.

Conole, G. (2007), “Describing learning practices: tools and resources to guide practice”, and Appendix 7 “Taxonomy of learning activities”, in Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe (eds), Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age: Designing and Delivering E-learning (Routledge), pp 81-91, pp 235-237.

MP3 files from an Audacity audio recording

Audacity is a great piece of free software for audio recording and editing, but unfortunately creating an MP3 file from a recording isn't entirely straight-forward and regularly perplexes some of the Open University's Languages students (who have to record themselves speaking their target language and upload the audio file to the online assessment submission system). The fact that questions about this keep coming to me suggests that not all OU staff are entirely clear about it either...

There are two complications.

(1) The "encoder" which Audacity needs to produce an MP3 file isn't built in. (Apparently US patent law says that the Audacity people aren't allowed to build it into the software, but they ARE allowed to point us to another website where we can download it and build it in ourselves. This is one of those cases where the law is an ass and makes additional work for the rest of us. D'oh!)

Assuming you've already downloaded and installed Audacity (from http://audacity.sourceforge.net/), you also need to follow the link to the "LAME MP3 encoder" and install that too. When you first try to export a recording as an MP3 file (see below), Audacity will ask you to find a file called "lame_enc.dll"; hopefully it will be in somewhere obvious like C:\Program Files\Lame for Audacity, and once you've pointed Audacity towards it you won't have to do it again.

(2) The second complication is (apparently) simpler, and therefore (paradoxically) more difficult: the difficulty isn't obvious so the solution is harder to remember. To create an MP3 file from your recording you DON'T select "Save As" (or its nearest equivalent, "Save Project As") from the file menu, as you would if you were saving a Word file in a different format (such as .RTF or .DOC instead of .DOCX). You don't want to do that, because that would save your recording as an Audacity project, which won't be readable by anything other than Audacity.

What you need to do is to select "Export..." from the file menu; then under "Save as type..." select "MP3 files".

Easy when you know how. (But harder to remember.)

(For Open University staff: you can see the Department of Languages' guidance on installing and using Audacity on the website for any Modern Languages module, amongst the resources for assessment.)

Audio (and video) feedback on written assignments (3)

Russell Stannard - confusingly, not the Open University emeritus professor of physics, but the University of Westminster lecturer in multimedia and ICT of the same name - has been having great success it seems with audio-visual screen recordings (using Camtasia) of his feedback on students' written work. It seems it enables him to be much more detailed in his comments, combining the benefits of audio feedback with the ability to point to precisely the parts of the students' work he's talking about (the example mentioned is correcting the grammar of Chinese students).
See this article in The Independent, and his own write-up of the work.

Audio feedback on written assignments (2)

Since my previous post on this subject, there's been a lot of talk about audio feedback at Alt-C (the Association of Learning Technology Conference): at least two papers on it and mentions in many more.

Much of the talk has been wildly enthusiastic, but as Isobel Falconer observed to me, most of the examples presented of good audio feedback were just examples of good feedback pure and simple, which would have been good even if they were given in print. People found it hard to distinguish the benefits which were due to the audio medium and the benefits which were simply due to giving better feedback. For example, in one workshop, we were invited to compare a piece of written feedback which was impersonal, brief and bueaucratic, written to a form template, with a piece of audio feedback which was warm and personal, supportive and encouraging, with suggestions for how to improve. Not exactly comparing like with like.

The Open University since its foundation has made it its business to provide its students with personal, supportive and extended feedback; in fact, it is is this, rather than its TV programmes or even its printed course materials to which its success is chiefly attributable. So what WE want to know is whether there is anything additional which the audio medium adds.

From the sessions I attended - together with the much more sophisticated research paper also presented at Alt-C by Sue Rodway-Dyer et al - here are some of the potential advantages.
It may make it easier for tutors to give better feedback, for example:

• they are less likely to slip into academic language
• it may be easier for non-native speakers of English, the medium being more tolerant of verbal idiosyncracies
• by making their feedback more of an object, from which they can stand back and experience it as students will, it prompts tutors to be more critical.

It may be easier for students to make good use of feedback, for example:

• they may find it easier to take in, if their literacy is poor
• it forces them to pay attention, because it can't be skimmed over the way written feedback can (we know this is a problem) - in fact, students apparently often listen to audio feedback two or three times and sometimes make notes
• BUT where their assignments are long and discursive, it can be harder for them to locate the particular places being referred to in the feedback.

Some lecturers are reporting that audio feedback has encouraged dialogue between students and tutors, and between students themselves. Others have reported additional benefits if students themselves start to submit assignments in audio form also - for example, health studies students started to become more critical of how they related to their clients.

Having just heard Mike Wesch's keynote address on how media are not just tools but mediate relationships, it occured to me that this may be a case where a change in medium opens the possibility, at least of a change to the relationship: making it more personal, more aware, and more critical.

Audio assignments for students?

A previous post (Audio feedback on written assignments) listed a few examples of tutors giving feedback to students in audio form. (Collective feedback, as a podcast to an entire class, is common; individual audio feedback is rarer and I think more interesting.)

I've since found out that in my own faculty (Education and Language Studies) tutors on the language courses give audio feedback quite regularly - which should not be surprising: these being distance learning courses, students make audio recordings to practice their language productive skills, so it's natural for tutors to give feedback in the same medium.

But reading about some highly successful podcasts by a philosophy lecturer at Glasgow made me wonder whether this model of spoken-assignment, spoken-feedback could be extended further. Why are these podcasts so popular? Of course, it may just be that she's a brilliant lecturer. But there's another possible reason, to do with the nature of philosophy itself: that it's a discipline which is practiced through language. To do philosophy is to talk. One can do philosophy through writing, of course, but talking is the original technology through which philosophy was created, and through which its business (the persuasive engagement of another soul) is most intimately conducted.

If it were not for the traditions of the modern university, which since about 1800 have based their systems of assessment on written examinations, we might place more value on the spoken production of language. Philosophy is just one discipline where we might reasonably expect students to be able not only to think and write persuasively but to speak persuasively. Management is another (eg the team briefing, the strategy presentation, the three-minute business case to the Board). In fact, most professional disciplines have a communicative and persuasive component, which in practical situations is more often conducted in speech than in writing. Perhaps it's time that our assessment methods reflected this?

Audio feedback on written assignments

A colleague has just asked me whether I know of any courses where students get feedback to their written assignments in audio form - either as audio annotations to the document or a separate audio file.

I remembered hearing about people trying this, but I couldn't put my finger on any specific instances. There are none in my own faculty, as far as I can establish. The Open University's Cloudworks website includes some notes form people trying it at Athabasca University (Canada), Marietta College (USA), and Sheffield Hallam (UK) - but not the OU itself!

A quick check turned up some people at Staffordshire University using it in biosciences (August 2007), and a just-finished JISC-funded project at Leeds Metropolitan called "Sounds good", reported in The Guardian with a link to the new project website.

Sounds good indeed! They seem to have found some benefits for students, but I'm wondering what it does to the tutor workload. It ought to make it lighter, of course, but things are never so simple.