Tag Archives: money

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


Posted by hallymk1

*Originally posted at Learning Exchanges on 13 August 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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”.