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.

Engineering an online community: lessons from a student-centred hack day

A chance to spend a whole day with twenty of our students, selected from over 140 volunteers, for a workshop to find ways of teaching them better: too good to miss. The workshop was run like a coding “hack day”: each team identifying a problem, then developing a solution, prototyping it, and pitching it to the whole group with votes and a prize for the best conception. It was intense and fun (as hopefully comes across from the Twitter posts during the day), but for me the strongest sign of something important happening was that the problem my team chose to work on was not something I’d have guessed at all, despite my many years working in the field: testimony to the power and importance of bringing students into the process.

What’s the biggest problem you face in your studying? we asked the two students in my team. Both of them in different ways pointed to the problem of isolation and the difficulty of contact with other students. The first wanted to be able to share impressions with others, to see how they were responding to the same questions; online forums should have helped her, but she found that other students didn’t reply to her posts, and that in general people tended just to post their own ideas, at length, without responding to others. Long travelling distances were an obstacle to her attending face-to-face tutorials. The second student, on a foreign language course, wanted to find other students with whom to practice speaking; online tutorials enabled this, but low attendance put extra pressure on those who did attend, with added stress when the technology was unreliable. Hearing them talk, I remembered that the problem of student isolation is THE fundamental problem of distance education. I’d forgotten it because the problem has been around for so long, and because we’ve made so many efforts to solve it; what I realised was that despite forty years and more of trying, with all the latest technology at our disposal, we still haven’t really cracked it.

In trying to address the problem of student isolation, I think we’ve been ill-served by academic talk about “community” and in particular “learning community”. In health and social care, “community” has become notorious as a fantasy concept: that thing for which we all long to alleviate our sense of alienation in an individualised and fragmented society – ignoring the fact that communities are not necessarily benign or supportive. In education too, there has been something of the same hippy-like dream of creating “learning communities”, as networks of cooperative sharing and the collaborative construction of knowledge. Efforts to document actual learning communities has not been accompanied by comparable analysis of how they can be deliberately created, sustained and developed, and instead there has been an unhealthy fixation on collaboration as the highest form of participation in a learning community, with less intense forms – such as mere cooperation, or sharing, or (worst of all) “lurking” - relegated to lower rungs on the hierarchy of community engagement.

Yet “community” can be a meaningful concept even if there is only identification and no interaction. I remember once commenting to a colleague that my wife and I were Trekkies, Star Trek fans. “Oh,” she said, “what do you do?” I think she imagined that we went to conventions dressed as Klingons or something, so she was rather disappointed by my answer: “Well, we watch the TV show, and we rather enjoy it.” When I told this story at the Hack Day, two other members of my team to my surprise enthusiastically self-identified as Trekkies, showing that even this minimal level of identification with a community can have social significance.

More importantly, there can be practical outcomes from even low levels of community engagement. When I’m working out at the gym, I don’t interact with other gym users, and I don’t particularly want to; yet I can see them doing what they’re doing, and the fact that they’re there and working out also gives a spur to my motivation and persistence. “Exactly,” said one of our students, when I made this comparison. He regularly went to his local university library to work, so as to be in the midst of other people at study – even if they were studying different things – which helped him work longer and harder than he would have done at home.

The critical point of insight for me came when I realised that he didn’t have this sense of working alongside others with the other students on his course. He had no perception of the other students in his geographical area, who would be potential partners for face-to-face language practice, for example. Ideas started to ping rapidly now: I had a vision of a Google maps display, showing the geographical location of other students on his course (for privacy reasons, probably limited to the first part of the postcode); a faculty colleague had a vision of a dating app, which matched students with similar “would like to meet” profiles in the same geographical area or with a willingness to meet online.

And so, with the assistance of a super-smart graphic designer, we mocked up a screenshot of our solution: a view of the student’s community as >the first< screen a student sees on entering the University’s online environment. It included:

• a map showing the locations (approximate for privacy reasons) of other students (either on the course, on the qualification, or in the OU), with roll-over pop-ups of their profiles (for those who have made their profile public), and the colour of the indicator showing when they are online
• a roster of designated “friends” or “buddies” with whom the student already has contact, with again a colour indicator showing when they are online
• an “Ask the community” message board, switchable between messaging students on the course, the qualification, and the OU as a whole (this was a more modest substitute for the “dating app”, though we still thought this was a good idea).

 

Our choice of student isolation as a problem was validated when we discovered that two other teams had also chosen to address it, though in very different ways: one conceived an app for instant messaging with other students or with a tutor, and the other aimed to improve the effectiveness of online forums. It was the app which won the popular vote at the end of the day, but we still thought our solution was a good one because it embodied three critical features, necessary for students to build their own community:

• mutual visibility of online presence (if you can’t see the community, you won’t interact with it)
• flexible levels of engagement (you can interact minimally or massively, or start small and build, or drop back if other pressures intervene)
• viable even with initial low participation (unlike an empty forum, the community is visible and invites interaction even before anyone has done anything).

And the best thing about our solution, we thought, is that it requires no new technology: just the common social media tools, already familiar to a good proportion of our students. It can be done right now. Now we just have the challenge of making it happen!

Stars of YouTube and the limits of the digital world

Yesterday, Channel 4 news covered a convention at Alexandra Palace for fans of YouTube bloggers and musicians. Cue predictable comments about how incomprehensible this must be to anyone above their teenage years or not of the YouTube generation, with supporting clips of accompanying parents deeply grateful for the Adult Crèche where they could wait while their children queued to get a selfie with their internet idols.

But what occurred to me was how completely the success of this event contradicts the utopianism of the techno-evangelists, who have been prophesying for some years now the total domination of the digital world. Yes, its digital technology which has given these YouTube celebrities their global following. But what do their digital fans want and are willing to queue for hours to get? To be in the same physical location as them, to see them with their own eyes, to be able to speak to them in person. They're wanting something which the digital world cannot provide.

It's like David Edgerton says, in The Shock of the Old (and in his Guardian interview): new technologies hardly ever displace old.






YouTube's biggest stars in person - Channel 4 news items

http://www.channel4.com/news/youtubes-biggest-stars-in-person-video

"They're global celebrities: but not as you know them. Young people turned massive social media stars - who've been mobbed by thousands of fans at Britain's biggest YouTube convention."

Visions of the future

As part of the Guardian’s Generation Y series, four authors wrote short-short SF stories about the media of the future. All were dystopian, and interestingly two of the four focused on the issue of personalization (as distinct from customization, see below), taken to the extreme: where you can view only the online content which has been deemed suitable for you, not by some Big Brother central state but the commercial forces of advertising and profiling.

In “News hacking is the new glue sniffing” by Laurie Penny, teenagers gather in a seedy dive to read the news: “not only the news that’s been tailored to their age, interests and background, but any news” - for example, that Tottenham has been under military occupation for two months, which is blocked if you have a London login. They hack the internet service to create open logins, which is a risky pursuit; “companies can and do sue users for loss of potential advertising revenue”.

In “Paper” by James Smythe, a man on the underground is reading his own (digital) Paper, which is feeding him news and gossip about the Oscars ceremony and trying to get him to buy a suit similar to the one worn by one of the actors. He sees a woman reading about an unfolding war on her own Paper, but he can find no trace of it in his own (although he finds “war” occurring in the names of TV shows and films, and a story about a fight between two women on a reality TV show). A message comes up: “Based on your social profile, we have predicted that these will not be interesting to you. Would you like to know more about best actor at last night’s Oscars?”

Generation Y, it seems, has no truck with the happy hippy utopian vision of the internet as a free space for (hedonistically) sexual expression or (politically) democratic protest. Some of us old ‘uns never believed it anyway, but the younger generation sees perhaps more clearly – despite, or perhaps because, being more immersed in online social media – that the digital world replicates all the power structures and social tensions of the physical, though amplified and on a larger scale. Let’s be careful out there, as they used to say in Hill Street Blues.

Note

“Personalisation” and “customisation” are similar and the words are often used interchangeably, but there’s an important distinction. In usual usage, “customisation” is what you, the user, do to select the things you want; for example, you can “customise” the Toolbar in Microsoft Office so that it contains the icons you want to see most frequently. “Personalisation” is the system choosing what to put in front of you, based on what it knows (or thinks it knows) about your and what you want; targeted advertising or, more benignly, Amazon recommendations, are personalisation.

How to care for introverts / extroverts

This pair of wonderful diagrams has been circulating around the internet without source or acknowledgement – but as far as I can see the original designers are here, and we should acknowledge their brilliance.

For me, there are several reasons why these diagrams are great. First, they get right the meaning of introversion and extraversion. The popular misconception is that introverts are shy and don't get on with people, or are lacking in social skills, whereas extraverts (or extroverts, as it's now often spelled) are gregarious and get on with people splendidly. But in Jung’s original conception, introversion is a focus on the inner contents of one’s mind, and extraversion is a focus on external objects and the outside world. So extraverts get energy from other people, and introverts get energy from thinking. It isn’t that introverts don’t like other people or don’t know how to deal with them: it’s that they find them draining of energy (though not quite in the sense of this Dilbert cartoon). Introverts can be very socially skilled, though they’re unlikely ever to shine in a field such as telesales. It’s rare to find an extrovert with poor social skills (though they do exist), but it’s common to find extroverts who prefer to do their thinking by talking to other people.

The second reason these diagrams why these diagrams are great is that they’re actually useful. Most discussions of extraversion and introversion in pop psychology or HR literature focus on “finding your type” or working out where you are on the introversion-extraversion spectrum, but don't tell you what to do about it - except, usually, to imply that if you're an introvert you shouldn't be promoted into management or do any kind of job which involves working with people. (Hence the need for ripostes, such as Susan Cain's Quiet.) These diagrams address the problem that if you're an extrovert you probably don't know how extroverts like to be treated (and they're unlikely to tell you), and if you're an introvert you may know what extraverts like but don't have the confidence to do it for them. These are diagrams which offer the possibility of a better world.

And the third reason why these diagrams are great is of course that they're superb pieces of design. Pithy and memorable text, engagingly laid out. (I think the variation in type sizes forces one subconsciously to slow down and pay more attention while reading the text, hence encouraging one to pay attention to what it actually says.) Writers and designers of motivational aphorisms, take note.

Massive online collaboration: Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir 4

As an amateur singer myself, I'm a bit ashamed that I only took notice of Eric Whitacre's virtual choir with the release of the fourth video on 11 July, premiered as part of the Coronation celebration gala concert.

It's a great example of how the online technology enables massive scale collaboration - in this case, the performance of a very large community choir: the volunteer singers (nearly 6000 of them in Virtual Choir 4, from over 100 countries) record their parts individually on a webcam and upload the recordings to Whitacre's team, who (funded by Kickstarter) mix the recordings together and create a video.

This is a method which excellently suits Whitacre, who for a classical composer has a huge worldwide fanbase ready to jump at the chance of singing his music to and with him. It also suits his trademark big-chord musical style: small differences and imperfections are averaged out in the aggregation process. (It wouldn't work so well, I think, for Bach's rapid counterpoint.)

Here's Whitacre being interviewed by Tim Lihoreau of ClassicFM just after the call for submissions, in which poor old Tim has to sightread the baritone part in front of its composer in order to show the working of the online interface (note the demonstration tracks, conducting and click tracks, and the ability to make multiple attempts).



Some of the singers have done their own video aggregations. One very skilled performer produced a video of himself singing all eight parts - but perhaps the more revealing aggregation is this one of fifteen singers (the originator did both soprano and alto parts); Eric Whitacre's conducting track is in the middle.



And here's the final product, with the addition of soloists, electronica instrumental track, and Manga-style animation.

Sign me up for Virtual Choir 5...


See also
Eric Whitacre's 2011 TED talk, reflecting on the Virtual Choir phenomenon and introducing Virtual Choir 2
Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choir site

Designing emergent collaboration: lessons from games design

Having written about what learning design has to learn from games design, I've just read an extraordinary account of the development of an extraordinary game, which has something to teach everyone concerned with collaborative learning activity.

The game, called Journey, has already created something of a sensation. Visually powerful, wordless and emotionally intense, it was specifically intended to be a co-operative experience, allowing simultaneous players linked through the PlayStation online network (it's only available for PlayStation, unfortunately) to meet (though not talk) and help each other.

One reviewer's account of playing the game is here. And the designer's account of developing the game is here. What's interesting from the learning design point of view is the repeated playtesting, to check how players were responding to each other the game environment, and the tweaking of the game rules, so that the cooperative and trusting behaviour they wanted the game to afford was positively encouraged.

Later addition. To spell out the take-away point for learning design: if you're designing a collaborative or cooperative group activity, the most important thing to clarify and specify is what kinds of interactions you want there to be between the learners - and then design the task accordingly, and check that those are the interactions which actually happen.

Are MOOCs progressive or regressive?

At the ELESIG's recent symposium on students' experience of MOOCs, one of the interesting questions posed by George Roberts of Oxford Brookes University was whether Open Online Courses (massive or not) would address the digital literacy deficit.

Since we had already agreed amongst ourselves that MOOCs weren't really suited to learners without significant pre-existing digital skills, as well as considerable self-confidence and the ability to drive and organise their own learning, I mischievously proposed that MOOCs would actually widen the digital divide rather than narrowing it: those who had good education already would be able to get more from MOOCs, but those unfortunate enough to have been poorly taught and given no models for self-directed learning would be left even further behind.

It's a feature of open and free systems - such as free markets - that they favour those with the power and resources - the capital - to dominate them. This connection between digital liberalism and political liberalism (that's to say, conservatism) was also made interestingly last week by a commentator on The Guardian's website, following a review of Evgeny Morozov's new book To Save Everything , Click Here. "RO42" wrote:

This sounds a very valuable book, and one that need to be more widely read.

The thing I'm increasingly coming to notice is that technophiles are very, very conservative politically but think they're liberal. They believe in deregulation and hands-off governance because it is "freer", market self-regulation rather than legal frameworks for business operation because it "promotes entrepreneurism" (shades, of course, of "wealth creators") and a strange kind of philanthropic Big Society obsession where everything is "democratically" chosen and the enthusiastic amateur rather than expertise listened to.

There is a massive fear of expertise and knowledge in this new technological culture; anyone who claims to know things is lumped in with the charlatans, or even worse deemed elitist and irrelevant. There is a place for crowd-sourcing and co-operation but it should not come with the devaluing of education.

If free and open education is not just to favour the already-privileged, there need to be educational structures to protect the vulnerable and disadvantaged - which is why I hope there will always be a place for institutions such as my own, The Open University, which have a mission to do precisely that, and why even as we ourselves move into MOOCs I think ours will be rather different from those envisaged by techno-utopians.

Reference

The sessions led by Alison Littlejohn and George Roberts at the ELESIG symposium "Researching Learners' Experiences of MOOCs and other New Pedagogies" can be seen at http://elesig.ning.com/video (you need to register, free, for access to the site).

Online collaborative work for beginners

We seem to have realised, at last, that one cannot simply provide online collaborative technology to students and expect them to collaborate. (One of the most interesting findings from the JISC Great Expectations survey was that although young people may be experienced in social networking technology, on arrival at university they struggle to see how it can be used in learning.) So how should one introduce online collaborative work to students? What kinds of scaffolding and support do beginning students need?
I've just come across a paper (unfortunately it doesn't seem to be available online) by Andy Northedge, author of The Good Study Guide, describing how he and colleagues designed "a fail-safe online group project work environment" for students on an entry level Open University course in health and social care (KZX100). A high degree of structuring to tasks, supported by custom online software, meant that after an initial set-up stage student teams could work largely independently with little teacher support. Satisfaction levels were high, and - most remarkably - students were actually interested in each others' work. (This happens much more rarely than teachers suppose!)
The key features of the learning design were as follows.
(1) A highly structured team set-up stage. This addressed the critical issue for all collaborative work: that students need to be doing their work at roughly the same time - not trivial to arrange with distance learning students, for whom flexibility of study is often critical. Students began by indicating their availability during a six-week period, after which their tutor divided them into teams who could work on the project during the same two-week block. A coordinator in each team then obtained students' commitment to precise start and end dates. Importantly, students received credit for tasks in this stage, even before actually doing any work on their project, "to stimulate them to participate in a timely way and to commit to the team enterprise". (Without the custom software, other courses could do some of these tasks on Doodle.com - a free public web application for event scheduling.)

(2) Visible time targets for project milestones. These were initially generated by the software, from the start and end dates, but could then be adjusted by coordinators, allowing teams to re-plan their time strategy.

(3) An interface which rendered each student's work visible to other members of their team. Each student had first to find three websites relevant to their chosen concern and review them using an online proforma, and then to review two high-rated and two low-rated websites found by other students. The software displayed students' review of the same website in parallel columns, as well as a "hit parade" of websites in rank order.

(4) Discussion to facilitate the transition from exploration to production. After reviewing the websites, the students used an online forum to discuss six evaluation criteria (breadth, accessibility, trustworthiness, etc), drawing on their experience, and also working towards the joint report which they would next be writing.

(5) Individual authorship of discrete parts of the joint product. Each student wrote a separate section of the final report, summarising the team's discussion of one of the six evaluation criteria. The software only allowed them to work on their own section (or sections), but reading and suggesting improvements to other sections was encouraged.

(6) Assessment not of team product ("to reduce strain on team relations"), but of individual reflective essay on what has been learned from the project.

Although the course has now been superceded, the learning design remains valid. Like the InterLoc tool for structuring online discussion, this is an example of how structure and constraints on action can be useful in a teaching environment, as scaffolding to help students attain a level they would have found it difficult to reach on their own - in contradiction to the freedom ethos of Web 2.0.

(The full reference of the paper: Northedge A, 2006. Designing a fail-safe online group project work environment, Proceedings of International Conference on e-Learning: Learning Theories vs. Technologies, 14–16 December, 2006, Ramkhamhaeng University, Thailand, pp 12.1-7)

The enforcement of rational chat

InterLoc (formerly AcademicTalk) is a tool for synchronous online discussion, or chat, which has been specifically designed to force participants to follow the rules of rational academic discussion.

Its creators, Andrew Ravenscroft and Simon McAlister, were responding to concerns about the low levels of online debate - not only in public chatrooms, where dialogue can often take the form of "You suck!" "No, you suck!", but even in organised student discussions, where the tendency is for students to give each other an easy time and resort to "trading" opinions ("I think this." "I think that." "Okay, shall we go for a drink now?")

The InterLoc interface forces participants to start each message with one of a number of prescribed openers, not only to state a position ("I think...", "Let me explain...") but to ask questions ("Why do you think that...?" "Can you give an example...?") and make challenges ("I disagree because...", "An alternative view is...", "How reliable is that evidence...?) Student discussions with InterLoc are found to stay more on topic and go deeper than synchronous discussions conducted without it; in particular, students seem to be more willing to question and challenge each other when socially protected by the formal structure of the system.

Of course this goes directly against the cultural assumptions of freedom and spontaneity associated with online discussion and chat in particular, and some students reported resenting the restrictive openers. But as the authors comment: "It is only by being restrictive in some degree that they will have a positive benefit for the student, by forcing them to reformulate intuitive, reactive thoughts into a more well crafted and, hopefully, thoughtful contribution" (Final report, p. 37)

The InterLoc project's website includes details of publications as well as the latest version of the tool and links to other users. The list of message openers used in the original AcademicTalk is published as an appendix to McAlister, Ravenscroft and Scanlon (2004), "Combining interaction and context design to support collaborative argumentation using a tool for synchronous CMC", Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 20, pp 194-204.

Techno-fear

People who have to manage information in their job are often worried about the loss of control entailed by new technologies - in particular social media, Web 2.0 etc.

"New technology: the threat to our information" is a wickedly satirical slidecast on this by Norman Lamont. I can't say much about it without spoiling the joke; you'll have to watch it for yourself. (It won't take you more than a couple of minutes.) I'll just say that it's a reflection of how quickly we adapt our expectations and our organisations with the arrival of new technology, and how quickly we forget that we've done so.

The "presenter" of the slidecast is a corporate manager, but the same joke could be done for academics too. My wife recalls a meeting, not so long ago, where the library staff's proposals to make more resources available to students over the internet was met with horror by lecturers, because that would mean that students might read things which they had not read themselves.