Fortnightly Mailing

Sponsorship needed: biking for Barnsley Hospice

Page updated on 4 October

On 3 October I rode in the Brompton World Championships at Blenheim Palace in one of two teams raising money for Barnsley Hospice. We got a result, being the fastest team of three veterans. Go here if you would like to sponsor us, and thanks to several readers who've already done so.

Handlebar view, with the sounds of suffering, from the 2008 race.

Jaron Lanier asks "How can you be ambidextrous in the matter of technology and education?"

NB - Post from October 2010 - scroll down for much more recent stuff.

Earlier this year I read and greatly enjoyed Jaron Lanier's enigmatic You are not a gadget - a manifesto. , which gets to the heart of why I sometimes feel uncomfortable about the way the Web is going, and which challenges ideas that I hold dear about it (in particularly in relation to open content). Lanier himself puts it this way "The book is centered on the philosophy of consciousness, the nature of science in the proximity of big computation, recent musical culture, and other topics that all connect to the nature of network-age personhood. I think the book is actually about what might best be called "spirituality". See also this February 2010 interview with the Observer's Aleks Krotoski.

Just now, while writing a comment on Clive Shepherd's post about Nicholas Carr's interesting but annoying "The Shallows", I came across Does the digital classroom enfeeble the mind? a recent New York Times piece by Lanier.

To put Lanier's striking question in context here is an excerpt from the NYT piece, though the former is no substitute for Lanier's "You are not gadget", which anyone striving to be ambidextrous in the matter of technology and education should make a point of reading.

A career in computer science makes you see the world in its terms. You start to see money as a form of information display instead of as a store of value. Money flows are the computational output of a lot of people planning, promising, evaluating, hedging and scheming, and those behaviours start to look like a set of algorithms. You start to see the weather as a computer processing bits tweaked by the sun, and gravity as a cosmic calculation that keeps events in time and space consistent.

This way of seeing is becoming ever more common as people have experiences with computers. While it has its glorious moments, the computational perspective can at times be uniquely unromantic.

Nothing kills music for me as much as having some algorithm calculate what music I will want to hear. That seems to miss the whole point. Inventing your musical taste is the point, isn’t it? Bringing computers into the middle of that is like paying someone to program a robot to have sex on your behalf so you don’t have to.

And yet it seems we benefit from shining an objectifying digital light to disinfect our funky, lying selves once in a while. It’s heartless to have music chosen by digital algorithms. But at least there are fewer people held hostage to the tastes of bad radio D.J.’s than there once were. The trick is being ambidextrous, holding one hand to the heart while counting on the digits of the other.

How can you be ambidextrous in the matter of technology and education? Education — in the broadest sense — does what genes can’t do. It forever filters and bequeaths memories, ideas, identities, cultures and technologies. Humans compute and transfer non-genetic information between generations, creating a longitudinal intelligence that is unlike anything else on Earth. The data links that hold the structure together in time swell rhythmically to the frequency of human regeneration. This is education.

Now we have information machines. The future of education in the digital age will be determined by our judgement of which aspects of the information we pass between generations can be represented in computers at all. If we try to represent something digitally when we actually can’t, we kill the romance and make some aspect of the human condition newly bland and absurd. If we romanticize information that shouldn’t be shielded from harsh calculations, we’ll suffer bad teachers and D.J.’s and their wares.

Sugata Mitra - "The hole in the wall": self organising systems in education

Here is the video recording of Sugata Mitra's 8 September keynote speech at the 2010 ALT Conference in Nottingham.

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.

Immersive and virtual worlds - ALT-J articles now freely available from the ALT Open Access Repository

The ALT Journal is not an Open Access publication. But by agreement with the publisher, 18 months after each issue is published, ALTputs the individual articles from ALT-J into the ALT Open Access Repository.  (Disclosure: I work for ALT part-time.)

Volume 16 Number 3 is the most recently released issue under this arrangement, and is a Special Issue on learning and immersive and virtual worlds, edited by Maggi Savin-Baden and Robert Ward. Here are links to the individual articles in the repository.

• Bell, Frances and Savin-Baden, Maggi and Ward, Robert (2008) Editorial
• Richards, Debbie and Fassbender, Eric and Bilgin, Ayse and Thompson, William (2008) An investigation of the role of background music in IVWs for learning
• Middleton, Andrew and Mather, Richard (2008) Machinima interventions: innovative approaches to immersive virtual world curriculum integration
• Savin-Baden, Maggi (2008) From cognitive capability to social reform? Shifting perceptions of learning in immersive virtual worlds
• Bayne, Sian (2008) Uncanny spaces for higher education: teaching and learning in virtual worlds
• Whitton, Nicola and Hollins, Paul (2008) Collaborative virtual gaming worlds in higher education
• Good, Judith and Howland, Katherine and Thackray, Liz (2008) Problem-based learning spanning real and virtual words: a case study in Second Life
  
• McVey, Michael (2008) Observations of expert communicators in immersive virtual worlds: implications for synchronous discussion
• Minocha, Shailey and Roberts, Dave (2008) Laying the groundwork for socialisation and knowledge construction within 3D virtual worlds
• Livingstone, Daniel and Kemp, Jeremy and Edgar, Edmund (2008) From Multi-User Virtual Environment to 3D Virtual Learning Environment

Catching the Learning Wave - Guest Contribution by Ray Schroeder

Updated 5 August 2010

Lower down is a 30 May 2010 Guest Contribution by Ray Schroeder, Director, Center for Online Learning, Research and Service at the University of Illinois at Springfield.  Here is Ray's reaction to Google's 4 August 2010 announcement that it would be stopping development of Wave.

This is really disappointing for those of us who have successfully used Wave for class and other collaborations. It is an especially useful tool for education. As a platform for a host of advanced multiple-media tools and with a wiki at its heart, Wave has served many of us in the past months.

Wave is a complex tool. Those who took the necessary time to learn the tool, found it to be especially robust and useful for many situations. Those who could only invest ten minutes in learning Wave were frustrated and confused.

The potential business and commerce applications were never made clear. Certainly, this was factor in the decision.

30 May 2010

Google Wave has been much discussed and speculated about since it was first announced just over one year ago. Many in the business community have wondered how it can be used for marketing and sales. Others have wondered how it will be integrated into daily communication and collaboration. Still others who lack the patience to test a tool with more than a few layers have wondered just what it is. Google developed the product as an answer to the question what would email look like if it were invented today rather than 40 years ago? (Trapani)

For those of us in technology-enhanced teaching and learning, the answer is clear. Google Wave can be described as a wiki-based platform for interactive multi-media (Web 2.0) tools. As with any good tool, Wave is versatile in application and adaptability. As with any good new tool, it is evolving and expanding.

In December of last year, I joined Brian Mulligan and Séan Conlan of the Institute of Technology at Sligo Ireland (IT Sligo) in a trans-Atlantic collaboration using Google Wave. We joined volunteers from our classes – an energy sustainability class at IT Sligo and my Internet in American Life class at the University of Illinois at Springfield (UIS) – in Google Wave.

The results are published in the journal e-Mentor (Schroeder). In brief, the collaboration was successful, though not without a few technical glitches. Students were engaged and enthused. Some real exchanges took place, even with the very early pre-release version of Wave. We identified some twenty Wave tools that seemed to hold significant potential for collaboration and group work in higher education.

In the six months since that very early experiment with Wave, many upgrades have been put in place and Wave has become a much more stable platform for collaboration. Google Wave is now openly available to the world. That’s not to say it was a secret or much of a closed system before (some three million users were signed on prior to the official opening of Wave on 17 May 2010). But now one can join Wave by logging in with any email address. You can add new users who had not previously been in Wave by typing in their email address. The newbies are immediately sent an invitation to create a logon.

It appears that we may be poised for an explosion of testing Google Wave in higher education this fall. Workshops and Webinars on the topic are proliferating. The Sloan Consortium in the U.S. has already offered three introductory Webinars on the topic this spring and a summer workshop is schedule for June. Enthusiasm has run high in those Webinars that I and two colleagues, Carrie Levin and Emily Boles, have hosted. The “Aunt Rosie” automatic language translation bot is among the popular tools supported by Wave. For group projects, the “playback” feature is also very popular, enabling the instructor to view a kind of time lapse version of how a final report was created, showing how and when each revision was made. The scores of other tools, from mind maps to iframes to voice and video recordings are easily accessible in the extensions folder provided to each user. These extensions will, no doubt, continue to expand as more and more third party providers add to this open source tool.

The question remains, how will we in education use this tool? I cannot presume to speak for the broader educational community, but I can share what new abilities are enabled by this technology and what I think are the most exciting prospects for this tool.

We have had wikis for years – and Google has already created a rather evolved form of the wiki in the form of Google Docs. We have an ever-expanding array of Web 2.0 and associated cloud-computing tools that are launched independently and supported individually by a whole host of providers. What is new with Wave is that these are brought together into one robust wiki-type platform that is open source and can be secured.

Rather than separate logons and locations for the array of Web 2.0 tools we may wish to employ in a class, we now have a single platform through which our classes can collaborate and utilize these tools: one logon; one URL. And, we can embed waves into our learning management system.

The most exciting uses of Wave, I believe, are the ones that break down classroom walls and institutional barriers. Just as we showed in joining classes between IT Sligo and UIS, there are no international or institutional boundaries with Wave. The collaboration potential is as broad as the Web itself. It is both a synchronous and asynchronous tool with live video, chat and language translation capabilities. As with all wikis, a history is kept of all activities for asynchronous review. With these capabilities, I see the opportunity to easily:

1. Join classes within an institution. For example, a biology class could meet with an ethics class. The students could conduct a case study related to bio-ethics, merging the classical ethics approach with the high-tech aspects of cutting edge science. The faculty members could encourage the discussion and probing of issues that arise in the ethical pursuit of science.
2. Join classes across institutional boundaries. For example, a 19th century American history class at one institution could join with a US Civil War history class at another institution for a couple of weeks to interact on the topic of the Lincoln presidency. The faculty members could encourage their students to engage with students in the other class to gain a breadth and depth of perspectives on the topic that would not normally be part of either class.
3. Join foreign language classes. An English class in China could meet with a Chinese class in the UK. Cultural as well as language learning could take place.

The opportunities are endless. For the first time, the technology is in place to easily accomplish this kind of collaboration at the instructor and individual class level. In many institutions, creating a brief collaborative module can be done by the instructor without time-consuming proposals, governance reviews, and inhibiting technological issues. It is no more complex than arranging for a guest speaker to address your class. But, in this case, you are reaching out anywhere on the globe (or the campus) to create a planned (or spontaneous) collaboration that add depth and richness to the learning in your class.

schroeder.ray[AT]uis.edu or rayschroeder[AT]googlewave.com

References

Schroeder, R, Mulligan, B, & Conlan, S. (2010). Waving the google flag for inter-institutional class collaborations. e-Mentor, 7(1), ISSN 1731-6758. Also available online: http://www.e-mentor.edu.pl/33,723,Waving_the_Google_Flag_forInter-institutional_Class_Collaborations.html
Trapani, G. (2010). The Complete guide to google wave [First Edition]. Retrieved from http://completewaveguide.com/guide/The_Complete_Guide_to_Google_Wave

Teacher quality: how to get more of it. Plus numerous presentations by Dylan Wiliam.

Dylan Wiliam gave a great talk at the 2007 ALT Conference (there are links lower down). Many of Wiliam's presentations are available from his web site. The text of a March 2010 talk to a conference organised by the Spectator magazine - Teacher quality: how to get more of it [8 page DOC, extensively referenced] - develops some of the themes in the ALT-C talk, albeit without a technology slant. Excerpt:

"If we are serious about improving the quality of our education system to meet the increasing demands of the world of work, then we need a culture change. No longer can we accept that once one has been teaching five or ten years, one is “good to go”. Teaching is such a complex craft that one lifetime is not enough to master it, but by rigorously focusing on practice, teachers can continue to improve throughout their career. From teachers, therefore, we need a commitment—not to attending a certain number of hours of professional development per year—but a career-long commitment to the continuous improvement practice, and an agreement to develop in their practice in ways that are likely to improve outcomes for their students."

For the ALT-C talk "Assessment, learning and technology: prospects at the periphery of control" use these links: slides and video of the talk, captured as an Elluminate Live! session [~75 MB]. Text transcript [75 kB PDF]. Slides [400 kB PDF]. MP3 recording [12 MB].

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.

Jonathan Zittrain explains Ronald Bowes's work on the Facebook membership list

Here is a very clear explanation of how Ronald Bowes stripped out, aggregated, and republished a large number of Facebook users' already public data, along with some well-informed comments about whether or not it matters. In short:

• it was only to be expected;
• it probably does not matter all that much;
• caveat "emptor";
• if you change your privacy settings on the web, your previously public data may well be for ever out there beyond your control;
• this is good example of the generative nature of the Web.

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.