Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

The 2011 Horizon Report was published today.

Each year, the Horizon Report describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact on higher education and creative expression over the next one to five years. There are no real surprises in  areas of emerging technology cited for 2011:

Time to adoption: One Year or Less

• Electronic Books
• Mobiles

Time to adoption: Two to Three Years

• Augmented Reality
• Game-based Learning

Time to adoption: Four to Five Years

• Gesture-based Computing
• Learning Analytics

However whilst the impact of mobile devices on learning is becoming readily apparent, the impact of e-books is harder to assess. Of course it may be that students will access textbooks and academic publication on e-book readers, along with the accompanying Digital Rights Management. But I think we may be reaching the tipping point where academic textbooks and research are published online or in electronic editions and are not published in traditional paper based book format. Of course this may be somewhat disruptive for the academic publishing industry! It also raises interesting issues of quality. And in the longer run I wonder if students will shun e-book readers as such preferring to read open materials on reader apps on mobile devices. We may actually be seeing the zenith of the Kindle in just the same way as analysts suggest that iPod sales may have peaked.

This video appears to have gone viral on YouTube with over one million views. Nice to see that viral videos are beginning to address serious topics.

I spent most of the weekend clearing up my office. It was one of those jobs which starts out as a small thing – I had just run out of shelf space and ends up as a major spring cleaning operation. The biggest job was throwing out paper – bags full of it. What was all this paper? Most of it was photo copies or print outs of various academic papers and reports. there must have been hundreds. And to my surprise I realized that I had read or at least flicked through mots of them at one time or another in the past. But certainly not lately. I would not have had a clue where to find any of them, even if I remembered I had them. So why did I photocopy and print so much. Is it that in those days I did more academic research and now work more on development projects? I don’t think so. Or is it that the internet is dumbing us down? Do I spend all my days following tweets rather than reading anything serious. Although I don’t subscribe to the dumbing down thesis there certainly are changes in the way we access knowledge. I originally intended to write a short blog reflecting on my clean up. but the ideas have grown so here is the introduction to what I guess will be a mini series this week about how we are using technology for research and knowledge sharing.

I am old enough to remember card index files as the way of searching for books and papers in the Swansea University library when I was a student. And much later, when I was appointed as a researcher at the University of Bremen, I used to travel to the UK to photocopy papers in the University of Surrey library (this was the nearest university library to Gatwirk and thank goodness, there were no Ryan Air type weight restrictions).

Why not access on line resources? Because quite simply even 15 years ago there were few research resources available online. of course that has rapidly changed. Even with the annoyance of DRM restrictions, it is usually fairly easy to access research papers and outputs, even in smaller research areas.

One of the other big changes we tend to forget is search. In 1995 search engines were fairly rudimentary. However we may moan about them, we now have choice of a wide range of pretty good search engines  and with persistence can usually find what we are looking for online.

Other changes? Ubiquitous, or near ubiquitous access. Most researchers, at least in the richer industrialized countries are online most of the time. And one of the big changes, at least in explaining why I had so much paper stored, is improvements in screen technology. Nowadays we even try to read documents on handheld devices. Even five or six years ago screens were small and lacked the resolution to make reading a comfortable experience. So we printed everything. I would go to the university to sue their fast laser printer to print collections of papers I had downloaded at home for the internet.

In this blog I have focused mainly on the change sin technology and how they impact on research. In the next entry I will look more at  socio technical changes and in particular at social software and changing research practice.

At the moment we are doing a  lot of work with careers guidance professionals. And part of this work is around the use of Labour Market Information in the guidance process. What jobs are available? What are future trends in employment? How much can a person expect to earn in any occupation? What qualifications are needed?

Much of this information relies of statistics. There are a lot of statistics provided by governmental and other agencies. In the UK the data.gov.uk web site is providing increasing access to data and encouraging visualisations, mash-ups and reuse.

But statistics require interpretation. By chance this morning I stumbled on a tweet -

DrEvanHarris Exposing dodgy various claims on average start grad pay http://bit.ly/gmjT5x by @Straight_Stats – reported uncritically – even by FT

Following that link took me to the excellent Straight Statistics website. The home page says:

We are a campaign established by journalists and statisticians to improve the understanding and use of statistics by government, politicians, companies, advertisers and the mass media. By exposing bad practice and rewarding good, we aim to restore public confidence in statistics.

The tweet from DrEvanHarris led to an article by Nigel Hawkes entitled Questionable Claims on Government Pay.The recent campaign against rises in student fees in the UK has focused attention on how much graduate earns. And the article suggests that many of the figures quoted in UK newspapers may give an inflated impression of graduate starting salaries because of the way these figures are compiled.

The Straight Statistics website provides a number of excellent and free resources including a simple guide to numerical and statistical traps, Making Sense of Statistics. a simple guide to numerical and statistical traps, Although the guide is “ primarily designed for journalists and press officers”,  the web site says it may be interesting to others as well. And indeed it is, providing clear examples of how statistics can mislead.

One of the issues we have looked at in the Labour Market Information for careers guidance is the impact of gender on pay. Nigel Hawkes explains this depends on how the figures are collected:

How big is the gap between the earnings of men and women? According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), it is 12.8%. But the Government Equalities Office (GEO) says it is 23%. And the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) says it’s 17.1%1.

The differences in these figures arise from the different methods used to produce them: the ONS includes only full-time employees, excluding overtime and part-time workers. The GEO includes part-time workers because it says more women than men work part-time and it is wrong to exclude them. The EHRC figure uses the ONS data but compares the mean salaries not the median. It justifies this by saying than men are over-represented at one extreme of the earnings range, and women at the other.

Three figures – all of them right – but asking what is being compared and how it was calculated tells us why there is a difference.

Well worth a read!

In around 1995 I was appointed by Bremen University to manage a relatively well funded European project on the teaching of teachers and training for vocational education and training. The project had partners in seven or eight countries. I set up a project newsletter and after three or so months announced I would no longer be ending postal copies but it would be sent exclusively by email. There was considerable opposition to this, one person (the Swedish partner) saying he had a Mac and documents would not be compatible, others claiming that they lacked the skills and technical infrastructure to manage a project electronically (my own professor used to get his secretary to download and print off copies of any emails to him).

But the shift was made and by the end of the three year funding period no-one could imagine going back to post as the main means of project communication.

In the last two or so years we have seen a similar radical shift in the technologies we use for research communication and collaboration. At the launch workshop for a project in January I was asked what tools I wanted to use for the project. My list got surprisingly long:

• Skype for day to day chat and audio communication
• Flash meeting for online project meetings
• Diigo for shred bookmarks
• Twitter for project dissemination and sharing outwards
• WordPress for the project website
• PB Works for sharing work in progress
• Flickr for sharing photographs
• Google Docs for collaborative authoring
• DropBox for sharing documents

Interestingly, one of the parters offered us a space on a relatively mature project management system and although we all agreed to use it I doubt we will. In my experience these systems are too restrictive and do not provide sufficient facilities for active collaboration. Of course they usually provide forums, but I have never worked on a project where there has been prolonged collaboration through a forum (despite most projects trying).

The one application not on my list is of course email. And despite having taken part in many projects where it is decided not to use email as the primary means of communication, after a short period everyone reverts back to it. Is this because of familiarity or because it perhaps is the quickest and simplest means of communication?

None of the applications listed require any great technical abilities (although firewalls and interoperability issues do sometimes arise). However they require changes in our working practices – in our socio-technical competences. And that can be difficult, especially where researchers are not used to working in an open and collaborative environment.

In terms of distributed international projects it is probably skype and Flashmeeting which have made the greatest impact. even then it takes time to get used to working online in synchronous environments. Online meetings require preparation and moderation – just as do face to face meetings. Yet because it is online there is often a tendency not to prepare in the same way as we would for a face opt face workshop.

I am not quite sure how DropBox is going to pan out in all of this. It certainly has a clever financial model – my free account was overflowing within a month of setting up an account.

And it is an uncertain science. Whilst organisations like Jisc have invested considerable expenditure into developing relatively heavyweight online research environments I do not know of any research into how we can use loosely coupled social software tools for research projects. We are maki9ng up our own practice as we go!

I wrote in my dissertation draft (Version 1037.2) that the reason I was surveying students about their experience of initial assessment was because I thought that they were more likely to give candid responses than their lecturers.

I beleive that academic staff would have answered my questions about assessment based on; what they think they should say, what their organisations policy says is done, and what they think they’ve done. Whereas a student would say; “we did this” or “we didn’t do that”.

Now of course I have to find some evidence to back up my assumption.

I am very happy to see the launch today of the Purpose of Education web site, initiated by Doug Belshaw and Alec Stewart.

The recent uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt have shown the power of social media for not just discussing politics but for mobilising. And the student protests in the UK against increases in university fees and the abolition of the Educational Maintenance Allowance have shown a willingness by young people in the UK to act around education. However, it is clear we need a wider debate about the whole purpose of education, especially as technology is opening up new possibilities for learning.

The new website aims to kickstart that debate. “We’re going to initiate the debate, grow the community and inform key decision makers about the outcome of this movement to improve education for all. Our 3-year plan provides more information and will be updated as the movement gains momentum.”

And the site is inviting 500 word blogposts, suggesting a focus on the questions posed by Keri Facer in a keynote to the JISC Innovating e-Learning conference 2010

What is your vision for the good society?

What is the part that education can play in achieving that and what is the part that others need to play? Who are these others? What is/what should be their relationship to education?

What are the building blocks we have in our schools and universities already that could move them towards that role?

What are the building blocks outside formal education?

What are the impediments to change and what causes them? And are there good reasons for these?

What can I see of merit in the ideas of those who disagree with me?

Do the ideas I suggest draw on the expertise and insight of others?

Do the ideas I suggest offer enough benefit to outweigh the disruption that they would cause in their realisation? how would we get there?