Cornice avalanche East of Slettningsbu, Norway, April 2012
Written in March 2013. Video PS added in November 2013. Broken links fixed in March 2020.
Tsunamis and avalanches kill. They are so vile and fearsome that I think it is almost in bad taste to compare social and technical phenomena to either of them.
IPPR's use of one of the terms in its An avalanche is coming: Higher education and the revolution ahead[1.8 MB PDF] (written by Michael Barber and colleagues from Pearson) caught my eye, and reminded me of a talk - Universities, eLearning and The Internet Tsunami [PPT] - that I heard at the 2000 ALT Conference by Jack Wilson, then of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
I've only skimmed the two documents so far, but the fact that quite similar things are being said now as were being said 13 years ago probably shows that these kinds of apocalyptic visions are a bit wide of the mark, and that what is really going on is better viewed as a rather slower "tectonic" movement, that peppers the landscape with very big but patchy bursts of change.
I believe that looking back in 20 years we will see that over the previous 40 years technology's impact on learning, teaching and assessment will have been very profound indeed. In effect there will have been several big step changes. But I do not think that apocalyptic metaphors - which in some respects play into the hands of the naysayers - are helpful for organisations needing to take wise decisions about what to do next. Jack Wilson's much more recent talk at the 2012 Sloan Consortium conference - Evolution or Revolution? The relentless advance of online learning - Neither hype nor negativity can stop it [PPTX] - is of a very different ilk.
PS - for an effective, angry, sweeping and affecting critique of the ideas in IPPR's report, watch this 24 minute video by David Kernohan, narrated by Mark Styles:
Good point Seb but in my experience it does not seem to help that much to remind enthusiasts (of the latest thing) that progress is slow - but relentless. A few of us are still functional who started the UK HE virtual campuses in the late 1990s - when many virtual high schools started too - and we know the game does not change that fast.
I used at this point to refer to our (Sero's) reports on "organisational change" done for Becta which people seem instinctively to refuse to read - a bit like not buying a painting because the painter has died!
I also used to point to the article I did (via some facilitation from Seb) with Sloan-C on "online education today" - http://www.sciencemag.org/content/323/5910/85.short - and then bemoan that it was not open access - but hey! it is almost so - see http://www.sciencemag.org/content/323/5910/85.full - register and read, folks! The US is awash with online learning in HE/FE. And has over 500 online virtual high schools.
What IMHO is truly amazing is that despite the relentless prevalence of online learning in the US, nearly every day one can find an article in a "learned journal" from a US academic who has "discovered online learning" via MOOCs and seems unaware of any other kind.
And there is a lot more online learning in the UK than most are aware of - and not only from HE. Check out http://virtualcampuses.eu/index.php/England#ICT_in_education_initiatives
Paul Bacsich
Posted by: bacsich | 18/03/2013 at 11:14