Fortnightly Mailing

Is all now calm in the VLE world?

Pearson LearningStudio is the product/service that has emerged from the "big beast" of publishing's purchase of Fronter and eCollege. This leaves the public education VLE world - bar future acquisitions - split between three commercial products (Pearson, Blackboard, and Desire2Learn) and two Open Source (Moodle and Sakai).

Pearson dwarfs Blackboard and Desire2Learn. It has a large catalogue of text books, some of which already give their owners access to an array of online learning content. It is an educational publisher with an international marketing infrastructure. It owns awarding bodies such as Edexel. 

Alongside this, both Fronter and eCollege have concentrated from the start on running hosted services rather than on selling software for learning providers to run themselves. (Sure, both Blackboard and Desire2Learn offer hosted services too.)

A supplier of hosted services gains a mass of data about learner behaviour. Google and Amazon are not the only companies that have learned how to extract meaning from such data. So my current "intuitive tip for the next ten years" is that the next phase of VLE development will involve the provision of automated and semi-automated tools that draw on the mass of data about user behaviour and about user performance that hosted VLEs hold (or can access), combining it with data about the individual learner. 

Such tools could provide help and guidance for learners, teachers and others involved in the support of learning (parents, e.g.). Perhaps they could also shape the content, activities etc., that the VLE provides the learner, based on the learner's characteristics, and on factors like the learner's previous behaviour in the system.

The selling point for VLEs that use data in this (dystopian?) way will be improvements in effectiveness and efficiency - nothing wrong with either; but the approach described also raises many issues, some concerned with privacy and data-ownership (it would certainly be interesting to see what the privacy policies of hosted VLEs say about the use to which user data can be put), and others with the continued transfer of "knowledge mediation" from the public to the private sphere. And the technical challenges are formidable. The amount of data is much smaller than is held by really mass systems like Google, and it is more nuanced and multi-dimensional. As my friend David Jennings pointed out when commenting on a draft of this post:

"One reason I can think that your predictive hunch might not come to pass is that VLEs are a different context from Amazon, Google or (for the most part) libraries. In the latter, the data collected is person <--> resource. In VLEs it's person <--> mediator (tutor, peers, group dynamics) <--> activity <--> resource, with lots of scope for unpredictable interactions between these to create 'noise' that drowns out clear statistical associations. In other words, the numbers are a hell of a lot harder to crunch."

Last July the US National Academy of Engineering identified "advance personalised learning" (along with "provide energy from fusion") as a grand engineering challenge for the next decade.  Google now influences what you find. Will hosted VLEs, applying automated statistical analysis to data about users and user behaviour, start to shape what and how students on formal courses learn?

This piece was influenced by David Jennings's 30/1/2009 Web 2.0-style resource discovery comes to libraries - the TILE project.

We must ..... a call to action to create the university of the future

Here are five tasks prioritised las month at a "create the university of the future" meeting sponsored by the Open University of Catalonia and the US based and led New Media Consortium, and attended by "forty leaders in open education and technology" Barcelona. Source [140 kB PDF], with thanks to Phil Candy.

Jaw-dropping: a talk about "lightweight learning" by Sugata Mitra at Google's London office

Source: Infonomia

Updated: added extra bullet-point from Sugata Mitra - 11/10/2009; dates clarified - 25/10/2009.

Last Monday I had the pleasure of hearing Sugata Mitra give a jaw-dropping talk about his "Hole in the wall experiments", at a 157 Group / Becta event at Google's London office that I had had a bit part in organising. (Becta is the UK Government's agency to promote and support the effective use of ICT in education, and singled out on Thursday 7 October by David Cameron, in his pre-election speech to the Conservative Party Conference. The 157 Group is a group of England's big and most successful further education colleges.)

OLPC laptops - a year of mass use in Uruguay / Android: coming from behind

Two informative pieces in the 3/10/2009 Economist. The first - "Education in Uruguay - Laptops for all" - provides quite an upbeat, though "warts and all" summary of Uruguay's deployment of nearly 400,000 OLPC laptops (nearly all of the country's primary school pupils now have them), pointing out that government's ambition that laptops will improve the overall standard of education "will be tested for the first time later this month when every Uruguayan seven-year-old will take online exams in a range of academic subjects", and that the introduction of laptops should "prompt a shift away from rote learning towards critical analysis".

The second - "The boom in smart-phones" - describes the rise of the Open Source operating system Android, emphasising how Android has enabled "cut-price Chinress firms such as Huawei and ZTE to enter the smart-phone market which they had previously stayed out of for lack of the necessary software". The article suggests that within four years half of handsets sold will be "smart", and that almost all will be so by 2015. (I think these figures relate to worldwide supply, in which case the switch will be quicker in the UK.) The changes this will cause in the role of technology in learning (and, perhaps more importantly, in its organisation and control) will be profound.

Back-links to related pieces:

• 26/9/2009 - The "mobilely accessible" Internet - global overview;
• 20/2/2009 - Using mobile technologies to promote children's learning;
• 2/10/2008 - Android: phones are PCs, only smaller and with more stuff on them;
• 4/8/2007 - Smartphones "are the PCs of the developing world";
• 28/7/2007 - Point-to-point wi-fi brings internet access to all;
• 1/6/2007 - Test the mobile-readiness of a web site;
• 27/1/2007 - Mobile phones in Africa: a "simple sort of eBay for agricultural products;
• 14/12/2006 - Wireless Ghana;
• 17/10/2006 - What would you install on One Laptop Per Child;
• 22/9/2006 - 80% of the population is covered by a mobile network.

Progressive austerity and self-organised learning

I've worked on and off with David Jennings for nearly 15 years, starting with unsuccessful efforts in the mid 1990s to get Sheffield-as-a-City to take the Internet more seriously, and including Living IT [slow to load from The Wayback Machine] a project with MANCAT, The Sheffield College, and FD Learning, to make a suite of wholly online courses about how to use the Internet.

More recently we've pitched for and won various contracts concerning e-learning, standards, web site usability, social networking to support professional development, and so on.

Why the throat clearing? To provide a context for my pointing to a longish piece that David Jennings has written - Progressive austerity and self-organised learning - which I think is worth taking the time to read, and to make comments on it. (Though I've not switched off comments on this post, I encourage you to respond there not here.)

For the record and leaving aside my scepticism about "collapsonomics" (which reminds me too much of The Limits to Growth and Protect and Survive) I agree with some but not all of David's argument.

I particularly like the way David tabulates some "Literacies for self-organised learning" using lists by Guy Claxton and Howard Reingold (I'd be for including Claxton's "characteristics of a confident explorer/researcher" in many recruitment specifications), but I think David underplays the importance of accreditation of learning and of qualifications generally (this is more than the issue of compliance training that he raises towards the end of the piece).

Secondly learners in many contexts at many levels (medicine, catering and hospitality, car maintenance, marketing, say) need to learn in real "vocational" environments. These are generally anything but "lightweight" to provide.

Finally, though we are programmed to learn, for many it helps a great deal to receive the right formative feedback, and to be asked what Dylan Wiliam calls "hinge questions" [150 kB PDF - see page nine]; and in this respect the "self-organised" learning that David argues for  is not sufficient. 

What I think we do agree on is that the "information environment" has become far more "lightweight", with the bypassing of institutions, libraries, teachers, publishers, experts etc, and the establishment of an apparently open environment in which motivated people can learn a great deal on their own. (I put quotes round the term "lightweight", because the technical infrastructure that sits behind and supports the information environment is anything but lightweight.)

But you can make up your own mind by reading David's piece.