Michael Stevenson (DfES Director of Technology) - an interview which is worth listening to

This recent 10 minute interview by JISC with Michael Stevenson [MP3 file], DfES Director of Technology, is worth listening to closely if you work in or have commercial interests in English public sector education, despite its inevitabe "JISC focus". If you listen, you may find useful the diagrams in the first few slides from this March 2006 presentation by Adrian Hall [PPT file], who reports to Stevenson, as "Programme Director for Personalised Content".  Note (22/7/2006). Michael Stevenson announced his resignation from DfES on 14/7/2006, with effect from the end of August, and the DfES announced that responsibility for the e-Strategy would pass to Becta.

To his credit, Stevenson is hot on the importance of leadership in producing change, and on the need for a simplified, silo-free, cross-sectoral approach that works across the whole of publicly funded education.

But I am more sceptical about the apparent dominance in his thinking of personalised learning, which he describes as "the great issue of the day", with one of the DfES's "early wins" being "the personalised e-learning strategy". Nor do I share his optimism about e-portfolios. The DfES, says Stevenson, is "very close to a way forward on e-portfolios"; but I think that even if the sort of e-portfolio that is envisaged is "only" a transcript of a person's qualifications, there are enormous, uncosted, technical, security, and organisational challenges in getting this to work in an education system that is as decentralised as England's.

Obviously the current £6b plus NHS computerisation project is about much more than a computerised patient record, but nevertheless, if (as is the case with the NHS) a very centralised and costly project is needed to get the patient record in place, why would things be any different to get a computerised learner record (i.e. portfolio system) in place in education?

Meanwhile the political emphasis in educational policy is on decentralisation of decision-making; and the Web and the ICT infrastructure are quickly developing in such a way that educational providers face an "inevitable future" in which they cannot realistically hope to control the access devices, or the connectivity, or the content, or necessarily the e-learning tools and systems, that learners and teachers choose to use in their learning.

", despite its inevitabe JISC focus" added to opening sentence - 28/5/2006.

Comments

[Donald Clark]

Oh dear. Yet another set of abstract, top-down ideas from the DfES. His claims on early wins and achievements are really questionable. You're right to be sceptical on e-portfolios - government initiatives are almost always top-down and therefore prone to catastrophic failure. Let’s take just a few of the more recent examples; Individual Learning Accounts (ILAs), the Uk eUniversity (UKeU), the National Health Service University (NHSU), or ‘Towards a Unified E-learning Strategy’ (that fell stillborn from the press). I wonder also if Michael has any views on the truly awful BBC Jam content that has been released from his old employer. It is literally unusable. This has all the signs of yet another catastrophic failure. I’d be willing to bet a large sum of money that government inspired e-portfolios will not be used by the majority of learners and that it is ‘doomed to succeed’ i.e. lots of money on research and implementation but no practical take-up. The only examples of success he could quote were interactive whiteboards and Shibboleth (a project no one in the real world has heard of).

The DfES and JISC are determined to force unsuccessful top-down initiatives (none of which are evidence-based) into a system that is blooming with successful bottom-up phenomena such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, files sharing, social software, messenger, MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games) and many other Web 2.0 phenomena.

He is right about how the technology is transforming the world of the learner but misguided in his idea that the DfES or JISC are leading the way. They may do better to get out of the way.

[Seb Schmoller]

Whether the consultation document 'Towards a Unified e-Learning Strategy' "fell from the press stillborn" is certainly debatable, because after its launch in July 2003 it did finally emerge in March 2005 as 'Harnessing Technology – Transforming Learning and Children’s Services' a.k.a. "the DfES e-Strategy".

Stevenson can be forgiven (in an interview with JISC - something I have now made clear) for highlighting the success and importance of Shibboleth, the next generation access management system to replace Eduserv Athens, which is very widely used in post-school education, the NHS, and research, and which, as Shibboleth, is likely to be extended much more widely in public education.

Putting JISC and DfES in the same "basket" does both a disservice. DfES funds public sector English education, so it is "in the way" whether we like it or not; and I'd rather it had a wise and enabling stance on e-learning than an ill-informed or obstructive one. JISC, in contrast, plays several key roles in the UK in the practical provision of infrastructure, online content, and support (technical and development) for higher and further education, and for the academic research community. Of course it is not fault-free - what organisation is? But if it did not exist there'd undoubtedly be pressure for something like a JISC to be created.

Disclosure. I occasionally respond to invitations to tender issued by JISC, and was working for JISC on two unrelated contracts at the time I wrote this. In the past I have undertaken work for DfES.