Fortnightly Mailing

Donald Clark's "Don't Lecture Me" keynote at ALT-C 2010

Disclosure - I work for ALT half time. Post updated 30/9/2010.

Donald Clark spoke at ALT-C 2010 on 7 September 2010: topic "Don't Lecture Me". The talk was a structured, passionate,  critique of the lecture as an ineffective way to support learning. Donald's talk was controversial, and he chose not to hide his anger at what he sees as the wasting of public resources (physical and human) that lectures involve. (Abstract of talk, with two comments on the talk itself.)

Some in the audience were unhappy with the talk; but I think it got the conference off to a good and challenged start. You can make up your own mind.

Twitter has become a major cog in the machinery of conferences where a substantial proportion of participants are enthusiastic users of social media, and have an "always on" device with them and running during talks. Consequently the #altc2010 "back channel" was buzzing. As well as ~500 delegates in the auditorium, around 60 participants were accessing Donald's talk in real time, free, using Elluminate. Alongside this, unknown additional numbers were following the talk second hand (and commenting on it?) through the back channel, in effect mildly heckling him,  albeit with neither Donald nor the non-tweeting audience realising it at the time. Donald picked up on it some days later, and here is his response, plus plenty of comments, including mine.  

I've got mixed views about the way that Twitter works in these situations. I'm incapable of following a line of argument whilst i) trying to write pithy observations on it, and ii) keeping an eye on what other people using Twitter are writing. Does this kind of research evidence ["Cognitive control in media multitaskers" - HTML] and this kind ["The effect of multitasking on the grade performance of business students" - PDF] show that those who think they can multi-task are, like phone-using drivers, deluding themselves? My experience at this year's ALT conference has been that the value of the back-channel has varied widely: sometimes it seems to work like a bad feedback loop on a sound system (for an angle on this, see Jaron Lanier's interview in the Guardian); sometimes it seems to add focus and clarity to a discussion, and to induce productive involvement. In the case of Donald's keynote it seems to have worked in both ways.

Nicholas Negroponte's open letter about India's $35 tablet device for education

Below is a long excerpt from an open letter by One Laptop Per Child founder Nicholas Negroponte following the announcement by India’s Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal (above left) of plans to develop a $35 tablet device for education. (The picture to the right is a representation of the OLPC XO3, due (?) later this year.)

1. Focus on children 6 to 12 years old. They are your nation’s most precious natural resource. For primary school children, the tablet is not about computing or school, it is about hope. It makes passion the primary tool for learning.
2. Your tablet should be the death of rote learning, not the tool of it. A creative society is built not on memorizing facts, but by learning learning itself. Drill and practice is a mechanism of the industrial age, when repetition and uniformity were systemic. The digital age is one of personalization, collaboration and appropriation. OLPC’s approach to learning is called constructionism. We hope you adopt it too.
3. Tablets are indeed the future. OLPC announced its own eight months ago. However, caution is needed with regard to one aspect of tablets: learning is not media consumption. It is about making things. The iPad is a consumptive tool by design. OLPC urges that you not make this mistake.
4. Hardware is simple. Less obvious is ruggedness, sunlight readability and low power. We use solar power because our laptop is by far the lowest power laptop on the planet. But do not overlook human power – hand cranking and other things that kids can do at night or when it rains. Just solar would be a mistake. Rugged means water resistant and droppable from 10 feet onto a stone floor.
5. Software is harder. Linux is obvious, but whatever you do, do not make it a special purpose device with only a handful of functions. It must be a general purpose computer upon which the whole world can build software, invent applications and do programming. We know that when children program they come the closest to thinking about thinking. When they debug, they are learning about learning. This is key.
6. More than anything, of all the unsolicited advice I have to offer, the most important and most likely to be overlooked is good industrial design. Make an inexpensive tablet, not a cheap one. Make it desirable, lovable and fun to own. Take a page from Apple on this, maybe from OLPC too. Throw the best design teams in India behind it.

September ALT Conference. Keynote and Invited Speakers.

The ALT conference "Into something rich and strange" - making sense of the sea-change is approaching fast. (I work for ALT half-time.) Today we published summaries of the sessions of our keynote speakers and invited speakers, whose pictures are shown above.  Keynote speakers will be Donald Clark, Barbara Wasson, and Sugata Mitra, with a welcome from Saul Tendler.  Invited speakers will be:

1. Hans-Peter Baumeister, Co-Director of the European School of Business's Research Institute at Reutlingen University, Germany;
2. Heather Fry, Director of Education and Participation, HEFCE;
3. Sudhir Giri, Head of Google Learning Labs;
4. Martin Hall, Vice-Chancellor, University of Salford;
5. Frank McLoughlin, Principal, City and Islington College;
6. Aaron Porter, President, National Union of Students;
7. Josie Taylor, Director, Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University;
8. David White, Senior Manager: Development, Technology-Assisted Lifelong Learning, University of Oxford.

The conference will take place in Nottingham. You can book to attend (day-passes are available) until 19 August, and there is also a three page PDF with a summary of the conference timetable.

Putting CIPD straight

Earlier this month CIPD - a large membership organisation with a royal charter - published a shoddy report about spending on education and training quangos.

The report was shoddy because:

• several of the organisations identified - including LSN and NIACE - were not quangos at all;
• the figures cited were inaccurate;
• the author of the report seemed neither to have understood the work of the organisations in question, nor to have checked his facts.

CIPD subsequently withdrew the report, but not before The Daily Telegraph had blithely repeated the report's assertions.

Here are links to justifiably angry rebuttals from LSIS [100 kB PDF], NIACE, and LSN. Excerpts:

NIACE - "NIACE's reputation, built up over eighty nine years, rests on its independence. Unlike trade or professional associations, NIACE does not defend a single sectional interest and unlike a quango, it can and does campaign against government policy on occasion (for example by drawing attention to the loss of 30 per cent of publicly-funded places for adult learning between 2004 - 2008). This advocacy work is not funded from the public purse but through other charitable funds - which are also used to fund independent research, such as the Inquiry into the Future for Lifelong Learning that reported last year."

LSIS - "It is unfortunate that an organisation such as the CIPD that purports to support professional development can be both so inaccurate and dismissive of this activity. It’s a pity too that they can be so unprofessional as to not check their facts or find out how an organisation really works or what it does before rushing into print. I’m sure many of their existing members will be very disappointed in what is clearly a lack of professional competence."

LSN - "LSN is not a quango.  It is a private, independent charity which seeks to improve learning and skills in this country.  Contrary to the CIPD’s report, LSN is not in receipt of grant funding, nor have any of its recent acquisitions been funded by the taxpayer."

Instinct or Reason: How education policy is made and how we might make it better

CfBT's Instinct or Reason: How education policy is made and how we might make it better by Adrian Perry, Christian Amadeo, Mick Fletcher, and Elizabeth Walker "investigates the factors that lie behind the formation of educational policy". It is "based on discussions with an expert group, a desk based literature review (including academic research and politicians' memoirs), interviews with stakeholders and an extended process of draft revision".

You can download the full report from the CfBT web site [1 MB PDF], and there is also a 23 slide presentation [0.5 MB PPT] from the report's launch on 7 June.

Meanwhile the report's main recommendations, which make me think that in less straightened times there'd be mileage in the establishment of an Educational Research Council along the lines of the Medical Research Council, are as follows.

(a) The recommendation that the prime role of ministers is to bring their values to inform goals and ambitions, rather than tactics and methods, where expert analysis should play the larger role.

(b) An expert commission, analogous to NICE in healthcare, should be established to create and interpret educational research, evidence and analysis. Such a body should advise institutional leaders as well as politicians and civil servants. Ministers would be encouraged to share their thinking when their analysis differs from that of the commission.

(c) An office of Chief Officer – analogous to the Chief Scientific or Medical Officer – should be established. He or she should build strong links with the Select Committee system.

(d) Evaluations should be independent, commissioned outside the Department and published. Research and evaluation should be brought together to share a budget.

(e) Given the short career life of ministers and the limited life of governments on one hand, and the need for long-term implementation of educational reform on the other, there should be a search for consensus between political parties on non-controversial ground.

(f) Attention should be given to the perception that little useful research is being generated for education policy makers. We recommend that a portion of the budget for educational research should be directed to topics which can be seen to relate closely to identified needs of the system.

(g) Researchers should remain independent, but be given help to present their conclusions in a way that will give the best chance of calm consideration rather than rejection. (h) A prize should be established for well evidenced policy.

(i) Better links should be built between practitioners, researchers, civil servants, politicians and quangos – represented in shared career paths.

(j) International comparisons should be encouraged as part of a managed learning system.

What research has to say for practice - nine guides from ALT

ALT (for which I work half time) has made public nine What research has to say for practice guides. The guides, which are freely available, and which are open for others to edit, have been written mainly by members of the ALT Research Committee. It remains to be seen whether the guides languish without contributions being made to them, or whether people in the learning technology community decide to "muck in" and maintain and develop them.

Becta's Emerging Technologies web site, and a cross-site search

Becta currently runs a big Emerging Technologies web site. It has valuable contents but I found it frustratingly organised. (I vaguely remember being consulted a few years ago - with wire-frames - by a company that had won the contract for this service, or the web site on which the service runs.) I found the site quite difficult to navigate, with unhelpfully short abstracts, and peculiar policies on things like the dating of items, and their authorship. I n the continuation post below I combine some links on the site with abstracts about the (interesting and useful) items to which they point.

Abstracts of this kind save the user a lot of time in the long run, and JISC does them a bit better in sites like this one, although it is also evidence that the UK technology in learning world is unhelpfully fragmented, something that is on my mind as a result of UK Government's decision to close Becta.  (The Association for Learning Technology - ALT - for which I work part-time, had  something about this published yesterday.)

I played about with a custom search that gives returns from JISC, Becta, ALT, Naace, Futurelab, TEL  (it would be simple to add others, cheap to get the advertisements removed, and the current version of the code for the search window is at the foot of the continuation post if you would like to reuse it):

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Encouraging Digital Access to Culture - a March 2010 report by Jonathan Drori

Updated 19/4/2010

Encouraging Digital Access to Culture - [2.5 MB PDF] - went on the Department for Culture, Media and Sport web site just before the election was called, and though it has a Ministerial Foreword, its publication will not be announced till after the General Election, if at all. (As a precaution I've uploaded a copy here.)

White Papers - Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ACT21s)

[Post originally written on 11 January 2010, and rewritten on 16 September 2010.]

The CISCO/Intel/Microsoft Assessment and Teaching of 21st Century Skills (ACT21s) initiative published a series of draft Working Group White Papers on 11 January 2010. Each of the white papers deserves to be read. According to the announcement made at the January 2010 Learning and Technology World Forum (attended by ~700 people including over 70 education ministers),  Australia, Finland, Portugal, Singapore, UK, and USA are "signed up" to apply (take account of? actively implement? I do not know) ACT21stCS. The individual white papers are (were?) on 21st Century Skills, Methodological Issues, Technological Issues, Classroom Learning Environments and Formative Evaluations, and Policy Frameworks for New Assessments. They were originally available for download, but now [16/9/2010] need to be requested by email, which seems to be a backward step.

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.