Mind the Gap

It has recently come to my attention that those of us who work in professional development, particularly in schools and universities cf industry, are missing a rather large boat. A huge, glaring boat.

Generally if you are an educator in a university or school, you have a fairly extensive list of restrictions you are working with whenever you attempt to do something new and/or innovative with your teaching practice. You have both institutional and governmental red tape to comply with, administrative processes to follow, institutional structures, set content and/or assessment etc etc. Change is difficult to effect. There are many rogues and cowboys out there doing cool stuff regardless, but generally, as an industry education is far from agile and conducive to innovative practice.

But – professional development (as an entity in education) is almost entirely unregulated. Almost none of these restrictions apply to us when we are designing training and PD programs. And yet this is an almost universally wasted opportunity. We fill our PD programs with face to face workshops that are generally only a computer click or two away from a lecture. Powerpoint presentations. Paper handouts. We’re presented with a situation which perhaps more than any other scenario in education facilitates truly innovative design, and we’re dropping the ball rather badly.

Now I am aware this is partially a market demand thing. Most people who are the consumers of professional development have the workshop model as their primary concept and this tends to be the expected and requested model. But – somebody has to start changing the status quo somewhere. We should be taking advantage of this opportunity to start a trickle of creative thinking, innovative practice and cool stuff, not biding our time with the same old. Coffeecourses was kind of a nod in this direction on my part, but we still have a long way to go.

Now excuse me while I go write a conference presentation on this. I’ll make sure you all get a printout of my slides.

Apr 04 2013

3 Comments

Edtech, Higher education

The problem with educational design (+ the WDC)

Once upon a time, I was a teacher. Probably quite a few (most?) of you reading either were or are as well. And while teaching is a varied and movable feast of a profession, one thing can be taken more or less for granted, and that is that pretty much every day for at least part of it, you will be teaching. You’re a teacher, you do teaching, simple, no?

Nowadays I do something rather intangibly named ‘academic development’, and I’ve just been seconded into a gig on a SAF-funded project titled ‘educational design’ (all part of the same semantic quagmire). However, if we follow the same nomenclature logic as teaching, the profession should actually be called ‘A bunch of meetings, planning and administration, some testing, making Moodle quizzes for people and sometimes you might get to go to a conference’.

The problem with educational design is that we spend so little time actually designing education.

I am well aware that higher education throws up quite a lot more red tape than K12 education, but most of the time universities are in danger of project managing themselves into the ground. There’s an awful lot of talking about deliverables that sound like doing something, cf actually doing something, and very little abounds that really looks like innovation. So – as an antidote to this, I’ve just tossed up a Weekly Design Challenge project, in which for an hour or so each week we tackle a pedagogical design problem, in a sort of conceptual hackerspace.

Functionally it’s not dissimilar to the daily quest idea – a short repeated task that keeps your hand in and ups your skills and reputation. It also neatly solves the problem of being able to show something tangible when people ask ‘can we see an example of an innovative unit?’ (because when you tell people they have to innovate that’s invariably the first question they ask). It’s also not far removed from Google’s 20% time I suppose, although it’s depressing to think that we need to specifically allocate time to do the thing that’s in our job title.

Will it work? Who knows. But at least it’s doing something.

Apr 02 2013

3 Comments

Higher education, Presentations

#UCSaffire

I’ve been a bit slack about getting this up here given it was a couple of weeks ago, but better late than never, yes? At any rate, SAFFIRE was a festival of innovation-y things and general pot-stirring hosted by UC as part of their SAF-funded initiatives. A few of us who are known for liking to poke the beehive (was in good company with @marksmithers, @type217 and @jonpowles) were invited to present on whatever tickled our fancy. My presentation focused on getting outside of the higher education echo chamber and taking some cues from the ways other places were approaching innovation. The annoying thing is that I presented by live-drawing some ‘slides’ using Screenchomp (an iOS app from the same guys who make Camtasia), but the sharing feature completely failed and now I can’t get at the recording at all to even screenshot some highlights for you. So instead, you get the non-visual Cliff’s notes version. Enjoy.

What if we thought like game designers?

Academia (and most forms of education really) have a rather insane reliance on the written and spoken word as method of delivery. But – if you look at games like Angry Birds, they manage to conduct the entire experience including all the necessary instruction without using a single word. Everything is visual. Would you be able to express the last thing you wrote (paper, topic notes etc) in a purely visual form?

For some inspiration from people who can, check out Dance Your Thesis: http://gonzolabs.org/dance/.

What if we thought like product developers?

Let’s pretend that Apple, prior to bringing out the iPad, had asked people what they wanted in a tablet device. They probably would have said they wanted a nice physical keyboard, an input device, probably running a full OS etc. Et voilá, they have created the laptop. People didn’t know that they wanted a touch-only, mobile-OS, non-keyboard device until one came out. It was panned in initial reviews then promptly sold eleventy billion units.

However – the iPad didn’t happen overnight. In the late 80s and early 90s Apple brought out the Newton – a neat little brick of a tablet device that was stylus-only, and had cool things like a mobile OS, handwriting recognition and rudimentary bluetooth. People weren’t really ready for that kind of thing and it was a giant flop, getting axed entirely in the mid-late 90s. But rather than binning it entirely they developed it in the background until they could release something people were ready for at a more opportune time.

Conversely. In higher education we slavishly adhere to the student review process of units – units are judged almost solely on how they fare in the end-of-semester student reviews. Effectively, we keep asking our customers what they want, and what they want by and large looks rather like the type of education we’ve had all along. What we need to start doing is selling them on something they don’t even know they need yet and probably doesn’t look like anything they have a concept of. And if it fails, we need to stop shelving it and start tweaking, redesigning and reimplementing.

What if we thought like MacGyver?

Ah MacGyver. Paragon of mullets, purveyor of duct tape, the stuff of every good 80s woman’s dreams. MacGyver is a champion of kludging, cobbling together anything at hand with his ever-present duct tape to solve any problem he encountered. What he did not do, interestingly, is sit around making a whole bunch of feature requests on the duct tape, pushing them through user acceptance testing and hoping the duct tape would eventually turn into a boat or a bomb or whatever he needed.

We waste so much time in higher ed trying to make our LMSs into something else – if we just added this plugin or patched this or if this looked a bit more green then we could finally do something innovative. I call bollocks. I’m interested in what we can do with what we have at hand, in exactly the form it currently exists. We can already do some really innovative stuff, we just need to turn our approach on its head. There’s nothing stopping us from starting something now, today.

EDITED TO ADD: Several of the questions I fielded following this presentation were along the lines of ‘that’s well and good but how do you marry this with the restrictions lecturers face?’. My response is – someone has to not care about them. The restrictions and red tape are very real and limit a lot of what goes on, but if we all just throw our hands up in disgust and say nothing can be done we’ll never get anywhere. Somebody has to be the cowboy who says ‘bugger that, let’s do some stuff anyway’. May as well be me.

Feb 12 2013

4 Comments

Higher education

How sustainable is sustainable?

Last week I flirted with the idea of nominating for an OLT citation (ultimately, didn’t happen, didn’t get my institutional EOI in on time). What struck me, though, was the requirement that ‘your excellence be sustained over time’. Which means that any project you nominate has to have run for at least three years (two if you’re an ECR), and even that is reduced from last year’s four years.

Four years. Think about it.

Given where we are in terms of education and evolution I find this staggering. Four years ago we were talking about web 2.0 like it was hot stuff. Four years ago virtually nobody had a tablet device and smartphones were kind of optional. Four years ago there was no Minecraft or Instagram or Angry Birds or Kinect. Four years ago you were almost certainly using a different LMS, OERs were a bit meh, and almost nobody was MOOCing and if they were they probably weren’t calling it that. Given this rate of change, how can we justify keeping something exactly the same as it was four years ago?

In higher education we like to talk about sustainability. Generally this can be interpreted as ‘we’re going to throw a stupidly large amount of resources at a temporary project team to implement a flavour-of-the-month impressive-looking project and somehow we need this to exist after all our funding runs out’. Which, in theory, is good, if something is to exist long term it needs to be able to sustain itself sans enormous pots of money and time. But – at what point does longevity become detrimental? What if what we need isn’t sustainability at all, but adaptability?

When I think about my own work, I tend to classify anything that I was doing more than a year ago as old news, outdated or irrelevant and time to move on (which makes my career look a little like the Chinese calendar – the Year of The Moodle Dailies, the Year of Coffeecourses etc etc). The only project of mine that satisfied the criteria for the OLT citation was the Moodle Dailies (by the skin of its teeth, incidentally, and only because I’m classified as an ECR), and as I was writing the EOI it occurred to me how ‘old news’ it feels to me. A Twitter conversation with @catspyjamasnz on the Moodle Tool Guide showed I’m not the only one:

@sthcrft excellent nice when something you did 2,5 years ago lives on. I mean in internet age, #moodletoolguide‘s like a dinosaur…

— Joyce Seitzinger (@catspyjamasnz) February 11, 2013

By getting caught up in the concept of sustainability and requiring ‘excellence to be sustained’ over multiple years, are we creating a bigger problem than we’re solving? I’m left wondering what will happen if we don’t acknowledge that adaptability and flexibility may trump longevity. Universities are already dangerously outdated in many ways – an obsession with sustainability may just tip us over into irrelevance.

Nov 01 2012

8 Comments

Education

Dropping tablets and other edu-memes

So this article has been doing the rounds today. TL;DR version: One Laptop Per Child dropped a bunch of tablet devices off in an Ethiopian village and left the kids to it to see if they would learn to read. What I find interesting is the extraordinary number of assumptions and cultural memes around education inherent in the project, which to me are symptomatic of endemic thinking generally in education. I thought it was worth unpacking a few of these:

Learning doesn’t happen without teachers

The fact that this project was designed as a rogue experiment illustrates how widespread the notion is that learning is something specific that happens in a school with facilitation by teachers (otherwise, why bother making a point of their absence?). Apparently the concept that kids might learn on their own without input is completely alien and requires an experiment to find out if it can actually happen.

Learning only means certain things

I found it quite telling that the tablets were ‘preloaded [with] alphabet-training games, e-books, movies, cartoons, paintings, and other programs’ and locked down to prevent most kinds of customisation or ‘non-intended use’ (props to the kids for swiftly working out how to hack around this). Not only does this indicate that those running the project felt the need to so heavily direct the kids’ potential interactions and learning experiences with the devices, it highlights how ingrained our thinking is around what constitutes learning. Literacy. Reading. Etc. No non-serious games were loaded on the devices, and I’ll hazard a guess no internet connectivity was provided. Obviously literacy is important (although see my point below) but the rather narrow definition of ‘learning’ that was provided for in the design of this project I find frankly astonishing. And what bothers me is that the results – where kids quickly designed their own learning pathways through bypassing restrictions – will probably not result in anyone reconsidering this. I very much doubt that any repeat (or similar) of this project will result in the devices being configured or preloaded any differently. The success of this project still appears to be measured solely by the fact that kids started to learn to read, not by the fact they learned to thwart restrictive software and hack into an OS.

We must fix the broken people

I’ll preface this one by saying I am no sociologist, linguist or expert in cultural studies. However. I find it strange that the idea of education in other cultures generally (and this project specifically) is approached as a deficit model according to western concepts. The students in this project were ‘poor’ and had ‘no access to schooling’. The medium for both determining and teaching literacy appeared to be English. But who are we to assume that other cultures have the same attitudes to and definitions of what constitutes learning, education and literacy? The concept of westerners appearing in another country to ‘fix the natives’ or the ‘poor kids’ by bestowing them with western technology and principles just doesn’t sit well with me. The article uses the quote ‘if they can learn to read, they can read to learn’ – but does this hold true in a non-western linguistic tradition? How is the written word approached in Ethiopian culture?

We must set some goals and measure them

It strikes me that both the expectations and the metrics used to measure outcomes in this project were remarkably shallow. When first delivered, the project founder thought the kids would just ‘play with the boxes’ and expressed surprise when they got the devices out and powered them up. Way to set the bar low. These aren’t cats or babies, these are children with vast cognitive capabilities. Then, after several months, a measure of success was determined to be the fact that kids were singing the alphabet song. The fact that a child can recall and sing a song verbatim is indicative of approximately nothing other than the fact that kids are natural imitators. Why not instead investigate the analytic, problem-solving and creative thinking abilities that were utilised and developed in working around the anti-customisation software as a measure of outcomes? I question both the need to have defined goals at all and the limited nature of the goals and metrics in this project. Why not just stop at dropping off the devices and seeing what happens?

The last paragraph of the article kind of sums these issues up for me:

Giving computers directly to poor kids without any instruction is even more ambitious than OLPC’s earlier pushes. “What can we do for these 100 million kids around the world who don’t go to school?” McNierney said. “Can we give them tool to read and learn—without having to provide schools and teachers and textbooks and all that?”

I’m not convinced that we are going to see any kind of significant changes in education while this kind of thinking still holds. Our unwillingness to redefine the parameters of education is viral – it’s incredibly pervasive on a global scale. And until it starts to change, projects like these aren’t going to yield anything more than superficial results that get keynoted at shiny edtech events.

Oct 09 2012

9 Comments

CFHE12, Higher education

Fire up the moocmobile, Jerry, we’re joining the bandwagon

So I’ve signed up for a MOOC (I’m still undecided at which point I’ll start decapitalising that acronym). Having thought for a while now that I should at least attempt a mooc (turns out that point is now) before whinging about the genre at large, since if there’s one thing that irks me it’s people either complaining about or advocating for something they haven’t experienced (conversations around games-based learning by people who refuse to game themselves, for instance). Now I am well aware there are moocs and then there are moocs (cMOOC/xMOOC distinction etc but I have very little patience for adjectival lettering these days), and for a couple of years now I’ve had half an eye on what, to me, are proper moocs – the #ds106s and #change11s of the world. Since I have no particular desire to point criticism in that direction it might seem a little misguided that the mooc I’ve signed up for is #cfhe12, a Siemens/Downes offering. However, I did spend some time last week trawling the likes of Coursera and I just couldn’t do it. Most of the courses had descriptions like this one:

The class consists of 1 to 2 hours of lecture each week, which are made up of videos that are generally shorter than 10 minutes each. Each video contains integrated quiz questions. There are also weekly standalone exercises that are not part of the video lectures and a (non-optional) final exam.

I’ve had enough lecture/quiz/exam/essay courses to last a lifetime, and I can’t bring myself to suffer another one just for the sake of confirming what I already suspect about mainstream moocs. End of last week I came across #cfhe12 via the twitterverse, which seemed a much better fit for how I do things, so here we are.

I feel like I should be up-front about my motivations for doing this, which are equal parts curiosity and street cred. I don’t intend to participate beyond dipping in and out and discussing the odd thing here and there with a bunch of people whose opinions I value, which conveniently is exactly the type of participation suggested. This is in stark contrast to most mainstream moocs which appear to be desperately asserting themselves as ‘traditional courses’ and hence talking about things like ‘attrition’. It strikes me that if you are going to take something that conceptually doesn’t scale well (traditional edu) and try and stick an M on it (‘massification’ is another trendy that’s coined itself lately and which also irks me to no end), you really have no room to complain about the M also applying itself to attrition rates.

Anyway. I’ve had some mixed feelings about #cfhe12 thus far. I like the deconstructed, decentralised, DIY approach, the fact that many of the readings are blog posts and media articles (cf journal articles) and the fact that several of my Aus HE peers are also taking the course. I was not so enamoured with the registration process, site navigation etc although this seems to be sorting itself out now. I was pleased to see at least one member of senior executive from Aus HE enrolled to participate (@drpievann). I’m currently debating whether to get involved with the introductions discussion board – I’m never convinced that a ‘hi my name is’ is actually a better snapshot of a person than you can get from trawling their Twitter feed or blog, and threaded discussion forums, regardless of LMS, universally suck for that kind of thing. I’d rather meet someone out in their own space and converse with them that way.

So – watch this space, or don’t. I have no idea if or how #cfhe12 will fly for me but there’s one way to find out.

Oct 05 2012

5 Comments

Higher education

The televised will not be a revolution

by turquoise boy

This was originally going to be a post on the veritable cornucopia of buzzword that is MOOCs, but as @marksmithers rightly pointed out there’s not a whole lot to say. MOOCs (in the mainstream sense) are what they are – content-push delivery systems unchanged from standard university educational practices, offering no credentials for no money in a culture that supports the proliferation of neither.

MOOCs (and you can substitute any edu-buzzword flavour of the month here) get rather a lot of screen time (‘televised’ is a bit of a stretch given how the media functions these days, but who am I to pass up an excellent title on a technicality?) claiming they are going to revolutionise higher education. Now the implication here of course is that if there is going to be a revolution you’d damn well better be part of it or you’ll be rapidly rendered obsolete. Thus we find ourselves in the current situation where universities are either scrambling to get on the bandwagon, or publicly justifying non-participation. The significant problem with both of these approaches, however, is something I found summed up neatly in this article this morning.

While mostly commenting on an unrelated topic, Stokes’ comment ‘You are not entitled to your opinion. You are only entitled to what you can argue for’ struck me as interesting, along with his assertion that we should not be substituting opinions and matters of personal taste for expertise and research. Following this principle, we should expect that those who identify educational trends as innovative and revolutionary and subsequently are responsible for implementing them are education experts, perhaps with education degrees and certainly with a background in teaching and learning. Those who have worked in universities, however, will understand how rarely this is actually the case.

Frequently, the media commentary on these trends comes from senior executive, and usually presents with a business focus rather than a discussion of the educational issues. Implementation often falls to management units with a ‘strategic’ focus and involving those with backgrounds in management, consultancy, IT, project administration, marketing and so on (@djplaner offers some good comments on the implementation of fads in universities in this post). As a result, the emphasis tends to be on hype, fast-tracked implementation and deliverables rather than a critical analysis of educational value and long-term outcomes. One has to wonder how much of what we’re arguing for is based on in-depth educational research and expertise rather than the opinion of business or marketing strategy.

I am wary that this repeated hype cycle of implementation and attrition will not revolutionise anything, and in fact may result in a revolution vacuum (or are we already there?). As long as it happens in isolation from the conversations we (those of us working in edtech and teaching and learning) are having about what might truly start to change things, I don’t think we’re headed much of anywhere at all.