Taking forward change in technology-enhanced education


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 1 April 2010

I had a great day yesterday in Bolton at a JISC-sponsored Strategy Cascade event for institutional teams, which was focused upon “the wider debate around what technology can offer our institutions, and how to most effectively harness technology in ways that are sensitive to the specific needs of institutions” and their stakeholders. The session, led by Keith Smyth from Edinburgh Napier and Mark Johnson from the University of Bolton, was an excellent example of grounded, deliberative action. It focused upon achieving an institutional understanding of the contested nature of technology-enhanced learning [TEL] as HEIs struggle to review their strategies and plans.

I was asked to kick the event off with some thoughts on the issues that I see as important in this debate. My slides highlight my activist, political position around the highly contested nature of the value of TEL, and against techno-determinism. The key themes I wanted to highlight were as follows.

  1. Values: do we understand the place of TEL in the idea of the University. Do we recognise and debate our institutional or educational or personal or humane values? How do technologies help us to realise or diminish these values? How do technologies impact the social relations that emerge around these values?
  2. Disruption: we are experiencing disruption, the scale of which may prove overwhelming. This is focused upon: massive public sector debt that will impact our spaces for action and activity; the realities of climate change science, which ought to affect our engagement with technology; peak oil and energy prices/security, which will impact our use of technology and our approaches to resource management; the impact of personal technologies on power and control at the centre or the boundaries of formal and informal classroom and curriculum settings, and the concomitant need for critical pedagogies; and the impact of non-institutional technologies on the value, place and space of the institution.
  3. Contestation 1: the policy and implementation landscape demonstrates complexity of use, expectation and delivery of educational technology within competing value-sets and practices. One space in which this is made manifest is the discussion over open educational resources, as a rider for discussions over the openness of higher education and HEIs that are [being set-up to be] competing. This discussion ought to take place against an ideological and political [small ‘p’] backdrop, which looks at what we stand for institutionally and societally.
  4. Planning: in thinking about institutional change Mark Johnson highlighted the work of Richard Gombrich [after Karl Popper] in developing approaches to piecemeal social engineering. I am concerned with how we are able to provide secure core institutional spaces that enable staff and students to position and become themselves, and to act in the world. Mark Stubbs at MMU has blogged about a vision of joined-up systems that is a powerful description of how institutions can support individuals in making sense of their institution [socially, administratively and academically], by aligning key events, data, processes and technologies, and how “mavericks” [an emergent participant-generated term] can be encouraged to innovate around the edges of the HEI within a supportive set of spaces. In taking this forward we need to see change as institutionally-led, and so as more than a project: it is a programme of work focused upon catalysing flexibility, diversity, modularity and feedback, which then delivers benefits aligned to key outcomes. At DMU we are developing a portfolio of projects to engage this approach.
  5. Contestation 2: we need to know more about the interplay between notions of personalisation and models of the curriculum. In thinking about this I highlighted some DMU examples of: mentoring as a key concept in learning design; thinking around technologically-flexible and modular “curriculum learning environments”; and recasting spaces for life-wide learning opportunities, where students can demonstrate activity in the world, and be accredited for it. This is complex and ill-understood, and techno-determinist approaches to its management are problematic.

I ended by focusing upon a series of issues related to power and emerging self-awareness and action. In particular, I was concerned to reflect upon whether institutionalised approaches reclaim and neutralise innovation within traditional, safe paradigms, and whether this neutralises agency. I wondered whether we know enough about the specific strategies that are deployed by learners using social media, as they become resilient learners and citizens. Finally I wondered whether we acknowledge and care for those who are marginalised or who risk marginalisation though our curriculum practices and values.

The activities that the participants undertook were focused upon: realising the value of different perspectives in the change agenda; our aspirations and who sets the agenda for change; the tensions between monolithic approaches and enabling diversity; and whether we do the simple stuff well enough to enable people to undertake meaningful activity. I was left with three key points that I wished to make as a plenary, with one caveat. These are captured in this Strategy Cascade plenary presentation.

However, I also added that we have travelled a long way in the last decade, in terms of developing the tools and communities that can engage with critical pedagogy and challenge the development of educational norms. There is much to hope for in this celebration of the possible.


The political economy of openness in HE: or what is the point of it all?


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 8 April 2010

I’ve been quite taken with the emerging discussions around openness and transparency in HE, the creation and management of open educational resources, and the concomitant lack of a discourse around open governance in HEIs. In particular I am interested in why there is a focus on the mechanics, rather than the ideologies, cultures and political economics, of openness, and whether this is a function of educators colluding in their own coercion.

This notion of colluding in coercion, in acting in ways that either overtly or unquestioningly maintain dominant power and economic relationships, exists at several levels: the individual, the discipline, the institution and the sector. One example of such collusion was been picked-up by Joss Winn, who highlighted the place of parallelism through which higher education and its programmes of work set agendas that mirror dominant economic models:

“we collude in our own oppression… [even suggesting that] new autonomous spaces needed to be created apart from the agenda of neo-liberal education… [our] parallelism would still serve the interests of the State by removing the responsibility of funding ‘uneconomic’ subjects. In effect, parallelism would act as a form of efficiency under the neo-liberal agenda.”

Economically inefficient courses or items of content or ways of working risk being cut by institutional managers, even in programmes of openness, because they are working to or in parallel with the core economic values of the State. In the same way, we fund projects that are aligned with the view of those who are qualitatively dominant – *our* values are set by those with power, rather than by way of deliberation with the quantitative majority.

This issue of power is important because it speaks of values, inclusion and justice, and is amplified by the traction within society that openness, in terms of data and government, is gaining. Clearly for some HEIs this is subjugated within a dominant economic paradigm. However, openness is also emerging throughout the practice of higher education, and in programmes of work around open education, like the JISC OER programme. Catalysing a culture and set of values around openness offers spaces for cultural reinvention, which offer opportunities to re-fashion social relationships. Thus, whilst at the moment, for example, the Humanities OER project Humbox, with its wealth of open resources, overtly demonstrates a focus on staff, peers and disciplines, and tends to paint learners as objects who have content made for them, or made available for them, it offers a valuable space or catalyst for the socio-cultural re-invention of higher education. The issue is whether we have the will to do this re-invention.

Joss Winn makes this point in his call for a manifesto for sharing, when he eloquently argues that “sharing doesn’t need institutionalising”. In quoting a paper by David Noble, which argues that universities are responsible for “the systematic conversion of intellectual activity into intellectual capital and, hence, intellectual property”, Joss notes “that by institutionalising OERs, we’re producing constraints that go against sharing. Scaling up the production of OERs to an institutional level where sharing is considered in terms of an IP Policy, business case, marketing and ‘best practice’ will kill the potential that already exists to share.” Moreover Joss argues that this is alienating precisely because “[it] is just another way of creating capital out of immaterial labour.” We collude because we legitimise the role of the institution or the discipline in taking surplus value from our own labour, or that of our students when we co-create.

Debating and fighting for the idea of the University, infused with and by a culture of openness, is vital, and that resistance might usefully be centred on deliberating the social relations that enable learners and tutors to manage disruption, rather than situating OERs within “the adoption of appropriate business models” that may ultimately be alienating. In situating openness as a form of cultural production, a recent EDUCAUSE paper, Innovating the 21st-Century University: It’s Time!, argues that “Universities are losing their grip on higher learning as the Internet is, inexorably, becoming the dominant infrastructure for knowledge“. They state that the value produced for students and the control of the mode of production are central elements of a meaningful experience in Universities. The authors quote Charles Vest’s view that “a transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic, communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms” is central. However, they then focus upon shared course content and connections, rather than negotiated ownership and co-governance.

It is this notion of co-governance that ought to be central to the development of openness and its value in the idea of the twenty-first century University. One proactive example is the Really Open University’s ideologically-driven stance on the need for praxis, in re-asserting the idea of the University as a site for critical action, resistance and opposition, lead by students. This aligns with the model for organic intellectual endeavour proposed by Gramsci, in challenging institutional or state-legitimised power and hegemonic ideologies, through an engagement with, and challenging of, values and attitudes. What is required in this view is counter-hegemony, a counter-culture in which we deliberate and re-assert the social, rather than economic, obligations that drive us, and through which we focus upon social rather than economic enterprise.

So, is re-invention of the production of content, by enabling the mechanics of re-use, the key issue? Or rather is it more important to re-think and change the rules of the game? It is clear that established corporate and industrial models dominate the discourses around openness. So we see the Open Data and Open Gov movements colonised by corporates, or those seeking to gain from traditional political economic models, which are generally focused upon re-use of content rather than re-invention of models of power. It is necessary then to fight for the prioritisation of people over organisations or business models, and against the use of open agenda for “online opinion research and consultation”.

More important for me are the legitimation of our social obligations and a move towards the commons, catalysed through acts of sharing and underpinned by a deliberative, shared socio-cultural values or co-governance of the means of production. In an excellent article on Twitter and Copyright Shinen argues that “creators needed incentive to create” and generally Copyright Acts frame this incentivisation financially . But what if incentivisation could be re-shaped as social or cultural, and be defined democratically?

One of the positive outcomes of the angst over the Digital Economy Bill (#debill) might to be a renewing of praxis, framed by shared socio-cultural values, with educators acting as conduits for production and in resistance to the alienation that is enforced through a business model that legitimises domination of production. This would truly align with Raymond Williams’ view of the power of the cultures that are publically defined and fought for, and that enabling social transformation. In the debate on openness we are in danger of losing sight of the interaction between political, economic and cultural forces, and the possibilities that openness can be a site of resistance against established norms that have lead us towards crisis, or which at least seek to oppress.

The ideas both of oppression and control of the value of content and the means of producing and sharing it, can be read into the reaction to the #debill farrago. Mike Butcher noted the telling use of the term “likely to be used” in the Amendment to Clause 8 of the Digital Economy Bill: “a location on the internet which the court is satisfied has been, is being or is likely to be used for or in connection with an activity that infringes copyright” will lead to disconnection. The economic model defined by business, rather than one framed by social relations, won out. The language of consumers and industry used by MPs in the Digital Economy Bill, is just the same as the language deployed within HE about the relationships between students and institutions by those in power, which we hope will be socially-constructed but that are increasingly infused with economic determinism.  What hope for co-governance here, especially when the dominant discourse is co-creation or co-production, which risks objectifying students?

In this we should forget the issue of whether access to the internet is a basic human right – this is an incredibly problematic statement and risks diminishing the struggle for true human rights as enshrined in the European Convention and the UN Declaration. However, there is an increasing unease about the possibilities for openness and truly open governance, where societal values clash with those of business, and this stretches beyond #debill. Chris Marsden makes an interesting point around control of the web and net neutrality, arguing that #debill is an affront to that, and when taken with the  recent ruling in favour of Comcast versus the FCC over net neutrality in the US, we might see this as reflecting increasing confrontation over the control of web-based means of production. The Open Rights Group certainly begins to make that case, in arguing for democracy and transparency.

In reclaiming the spaces for openness we might usefully revisit the histories, cultures and values of the Commons. This is important because overcoming disruption and enabling justice lies in shared values, and as Joss Winn argues, we achieve this not through “institutionalising sharing, but by sowing the humanity in sharing; the joy of giving and receiving; the immaterial wealth of knowledge that already exists and the pleasure of creating social relations that resist the organising principle of private property and wage labour.” We need to question continually the extent to which we collude in coercion.

One of the drivers for the emerging discussions around openness and transparency in HE, and the creation and management of open educational resources role, should be the socio-cultural praxis around co-governance. This needs to highlight issues of legitmation and alienation, of value and active participation in practical life. We need to move beyond objectifying the student as co-creator or co-producer to celebrating our shared, subjective deliberation of democratic governance. Through such an approach, the idea of the University might come to be re-framed as active, creative, self-aware and socially-constructed. Moreover it might also tap into the joy and passion of mentoring learners, and of developing truly transformative spaces that change lives. Our approach to openness ought to stand against the production of diminished or controlled spaces, impacted by business models and metrics, which in-turn focus instrumental engagements.

In standing against the economic ideology of openness, and in support of our shared, deliberative democratic values, we might consider and add to the manifesto stared by Joss Winn.

  1. A commitment to transformation and solidarity
  2. Learning our own histories and not his-story
  3. Starting from daily reality
  4. Learning together as equals
  5. Getting out of the classroom
  6. Inspiring social change

The momentum being developed around the idea of openness, through resistance to #debill or threats to net neutrality, or the opportunities of OER programmes, offers us sites for resistance and hope. The question is whether we have the energy to deliberate and then fight for our shared values in the idea of the University.


Towards the democratic university: openness and community collections


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 28 May 2010

At the end of a thoughtful piece on the resistance to the closure of the Philosophy Department at Middlesex University, John Protevi, notes that we need to enact “the beginning of the democratic university”. This made me reconsider my blogpost from early April about openness within universities and the nature of the latest technology-enhanced learning project that captures the zeitgeist, open education resources [OERs].

In particular, I am interested in the use of OERs as a means for the legitimation of the production/social value of all actors in the education process, through the ownership of the processes of creation and sharing. This connects into Holloway’s view of the value of “doing” in re-shaping and refining and re-casting the world, and in resisting our alienation from it. He rightfully notes the importance of engaging with issues of power on our place in the world. This matters for OERs in terms of the two forms of power that Holloway writes about: firstly, the power to create, or to do; and, secondly our power over, be that over the productive process or of domination and subjugation, which stifles the power of people to create and act and be. So when we are talking about co-creation or co-production, or the value-for-money of approaches to OERs, we need to see this framed by issues of power, self-concept and legitimation.

These issues were thrown into sharp relief at a recent ANTF symposium, during a session on ‘The Future of Higher Education’. This space enabled senior managers to focus on the recent election and subsequent headline statements about education in the face of proposed cuts. The session highlighted a view that “what we do makes a contribution to the economic strength of other sectors”. It also created a space for the view that HE must “do things differently and stop doing some things”, and that innovation, or doing more with less, was central to HE’s role in 2010. When I hear that “the challenge is demonstrating impact”, I feel that this is a cipher for economic growth/economic value, and not social value, equality or inclusion. As part of this business-focused discourse, the language used was one of homogenisation that could be seen as objectification [“their learning experience”]. This market fundamentalism then shrouds our development of a discourse around sharing and OERs in HE.

This matters more because higher education faces critical times ahead and needs a critical response. The development, deployment and sharing of OERs offers hopeful purpose for an active participation in a practical life, both in stimulating innovation that supports social inclusion and justice, and in resistance to dominant economic models of education that link self-worth to externally-imposed metrics. A key here is academic activism in opening up spaces and places where students can engage in co-governance as much as co-production. Co-governance is vital because it is through engagement with both the theory and practice of negotiating and defining spaces and practices through and in which materials can be produced that individuals can become themselves and respect divergent perspectives. In the homogenisation of HE, in a discourse that only stresses the economy, the markets, value-for-money and STEM, we risk losing our humanity.

Perhaps one central question to which we need to return is “what is this for?” I ask this question not only in terms of HE in 2010, but also the OER project. For me a key outcome is self-determination and personal transformation, so that individually we are able to judge what is good enough for one-self [rather than good or excellent], given our own partial, situated experience. In fact, this partial, fragmented view of the world may be shaken up by an approach to OERs as sharing, which is highlighted by the anti-curriculum tract of the University of Utopia. Anti-curriculum stresses the joy of communal working and sharing beyond borders, and it highlights how engagement in productive sharing brings the curriculum to life, but perhaps also that it brings life to the curriculum. Our view of ourselves, others and the world is enhanced then, through the act of sharing, and this might usefully be the focus of an answer to the question of “what are OERs for?” However, it might also form a strand that enables us to engage with Protevi’s “democratic university”.

This democratic imperative focuses issues of inclusion and community engagement, which are in turn amplified by the possibilities of social media. These possibilities are becoming realised through connections between OERs and the power of community collections like the East London Lives 2012 project and RunCoCo, or community-approaches to research, like the Galaxy Zoo. In each of these cases, the focus is on democratic engagement in the production of digital stories or research, which accepts divergence in ideology, but that is ultimately about sharing artifacts, ideas and identities. These projects are primarily not-for-profit, and focus upon communities or networks or affiliations understanding difference and representing themselves. In framing the spaces that co-workers on a project occupy, a range of voices can be respected, and a range of roles are taken up, from novice, through to agitator, organiser, educator, advocate and more experienced other.

The beauty of these projects, accepting difficulties in licensing, copyright, establishing authorship, overcoming entrenched political positions, and finding ways to engage those with limited power to speak, is their mutuality and their focus on respect, devolved authority and responsibility for governance, creation and sharing. In this way the mix of social media and face-to-face workshops held by Culturenet Cymru and the Community University Partnership Programme offers the hope for community-engaged work that offers equality, and participation-as-partnership. Through these projects we have ways of seeing things differently, and of overcoming fragmentation or disintermediation, whether in the production and sharing of resources, or learning objects or in commenting and critiquing those resources. Promoting the sharing of interactions around an object enriches dialogue about issues, disciplines and ourselves.

Again the key question is what is this for? What is the role of HE in mediating and advocating and sharing? What is its role as a social enterprise working with not-for-profits? How do these types of projects, framed by OERs open up a space for us to challenge the dominant economic discourse around our activity and our very being? In answering these questions, a critical issue is how to enable people to own the process of creation and sharing, and thereby to become archival activists. Perhaps a key role for academics in this democratic process is as Gramscian traditional intellectuals, committed to the cause of personal-emancipation, who are able to advocate for and lead the development of organic intellectuals within communities, associations, student cohorts or networks. The hope is that such organic intellectuals are able to develop ideas that lead to the democratic and collaborative transformation of those communities.

In this context we need to seize each opportunity to widen the space in which we resist the dominating paradigms for HE. As a result, two things strike me as important in thinking about OERs and community collections, framed by co-production and Co-governance. The first is to cherish and support examples like the Really Open University and its focus upon praxis, in re-asserting the idea of the University as a site for critical action, resistance and opposition, lead by students. The second is to work with institutionalised structures, for example in defined OER programmes or open access legislation, to use them as levers for enhancing agreed social values. As a result we may be able to enact “the beginning of the democratic university”.


Scoping the relationships between social media and open education in the development of a resilient higher education


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 14 June 2010

With Joss Winn, I have had a paper accepted for the Open Education 2010 conference. This paper begins to open up a space for us to discuss some of the revolutionary possibilities for open education, linked to the production and sharing of socially-useful open educational resources, upon what we might term the academic-social commons. I am pleased to note that the University of Utopia have also had a paper accepted on Opening Education beyond the property relation: from commons to communism. I can feel the unease and shifting in seats at the mention of the ‘c’ word. However, the UoU’s focus is political, based upon a discussion of openness in production and sharing as a site of resistance to individual alienation. The key is to develop a “critical social theory on which to build a really open society”.

Joss and my paper connects into these ideas of the political economy of openness to ask whether open education, or approaches to the production of open educational resources, can enable learners in higher education to overcome disruption. In engaging with this issue I have been reminded of my historical research into the place of commons, commoners and communities in the political world of the early eighteenth century, with a case study of Yorkshire electioneering.

In this, work on common right, enclosure and social change is important because common usage/sharing of resources was a form of social, and potentially political cement within and across communities, based upon local custom and which added to the difficulties and differences of political control. At this time, the commons were crucial for rearing sheep, oxen, horse and pigs, as well as providing thatch, bricks, and sundry extras which bolstered the local economy. Moreover, if the commons were crucial to the psychological and personal well-being of the individual and the community, then its defence was all-important no matter whom the attacker. The commons gave the individual and the community a chance to live of their own and to survive a dearth. They also gave the chance to have an economic independence that underpinned political autonomy.

I view the open education project in a similar light, as giving individuals-in-community a chance to share and to resist dominant and domineering discourses, notably around economic growth and the subservience of higher education’s social values and relationships to the invisible hand of the market. Perhaps its most important role is psychological, as the manufacture and sharing of resources for socially useful ends frames well-being and purposeful living.

Anyway, details of our paper follow…

140-character abstract

HE faces complex disruptions. Can open education and social media enable individuals-in-communities to develop resilience and overcome dislocation?

Proposal

Higher Education faces complex disruptions, from the growing threat of peak oil (The Oil Drum, 2010) and the impact that will have on our ability to consume/produce (Natural Environment Research Council, 2009), and from our need to own the carbon and energy we emit/use, in order to combat climate change. These problems are being amplified by energy availability and costs (The Guardian, 2009), public sector debt and the effects of a zero growth economy (new economics foundation, 2010).

One focus for response is the use of technology and its impact upon approaches to open education, in developing resilience. The Horizon Report 2010 (New Media Consortium, 2010) highlights the importance of openness but argues that learning and teaching practices need to be seen in light of civic engagement and complexity. Facer and Sandford (2010) ask critical questions of inevitable and universal futures, focused upon always-on technology, and participative, inclusive, democratic change. There is an ethical imperative to discuss the impacts of our use of technology on our wider communities and environment, and to define possible solutions.

Educational technology might be used to address some of these issues through the development of shared, humane values that are amplified by specific qualities of open education, including: relationships and power; anxiety and hope; and social enterprise and community-up provision. These areas are impacted by resilience, which is socially- and environmentally-situated, and denotes the ability of individuals and communities to learn and adapt, to mitigate risks, prepare for solutions to problems, respond to risks that are realised, and to recover from dislocations (Hopkins, 2009). This focuses upon defining problems and framing solutions contextually, around our abilities to develop adaptability to work virally and in ways that are open source and self-reliant. This means working at appropriate scale to take civil action, through diversity, modularity and feedback within communities.

The key for any debate on resilience linked to open education is in defining a curriculum that requires institutions to become less managerial and more open to the formation of devolved social enterprises. This demands the encouragement of what Gramsci (1971) called organic intellectuals, who can emerge from within communities to lead action. Learners and tutors may emerge as such organic intellectuals, working openly with communities in light of disruption. An important element here is what Davis (2007) terms “democratic ‘co-governance’” within civil action, but which might usefully be applied to education, in the form of co-governance of educational outputs. One key issue is how open education is (re)claimed by users and communities within specific contexts and curricula, in-line with personal integration and enquiry, within an uncertain world (Futurelab, 2009).

The following questions emerge, catalysed by open education.
1. What sorts of literacies of resilience do people as social agents need?

2. What sorts of knowledge/understanding do these learners need to be effective agents in society?

3. Are our extant modes of designing and delivering curricula meaningful or relevant?

This paper will address these questions by examining whether open education can enable individuals-in-communities to recover from dislocations.

References

The Oil Drum 2010. http://www.theoildrum.com/


Inclusion, social relations and theory: issues in mobile learning


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 16 June 2010.

I had a great day on Tuesday at Mark Power’s Jisc CETIS mobile learning symposium. Mark has uploaded the presentations from the day to the wiki via a slideshare link, including Tim Linsey and mine on our Mobilising Remote Student Engagement project. There is also an overview of issues posted by Paul Richardson from RSC Wales.

Thinking about our presentation I raised 4 matters arising.

  1. The importance of transitional engagements and activities, in managing students’ migration into remote working, either in fieldwork or placements, from the academic environment. These remote spaces might be group-based or individual, and as such transitional moments need to address socialisation, engagement with technology, and the nature of doing, being and becoming at a distance. The role of students as more experienced others or mentors, in leading and framing transitional activities is critical, as is the role of employers and supervisors. Crucial here is the way in which mobile technology, coupled to social media can enhance respectful partnerships.
  2. The importance of recognising that not everyone is working at the leading-edge of the technology curve, and that many students do not have cutting-edge technology. Clearly where they have such kit, learners need support in making academic/practice-based sense of it. However, there is substantial research on the digital divide between rich and poor, and a serious concern that moves to give free computers and broadband access to low income families under, for example, the Home Access scheme will be cut by the current Government. Those of us who work with leading-edge technology need to consider the impact of poverty and inequality, and how we plan for those who do not have such access, so that they are not left behind. In this way an obsession with the new, as a commodity to fetishise, risks leaving the economically and pedagogically vulnerable behind. I wonder whether a focus on a core set of technologies alongside specific approaches to content and communication delivery, rather than an obsession with chasing specific kit, is more beneficial. So the mobile becomes a strand in curriculum delivery, to which staff/student engagement/development is geared, but not its centre.
  3. The importance of mentors. There is lots of work on mentoring and the engagement of more experienced others in doing/shaping the curriculum. The MoRSE project encourages a process of engaging the values and understandings of those who have already been on placement and fieldtrips, in the process of socialisation, in utilising technology, in planning task-work, in capturing and analysing detail, and in reflecting on practice.
  4. The value of doing and acting. One of the key elements of fieldwork and placements is work or activity – in a very clear way, taking action in the world. As part of a critical pedagogy this helps us move towards the learner as an active partner in shaping the world, in producing and critiquing the real-world. If individuals are to overcome disruption this is vital, and mobile learning has a powerful place in this approach, through framing opportunities for doing. How can this then be applied to non-vocational and non-practice based learners and programmes? What projects might historians or English learners be engaged in, in order to take action and make decisions? How might mobiles affect these strategies?

However, I was left with two issues from the day, wholly de-coupled from the specific mobile technology.

  • We need to theorise our positions around educational technology and within that mobile learning. The key question is not, “what is the business case for mobile learning”. If you are a programme/project manager the vision and the blueprint prime the business case, which is only ever a test of viability after, it has been decided that a project is the right thing to do [the why of an intervention]. The vision for the transformation of the organisation is key, NOT the business case. In this way the latter needs to be part of a broader programme mandate for technology-enhanced learning within the curriculum. However, if you are a critical pedagogue, where the power of pedagogy to change the world through social relationships and action is central, then a business case reduces education to commodity and should be resisted. The beauty of a engaging a theoretical position is that it enables the critique of evidence and positions taken around technology, and helps to counter overt techno-determinism, or the belief that technology is inherently and unquestioningly a good thing. Again techno-determinism, often based on weak evidence, leads us back to fetishisation. That isn’t say that that examples of how mobiles affect our lives are redundant, just that when we argue that they are “game-changing” we need to ask for whom, and at what expense. In terms of the latter I’m thinking about the velocity of our existence, and our commodification/exploitation, and the damage to our personal, social relations, exemplified in a post about “why I Returned My iPad“.
  • Linked to this more theoretical position is a need to evaluate technology meaningfully, without being drawn into a desperate need to demonstrate impact. Too often this is tied to business cases, and economic determinism. Research in the social sciences is notoriously problematic, and meaningful positions need to be taken up and contexts for research and development carefully articulated. The role of champions in this is key, as is the role of students as evaluators, and placing any study of mobile technology firmly within a critique of technology-enhanced learning and the curriculum as a whole. Scoping and shaping the curriculum as a process should be our aim, as should a move towards good-enough TEL provision. Where we are driven by impact, we are outcomes and growth-focused, and tend to make statements based on poor data/evaluation. A great example of the possible in educational technology research is the special edition [25(1)] of JCAL on social software from February 2009. The methodologies deployed highlight how complex our engagements with technology are, and how we need to avoid a focus on impact to speak about a process of engagement and development.

I guess for me a key element is seeing mobile tech as part of a broader approach to TEL, tied to professional development and student engagement, and that is what we are hoping to achieve at DMU through our programme of work. That said I encourage you to critique the presentations at Mark’s excellent event on Tuesday, and to check out the #jisccetis tweets.


Learning Technology as Tax or Enabler? Reflections on an ALT Policy Board meeting


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 19 June 2010.

I went to the Association for Learning Technology Policy Board meeting at the LSE yesterday. The event was tagged with a focus on “Technology in Learning and Teaching. An Enabler or a Tax”, which was a pragmatic focus given our current fiscal concerns. It was also relevant given the current ideological attack on the public sector. This attack has been fore grounded elsewhere in relation to, for instance, pensions. It can also be seen in the general tenor of the current Administration’s approach to education through privatisation, and the increasing and uncontested role of private business in the delivery of learning opportunities.

The meeting itself left me equally frustrated and hopeful. Frustrated in that the discourse of the presentations was wholly uncritical and techno-determinist, presenting a world in which we could do more-for-less without evidencing how or why, or what the consequences would be for social or economic relations, or for those who are vulnerable. Hopeful in that the discussion at the close of the meeting offered some space for rejection of these deterministic positions.

Professor Dame Wendy Hall kicked off with a focus on the development of the web, and the move towards the semantic web, and she highlighted the profound changes that the social web had made. However, whilst she talked about the web linking people, at no point did she highlight what they were being linked for. It was as if the technology was an uncontested given, an uncritical, apolitical good, divorced from issues of social and political power, or equality of access. Moreover, there was no focus on the impact of technology on carbon emissions, or the impact on technology in HE of public sector cuts, and of peak oil or of projected energy costs.

As I reflected on the fact that we always seem to be chasing the front of the technological curve, a point highlighted by David Harvey as a key thread in the narrative and reality of capitalism, the question “what is it for?” was screaming at me. This was especially the case given the language that was used: “productivity”; “growth”; “doing more with less”;“mission critical strategic operation”;“change the way technology interacts with students in the learning process”;“leverage”;“technology-supported execution”;“growth”;“realign our working practices to maximise efficiency”. The discourse was around consumption, and learning technology being a driver and a realisation of that economic relationship. The focus was always outcome and never process, of commodification and not being.

This discourse of commodification and of uncontextualised redefinition of perceived educational success and failure was pushed to a ludicrous conclusion when one speaker argued that a 50 per cent pass rate at A-C at GCSE signalled systemic educational failure. We were told that “in the world of manufacturing” this would be unacceptable, and that the automated methods of efficiency demonstrated by, for instance, learndirect provided the solution in “driving quality up and driving effectiveness up”, whatever that means. The linking of innovation to outcomes-driven education, taking an automated and materialist approach to learning, with a focus on units of production and no recognition of the complexity of personal and educational backgrounds, was made uncritically. The discourse of the factory, of the taylorisation of education, leaves no space to deliberate what it is for beyond profit through efficiency. So what does do more-for-less actually mean?

The mantra that we were left with was that “more for less means doing things differently”. Differently did not mean asking whether our vision and our construction of what education was for was right or wrong, but that the ideology of economic growth through privatisation and factory-driven approaches was now the only game in town. What “more” actually equates to is never defined. More education? More outcomes? More profit? So the focus is on “the power technology” has for efficiency savings, rather than on the social power and agency of individuals; it is on “tutoring and not teaching”, and the de-skilling of teachers-as-mentors in the educational process; it is on flexibility and “learners as consumers”, with the very real risk that educationalists are complicit in a new reality of economic exploitation.

In a session on strategic leadership in HE, and the impact on technology, we were informed that the sector had to “grasp the opportunity of technology”, and that this would generate capacity for culture change through “smarter businesses”. Again there was no sense of what this change was for or how it would enable our values? The discourse of change was for economic growth in ignorance or in spite of major disruptions, rather than addressing our broader societal needs. Moreover, it is a very narrow view, focused on innovation at the leading-edge of the technology curve, because we are told that we need to “innovate about the business model”, and that in some unevidenced, ahistorical way we can realise a win-win of growth and inclusion.

There was no recognition shown that learning is a difficult and traumatic process, or that education should focus on equality. We were left with the view that technology, and the private sector’s involvement in it, is about equality of opportunity, with no sense that this further alienates and disempowers those who have no access to that opportunity. This then crystallises the objectification of those involved in the educational process through the mantra of “learning as consumption” or “learners as consumers”. The focus on data, on administration, on economic value, on innovation and growth, on efficiency, on more-for-less, amplifies an outcomes-obsessed, object-driven, alienating approach to higher education, with technology as a driver of this economic and determinist agenda.

The level of techno-determinism, of change, innovation, growth, chasing the next technology, efficiency, effectiveness, which apps we can sell, which OERs we can sell for “business gain”, needs to be resisted through a realisation of critical pedagogy focused on social relations. There is a morality at play here that is about more than money. The recent Centre for Alternative Technology report on a Vision for a Zero Carbon Britain by 2030 states clearly the need for us to recognise our “ethical responsibility” towards powering-down and de-carbonisation. With the threat of peak oil and energy costs, and the fact that three million children in the UK are below the poverty line, educationalists have a moral duty to reframe education and to act in society for democratic, inclusive ends. This means recognising the contested and critical nature of learning technology, rather than allowing it to be co-opted unopposed by those who wish to taylorise it.

So we need to ask more critical questions of our use of technology. What is it for? What power does it have to be socially, rather than economically transformative? How do we enact our social values, of generosity, trust, respect, co-operation, fidelity, through technology, rather than simply using it for economic growth and hiding behind the objectification of learners and learning? How do we enact an activist, scholarly society in order to challenge the dominant view of technology as a lever for growth, rather than equality? How do we resist these dominant models in our use of social media? In our development of learning communities? In our framing and delivery of the curriculum? In our actions in our communities and associations? In our contribution to institutional values, policies, practices and technologies?

I was left feeling hopeful because there was a sense that this was a political role for ALT. However, the 10 discussion points flagged as next steps for ALT were again heavy on a neoliberal economic agenda as being the accepted reality for UK HE, rather than seeing a possibility for resistance around a model of social justice. So, terms like “cost-effectively”, “the successful delivery of ‘Higher Ambitions’”; “modern learning”; “leverage”; all featured without any critique. It is this level of critique that must be central to our use of technology in HE. The recognition that this is a political project is critical, and is one that groups like the ALT Policy Board must address.


Educational futures, educational technology and digital social media


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 7 July 2010.

The application of Futures’ planning and thinking in the development of higher education is receiving more attention, and in particular is catalysing researchers and practitioners to discuss frames of reference, methods, and ethics for thinking about futures’ planning. The work of FutureLab on Beyond Current Horizons, was synthesised by Facer and Sandford in addressing technology futures. They critiqued much that was taken-for-granted in the use of educational technology, noting that (p. 75): “the ‘imaginary’ upon which future-oriented projects are premised often takes for granted the contemporary existence of and continued progress towards a universal, technologically-rich, global ‘knowledge economy’, the so-called ‘flat world’ of neo-liberal rhetoric”. As I noted elsewhere in challenging positivist views of technology, Facer and Sandford ‘ask much more critical questions of “the chronological imperialism of accounts of inevitable and universal futures”. This accepts the complexity of the use of technology, of societal development, and of political economy, and asks us to consider some of the ethical imperatives. In addressing these we have a chance to re-think our values.’

Our humane values are critical in defining the theory, methods and ethics of futures-oriented research in education. In the introduction to his latest e-book, The Biggest Wake-Up Call in History, Richard Slaughter highlights the values-driven, hopeful opportunities that underpin an integral approach. An integral approach might enable societies to take a respectful and generous stance to the interpretation of and engagement with the “‘signals’ that are being constantly generated within the global system, [and therefore] as we become aware of their import and actively respond to them, then a deeper, richer, understanding emerges”. Slaughter’s work is important for education, and those who work with technology, because his integral approach highlights the importance of taking a proactive role in critique and action, around transitions to new ways of being and living, in the face of climate change, peak oil and the dominant, neoliberal ideology of political economy. Education has to work with these external issues in planning its possible futures. One strand of this that needs greater critique is technology and digital social media.

Slaughter asks two important questions in addressing these issues.

  1. How can so many contributions fit together within a coherent whole?
  2. How can many different kinds of truth be honoured and adjudicated?

In respecting complexity, pluralism and difference, the onus is on us all to look at ways of planning for transitions rather than waiting to adapt to shock. This may involve taking on-board relevant historical lessons, in order to stand for a position of “Science and technology + foresight + moral courage”. This interrelationship of science and technology, humanism and the liberal arts is critical in any approach to futures’ thinking, in particular because difficult, inclusive, ethical decisions need to be made around the pressures of population, affluence and the environment, and the possibilities of technology.

One of the questions with which I have come away is how are those of us involved in educational technology and digital social media actively engaged in futures work? Is there a sense in which these communities are futures literate? How do these communities of practice enable the critique of technology and the possibilities for the uses of educational technology, in both the process of creating the future and the outcomes of those processes [what is actually done as well as how this happens]? In engaging with social media and in touting personalisation, how are we looking at values and customs in common?

I return to this issue of values because it is important and is one that technologists ought to address, especially in underpinning our activity and what we do in the world. In part, this reflects Holloway’s “power-to”, and his focus on doing as an emancipatory activity, in direct opposition to others’ “power-over” us and our labour. Doing and activity are crucial, but need to be seen in light of our shared humanity. Dowrick reminds us that the ways in which we live our lives should be driven by humane values that can help us overcome disruption, namely: courage; fidelity; restraint; generosity; tolerance; and forgiveness. Those of us who drive forward the use of technology has a duty to foreground these issues in ensuring that we do not contribute to individual alienation, the taylorisation of work, or the fetishisation of tools.

In engaging with technology and social media, I see decisions being made to enact our values. In this way there is space for activism, and the creation of pedagogies of excess, supported by the use of technology and social media. However, we need to ask more often what do “we” want to be and why? Why do we want to do what we do with technology? How does, for example, Twitter enable our shared humane values? How do we allow Facebook’s form and function to (de-)humanise us? Who is marginalised/empowered on-line in a virtual learning environment, and what does this outcome say about us? Do we allow mobile technologies to enable or prevent us from doing and creating? How does our understanding of the present and our work with educational technology in the present enable us to plan for the future? My use of “we” and “our” and “shared” is critical.

Analysing the present is an important issue. Do we properly understand why and how technology and social media are being (ab)used in the present, and how and why they help us to act/react now? Or are we simply accepting dominant hegemonic positions about the use of technology in education? When we make statements about engagement, participation, marginalisation do we critique those statements? How do we use those statements, and our approaches and needs, underwritten by our core, humane values, to help communities of practice to develop their own solutions to problems? I see this as a starting point for enabling a discussion about futures that utilises technology to enhance our humanity, and to move us from the fetishisation of the digital towards communal solutions to significant problems.


How might current and future trends in technology affect educational leadership?


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted on Learning Exchanges on 13 July 2010.

At DMU’s Leadership and Management Conference, Mike Robinson [Director of ISAS] and I ran a workshop on “How might current and future trends in technology affect leadership at DMU?” The purpose of the session was to enable staff to share aspirations, revisit key trends in the strategic development of institutional IT, and to analyse the development of TEL at DMU as a case study, before identifying key short/medium-term priorities for their teams. The key outcomes raised by the mix of academic and support staff are noted below.

What are your aspirations for your use of technology as a leader?

  • Demands effective leadership that is proactive rather than reactive.
  • Enhanced processes/controls [automation and infrastructure].
  • Integrated management information to inform and support decisions, including finance.
  • Enhanced administration/efficiency of teaching tasks, including distance learning.
  • Improve communication of information, document management.
  • Mobility and remote working.
  • Meeting staff/student expectations.
  • Interest in short-term innovation within a long-term view.

Can you define a short and medium-term priority for your team in utilising technology?

  • Aspirational strategy for DMU, which is suitable and sustainable.
  • Having a typology of technology allows for flexibility/innovation and security/comfort factor for some staff.
  • Culture change away from paper towards the use of data repositories, recorded webinars etc..
  • Joined-up systems/thinking – synergy/seamless..
  • Planning; communications; identify support.
  • Engagement with what is currently available – how can it help me?
  • Feedback from team about what works/needs attention.
  • Developing approaches to Open Educational Resources.
  • Matching possibilities with University procurement and decision-making processes.
  • Develop a knowledge base on non-DMU systems, and contextualisation of use.
  • Training and support.
  • Innovation, investment, resourcing.
  • Open mind, agile and flexible.

Can you identify key barriers to this?

  • Culture change. We are in a faster world, with no space to think, where staff need to be subject specialists and technologically aware. What does this mean for relationships between staff/students/university?
  • Need for enhanced collaboration between services/faculties and the use of champions/pioneers.
  • Top-down strategy and cultural bias that impacts staff fears/increases resistance,
  • IT as a distraction; the need to follow the crowd; buy-in; resistance to change. Speed of change, and lack of engagement/awareness.
  • Better communication about reviews/developments.
  • Lack of support [resources for innovation].
  • Lack of testing of new technology; being wedded to certain providers is restrictive.
  • Sourcing everything from the private sector.
  • Security of the environment.
  • Green fingers – work/teach remotely.

The headlines for me from the session were three-fold, and connect into the work we are undertaking around a vision for TEL at DMU.

  1. Staff focused on a vision for joined-up systems, including access to management information, learning technologies and communications tools, which can enable both effective decision-making/controls and curriculum/work innovation.
  2. Developing a joined-up approach requires staff participation in the development and delivery of a longer-term, aspirational strategy for DMU in engaging with technology. This strategy should help staff innovate in their activity/tasks/work with the tools that they already have at hand in the short-term, so that they are ready to innovate with new tools and to manage change in the longer-term.
  3. Sustainability, in terms of: the curriculum; our human relationships; our data; our infrastructures; our use of energy and natural/manufactured resources; is very important. How we develop “green fingers” in our use of IT is a priority and a responsibility for us all, in developing a resilient higher education.

 


Open education: the need for critique


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted on Learning Exchanges on 27 July 2010.

**This post is a set of personal reflections on open education, and the fetishised nature of Open Educational Resources [OERs], and arises from the JISC/HEA-hosted Open Educational Resources International Symposium. It is framed by posts about the Democratic University and the Political Economy of Openness.

Open education is a critique of our formal, institutionalised systems of education. Or it should be. It should help us to critique what we do as educators in a formal system and why. It reflects back to us how our work enables the people who experience our formal systems, to exist, to innovate, to succeed, to be(come). An engagement with the possibilities for open education enables us to examine our “power-to” change our social relations, rather than to exist in a state where some-one or some-thing has “power-over” our work and our selves.

The possibilities of open education include our ability to create spaces for reflecting upon our participation in the activity and labour of (self-) discovery and (self-) invention, and change. However, participation is an often co-opted word, which is de-based to a form of therapeutic engagement between individuals whose power-to govern and create in a situation/activity is markedly different. These differences impact how our work is constructed, and how it is perceived and valued. Our power-to govern a learning situation and the work that is actually done in it, and to re-invent the social relationships that frame it, are based on our agency in the world. There is a balance here between our individual and communal approaches to the process of participation.

Therefore, democratic practices in education are critical in enhancing our broader socio-educational life, and underpin radical re-conceptualisations of educational practice, for example mass intellectuality, a pedagogy of excess and student-as-producer. Marx’s Eighth Thesis on Feuerbach notes that “All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.“ One of the cracks in the formal education system that open models of education demonstrate to us is the hope for partnership and co-governance of learning between different actors in shared practices.

A second, co-opted and often de-based word is “revolution”, especially when coupled to “learning”, and tied to the creation of open educational resources. Marx’s oft-quoted Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach states “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” Is this what is meant by “learning revolution”? Where we use that term do we mean radically change our social relations, or the ownership and aggregation of the means of production? Or are we reducing the power of the meaning of “revolution”, so that it becomes a change in the method of “participation” or a change in the technological mode of production? Marx notes in his First Thesis on Feuerbach that we need to “grasp the significance of ‘revolutionary’, of ‘practical-critical’, activity”. Revolution implies a process of struggle and transformation in our social relations, towards an entirely different mode of both production and distribution of goods and services, and towards a different form of collective social (or in this case educational) order. To use the term learning revolution demands a critique of the political economics of education, and the social relations that exist therein. This cannot be done in terms of OERs without an engagement with critical pedagogy.

As a result, it is interesting to re-evaluate the ways in which we think about allegedly radical educational projects/arguments, in particular:

In each of these discussions, there are a number of risks.

  1. That the role/importance of individual rather than social empowerment is laid bare, and that within a libertarian educational structure, the focus becomes techno-determinist. The risk here is that, accepting the position of others in meaningful, socially-constructed tasks, technology is the driver for individual emancipation [although we rarely ask “emancipation for or from what?”]. Moreover, we believe that without constant innovation in technology and technological practices we cannot emancipate/empower ever more diverse groups of learners.
  2. That we deliver practices that we claim are radical, but which simply replicate or re-produce a dominant political economy, in-line with the ideology of accepted business models. So that which we claim as innovatory becomes subservient to a dominant mode of production and merely enables institutions to have power-over our products and labour, rather than it being a shared project [witness the desire for HE to become more business-like].
  3. That we fetishise the outcomes/products of our labour as a form of currency. This is especially true in the case of open educations resources, which risk being disconnected from a critique of open education or critical pedagogy, and PLEs which risk being disconnected from a critique of their relationship to our wider social relations.
  4. That we fetishise the learner as an autonomous agent, able to engage in an environment, using specific tools and interacting with specific OERs, so that she becomes an economic actor, rather than seeing her engagement as socially emergent and negotiated.

David Harvey notes that changing the world is more complex than a technological fix, and requires us to recognise and engage in the critique of an assemblage of other activities or practices. Harvey argues that there are seven activity areas that underpin meaningful social change:

  1. technological and organizational forms of production, exchange and consumption;
  2. relations to nature and the environment;
  3. social relations between people;
  4. mental conceptions of the world, embracing knowledges and cultural understandings and beliefs;
  5. labour processes and production of specific goods, geographies, services or affects;
  6. institutional, legal and governmental arrangements; and
  7. the conduct of daily life that underpins social reproduction.

These areas impact the broader projects with which we engage. As a result a number of questions arise, especially around open education and OERs.

  1. How do we prioritise engagement with the broader, open context of learning and education, with trusted peers? How do we raise our own literacy around openness, in order to legitimise sharing as social practice and as social process, and not as a response to a target of OER-production-as-SMART-objective?
  2. Is the production of OERs a means of furthering control over our means of production and our labour? Is there a risk that the alleged transparency of production of OERs is used to further control and power-over, for example, teachers and teaching by impacting contracts of employment?
  3. Though education, how do we enable the types of participatory engagement and re-production of groups like the Autonomous Geographies Collective or Trapese, where the production of OERs is a secondary outcome to the re-fashioning of social relationships that it enables? By so doing, we might just enable groups to engage with the activity-areas that Harvey highlights as a process of production, rather than fetishising the production of things.
  4. How do we resist the increasing discourse of cost-effectiveness, monetisation, economic value, efficiency that afflicts our discussion of open education? How do we move the argument around sustainability and open education away from a focus on economic value? Too often our discussion of open education is reduced to a discussion of OERs and this, in turn, is reduced to a discourse of cost and consumption. As a result, our role in education is commodified and objectified.
  5. Do we ask who is margnalised in the production of OERs or in open education? Are non-Western cultures engaging in open education and the production of OERs through the languages of colonialism or by focusing on native socio-cultural forms? At what point do OERs and open education become part of a post-colonial discourse focused upon new markets?
  6. How do we utilise OERs to open-up trans-disciplinary approaches to global crises, like peak oil and climate change? How do we enable the emerging array of open subject resources to be utilised across boundaries (be they personal, subject, programme, course, institutional or national), in order to challenge sites of power in the University and beyond? These resources enable ways of challenging hegemonic, mental conceptions of the world and framing new social relations. This requires curriculum leadership. These crises require socio-educational leadership.

The production and re-use of artefacts is of secondary importance to the social relationships that are re-defined by us, and the focus on people and values that are in-turn assembled through open education. In overcoming alienation, and in overcoming crisis, open education enables us to critique institutionalised forms of education, and to promote more resilient ways of doing. The challenge is to promote such a critique.