Tag Archives: futures

Student-as-producer: reflections on social protest, social media and the socio-history of re-production


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 16 November 2010

I was taken with Mike Neary’s description of the 10th November national demonstration by students, staff and supporters of HE as a public good. It was important that Mike called his piece “History (Change) in the Making”, in order to highlight the possibilities for fusing the production of our futures through an engagement with the past. In the quest for progress, too often we dismiss any attempt at critique of our present moment as historically-situated, especially in terms of our use of technology. Too often we make claims for technology in education as progressive because we believe it enhances engagement or participation or the value of a student as a knowledge worker, and this tends to be collapsed into a discourse around employability. However, a more critical, democratic reappraisal of our shared positions in the academy, underpinned by socio-historical narratives, rather than socio-technical ones, is being focused by Neary through the student-as-producer project. This project is working in the institution, against neoliberal views of the curriculum-as-consumption, to move beyond prescribed social relations. Neary notes that:

“Student as Producer is not only about encouraging students to produce products, whether in the form of artistic objects and/or research outputs. Student as Producer extends the concept of production to include ways in which students, as social individuals, affect and change society, so at [sic.] to be able to recognise themselves in the social world of their own design.”

In relating the project to the protest, he powerfully highlights that the students in London were not those who will feel the cold-wind of fees, and yet they were standing-up for higher education as a public good. He also stated that they could see that “the lack of money is a constant grinding relentless reality”, which diminishes us all. This diminishing of education and our social relations in the face of externally-imposed, economic necessity reminds us “how the power of money has so overwhelmed human sociability that it now seems like a natural phenomena, rather than the outcome of an oppressive social process. And, as such, it appears impossible to resist.” Critically, as the Rector of Edinburgh University, Iain MacWhirter, noted, this means that in the name of supporting coercive capitalism and the financialisation of our economy and life-world, prospective undergraduate students must mortgage their futures before they can consider a traditional mortgage.

One of the critical outcomes from the protest was around the importance of re-politicising the question of what higher education is for, not just amongst academics and established intellectuals, but also amongst others who benefit from the forms of HE. I do not know whether the students engaged on the NUS/UCU demo regard themselves as intellectuals, activists, citizens, agents or whatever. However, the ability of 50,000 people physically to see 49,999 other people, alongside brass bands, drummers and carnival grotesques, is an important moment in radicalising and re-imagining what our concrete, living experiences of higher education might be. This re-politicising offers the promise of a re-imagining and a re-production of the forms of higher education.

In this way the reality of this national event was its appearance as a crack in the dominant form of resourcing, sharing and delivering HE. As a crack in the dominant moment of higher education it forces other students, academic and professional services staff, society, workers, the state, to grapple with alternatives, or at least to defend their orthodoxies. This is important because, as Holloway argues, this is a disruption in the dominant logic of our social determination. He quotes: “We shall not accept an alien, external determination of our activity, we shall determine ourselves what we do”. For Holloway, moving away from imposition and alienation, towards automomies of doing is a critical, radical moment. I wonder the extent to which Wednesday was important because of the spaces it prescribed for autonomous activity.

The value of actual, living experiences, where fellowship can be described and re-formed through direct action in the world, shines through this crack. Whilst I tweeted my descriptions of activity from the demonstration [as activists have done in a range of spaces before], and whilst Twitter enabled newsrooms to manage live representations of activity, social media only ever remained a second-order instrument, as a reporting tool, or a mechanism to disseminate information, or to re-publish live information. After the fact it gave a way for me to re-interpret lived events and to correlate that with those of others. My ability to use social media to reflect on my position in relation to a range of others is critical. [Note that there is a wealth of vimeo footage, #demo2010 tweets and blog postings about the protest.] However, social media only described a representation of our power to recast the world; it described a possibility, or a space where radical moments might be opened-up; it was never, of itself, that re-presentation without taking the form of concrete action-in-the-world.

One of the great spin-offs of the use of social media by the protest movement is the ability of autonomous groups to see their peers exercising their power-to re-create the world. Technologies are a means through which the idea of the university is being critiqued, or through which the possibilities of collective and co-operative re-productions of higher education are being discussed ahead of concrete action-in-the-world. In this way autonomous movements in Popular Education, student protests in Italy, automonist student collectives in the UK, an Education Camp in Parliament Square, and planned and actual student occupations based on teach-ins and the historical, educational experiences of radical communities, are engaging with social media as a means of re-producing their living experiences of higher education. It is this latter point that is central. Technology in and for education is at once an external portrayal of a living reality, and a means of re-inforcing the ways in which established cultures are being challenged. This is why its use by students-as-producers is so energising, where it is keyed into: their social relations and their relationships with the environment; their production and governance processes; their conceptions of the world; and the conduct of their daily life that underpins their social reproduction.

The view of students-as-producers connects to Collini’s case for the Humanities, which moves us beyond the economy and its reductive/hostile positioning of the academy, towards the need for a public discourse on the nature of the university as a public good. Collini urges us to move away from a discourse framed by the power assumed by the state in the name of the taxpayer, to reconsider our educational and socially-mediated values. In the struggle for higher education, in moving away from formulae of impact, excellence and assurance, Collini urges us to engage with issues of trust and “contestable judgements”. This is exactly what the use of social media by students-as-producers is hinting at, in particular addressing the contested meaning of constructed positions, especially the socio-historical positions taken by coercive capitalism.

This issue of engagement with socio-historical positions is underlined by Zizek who argues that we need to reappraise ourselves of what “interesting times” actually means, in terms of the consequences of socio-cultural, economic and environmental dislocations. He argues that it is not newness that is interesting, but how the new and the old are mixed. Otherwise our present fiction, in which the future as defined by the dominant form of capital, will continue to function as our dominant, living culture. Zizek argues that our socio-historical culture, and our understanding of the past is critical here in developing “a culture of tolerance, this is a culture of its own, not just being open to the other, but open towards the other in the sense of participating in the same struggle.” One of the pivotal points that he raises is that in order “to change a view you must reveal the extent of your oppression.” Social media is one such way in which students and academics are revealing this in their living experiences.

This mixing of a socio-historical critique of our social relations, our ability to produce our world, and technology is needed to engage with any work on futures. In this, no meaningful engagement with technology in education matters beyond the question of what is higher education for? Keri Facer has argued that we need to ask some serious questions and whether our hegemonic educational systems, oriented towards accreditation in the current economy are viable. She has asked what sorts of worlds do we want to live in, what skills and relationships do we wish to encourage, how do we integrate education into our communities?

These are big questions, and they sit uneasily alongside our view of UK HE and economic growth through, for instance, internationalisation agendas. Can we really look to extend market share in a world where countries like India, South Africa and China are expanding their domestic, higher education provision to support their own economic growth? However, more importantly, how does higher education react to, and plan within, critical international issues of political economy, like banking bailouts and structural trade deficits. What value futures’ planning for higher education in these scenarios, beyond blind faith in business-as-usual?

Facer argues that we are not having right conversations about HE, that Browne is a symptom of a failure to have debate over what HE is for and how it should be funded. She states that we need “a serious public debate about education” and speaks for a critique of socio-technical change rooted in an analysis of the radical possibilities of the curriculum. In this she sees universities as democratic public spaces, which need to be reinvigorated. Where we have the university as servant of the knowledge economy and no more, where our lives are based on technical skills alone, we will see radical socio-economic polarisation and economic inequality. We need to imagine alternatives tied more closely to needs/aspirations of our communities.

The realpolitik of this is that new funding models framed in the name of sustainability, as outcomes of the shock doctrine, increase our alienation from imposed social determinations visited through manifestations of business-as-usual. I would argue that the key to grappling with Facer’s question of what HE is for, is a meaningful socio-historical critique of the forms of higher education. Within that the use of technology is an area of activity interconnected with concrete activities and decisions that can be described, compared, offered and critiqued. The current use of social media by students in producing new, radical moments for the university is a valuable starting point for fighting for the idea of higher education. In planning alternatives to prescribed futures, we must recover our socio-historical positions. Students-as-producers have demonstrated how critical engagement with technology in education may offer hope in this praxis.


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.


Postscript: open education, cracks and the crisis of higher education


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 29 October 2010

I’ve been pondering the realities and possibilities surrounding cuts and Browne, based on conversations and reading of the comments to my original piece on open education, cracks and the crisis of higher education. This has been spiked by Leigh Blackall’s point that “Richard stops short of describing alternative approaches, pointing instead to a few worthy projects”. Leigh is correct. As is Martin Oliver in noting that in re-imaging the University as social form, as part of a re-imagining of the forms of our communities/societies, “I’m caught between an idealised and a pragmatic response”.

In part we are left with a soft-and-slow response from within HE, as a few questions are worked out within the confines of business-as-usual. These questions include the following.

  1. What does the cuts and fees agenda mean for our allegedly progressive pedagogies and the roles of the student-as-consumer and the student-as-producer? Will students who are paying £1,000s accept pedagogic models and engagement with resources that are about their production of their curriculum? How will this affect their expectations of the curriculum and their experience of HE? This is more so in the face of a hegemonic view, from business and government, of HE as marketised, and increasingly individualised rather than socially-constructed, commodity. All that work we have done on progressive and radical pedagogies needs to be considered in light of the curriculum-as-commodity.
  2. Will, for example, Band D subjects fair better than Band C, in that the HEFCE subsidy plus fee income will be replaced by a top-level of projected fee in the former, but not in the latter. Will there be cross-subsidy? What will this mean for power relations between subjects within the University, when it comes to the student experience or the allocation for resources or approaches to mechanisms like quality? We already hear stories of powerful faculties claiming they subsidise smaller areas of work.
  3. How can institutions differentiate themselves in the face of fees and cuts? Will their current make-up of Band B, C and D subjects impact how they fare post-2012/13?
  4. What does “the student[s] experience[s]” mean in reality, when we don’t have funding letters and we don’t know how Browne will play out in Parliament? What does “the student[s] experience[s]” mean in reality, when we don’t know what the University is for?

In this I feel that there are possibilities to re-imagine our work. From management within the academy lobbying and positioning is already beginning as a form of protest within the model of business-as-usual. There is a form of critique framed around autonomy and complexity, and a focus upon the institution as social enterprise. On his blog, the VC of the University of Sheffield notes that “In a world of global competition and profound change, we want our children to have more than just bread to live on. And to do that, they will also need to appreciate the value of the full range of knowledge, and why our good colleagues do need, and deserve, some bread.” Note the use of our *good* colleagues. Martin Hall, VC at Salford argues that “Re-connecting with local communities leads to academic excellence and international recognition”, and that “partnership working makes more sense than Darwinian selection”.

This view of developing the University as social enterprise is important within the framework of business-as-usual, and it might enable, for example, DMU to develop its strengths in partnership with Leicester as a global, national and regional exemplar of strategies for partnership, inclusion, diversity. The issue of scale, strengths and also values is critical here. However, this assumes that business-as-usual is an option, which given the radicalisation and marketisation agenda of the coalition, and to which opposition political parties offer limited alternatives, seems of limited value.

Elsewhere we have seen a view that protest through demonstrations or occupations might be the way to direct opposition. In the UK, the NUS and UCU are planning a demonstration on 10 November [which I will be attending] with the strap-line “fund our future”. A danger with this approach is that it disempowers – that it waits for the Coalition to agree that they were wrong and to maintain the status quo ante bellum. In short it isn’t resilient in the face of an ideological attack – it plays their game to their rules on their turf. It is about negation. But it is about the negation of the newly-imposed terms of business-as-usual. It is not about the negation of our negation. It is not about re-imagining higher learning. It is not about what HE is for. If we are in this crisis, and wish to move beyond it, then we have to be against it politically. The key here is radical alternatives and transformation.

Martin Oliver goes on to note in a comment to my original posting that:

“we do need to try out these open forms now. If we can’t work out how to do it – and just as importantly, how to tell credible stories about its value, and about what resources it really needs – then we won’t have it in our repertoire when we need it in the future. We also wouldn’t be able to resist inappropriate versions of that path if we couldn’t spot them and understand what made

“So – where can we start sharing stories about this?”

Martin asks us to re-imagine and share. Some of this re-imagining is possible through, as Leigh Blackall indicates, radicalising our practices within the academy. This includes:

  1. Radicalising the curriculum to engage with issues of transformation in political economy, within and across subjects;
  2. Radicalising the forms of engagement with our partners or stakeholders, by working with them to re-imagine, produce and re-produce, decisions, spaces and activities;
  3. Building active connections with radical, alternative groups at local, national, global scale [social centres, reading groups, the WEA, transitions town movements];
  4. Asking questions about what higher education is for, and what social forms best support its outcomes; and
  5. Using funding calls and partnership-working to enable the academy to develop radical alternatives.

 

The key here is to build and share alternative models, based on negotiated, shared values, that can be realised locally or individually or by communities and which challenge and lay bare the fallacies of the dominant ideology. This testing and sharing of alternatives is oppositional, and is made crucial, not only in the face of economic liberalism, but also in the face of imminent crises like peak oil. Is business-as-usual really viable?

However, this demands that we live the alternative experiences of which we speak in the areas where we exist most fully – those areas where we have expertise or community investment or engagement. These operate at different scales, and in that they might usefully be seen in the context of how to change the world without taking power. This means, for me, in my work with edtech:

  • challenging the views of my institution about its place in the student experience;
  • being critical about pedagogy as a form of life-changing, transformatory production of political economic alternatives, and not just preparation for paying taxes;
  • working with curriculum teams to challenge their views of their pedagogies and the place of technology in that; situating myself against essentialism and techno-colonialism in all its forms;
  • using OERs as a driver for open education and production, co-operation and sharing, against commercialisation and consumption; situating this view of OERs in open education in political economy, against closed, vendor-driven models of education;
  • working to use technology to open the University up as more than a regional, social enterprise, so that it can offer resilient models of organisation and support at scale, against neoliberalism; working with local, regional, national radical partners using technology to develop new models for life;
  • using external bids to develop and share radical ideas with other stakeholders – to frame alternative models; to work in the hope that my decisions and activities challenge dominant positions.

Martin is right that we need to share and make the case for alternatives. That is the next challenge.


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.


What I’d quite like from HEFCE is transformational leadership


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 11 July 2009

Caveat: Before we get started on this I’m not saying that HEFCE don’t lead already. The HEFCE Strategic Plan frames an enabling environment for encouraging devolved institutional approaches, flexibility of mission and dynamism in delivery.

At the Heads of e-Learning Forum meeting at he HEA in York yesterday, HEFCE Policy Officer Alan Palmer, opened up a discussion of what HEFCE should do about the implementation of its Technology-Enhanced Learning Strategy. HEFCE itself, and this was reinforced by other speakers during the morning, highlight efficiency, enhancement and transformation as major outcomes. What was not recognised was that these are also drivers for institutions, as education providers, social enterprises and businesses, when seen as part of a bigger vision and blueprint for change.

Two elephants were *outed* early on. The first was the economic crisis and its impact on funding, with HE likely to be asked for £180 million of savings in 2010-11. The second was the apparent migration of terminology within the relevant departments towards on-line learning, with an implied view that this might be cheaper. In managing the issues that arose around these two elephants Alan used the phrase “What HEFCE won’t do” five times.

The first issue, primed a discussion about detailed stuff that might lead to some efficiencies, and which might catalyse some transformation in educational practices, namely creative commons and copyright, open educational resources, managing student [lack of] mobility etc.. This point ties into the second issue as it appears that there is a view that we can simply do things better or more cheaply on-line. Didn’t I read that in 1997? However, to lever the economic or investment gains that are being mooted does not simply require e-Learning Champions or Educational Developers to see how technology can save the day. In fact the discussion, which is doomed to revolve around issues of revenue and capital rather than social justice, requires a focus on what institutions are for and why.

I recently blogged “Towards a radical manifesto? The Impact of Web 2.0 on HE” and, whilst accepting the damaging impact of digital divides and learning illiteracy, I argued that the most crucial element of the recent Committee of Inquiry’s report was that the “inertia of any established [HE] system [is]… unlikely to be sustainable in the long term. The next generation is unlikely to be so accommodating” about its HE experience. Pre-HE developments like Building Schools for the Future and the EYFS are critical markers for Universities that demand vision, leadership and transformation of how HEIs achieve.

If we are serious about meeting the needs of future learners, and in enacting efficiency, enhancement and transformation as major outcomes, then Universities need a proper reappraisal of their strategic plans, in order to make sense of the bits-and-pieces of change surrounding Web 2.0, OER, personalisation etc.. This requires that strategic managers look at service restructuring, rather than the silos into which Corporate Directorates ossify. This then demands that a vision drives a blueprint for how the organisation will operate in terms of its people [contracts, professional development, workloads etc.], organisation [linked to the management of those primary services], technologies [insourced, outsourced, driven by the cloud, CMS-related] and the information that it needs and manages [from its key current and future stakeholders].

Without this kind of institutional visioning and transformation, asking Heads of e-Learning what should be done to implement HEFCE’s TEL strategy is a redundant operation. At best it buys some time to think about possible restructuring of the curriculum, without ever thinking through how students, staff and local communities can be empowered.

So in answer to Alan’s question of what should HEFCE do, two things are needed. Firstly, demand that institutional strategic managers are serious about transformation as a driver for empowerment. Enhancement is all-well-and-good, but education should empower people and has be written into vision statements and blueprints for change. The Welsh Funding Council’s “Enhancing Learning and Teaching through Technology: a Strategy for Higher Education in Wales” nudges Welsh HEIs in that direction and HEFCE should be stimulating discussion and leadership on this issue. The TEL strategy offers an opportunity for taking a step back, when evaluating what a blueprint for 21st Century HE might look like.

Secondly, in the face of Universities being tied to Lord Mandelson under the latest reshuffle, there is a desperate need for leadership in the support of teaching across the sector. The Guardian highlighted this in its comment yesterday “Eduction, Education, Education“, with the fear that the Government would focus upon research intensive Universities that are perceived to be captains of industry or drivers of the economy and squeeze those for whom teaching is the thing. Refashioning our collective view of teaching and learning in HE, to promote an agenda for progressive pedagogies that recognises the needs of the range of 21st Century learners, and sees HEIs as social enterprises as much as businesses, demands leadership from us all. In lobbying governments, this demands active leadership from HEFCE.


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.


Thinking about 2015: some issues for HE and EdTech


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 16 October 2009

I heard the excellent and inspiring Keri Facer at a JISC Curriculum Design and Delivery Programme event on Wednesday. There were three areas that made me sit up and think.

The pre-HE learner and their context

Keri described some recent work on the pre-HE learner and their context that is highlighting:

  • the impact of ”play” in its many forms;
  • the cultural context outside school, and the role of mentors or coaches rather than experts, who can engage learners individually or as members of social groups in developing their engagement with digital technologies in order to adapt it to their needs; and
  • sources of frustration, lack of skills and lack of opportunity that separate many other learners from the benefits of the same new technologies.

Keri went on to discuss an *idealised* view of children born in 1997, who would enter HE in 2015. She argued that the value of schools often existed in their ability to offer spaces that develop maths and critical literacy/evaluation, alongside safety, routine etc.. She also raised the issue of children having dual identities, between home/personal and school/performance/delivery. However, schools offer technology that is not the same as home technology, reflecting the fact that in the debate around personalisation and curriculum design and delivery, disconnections or dislocations might be amplified.

This may also be impacted by socio-economic differences, social justice and inclusion agendas. What does it say about our society if children and learners of any age or background get left behind? We do well to reflect on that term “left behind” because it points towards abandonment.

A recent summary of OfSTED reports on the importance of ICT noted that pupils’ achievement in ICT was good in over half Primary Schools, but that children in secondary schools were not being stretched; rather a consolidation of skills was the norm. Whether further collaboration between schools and pupils, in distributing the development of personalisation and engagement with ICT would shake things up to develop higher-level evaluative skills, is a moot point. This does have implications for learners entering HE.

However, the development of skills that frame agency, autonomy and decision-making is perhaps more pressing give the availability of alternative models for information gathering and *schooling*, like 5min.com, 12sec.tv, school of everything, home-schooling and Steiner education. The value given by coaches, mentors and teachers is now vital throughout life. Keri pointed to the huge demographic changes that are shifting towards an older and longer-lived population. At issue here is how a homogenised view of a Google generation within institutions tallies with a demand for later-life education, and intergenerational learning, and a focus on personalisation. These tensions then need to be squared with the implications of social learning.

A curriculum for human-machine relations, and a focus on the Self

One intriguing point Keri raised was our need to get used to working and living alongside machines, and outsourcing some activities to machines. She mentioned “a curriculum for human-machine relations”, and this got me thinking about a mash-up between Asimov’s 3 Laws of Robotics to provide governance and an approach for developing an integrated, educating self. I argue for the latter because one thing that Web 2.0 or the read/write web screams at me is who am I? What do I stand for? Who is my Self?

I need to do more work integrating Bloom and Winnicott with Illich, Wenger and Barnett, in order to make sense of this for my Self. In part this is because we have the opportunity [which might also be a risk over overload and #brainfail] to know more stuff about more stuff. The key is integrating this stuff within a secure self, as well as within a secure space. This becomes more resonant for me in the context of discussions around the development of a personal cloud. I interpret this to be a space, context or frame-of-reference that enables the learner to exist, learn, be and do. It is organised around the learner and not the HEI/organisation. A secure Self can then engage with this development. How do our curricula enable this to emerge?

Challenging economic narratives

Keri’s final point focussed upon addressing the challenges to the education and knowledge economy narrative. She highlighted how a polarisation of workforces may be in-train, with high and low-skilled workers and outsourced systems/services impacting the ability of specific individuals and groups to develop autonomy and make decisions. Keri asked “how does education respond”? This made me think about the value of education beyond the economy and beyond the formal economy – to focus upon collaboration and local social engagement, and demonstrating values of social enterprise.

She left us with 3 big questions that all JISC projects need to grapple with. Moreover, we need some collective aggregation of the outputs of our projects to see whether there are ways forward for the sector in addressing them.

  1. What sorts of relationships between people are we encouraging? What are our negotiated roles/responsibilities in a differentiated curriculum and beyond? Should we migrate our focus to coaching and mentoring? Who gets left behind if we do?
  2. What sorts of knowledge/understanding do these learners need to be effective agents in society?
  3. Can the curriculum work for a mixed demographic, with some networked, mobile learners, operating in information-rich environments and preparing for highly-polarised workplaces? If not how do we respond?

Higher Ambitions for whom?


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 4 November 2009

Having just listened to David Lammy’s interview about the new HE Framework, Higher Ambitions, set out by Lord Mandelson yesterday I’m left wondering how I feel, given that I work in a teaching-focused, research active, employer-engaged HEI that is mid-table, but where the focus is on enhancing learning, empowering teaching and framing social and economic opportunities for all. I felt happier when musing on the revised HEFCE strategic plan back in June but then the impact of the economic crisis on the public sector was possibly less well understood. Now I’m more anxious about the impact of those cuts on the visions and blueprints of our HEIs.

Lammy’s interview with the JISC mentioned “vision” for HE, but was very strong on “public sector cuts” and the impact on the public sector as a whole. “Scarcity” was closely tied to a prioritisation of STEM research, scientific research, a need for private investment, and the demand to demonstrate “effectiveness”. Lammy was clear that “a diverse set of funding streams is important if the quality of higher education is to be maintained and improved” as the public funding climate worsens.

Sadly, this focus on the private, on the scientific and on research doesn’t quite connect into the Edgeless University report that Lammy launched back in the summer. In particular, that report focused on affiliations between HEIs and the private, public and voluntary sectors that in-turn might open-up spaces for conversations around social enterprise. These types of affiliations beyond the private sector are missing from the rhetoric around Higher Ambitions, and in the swell of an apparent Governmental, economic agenda [ideology?] for HE.

Lammy focused upon student [not learners – see below] as consumers of information about Universities and programmes, but this demands that they, and other end-users, are able to “read” that information in context. The very real risk is that the consumer-model elides into all institutional services like technology-enhanced learning, without a proper appreciation of what this means for both the offer and actuality of what students get? Would a systems-based approach that focused on the human be more valid and reliable in socio-economic growth than one that is targets-based?

Mary Beard in the TimesOnline highlighted some of the problems with the fact that “The model for this is apparently the new ‘food-labelling system’” She notes the tension between prioritising information about contact hours that suggests a specific pedagogic approach, and the role of independent learning and thinking in HE, which may realise many different and co-existing approaches. Moreover, learners need to transition into and understand these learning cultures over time.

Whilst Lammy does argue that the “challenge… is to develop pedagogy” he doesn’t develop this and nor does the Framework document, so I am left wondering how it then connects into the raft of recent reports and policies. These include: DEMOS Edgeless University Report; Digital Britain; the JISC Report: Thriving in the 21st century: Learning Literacies for the Digital Age; the Report of an independent Committee of Inquiry into the impact on higher education of students’ widespread use of Web 2.0 technologies; and the Revised HEFCE Strategy. How and where do these all converge? How is any of this joined up? I guess the answer is at University-level, and maybe the key is a clear, autonomous and grounded vision within HEIs. In that case surely support and academic staff are central? Yet they are the main HE stakeholder missing throughout the reports of the last 24 hours and beyond. Overcoming their neglect is critical.

Lammy prioritises the challenge “to lead in the marketplace, to grow what has begun with the Open University and extend that out there to the world”. Note the mention again of the Open University – he focused on this at the Edgeless University launch, and as he mentioned his work with Microsoft in Seattle I also note that Martin Bean, the VC of the OU is a former Microsoft employee. With the cloud, outsourcing, big business and efficiencies being front-and-centre in HE TEL discourses, this is important.

So the focus is international; it is private and not social enterprise; it is on employers being “more involved in course design and funding of the degrees they want”. Mandelson reiterated a focus on linking science to research in his statement to the Lords: “We have a disproportionate share of the world’s leading research universities. With just 1 per cent of the world’s population, we achieve 12 per cent of the world’s scientific citations.” For others in the sector the key apparently is on training rather than education: “The challenge for the next decade is to offer a wider range of new study opportunities – part-time, work-based, foundation degrees and studying whilst at home – to a greater range of people.”

Whilst Mandelson focused primarily on his perception of the elite universities, it seems apparent that all HEIs are to be asked to help bail out the economy, whilst as Mary Beard notes facing a “bottom line in all this [that] is budget cutting.” Mandelson’s duality of an elite focus and public sector cut is seen throughout: “public expenditure inevitably more constrained. Attracting the best students and researchers will become more competitive. Above all it will be a decade when our top priority is to restore economic growth and our universities need to make an even stronger contribution to this goal” [my emphasis].

So what of social inclusion? What of social enterprise? What of new social and economic ideas rather than restoring those that have failed? Some essence of this shows up in Mandelson’s speech to the Lords as his 5th and last objective: “Universities provide employment, enhance cultural life and offer many amenities to their surrounding communities. They shape and communicate our shared values, including tolerance, freedom of expression and civic engagement. We will support universities in safeguarding these values.”

The only time that the terms “learn” or “learning” or “learner” were mentioned was in terms of “e-learning”. The mentions of “students” was generally [although not in every case] in an economic or consumer-related context. The wordle cloud of Mandelson’s oral statement to the Lords demonstrates his focus: Learning and teaching and teachers are noticeably small or missing. In the word-cloud of the full paper research, students, skills, business, education, funding, skills, Government are my stand-out terms.

So what of technology-enhanced learning? Lammy argued that digital technologies are vital, and then framed that by mention of the cloud, empowering communities and giving global scope. But that was it. The clear focus was on the economy, scarcity and value-for-money. What this means for the provision of institutional resources for technologies, for TEL teams, for pedagogic development, for moving beyond transmissive pedagogies needs addressing. So does the impact of energy costs that are likely to rise and our commitment to green ICT. This work has to be done locally, within HEIs and with partners, but also within the EdTech community.

The full Framework paper mentions “e-learning” four times. On p. 20 it argues that “We will empower our universities to be world leaders in the growing market in transnational education based on e-learning” and the link is to the private sector, “Through HEFCE, we will be prepared to provide seedcorn funding on a competitive basis for university-private sector partnerships”, that may include “The potential to develop international education through partnerships with broadcasters and internet service providers”. Is this for content? For communication? What of pedagogy? What of services that surround learning and teaching? What of work with voluntary organisations or the public sector? Where will the power lie?

On p. 80, “Continuing to strengthen the UK’s reputation as one of the world’s best providers of e-learning, both for those who study here and students based outside the UK” is seen to be a priority. This is picked up on p. 92 in “The continuing development of e-learning is a vital element in supporting improvement of teaching and the student experience and in enabling the personalisation and flexibility that students and employers expect.” So again we see a focus on the global and the private sector, with a limited mention of public sector and none of social enterprise.

On p. 100, Recommendation 31 is that “The Government, working with the Higher Education Funding Council for England, should prioritise investment in e-learning infrastructure to extend the possibilities of remote and online learning.” So I’m left wondering, as someone who works in a teaching-focused, research active, employer-engaged HEI that is mid-table, where the focus is here on enhancing learning, empowering teaching and framing social and economic opportunities for all. Perhaps this is a time for clear leadership within the EdTech community, within institutions, and within communities.