Category Archives: Technology

A note on technology, outsourcing and the privatisation of higher education


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 8 November 2010

Charles Arthur wrote in Saturday’s Guardian that the UK Government shouldn’t hang on Google’s every word. Arthur makes some interesting points around the increasing privatisation of public spaces and assets. [Although he does not explicitly make this connection, I am happy so to do.]

  • He notes issues of governance and evidence-for-policy, in the face of progressive use of technology [rather than technology-as-progress]: “sometimes there’s a temptation to think that because a big, successful company tells you something’s wrong, that it really must be”.
  • He notes issues of technology-as-progress that risks catalysing enclosure of the commons by our decision-makers, with PM David Cameron arguing that “we are reviewing our IP laws, to see if we can make them fit for the internet age”, and David Willetts, the Minister with responsibility for higher education adding “The US rule is that ‘anything man has invented under the sun you should be able to patent’. That’s something we do wish to investigate.”
  • He notes that there is limited critique of the role of technology in defining the state and its services: “But ministers and prime ministers are in thrall to those who would sell them technology.”

A key point that Arthur makes is about the productive value of opening-up, rather than closing down the web through overt institutional policy and governance. A central point here is that decision-makers are able to take action based on a view of technology as a function of systemic, socio-cultures, that are historic, rather than by seeing technology as a-historic and neutral. In referring to the opening-up of UK data under the last Labour Government and linking it to a view that open agendas spur innovation, Arthur argues that “There’s a lesson here: Berners-Lee spurned the idea of commercialising his invention of the web, in favour of giving it away; and everyone, including government, has benefited enormously.” The lessons of technology-in-education demand a political view rather than one which is driven by economics.

This gave me pause-for-thought, around what we give away, what we control, and what we open up, in terms of the recent Educause and NACUBO white paper on Shaping the Higher Education Cloud. The paper highlights how the Cloud offers hope for efficiencies and economies of scale, but that HE will need to overcome its “long tradition of building its own systems and tendency to self-operate almost everything related to IT”, as if culturally-specific norms, operations and strategies are inherently bad. The paper mentions the core mission and competencies of HE, hinting that these are not informed by technology [and neither do those norms inform the development of technology], and moreover that technology is socially, culturally and historically neutral, and can therefore be left to “experts”, or at least the managers who control the labour of those experts.

The argument given for efficiency in the face of mounting economic pressures, for flexibility in the cloud, for the commoditization of IT, makes no attempt at meaningful critique of what services, systems or data should be in the Cloud or why. It makes no attempt to focus upon an institution as a complex socio-cultural set of spaces, within which technology and those who work with it are situated. The paper highlights how privatisation of technology and infrastructures that support public assets like Universities are vital. Moreover, it highlights HE-as-consumption: as the consumption of content and data; and as the consumption of services. It says nothing of the lived experience of HE; it says nothing of the lived production of HE by those who work within it; it says nothing of the open engagement of those within HE with a range of stakeholders; it says nothing of the co-operative production of academic forms that are socio-cultural and which incorporate technology. In stating that by moving infrastructure, software and platforms-as-services to the cloud, universities can then concentrate on core competencies, the paper speaks of homogenisation, where the only choices on outsourcing are based on cost and risk, rather than academic practices and forms.

Whilst the paper says little about wider issues of enclosure of the open web, through Apps and the logic of private clouds, it does at least argue for federated access. However, identity management hosted by a broker for a set of private companies offers different perspectives from those negotiated and managed in the public domain, in co-operation. If my identity is in the cloud, and I am separated from my institutional ties through the dislocation of people and place, what does that do to my alienation from my work through myself? As I am further virtualised, and my identity commodified for the use of brokers or aggregators, what does that mean for the value of my labour and the control of my self or access to my self, whether by me alone or in conjunction with others? Separation rather than co-operation is at risk here, in the logic of outsourcing.

In this, as with so much analysis of technology-in-education, there is a chronic lack of critique. The paper argues for the “promise of cloud computing to transform higher education learning and business processes”, and yet offers no evidence for the former, or for systems that might be migrated [although the risk of payroll being managed in the Cloud gets a mention]. Does technology really transform learning? This is a classic positivist position, and one similar to traditional, historical arguments for the productive efficiencies of technology that underpin progress and ‘growth’. In this, other unsubstantiated statements are made for green facilities and the value of integration, whilst there is no meaningful focus on the impact of our outsourcing of carbon emissions or of our resource use. In spite of this, the key to the logic of outsourcing and the cloud is given on page 8: “the ability of cloud providers… to substitute capital for labour – makes it unlikely that higher education can compete on cost”. Here, the logic of technology within capitalism is laid bare, and it is reiterated on page 15, where the stepped-plan of what institutions should move to the cloud develops with no focus on culture and/or meaning, but simply on economic efficiency and ‘growth’. [Academic engagement is first mentioned on page 19.]

This demands a further reading of Postone’s Time, Labour and Social Domination. Where technology is divorced from academic endeavour and seen neutrally through a purely fiscal lens, it can be used to define the privatisation and marketisation of higher education, irrespective of that sector’s role as a key state asset. In this, the discourse of other technologically-driven innovations, like the personal learning environment needs critique against a prevailing libertarian standpoint, and in connection with co-operative and open, academic engagement. The fear is that an uncritical treatment of innovations that might be seen to be against the institution and against the public, and for the separation of private, individual consumption [including the PLE and OERs], work for neoliberal agendas of the marketisation of that which is ‘technologically-neutral’. Technology-in education has to be analysed in terms of critical, social theory, rather than simply economics.

This is an emerging crisis of the public space, which re-focuses our need to raise major questions of technology-in-education. Where are the spaces for partnerships of students-as-producers, or communities-as-producers with institutions or academic staff? What is the idea of the university where HE seems to be focused on consumption of data, networks, learning, resources, and the curriculum, and migrating this consumption to the cloud? Who should control the means of production in HE? There seems to be little space for denial of the dominant logic of outsourcing-as-privatisation, or technology-as-efficiency-for-learning. Within a logic of higher education as ancillary of business, seen in the Coalition’s cuts agenda and its response to the Browne Review, the privatisation of institutional functions risks HE becoming an edufactory for training/economic provision alone. Harvey saw this emerging in 1986, when he argued that universities were moving from being “guardians of national knowledge to ancillaries in the production of knowledge for global corporations”. As public control of HE as a public good is marginalised, and as we become less well able to think through the relationships of our local activities to global ecology and resources, this risk is amplified.

So I wonder, is the outsourced space one in which democratic governance can be imposed, in the face of the logic of markets? Is the outsourced space one which furthers the enclosure of the commons? Is the outsourced space about marketising higher education for efficiency of technological services before it is privatised for the consumption-of-training-as-learning? Does the outsourced space further remove us from the ecological damage of our resource-intensified life-worlds? Can our work towards open educational models help provide alternatives?


The relationships between technology and open education in the development of a resilient higher education


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 4 November 2010

I thought it would be helpful to write-up that which I spoke about at Open Education 2010 in Barcelona, yesterday. The slides are available on my slideshare, and the paper is also available here on learnex. I spoke without slides, but will create a screenr presentation to cover the main points. You might also like to read this alongside Stephen Downes’ Huffington Post article on Deinstitutionalising Education.

This is pretty much what I said, and it is my story of the last 12 months.

This talk has one caveat and six points. The six points focus on: critique; transformation; sustainability; hope; cracks; and openness.

The caveat is that this paper is presented in the policy and strategy strand of this conference. My role as a reader in education and technology, but also as the academic lead for technology-enhanced learning [TEL] at De Montfort University in the East Midlands of England, enables me to influence institutional policy, practice and strategy. My role is to examine and develop approaches for transforming education and the curriculum within my university. My expertise and experience regards TEL as a part of that transformatory moment of education. But it is not the driver, or the most important element of that moment. My understanding of the place of technology-in-education, and technology-for-open-education informs my approach to policy and strategy. I outline my developing understanding in the six points below.

However, in this developing understanding, one of my previous roles as a researcher and a lecturer in History is important. We need to recover the role of past struggles as we face new crises, to recover the stories of the past, and the radical moments when technology was used to transform education and social relations. This is not a focus on technology and progress, as has been seen in its co-option by a neoliberal educational agenda. Rather it is a focus on technology in the name of progressive, dialogic critiques of our current crises, to suggest and implement alternative moments.

My first point is on critique. Open Education is a critique of our current social forms of higher education. It offers radical moments for the transformation of our lived experiences in higher education. However, through an agenda of consumption, marketisation and commodification, visited through the focus on second-order elements like open educational resources, open education is being subsumed within a dominant paradigm of business-as-usual. This fetishisation of OERs as commodities, as abstracted, intellectual value-in-motion that is to be consumed, diminishes the transformative moment of open education.

My second point is on transformation. The transformative moment of open education is critical because we are in crisis. Climate change, peak oil and resource availability/costs, alongside the  attack on the idea of the public sector in the UK, are symptoms of a deeper crisis of political economy. This is usefully framed by Naomi Klein’s idea of the shock doctrine, where the neoliberal, financialisation crisis is being used to extend business-as-usual and to entrench dominant positions through a focus on economic growth. This is an unsustainable approach. The private and public institutions that catalyse this view are unsustainable. The current forms of higher education are unsustainable. We need to produce transformative moments.

My third point is about sustainability. The hegemonic positions defended through the promise of business-as-usual have assimilated the radical moments of socio-cultural and environmental sustainability. The conversation is now based upon economic growth as sustainability, with a focus on impact measures. Moreover, the radical promise of resilience threatens to be bastardised and turned into a radical conservative focus upon adaptation. In fact the crises we face will overwhelm any attempt to adapt and maintain business-as-usual. Transformatory change should be the focus of resilience. What are we sustaining and why is at issue. Our discussion of OERs linked to economic growth, rather than dialogic encounters with of radical, open education, implicates us in this hegemonic conservation, as it hides the importance of movements of struggle, in the service of the status quo. The status quo is not an option.

My fourth point is about hope. I have hope that new social forms of higher education, and possibly the University, can enable students and teachers to develop the characteristics of resilience and sustainability that are transformatory and emancipatory. These new forms hint at open educational curricula underpinned by radical, critical pedagogy. So we see engagement with student-as-producer, teaching-in-public, pedagogies of excess and hope. The intention  is to enable people to re-cast their lived experiences, and to rethink the production, value and distribution of our common wealth, beyond its accumulation and enclosure by the few. Production is the corollary of consumption. I have hope that we can create radical moments in which we can co-operatively produce our lived experience, rather than simply consuming it.

My fifth point is about cracks. John Holloway argues that it is important to widen the cracks within coercive capitalism, in order to transform moments and institutions for the public good. Open education is a crack in the dominant, neoliberal social forms of higher education. Open education is a crack in the unsustainable models of business-as-usual that exist within higher education. This is important because we are not observing the crisis. We are in the crisis. We are the crisis.

My sixth point is about openness. The theory-in-practice of open education has tremendously empowering, radical moments within it. The struggle for open education is central to transforming our crisis. Open education, open activity, open production, open curricula, open networks, open forms of learning and teaching, are all central to this project. It is important that we develop transformatory moments and re-imaginings of our place in the crisis, and that we openly define and deliver open approaches for resilience and sustainability. We must use open education to reclaim the radical history of education, and technology’s place in education. We must move away from chasing the latest gadget or fetish. We must move away from seeing OERs as value-in-motion, as commodity. We must recover the radical place of technology-in-education from the mundanity of the latest digital development. In this we must revisit and recover the movements and moments of struggle in the past, and the use of technology in those struggles. For me this is a revisiting of the Workers Educational Association, of the Co-operative movements in the UK and in Latin America, of Cuban education after the collapse of the Soviet Union, of community educators like Trapese and the Autonomous Geographers, of anarchist social centres of learning, and of forms of participatory, co-operative education. This is not to say that these are perfect examples, or projects that can be transplanted, but it is to say that they offer radical histories and radical alternatives.

My hope is that we can reclaim open education as a radical moment of struggle, that can transform our experiences in the face of our crises.


The iPad and the essentialism of technology in education


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 8 September 2010

I was taken with Jane Searle’s paper at ALT-C yesterday on social inclusion and justice, in emerging work with disenfranchised traveller communities. She made several points that resonated for me.

  1. Individual technologies are not culturally neutral, but that it assumes a form, linked to social relationships and power, based on their enculturation. So the possibility exists for technology to be appropriated in different ways by separate communities. This connects into the work of Feenberg on techno-essentialism or determinism, where technology is seen to be an end in and of itself, or where it is seen to be neutral in mediating relationships and outcomes, rather than forming part of a socio-cultural environment that exudes power relationships and can be marginalising. Our language in negotiating with people around their use of technology is crucial in enabling them to make sense of the tools, rather than their being told what to do. A separate outcome is that we critique the immanence of technology.
  2. Engagement with technology for social or learning outcomes takes time rather than being a quick fix, or a desperate search for the next tool as a commodity fetishism. Engagement with the frameworks of participatory action research gives us a framework for using technology over-time with communities. We need to fight to work long-term with communities of practice, rather than implementing to achieve the deterministic outcomes we need to satisfy impact-assessors and leaving again. This is a real risk of technologically-driven projects that are not socio-culturally rooted – that they become part of an obsession with short-term, positivist, outcomes-driven agendas.
  3. We need to look for cracks within which we can resist the demands of coercively competitive funding mechanisms, which are linked to governmental whim or that of experts, for short-term impact measures that force us as practitioners or technologists to collude in our own alienation from the subjects of our research/practice. Meaningful impact is social and personal, and true emancipation at this level, rather than simply coercing individuals to gain qualifications for jobs, ought to be our focus.

Jane highlighted the need for a critique of social practices, focused upon the uses to which technology was put, rather than “cooing” of the latest shiny tool. For me, one example is the way in which our view of the iPad is a mirror of our broader critique. Several practitioners have begun to engage in the learning possibilities for the tool, and one programme at Notre Dame in the US is using the tool extensively. However, big questions still surround the technology.

  • Factories in which the iPad is made in China have seen an abuse of workers’ rights, physical injuries and disturbing levels of suicide. To what extent do we dissociate ourselves and our use of this tool from those outcomes? This is a logical outcome of coercive competition, cost-cutting and late modern capitalism. However, we have individual and community agency to put pressure on Apple over these outcomes, and to reject the use of the technology. What should be done?
  • The threat of peak oil is growing, as highlighted in the recent, leaked German military report. Oil and coal are embedded in the production process for the tools that we consume from abroad. Is this sustainable? In this case we also outsource our consumption of carbon to China, without bearing the full cost. Is this morally right?
  • To what extent does the use of the iPad reinforce a pedagogy of comsumption, based in-part on Apple’s focus on Apps based development? This also threatens the idea of the open web, further impacted by the recent Google-Verizon deal. Again these technologies are not neutral – by engaging with them we reinforce others’ power-over us, the dominance of their cultural perspectives, and their enclosure of what was previously more open.
  • A second angle to the pedagogy of consumption is the almost constant need to search for the latest, newest technological innovation. This obsession with the next thing, rather than on enhancing or challenging or reforming the social relationships that alienate or marginalise some, needs to be critiqued. We are so scared of falling behind [what/who?] that we risk abandoning our responsibilities to a wider set of communities, and to a planet that contains finite resources.

Digital inclusion, education and the future of the web


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 6 May 2009

I recently blogged about Social exclusion and digital Britain, focusing upon how Universities should be engaging in partnerships with local communities, in order both to enhance learning literacies that are facilitated by technologies and to help create spaces within which those communities can empower themselves.

Having attended a lunchtime paper on Digital Citizenship, hosted by our LGRU and delivered by Karen Mossberger from the University of Illinois, I’m now convinced that this is more vital. In particular, Karen highlighted how the indicators of poverty also impacted digital citizenship, access to IT and broadband, and information literacy. She highlighted the disenfranchisement of poor neighbourhoods (in Chicago in her studies) and poor minority groups. However, much of her work focused upon a Web1.0 view of the world, with analysis of (PEW-based) data from pre-2003. The technological world has moved on so much more since then, with a focus now upon emerging issues like:

  • Social networks and networked literacy;
  • Mobile technologies;
  • Organisation of niche or issue-related associations, and communities of practice; and
  • Semantic web and cloud computing, that affect the management of networks and content.

Engaging with these emergent issues, the work carried out by NGOs like Amnesty and Oxfam is at once participative, devolved, deliberative, and activist to different people, who are able shape and personalise their involvement within different associations. This personalisation helps build communities of practice that stand beyond local and national government, and exists as a participative activity for different people in different ways. For instance, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, blogs can all be used in conjunction with an organisation’s own website or portal to arrange, report, disseminate and organise. The National Digital Inclusion conference recently kept non-attendees up-to-date using the Twitter hashtag #ndi09, whilst HopeNotHate use their own portal, linked to mobiles and email, to organise electoral activism across the whole East Midlands.

These new ways of working do not necessarily engage the technologically, culturally or politically disenfranchised, but they do offer new models for building social capital and civic engagement. Of course there is scope for those in power to use digital participation to maintain their own traditional agendas. This is witnessed by Number 10′s YouTube channel, and the use of digital data to monitor environmental protesters. This paradigm is also evident in The Future Internet: Web 3.0 presentation hosted by the Learning Technologies team at NUI Galway, which focuses upon how the web and our use of it can enable business and the economy. The danger is that it offers no new ways of working, just ways in which extant companies can gain efficiencies and market themselves to new audiences. There is no radical or progressive hope here.

Perhaps a more hopeful view for the future internet is building social capital and social enterprise, and enabling new communities of practice to grow. This is especially the case for education, where new ways of working and engaging with the emergent issues noted above offer hope for a newer, more radical pedagogy that is built around personally meaningful access, enquiry, mentoring, decision-making and action. This is framed by a promise of enhanced social [educational] capital and our ability to nurture new communities of inquiry. These stand against attempts by established organisations, including lecturers and Universities, to lever old ways of working into the use of new technologies and the new communities of practice that emerge.

These issues need to be addressed in light of the demands for flexibility in curriculum design and delivery, alongside, and not separate from the need for more active engagement with digital inclusion agendas. We have the spaces to discuss issues of power and control, participation and civic responsibility, and these can be led by Universities, as part of an engagement with students, voluntary groups, social enterprises and business. I’m just not sure that a traditional analysis of education, inclusion and the future of the web, focused on traditional models of engagement, development and participation, are relevant or helpful. In inspiring social and educational inclusion, we need are more progressve, radical evaluations, visions and proposals.


Towards a radical manifesto? The Impact of Web 2.0 on HE


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 15 May 2009

I have finally re-read the Report of an independent Committee of Inquiry into the impact on higher education of students’ widespread use of Web 2.0 technologies. From the report I am particularly taken by the following statements/outcomes, which have ramifications for our policy, practice[s] and culture[s]. I am especially interested in the connections between these areas as they impact our ability to re-define a radical pedagogy for empowering our learners, wherever they are on a continuum of engagement with technology. The key is making the world a better place.

1.    The impact of pre-HE pedagogies and technologies

This may be the single most important area that will impact HE practitioners. The report notes two key factors:

“Present-day students are heavily influenced by school methods of delivery so that shifts in educational practice there can be expected to impact on expectations of approaches in higher education”

“The digital divide, the division between the digital ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’, has not been entirely overcome and persists in several dimensions: in access to, and engagement with, technology; the capability of the technology; and in individual competence.”

Issues of marginalisation, disempowerment and disengagement by accident, status or design are still very real. They connect into Helen Milner’s recent work on social inclusion and digital technologies and her Next step for the digital inclusion manifesto. They are also impacted by the development and extension of the precepts within the Early Years Foundation Stage Strategy, which is in itself a manifesto for: inclusion; child-centred practice; productive, learner-defined and owned personal learning environments; a new politics of praxis within and beyond the classroom. The time is ripe for a reappraisal of the value[s] of Bandura, Dewey, Illich, Rorty, integrated with the work of Ronald Barnett.

As digital identities are developed and better understood, as libraries, community centres, social enterprises and schools extend coverage, and as access via mobiles broadens and depends, HE has a duty to ensure that its practitioners are not playing catch-up. This is especially important in the pedagogic cultures that drive programme teams, both in their definition and scoping of curricula, in their involvement of students-as-mentors, and as a result in the power relationships that exist in the learning space that a learner defines. Enabling learners to manage their place in a set of cultures and ask questions at key moments of transition – to their enrolment or registration, in their modes of assessment, in migrating between levels 1 and 2 or between levels 2 and 3 – are critical for good-enough educators who have to support the student in her/his integration of the disparate facets of HE study for her/his own development.

2.    The impact on staff

The report notes that:

“Staff capability with ICT is a further dimension of the digital divide… Tutors are central to development of approaches to learning and teaching in higher education. They have much to keep up with, their subject for example, and developments in their craft – learning and teaching or pedagogy. To practise effectively, they have also to stay attuned to the disposition of their students. This is being changed demonstrably by the nature of the experience of growing up in a digital world.”

Programme teams are crucial in setting a context and ethos within which students can become themselves and succeed. The academic as lone ranger in embedding technologies helps no-one, least of all the student. The student’s integration of the HE and subject environment into their self-concept as a learner who can achieve, demands that programme teams frame their learning activities and subject context around a cohesive digital environment. Too often this is missing at HE.

3.    Developing information literacy

The committee highlight that:

“providing for the development of web-awareness so that students operate as informed users of web-based services, able to avoid unintended consequences. For staff, the requirement is to maintain the currency of skills in the face of the development of web-based information sources”.

The higher-level speaking and writing skills that Bloom developed in his cognitive taxonomy are as relevant today as they were 50 years ago. Flexible pedagogic development, the impact of diagnostic assessment, peer-mentoring and enquiry-based learning are critical here. Equally important is engaging learners in the context and actuality of publishing data and argument for the wider world to utilise and judge. Issues like those raised by JISC Legal are critical in framing such a set of developments, but the reality of information literacy cannot be divorced from the reality of integrating and developing a digital identity. Critically this has to be linked to decision-making and action in the world. Problem-based learning may be a key.

4.    Change in HE

“The world [students] encounter in higher education has been constructed on a wholly different set of norms. Characterised broadly, it is hierarchical, substantially introvert, guarded, careful, precise and measured. The two worlds are currently co-existing, with present-day students effectively occupying a position on the cusp of change. They aren’t demanding different approaches; rather they are making such adaptations as are necessary for the time it takes to gain their qualifications. Effectively, they are managing a disjuncture, and the situation is feeding the natural inertia of any established system. It is, however, unlikely to be sustainable in the long term. The next generation is unlikely to be so accommodating and some rapprochement will be necessary if higher education is to continue to provide a learning experience that is recognised as stimulating, challenging and relevant.”

The last sentence bears rethinking. It should drive all we do in the coming months. At DMU it will certainly shape our re-definition of our e-learning [technology-enhanced learning] strategy and develop a plan its implementation, with our students, and our e-Learning Co-ordinators and Champions. It is critical that we evaluate our professional development approaches and the technologies we support.


Our post-digital priorities: overcoming the neglect of the tutor


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 1 July 2009

A number of national research reports and position statements have been published recently, which impact technology-enhanced practice across the sector. These include:

  1. JISC, Thriving in the 21st century: Learning Literacies for the Digital Age, http://bit.ly/u1Wrb
  2. DEMOS, The Edgeless University http://bit.ly/10pd2r
  3. Department for Business, Innovation and Skills [DBIS], Universities set to go online for millions, http://bit.ly/2lr0S
  4. Report of an independent Committee of Inquiry into the impact on higher education of students’ widespread use of Web 2.0 technologies [CoI], http://bit.ly/J1JMf .
  5. Revised HEFCE strategy: Enhancing learning and teaching through the use of technology, http://bit.ly/JikvC
  6. DCFS and DBIS, Digital Britain: Final Report, http://bit.ly/wdRgb

From the Revised HEFCE strategy, DMU is engaging with how technology-enhanced learning [TEL] can reinforce and extend its distinctive brand, in particular focused on the impact of the learner of the future, personalised learning and business flexibility, on both the business case and service provision. The development of a blueprint for TEL, and the concomitant investment and professional development implications, is central.

In engaging with these issues it is critical that HE is able to make decisions based upon the impact of developments in other areas of statutory and non-statutory education. The reports noted above highlight that HE doesn’t exist in a social or educational vacuum. Whilst current work on evaluating learner experiences helps shape and enhance current practices, future-proofing and planning demands engagement by the sector with progressive pedagogies being embedded in primary education. In particular the Rose Review of the Primary Curriculum and the Early Years’ Foundation Strategy enable HE practitioners to develop a manifesto for the future.

  1. Sir Jim Rose, Independent Review of the Primary Curriculum, http://bit.ly/2eBjX
  2. Becta’s contribution to the Rose Review, http://bit.ly/FOHEp
  3. DfES, Early Years’ Foundation Strategy, http://bit.ly/a0tkK

Pedagogically, Rose and the EYFS frame enabling environments within which structured play, risk-taking and decision-making can take place. There is a developmental focus on the learner taking personalised ownership of the learning pathways s/he wants to follow, framed by a mentoring approach by more experienced others. The addition of ICT as a core competency or “literacy” alongside numeracy and traditional literacy, elevates technological autonomy and agency [what tool to use, when, how and why]. The emphasis on the professional development of teaching teams also shapes or scopes a move towards technological transparency, or engagement in what might be termed a post-digital world.

The ramifications for HE of both a societal and educational move towards high-skilled digital and post-digital practitioners demand attention. In particular, there is a very real danger that we fetishise the learner voice at the expense of the needs of our teaching teams, and that an educational divide between staff and student capabilities, flexibility, autonomy and post-digital agency becomes unmanageable for institutions. In terms of fetishising the student voice, I mean, broadly the extravagant trust, fixation or reverence that is at times shown to it as a concept, without demonstrating the concomitant impact on other stakeholders. The wordle cloud for all the releavnt HE-related text from sources 1 – 6 above is shown at: post-digital HE. The focus on the learner and technology is stark. As is the potentially disastrous, limited focus on staff and staff teams. Whilst the reports all focus on the need for professional development, there is little concrete that is actually presented. At DMU this is now a core focal point, with a key frame-of-reference made by the Committee of Inquiry.

The world [students] encounter in higher education has been constructed on a wholly different set of norms. Characterised broadly, it is hierarchical, substantially introvert, guarded, careful, precise and measured. The two worlds are currently co-existing, with present-day students effectively occupying a position on the cusp of change. They aren’t demanding different approaches; rather they are making such adaptations as are necessary for the time it takes to gain their qualifications. Effectively, they are managing a disjuncture, and the situation is feeding the natural inertia of any established system. It is, however, unlikely to be sustainable in the long term. The next generation is unlikely to be so accommodating and some rapprochement will be necessary if higher education is to continue to provide a learning experience that is recognised as stimulating, challenging and relevant.

The themes arising from an analysis of the reports [1 – 6] are noted below, with key developmental areas. These will form the spine of our approach to technology-enhanced learning for a post-digital world at DMU.

  1. Enhancing our learners’ [post-]digital literacy through our services and curricula [focus on services, curriculum, pedagogic roles, literacies]
  2. Enabling learning environments that frame personalisation of experiences [focus on services]
  3. Developing services that enable students to manage transitions, progression and attendance [focus on autonomy, pedagogic roles, services and progression]
  4. Reappraisal and extension of professional development [focus on pedagogic pedagogic roles, reward and recognition, literacies]
  5. Developing flexible approaches to the curriculum [focus on informal learning, affiliations, business, personalisation, DL]
  6. Extending a distinctive institutional culture and brand [focus on the business case, services, affiliations and open access]

Google, Microsoft and HE: outsourcing the student and staff experience


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 13 August 2009

The issue of outsourcing technology-provision is emerging as a major issue for higher education managers. I know outsourcing has been around for a while – institutions have outsourced data networking and equipment maintenance since the year dot. Moreover, SOAS and Glasgow Caledonian outsourced email to Google in 2007. However, it’s only now that our institutional managers are grappling with the issue of student email provision, and as a result have to recognise the cultural and managerial implications of outsourcing the student and staff experience.

Outsourcing the student and staff user experience is what a pact with, for instance, Google, implies precisely because a Gmail implementation opens up possibilities and pressures for implementing the rest of the Google suite, and thereby changing the face of institutional communication and interaction. The impact on the core business of an institution will be seismic. Whilst such a pact may offer up opportunities for wider associations and networking, it also threatens those areas of an institution that may need to be closed (e.g. data management and processing for awards).

Outsourcing a technological solution has implications: for service provision; for data protection, privacy and confidentiality; for levering institutional, technological extensions [in Google’s case a burgeoning set of apps that have affordances for learning and teaching, rather than simply email]; and for institutional visions/blueprints of learning and teaching, especially where users can opt-in or out. It is critical that we recognise for whom this is being done and why.

There are a number of issues then in the migration of a major technological solution like student email to, say, Google.

  1. The first is the nature of the risk assessment that has been done, linked to the full business case. In fact, is there a full business case that focuses less on cost savings and more on real value? The key focus should be on the relationships between staff, students and resources within appropriate learning communities that are open and/or closed to the institution, programme, or individual. How are these best organised and supported? Outsourcing on cost alone should be a non-starter, although it seems that this isn’t always the case.
  2. Implementing, for instance, Gmail opens up opportunities for extending the rest of the Google suite that includes recent changes to iGoogle, Google Reader and Google Wave. This impacts any proposed blueprint for technologies that support an institutional vision/ethos, and which also engages non-institutional networks or communities. This has to be properly assessed by key local stakeholders in-line with their needs, rather than jumped on because students feel Google is sexy, shiny and better. Moreover, where new services have pedagogic implications, this impacts our development not only of existing tools, but critically our engagement with, development of, and support for academic and support staff. What will the services that we provide for staff and students look like, so that neither group are left behind?
  3. Oxford have argued that Gmail is not a viable solution for them for staff email given privacy and confidentiality issues. With the amount of shared group-work and collaboration needed by staff and students, delivering dual systems is not an option in their context. Given that other potentially-shared Google services are available, it is critical that both students and staff are engaged in a planned way, in order to avoid opening up a digital divide in the services are offered to support learning and teaching. That deliberation has to be set within an institutional culture that may be at once open and/or closed, and which frames decisions about data or relationships that need to be held in-house.
  4. There is a very real risk that managers are bedazzled by identification with, for instance, the Google brand, and new developments like ‘caffeine’. Google has been criticised over privacy, copyright infringement, hacking, censorship, DRM etc.. Hence the value-set of any association or affiliation needs to be deliberated properly across all institutional stakeholders. Anil Dash’s excellent piece on “Google’s Microsoft moment” asks whether Google is moving to a position where it is “favoring what’s convenient for [its] own business goals” rather than that which matters to its real-world users. He goes on to add that “The era of Google as a trusted, ‘non-evil’ startup whose actions are automatically assumed to be benevolent is over”. Most tellingly of all, he states that Google’s “protestations of ‘but it’s open source!’ are being used to paper over real concerns about data ownership, and the truth is that open code doesn’t necessarily imply that average users are in control”. We are not yet at the point of transition to the university of the people, where there is no need for closed positions. There are bigger issues here that impact local, educational user engagement, set within validated and purposeful institutional cultures.
  5. A final issue here is that of openness. Dave Cormier argued at OpenEd09 that open educational resources, including tools and contexts, are often not open for creation or re-creation or re-formation, and at best they are simply static and accessible materials. By focusing institutionally or within a community upon one service or set of services, we are in danger of excluding or marginalising by locking people into or out of specific ways of working. Empowered decision-making about relationships, technologies, services and resources demands contexts that scale choices for learners (for instance in safe, free-ranging environments). Cormier argues that the personal processes involved in learning and in engaging with communities are complex and messy. If he is right then decisions need to be made about institutional openness and engagement with shared resources, services and toolsets by a range of stakeholders, not just those who operate in isolated pockets.

This all needs clear planning with key stakeholders, with a clear rationale developed for any link with Microsoft, Google or whoever, which is based around institutional need and an institutional blueprint. Managers need to know for what issue(s) outsourcing is a solution – a technology or service or organisational change or cost saving? Why this technology and why now? What are the dis-benefits?

The implementation of, for instance, gmail is not neutral. It opens up possibilities for new technological developments. Those developments are also not neutral – they impact the management of identities, services, staffing, organisation, processes, data etc. at a range of levels, from the personal to the institutional. Some of these issues are raised by the JISC Legal Tutor Guide to Web 2.0, and again impact this debate.

Now it may well be that Google supplies solution for some of the things for which Universities need social media. I use Google services both personally and to manage the information/communication needs of a Homeless Hostel for which I am a Trustee, and I am very happy to do so. However, our Trustees have risk assessed this decision in terms of our data and resources, their management and the critical nature of our work. I see merit in an affiliation with for example Microsoft or Google, in terms of personalisation, scale and flexibility. However, there are huge cultural, curricula and working ramifications in any proposal to outsource an element of local practice to such an organisation. This is, I believe, a risky strategy that needs proper deliberation, so that institutions are not just pawns in on-going business battles.


Social media mores and cultures, and the role of higher education


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 27 August 2009

Two “events” have crossed my radar in the last week that have made me think about educators’ responsibilities for enabling a good-enough socialisation of students as they enter higher education. This is critical given the importance of HE for developing independent, associational and deliberative decision-making and actions by students, and also given the proximity of the start-of-term.

1. @Aggerscricket vs Will Buckley

This summer’s coverage of The Ashes [bear with me – I’ll get to the point] saw a growth in the use of Twitter, either by punters tweeting using the #ashes hashtag or by following commentators like Jonathan Agnew [@Aggerscricket] or David Lloyd [@bumblecricket] or cricketers like Graeme Swann [@swannyg66]. This enabled cricket lovers to keep in-touch with both information, in terms of what was going on at each test match, and expert opinion, alongside framing communication around specific issues.

One outcome was an emerging conversation between songstress Lily Allen and Agnew that ended with a discussion on Test Match Special on Radio 4/5Live Sports Extra during lunch on the Saturday of the final, Oval Test match. At least it would have ended there, had Will Buckley not written a piece in The Observer that stated that Agnew’s relationship with Allen had appeared “pervy”. Agnew subsequently used Twitter to “out” Buckley and to get the apology he wanted, levered through the power of the crowd, which commented on Buckley’s piece [usefully using the fact that “Comment is Free” in The Guardian and The Observer] and used email to pressure The Observer Sports Editor. Agnew declared: “What an eye-opener this has been for all… to the power of new media. It is here and will change the way news is responded to, in particular. This showed what twitter can do.”

The message: firstly, don’t print spiteful things, think about whether what you have to say is kind, true and necessary; secondly, social media is a powerful tool for engaging users – why and how it is used is morphing, and this has implications for socialisation, deliberation and our cultures.

2. Inappropriate use of Facebook and Twitter

A *news* item came across my desk that focused my thinking about privacy issues in social media. It concerned a new sexual relationship between two *friends* on Facebook. Details ended up on each other’s Facebook walls, which was then screen-captured by a mutual *friend* and went viral via Twitter. One of the couple felt ashamed that these statements were public within a localised friendship group, let alone the mortification that would follow when it went worldwide. This person did not understand how the wall worked or how privacy settings in Facebook work.

The item arrived on my Twitter feed, with one of those who re-tweeted it stating to me that “I thought it was funny; and I saw that it had just gone up on Digg ”, the implication being that others were forwarding it anyway so he might as well do so. What a mean, thoughtless and salacious response this was. My discomfort in this approach was matched by a fellow Twitterer who noted “everyone else was doing it? Seriously? You think that’s an excuse? Cliff. Jump. Would. You?”

The message: firstly, do you really have to print or forward spiteful things? Think about whether what you have to say is kind, true and necessary; secondly, how individuals engage with rules and settings, and cultural norms within social media matter. Whether we like it or not some users need and deserve our help and common humanity.

These two issues have implications for our approach to socialisation in HE. New students, many of them unsure of their place in the world, are coming into a very different, independent-yet-networked learning space, from those which they are used to. Part of the role of HE should be to engage these users in a discussion around the ways in which social media can be used and about how they can ensure their own safety. In part, this connects into the broader debate about the death of the VLE and the rise of the PLE. My own take on this is that whilst a radical manifesto that supports personalisation is needed for developing pedagogies for HE that are fit-for-purpose, we need to help our learners make good-enough decisions about tools, rules, signal-processing and approaches. This may involve structuring and closing down some learning in contexts within which they can free-range, but it also involves negotiating with them shared rules of engagement.

Defined environments for learning, built around or including a VLE or PLE, are unique to each learner based on their learning aims. These environments are fused from personal associations that are both formal and informal, and that use social media to process rule-based signals into action. Illich rightly argued that education was owned by an individual when s/he became a self-aware actor, and he also argued that the questions individuals are empowered to ask coupled to the socio-technical tools available to them, supports her/his personal emancipation. Social media, in whatever form, afford tools for encouraging individuals to associate with each other in contexts that support doing, questioning and re-conceptualising. However, this is risky because we have to make decisions about how we and our data are used and represented on-line.

HE ought to be a space in which norms, rules and cultures can be discussed safely, in order that co-operation and emancipation are enabled. This is important because HE has a duty to help make the world a better place.


Forget the technology and focus on the human


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 2 September 2009

I recently commented on the work of the 52 Group on post-digital futures. They argued that “We are moving towards a postdigital age where the tools driven by the microprocessor are common to the extent to which they will no longer be noticed”. This aligns with the view of Russell Davies that: “There are a lot of people around now who have thoroughly integrated ‘digitalness’ into their lives. To the extent that it makes as much sense to define them as digital as it does to define them as air-breathing. ie it’s true but not useful or interesting.” As educators, learning technologists, managers, our hang-ups about tools and technologies, trends and horizons, risk deflecting us from meaningful conversations about learning and teaching, and personal/social empowerment.

In fact, conversations about people, communities, associations and outcomes ought to be central to our discussions around the role of higher education. Technology should only ever be secondary. It is unfortunate that, according to the 52 Group, “the speed of the change [to a digital, Web 2.0 world] has left us with the mistaken belief that social change was somehow ‘created’ by the digital rather than simply played out on a the canvas of the digital.” This is important because digital and analogue tools offer possibilities to focus conversations around issues like: agency; emancipation; involvement; enterprise; and democracy. The key is integration into user-defined environments with a focus on the human.

We need to open up a space for deliberation around a vision for HE, in terms of what our institutions stand for and what our curricula look like. From there we can begin conversations about the processes, procedures, technologies, organisation and information that we need to support that vision. Educational technologists and practitioners need to shift the discussion away from tools towards the types of learning/pedagogic spaces that are good-enough to help staff and students make appropriate decisions and take action.

An element of this deliberation is the extent to which students and their/our perceptions of technologies should be driving the agenda. It can be argued that students and technologies are too fleeting and transient in their lifecycle/existence within HE to drive decision-making about sustainability agendas or effective pedagogic practice. They are important indicators of possibility within a system [HEI], but they offer much short-term variation and uncertainty within that system [HEI]. Decisions should be made about technologies, services etc., in order to manage uncertainty as it trends, but not to second-guess its management based on immediate whim.

Balance in the system demands that we align meaningful data from both students and technological horizon-scanning, with the strategic role of HEIs, and their visions, cultures, subjects and staff. The latter are more grounded and secure in anchoring institutional planning for sustainability and capability-building than either the latest technology trend or the technological expectations of current students. HEIs need conversations with students about practices, in order to empower those students to negotiate decisions about technologies as one strand of a conversation with staff about their curriculum. We risk skewing the debate over the purpose and future of HE if we base strategy and implementation either on the primary authority of the student as service user/client [validated by the NSS], or on reductionist/populist technological solutions, neither of which can anchor deliberation.

One risk is that a prevalent or dominant view of technology, in terms of what is and isn’t *enabled*, is validated above wider academic ownership and innovation. We also risk focusing on the shiny and the new, or what’s just over the horizon, rather than thinking about how trends can be embedded within an enabling environment, in order to offer flexibility going forward. Rather than a contested PLE-VLE debate, which fetishises tools and services, we desperately need to re-focus our thinking on developing both curricula and a vision for HE with staff and students, that are fit-for-purpose beyond 2010. As a result we may ditch the digital to debate the implications of a post-digital view.


Technology-enhanced learning: the emergence of ideology?


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 9 September 2009

ALT-C 2009 is billed as “in dreams begins responsibility”. The first day got me thinking about responsibility linked to rights and roles within a shared value system. This was amplified by the main messages that I took from Michael Wesch‘s keynote. Wesch highlighted the work of Charles Taylor on The Ethics of Authenticity and the emergence:

  1. of self-centred modes of self-fulfillment; and
  2. of the apparent negation of all horizons of significance.

Wesch went on to note that these two outcomes of late modernity led to disengagement and fragmentation amongst the citizenry, with individuals flocking together over specific issues rather than aggregating in persistent blocks.

This view of flocking for a purpose maps onto public policy research into associational democracy, where deliberation over issues occurs within and across associations of apparently fragmented people or groups,  and where affiliation may become a powerful connector. The work of Bauman on liquid modernity and Barnett on the need to rethink the relationship between the institution and the individual informs this complexity of this debate, as fragmentation and disengagement loom.

This view of 21st century HE is messy and complex. It aligns with both the DEMOS report on The Edgeless University, which suggests that Universities have to rethink their roles, values, and purposes, including their affiliations, and the recent SOMUL working papers, which develop the concept of parallel universities existing within the same physical and virtual space. To reiterate, the headlines here are: that managing and living within 21st century HE is messy and complex; that our working roles are messy and complex; and, that our responsibilities are messy and complex.

Wesch went on to talk about his teaching and learning strategy trying to overcome a “participation gap” between his students and his curriculum, and therefore him. The value I take from this is the power of relationships that enable learners to define themselves. New media are important because they offer the opportunity to build new relationships and ways of working, and thereby, in Barnett’s terms, to become themselves as an agent in the world. This is crucial because it aligns with the work of Winnicott on the value to the individual of an enabling environment where s/he can be held whilst making sense of the world. This act of holding is based on trust and engagement within a secure space, that is engaging and not fragmented. Both the environment and the relationships have to be good-enough to enable the individual to make sense of themselves and what they feel and want to achieve.

This is important beyond ALTC 2009 because the responsibility is for individuals at all levels within an institution, or a society, or an association, to be good-enough in their relationships to enable others to decide and act, within a set, or sets, of shared values. This accepts a range of desires, hopes, confidences, expertise etc across an institution, with that institution able to hold the individual whilst s/he makes sense of her/his place in it.

The institution’s ability to hold its associates, affiliates, staff, students etc. is tricky. However, this demands that it configures its services, technologies, information, policies around a vision of what it stands for and what it intends to do in the world. All other conversations are secondary to this, even if every university is trying to do and stand for the same thing. We still need a set of ideas that we are responsible for and can take action around. In short we need an ideology for HE, in an age when we allegedly run the risks of disengagement and fragmentation that atomise our needs and experiences.

The impacts debates for learning technologists, or e-learning co-ordinators, or heads of technology-enhanced learning because these people have the responsibility to enfranchise those they support in-line with a meaningful vision. All else, from discussions of progressive pedagogies to the technologies that support them, from how to frame enabling contexts for learning to the information we need to make decisions and the policies that are in place to govern those decisions, is secondary. In fact the clear danger is that with no ideology we become reductionist in our view of technologies, and that we predetermine the tools we will prioritise and sell based on personal whim or fragmented context. The allied danger is that we are determinist about why this tool works and that one does not. This carries over into the discussion over VLE-PLE where concepts like marginalisation, participation, democracy emerge but are not deliberated. We then risk the twin dangers:

  1. that we declare the PLE to be democratic and inclusive without assessing whether it disempowers some people, and the VLE to be controlling without appraising how it enables. One risk is technological dogma; and
  2. that we negate the very flexibility to which we claim to aspire because we close down certain avenues.

In fact, it may be that technologies are both transient and transitional in their use within and beyond curricula, for individuals and groups, as they gain and lose utility. A tool or toolset is useful where it enables me to achieve something in a specific time and increase my self-awareness and move on. However, the lack of proper deliberation over values, ideas and ideologies damages our debates over responsibility.

Technologies then amplify other more critical issues around:

  1. ideology and what we stand for;and
  2. power and control.

Technology changes nothing without a reappraisal of the “why” of HE. The responsibility of learning technologists or educational developers or heads of technology-enhanced learning is to work with senior managers on their vision for their institution, and to align technologies to that vision. Otherwise all we do is chase the next new tool or toy or trend, whilst perpetuating the mythology that innovation is stifled by large institutions and their administrators and that we are somehow better placed if we are counter-cultural.

A central element of this is to engage with Wesch’s view of the flock, and the development of a new localism that aligns tools and approaches to the needs of local communities or associations of practice. These local groups might be module teams or programme cohorts, or networks of e-learning champions, or departmental staff or faculties. An institutional ideology that enables localism augments the view of parallel universities, and of the local needs that so often pervade devolved institutions. In turn this demands flexibility in the deployment of technologies and our engagement with staff or communities of practice. Managing this flexibility demands that those responsible for technology-enhanced learning ask why, rather than how, and begin a deliberation around the ideologies they are confronting or supporting or enabling.