This post is about part of my H800 course with the OU. We are asked:

1. What is your experience of being a learner? The question implies a separate state that I do not accept. My learning is now inextricably linked to the rest of me and is not separable. Technology has for me cut the restraints of time and place that used to confine learning: this is about emancipation perhaps.

2. What tools and resources do you use? Click on the link that is above and you will see my crude attempt. Again we seem to be asked to separate learning form other activities, but I do not do this in life. I sit here at my laptop watching preparations for YMG and completing course materials and playing a game in the background, and just checking on the weather for a trip later today…multitasking merges our worlds and our landscapes

3. What are your views on different technologies?

I found them difficult to group and was surprised by home many tools I used. No wonder that I have so little time…no wonder that this course is in a perpetual state of catching up.

I think that we have an increasing choice of tools that are easier and friendlier to access, can anyone remember using JANET?

4. Can you think of examples where technology has made a significant difference to the way you learn?

My learning is more diffuse, merged in with other aspects of my life and moving seemingly without much effort from the formal to the informal. I am freed to learn whenever and wherever I wish. I am bereft if cut from the net and go to some length to reconnect. I would find it hard to afford the cost and time involved in studying for my Masters if it involved going to Milton Keynes. I would have to spend time in the library stacks locating, reading and note taking. Technology has set me free. What about you?

We are then asked to go on and explore bad experiences, but I am not sure I can think of any apart from my frustratingly slow and old desktop in my seminar room. I resort to prayer, brute force and lots of restarts. I would be interested to hear about anyone who finds technology impedes learning.

Change in Higher Education

Foucault tells us that power is "a complex strategic situation in a given society [social setting]". In terms of Higher education it is worth thinking about this.

I find it helpful to think of power as ‘authority’ which in simple terms seems to be power that is in some way legitimate. The question really is whether there is a change in the authority relations within Higher Education and to what extent these are driven by technological changes in the way that Education might be delivered or contrastingly the way that the authority relations drive the choice of technology; in essence what is promoted within a given institution. In order to examine this further though we would need to look at the way that there might be change that is not directly the effect of technology but about a change in the ‘social setting’.

Higher education has, I think, undergone just such a change. Higher education used to be the preserve of the few; I can distinctly remember my first lecture as an undergraduate, from the Vice Chancellor, which started with, ‘You are the few, the happy, select, chosen few, in the top 5%...’ In 1939 about 2% of the age cohort (mostly drawn from the male side) might have gone on to Higher Education…the figure is now nearer 40%? That is in the context of the UK, the contrast in India or China is even greater. This forms part of an historical trend in recent centuries to ever greater levels of formal education. The question is what causes this change.

This is part of the work for my H800 course. We are asked to read Read Web 2.0 for Learning and Teaching in Higher Education by Tom Franklin and Mark van Harmelen on behalf of the Observatory on Borderless Higher Education, and then answer as below. Reflecting on this it is a traditional top down task dressed up in web technology in itself. But then maybe it is that for which we pay.

1. What proportion of people in different age groupings are doing more than reading the Web? (See the table on page 6.) I thought this rather interesting, see below for my interpretation of the data. I had previously supposed that the older fifth of the population (placed in one group here??) would have been more active. I also wondered if within any given group of contributors what the relative size and frequency of contributions were. There is other evidence which suggests that this might be quite disproportionate with some very frequent contributors and others who ‘pop something in’ from time to time.

2. What does this suggest about the experience of Web 2.0 that the majority of users have? Does it embody the claimed characteristics of Web 2.0 or is it closer to those of Web 1.0? (See section 2.5 of the report.) The suggestion is clearly that many users of Web 2 actually function at a web 1 level, there ‘contribution’ to the common weal is not readily apparent. It would be interesting to explore in greater depth the barriers to becoming a contributor. On one level some do not wish to develop an online persona due to personal preference, constraints of time and so on. However there is also evidence to suggest that users feel constrained form participating, worried that they might cause offence or upset some higher level debate of which they are unaware. Some, certainly amongst my students, are still finding their academic voice. It might also be that participation is not encouraged; one might suspect that this is all to do with the power relations in Higher Education. For example Wikipedia is widely held to be not to authoritative…and yet at times speaks with greater authority than many peer reviewed articles http://bit.ly/pTGp so one might wonder if what we see here is a power shift, with those losing power making loud complaint.

3. Do the reports of projects using ICT at the universities of Warwick, Leeds, Brighton, Edinburgh and Klagenfurt provide evidence in support of Martin Weller’s view that universities are creating a centralised and top-down version of technology in current applications to teaching and learning? In as much as several examples are ‘walled gardens’ yes: this keeps all knowledge and information inside the Universities control. This is something that I have discussed before, on courses that I tutor there was a migration of students from Monitored forums in First Class to a free forum using Facebook: the origins of the original break were because posts were being censored by the moderators (for containing critical comments about tutors, and this was quite clearly their expected role so does not reflect on them personally). Some tutors were actively engaged in discussing ways of preventing the formation of breakaway groups and there were clear issues about power and ownership involved. Institutions have a prime objective of self preservation: to let go too much might prejudice this.

We are under control!

As part of our H800 course we use First Class (FC). This can be used as an agent of control over students and tutors alike. Consider these functions (much loved by many tutors)

1. It is easy to collect posts by any individual together so working out how much we have done is made simple.

2. There is the power to delete messages by anyone with the right priviledges (not sure htis has been used on H800 but it is quite defitely used elsewhere).

3. Even if the student does not write they leave clear and easily observed footprints. WHo has opened a post and whether they have downloaded anything is easy to see.

4. Outside of First Class it is easy to see who has signed in and when they last did so.

The fact that the new Moodle Platform may not replicate some of these functions is casuing distress to some tutors. SO we might choose to assume the current VLE is used as an agent of hierarchical control, at least to some extent. Here is a question: does the INteractive WHiteboaard fulfil the same function in school. Is the IWB an agent of control, sucking in the minds and eyes of the pupils like some sort of sick hypnosis?

SO now I am trying to think about Web2 and power. We have a very current example unfolding in front of our eyes in Tehran. the BBC http://is.gd/1497Z amongst others is reporting the role played by Web 2 technologies in spreading 'knoweledge' . Twitter delayed its upgrade apparently after a request not to dirupt its role in acting a chanel of communication http://is.gd/149dn speaks of this. This is knowledge creation taken out of the halls of academia and into the world. Knowledge truth and falsehood all revealed to our gaze. WHat is suprising me is that the purportedly powerful, the ruling elite, appear to be unable to effectively silence this event. Restrictions on journalists, closing down of services and feeds and the young in Tehran still manage to carry on twittering. There must be despots the world over who are looking on with interest and not a little concern. In my H800 course I am menat to be citing form previous activities, here I am citing from the current: but I think it fundamentally supports the notion that Web2 is shifting the way we learn and the way 'knowledge' is created.

Thinking about the history of Higher education it is possible to see a tension between encouraging what we might loosely call ‘free thought’ and enforcing academic conformity. I suspect but cannot easily demonstrate that this tension is not new, but is probably as old as Higher Education itself.

I think it is possible to argue that Web 2 (using the term broadly) tips the balance of academic power towards ‘free thought’. On H800 we have encountered a variety of tools and articles which support this, from this I am selecting two. My first is Wikipedia and Baker’s article in the Guardian. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/apr/10/wikipedia.internet) . Obviously we now have access to information which was perhaps available before, but was certainly not so easy to access. However Wikipedia is not just opening up access to knowledge, it is passing control of ‘knowledge’ from the many to the few. Web 2 is changing the way knowledge is stored and safeguarded. Wikipedia offers the chance for each and every one of us to add our bit to the commonwealth of what we know. More to come…

H800 Week 17 Activity 1a

Week 17 1a video

We look at this video

This is a video with which I am very familiar, I used it as a student on E891 (educational research) to challenge the consensus view on what research was.

The suggestion is that you try listening to the video without the sound:

It had never occurred to me to mess with the medium: though as someone who believes there is a useful message in ‘The medium in the MassAge’ it should have occurred to me. It would have been interesting to start with just the sound track and see what response that evoked (but then that is the musician in me).

The messages for me in this video are:

1. The ‘traditional distributive’ approach to HE (and by implication economics) in particular is something less than perfect

2. That these students are in a time of change (but they are ethnographers I think a interesting group of people who think carefully about evidence and behaviour)

3. That technology does have an impact, some students study times seem very short compared to the hours I put in a just computerised era. (I was not a ‘hardworking’ student)

4. Technologies might be used to address some of the real world problems but we have seen other technologies as being the saving of the world before.

With the sound off the message for me is about anachronistic approaches to learning. The hall is empty, stripped of any feeling, sad lonely isolated damp like the main hall in a great old castle (see above). Imagine if you can what this space would have been like packed with a mass of smelly, raucous humanity with all the injustices and glories, the victories and defeats, joys and pathos that comprised Medieval Society. SO different to the Heritage sanitised, empty soulless space neatly presented on for you to view.

I can remember the first time I got to university the thrill of sitting in a large lecture hall and listening to some very distant (quite eminent) professor…profess. Then as now I can fall asleep almost anywhere and did so at about 40 minutes, 2/3 of the way through the opening remarks. SO even full of life the lecture hall (now replaced by the podcast?) was dead in the water.

When we come to the student messages to whom do they think they are speaking…’the establishment’? If so who are the people who make up this group (some sort of special tribe?) or is the group created by the on looking students themselves, their own social construction. Or is this addressed to the world…if so it means the connected world since this video demands an internet connection.

The messages seem to say this is my life and I do not like it much, but it is better than the lives of many (many of whom will not see the message). That this is how I live and it is not always so good.

Then in the final ‘chapter’ technology shows how the rescue of the students and the world (by implication) can be made, but this is irritatingly contrasted with a 19^th century quote from Josiah Bumstead. Of course all the students were doing was writing on their own ‘chalkboards’ and then using video to display to a worldwide audience.

I assume lots of us will find this mirror of the first video

All this casts my mind back to the 'disestablishment' of my youth. It might be worth thinking about what is said in Illich's introduction to 'De schooling Society'

It may also be interesting to compare the sensible and careful ethographic research in the given video with 'another brick in the wall': this is of course not 'research'.

I hope this will evolve and plan to post to my blog I have already made this post 3 times and it is getting boring constantly deleting and adding to it. There will also be the notes I was supposed to write.