The 6th Plymouth e-Learning Conference will kick off with a free first day on Wednesday 6th April, where we will see an invasion of humanoid robots and artifical beings. The Faculty of Science and Technology in Plymouth is well known for its Robot football team and its work into intelligent systems, and delegates will get the chance next week to see them roaming the exhibition floor, and will even get the chance to interact with them! One of the cutest robots ever - iCub - is pictured here.
And of course, there will be prizes and free gifts after the plenary on Day 3 for those keen enough to stay to the very end, including a 3G Kindle, Nintendo 3DS and numerous other gadgets and gizmos designed to please our tech savvy audience. As usual, our conference dinner will be held in the historic and picturesque area of Plymouth's Barbican quayside (pictured), and there will be a Devon cream tea. Don't say we don't spoil you. See you there, or follow on the #pelc11 hashtag and via live streaming (of selected events) on the conference website. 
Robot invasion! by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
But it's not plain sailing. Influential commentators such as Andrew Keen have sniped consistently against such amateur content, suggesting that it is not only dumbing down society, but also eroding the authority of professionals and scholars, and denigrating knowledge. 
A lot of time has been spent studying the impact of user generated content. You know, all the stuff that gets posted up onto the web, and whether it is at all useful to us as teachers and educators. Some of the best content is often provided by amateurs - people who are not necessarily specialists or qualified in their field of interest, but who are never the less passionate about their subject. This is also the ethos of sites such as Wikipedia, which rely heavily on 'the people' and 'wisdom of crowds' to create and maintain the content held in its pages. Blogging has emerged in recent years as a strong contender for the number one spot as user generated content, driven as it is by people who are both passionate and knowledgeable.
Journal articles are usually double reviewed by people who are deemed to be experts in their field. Once reviewed, articles are sent back to the author for correction and revision before they are accepted for publication. Such tasks are usually performed by editorial teams. Blogs are peer reviewed, not necessarily in a formal way, but certainly informally through reader comments. I certainly think long and hard about what I write on this blog, because with between 1000-2000 views per day, and a stream of comments coming in from those who either agree or disagree with my views, I sure feel as though I am being peer reviewed. The difference between journal articles and blogs is that blogs are peer reviewed within minutes of being posted. They can also be adjusted, revised and corrected quickly, and re-posted instantly on demand. There may be typos and spelling errors in blogs, but who can honestly tell me that they have never spotted an error in a peer reviewed journal article or book chapter?
Blogs are gaining credibility, particularly those that are being followed and read by many people, and those that attract awards and plaudits from peers. They have credibility in a different sense to peer reviewed journal articles. Blogs can become a rallying point - a tribal totem - around which people can come to terms with ideas, change their approach, exchange best practice, and generally engage with their community of practice. It is a lot more intimate than the community that gathers around a peer reviewed journal article. Journals perform a different function entirely, and are less immediate, more slow burning in their impact. Blogs tend to be transitory and ethereal in their presence. Although the archive of a blog is there for people to revisit if they wish, generally it is the article at the top of the stack that is most visible and therefore most visited.
You may already have noticed that blog addresses are beginning to appear in the reference lists of peer reviewed journal articles. This is a trend that I predict will increase as blogs begin to achieve a more respectable and accepted position in the academic world.
One final word: We need to remember that professionals built the Titanic, but an amateur built the Ark. It's not always about expertise - sometimes it's about passion.
Image source Wikimedia Commons
Synching feelings by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Last year I wrote extensively about learning using Web 3.0 and Web x.0, which after much discussion across the network, was renamed the eXtended Web. Later I suggested in a presentation in London that we should call it the Smart eXtended Web, due to the high profile smart mobiles will undoubtedly play in the future of learning. For me, learning will need to fit into the palm of the hand if we are to grab the attention of younger students. Ever since I wrote about it, I have been thinking about what such a Smart eXtended Web might look like. Tomorrow I get the chance to speak a little more about the Smart eXtended Web when I address the ICS Skill's National IT Training Conference here at the Northwall Quay in Dublin. I took a photo of the Convention Centre today, which you can see is quite futuristic, so it's a great venue to be talking about things to come. Here's a reminder of what I wrote in a blog post last year:
"...it's not only Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 we need to consider, but extensions beyond these into a truly integrated, fully responsive and entirely personalised learning environment that fits into the palm of your hand. This is my vision for the future, but as I continually warn - predicting the future can be hazardous. I wrote about this problem in a recent post entitled 'Seeing the future'. The U.S. Mayor who in 1880 announced that one day every town in America would have a telephone was right, but also so far wide of the mark, it's almost laughable. So when people ask me when we will see all of these tools being used for learning, I simply smile and say - "we'll see". We know the tools exist (see: The Future is the Web) we just don't know when they will become economically viable enough for institutions to begin investing in them wholesale. Perhaps they never will. Perhaps it will be down to individual learners to purchase their own devices and applications. Perhaps this will be another aspect of the 'do it yourself' personal learning environment ethos we are all talking about."
Talking about the future has been one of my recurring activities recently, with several blog posts published right here in a series entitled 'Learning 2020'. Since I posted these, there has been much debate on this site, and the high view rates on all of the posts suggests that many people are interested in what the future holds and want to engage in discussion about it. But we are not just discussing it. I firmly believe that we can also help to shape the future, and tomorrow I'm going to speak about what we might expect to see in (and outside of) schools and universities over the next few years. You can follow the conversation on Twitter via the hashtag #ittc11
Learning in the palm of your hand by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Look above at the title of this blog. Yep... Learning with 'e's. The 'e' seems to be in front of just about everything now. Not just e-mail, but also e-commerce, e-tickets and of course e-learning. Someone pointed out to me recently that if vetrinary surgeons went 'e' then it would be my name backwards - e-vets. On it goes.
What kind of teachers will we see in 2020? Will they be any different (and will they be doing anything different) to what they are now? It's hard to say, because we can't predict the future. But can we help shape it? Take a look at what has already appeared on this blog in my 2020 Vision series, and there may be some clues. I have written about 2020 learners, 2020 classrooms and 2020 curriculum (focusing mainly on assessment of learning), and also touched on what we might see with 2020 learning technologies. Much of what I have written has been informed by crowdsourced through conversations with teachers on Twitter and other social media, as well as face to face. Those who are currently at the 'chalk face' will tell you that teaching at the moment is fraught with all sorts of difficulties. Many have already left the profession or are planning to, because they feel they don't have enough room to breathe - the restrictive practices and oppressive levels of performativity required by governments and funding bodies is driving many from teaching, often never to return. This is a tragedy. It's also unnecessary. All that talent lost to education, simply because education has become management heavy. We could easily do away with standardised testing, overcrammed curricula and league tables - we don't need them, and they do little to help learners - and concentrate instead on personalised forms of learning, open and relevant programmes of study, and a celebration of what each individual school does best and excels at. Most teachers would agree with this as a definite and positive future for schools. So what might teachers be doing in 2020?
I will predict this: there will still be a place for teachers, because teachers are irreplacable. It's still true that any teacher who can be replaced by a computer - should be. No amount of technology, self-study or user generated content can ever replace teachers. They will still be there to motivate and inspire, and they will still be there as pedagogy experts to facilitate and support learning. What they may do less of is - teach. There will probably be less 'front of the classroom' activities and more drawing alongside learners in project work, small group activities, problem based learning and technology enhanced processes. Most importantly, teachers will need to work more in partnership with their students. Finally, teachers may not actually be physically present in some classrooms, instead, taking on a virtual presence, particularly in places difficult to reach - a view endorsed by Spanish educator Jose Luis Garcia.
For the teachers who responded to my Twitter questions, there seemed an unanimous view that there will be a sea-change in the way teachers conduct themselves in education, and that teachers will drive these changes. Heidi Siwak, a Grade 6 teacher in Canada predicted: "I'll spend very little time designing lessons and more time assisting students in meeting their own learning goals." These sentiments are echoed by several others. Martin Homola in Slovakia, said teachers will pay "more attention to specific needs and interests of pupils. Less authority, more friendly older sibling approach. More discussion." Jack Beaman from the UK wanted to see small groups and a scenario where top experts would "use technology to reach masses allowing people to dictate own learning." He envisaged an education provision that would be "less top down and more social." Another UK teacher, Sonia Cooper, believes there will be a more dialogic kind of pedagogy, with teachers "hopefully talking less to the class, not imparting knowledge, but guiding learners by asking the right questions." She sees teacher tasks such as assessment (marking) being "very different with verbal feedback recorded and recognised as vital." She thinks that feedback to students will be given using other ICT tools too. A UK Headteacher, Andy Hampton, believes that teachers will teach and promote "Junior PLNs" (Professional Learning Networks) as university style teaching filters down to schools. Ben Jones sees the vital importance of learners taking centre stage, but warns that we should not confuse personalised learning with individualised learning.
From these views, it would appear that future changes in education will come from teachers adopting new practices, where social learning comes to the fore, and there is more negotiation through dialogue with learners. Teacher Linda Barron in Australia even goes as far as to suggest that collaboration should be so entrenched in future learning that it will be difficult to tell the teachers apart from the learners. Changes will need to come through flexibility and personalisation of learning, which will also bring new technologies into play. Changes are coming, and we will need to wait to see what they are, but we need the right changes. It is best that the future of learning will be shaped by teachers and their students in partnership, rather than by governments. Let's start now, shall we?
Image source
2020 teachers by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
One of the new skills that teachers will need to master in the future will be the ability to manage virtual learning spaces. Learning always takes place in the mind of the learner, but the formalised activities of learning have never been confined to the classroom. The use of web based resources and networked computers enable students to enter worlds previously inaccessible, allowing them to explore within that imagined world we call 'cyberspace'. These virtual learning spaces are often shared spaces, enabling symbolic interactions of all types to take place, the simplest through text alone, the most exotic through a combination of text, icons, sound, graphics, animation and video. Such imagined worlds can also be very flexible, in that they represent spaces where the student is not constrained by the traditional boundaries of space and place. Ultimately, virtual learning spaces can be very different from anything the teacher or the student may previously have encountered, and the management of these spaces will depend to a great extent on the imagination and flair of teachers.
And yet the management of learning environment is already a core skill practised by all teachers in schools and lecturers in colleges and universities. Learning spaces in conventional education are the classrooms, laboratories and libraries that are located in the physical boundaries of the parent institute. They are bounded by walls, rules and conventions. In the virtual learning environment, there are no boundaries, because there are no physical classrooms, laboratories or libraries. Although in spaces such as Second Life, we see constrained thinking in the form of virtual classroom and lecture halls, with doors, windows and roofs, this need not be they way we represent learning spaces in virtual worlds. Creative and disruptive educators can think of much better ways to represent learning spaces. They refuse to perpetuate old ways of thinking in new environments.
When I try to gaze into the future I hurt my eyes. It's difficult to see much beyond the end of the year, so trying to predict what technologies we might see in schools by 2020 is like staring into a very strong spotlight. We can merely speculate. It's not even worth trying to extrapolate trends based on developments from the previous 10 years. Change is not linear, it's exponential. That means that the change that has happened over the last decade, rapid as it has been, will in no way compare realistically with the changes we can expect over the next decade. But I'm going to stick my neck out anyway .... so how about this for a prediction?
I spent yesterday at the JISC Annual conference in the Liverpool Echo Arena. It was a day packed full of seminars and workshops, and I will report on it later, when there is some space to think. For now though, here is JISC's own report on the keynote given by Eric Thomas:
Professor Eric Thomas, vice chancellor of Bristol University, today highlighted the importance of colleges’ and universities’ use of technology in encouraging student applications. He said: “An integrated, sophisticated use of [new technology] is going to mean that the university is seen as cutting edge and more attractive. I see JISC’s role as assisting us in making the university look as attractive as possible.”
JISC’s deputy chair Professor David Baker agreed: “Over the next 5-10 years JISC will have an ever more vital role to play not just in the education sector but across the UK. I don’t believe that JISC or higher or further education can afford to slow down.”
Against the backdrop of an increasingly demanding student body, Professor Thomas predicted that within ten years there would be more students studying in their home towns to save costs, and that they would also have the choice of non-degree entry to traditional careers like accounting. Professor Thomas also highlighted recent scrutiny of universities’ connections with Libya as an example of how the public see education as operating within a different value system.
He said: “It’s essential that we see ourselves as educational institutions and that we retain our values. People expect higher education to have different value set. It’s really important that we maintain that.”
Professor Thomas’ talk opened the JISC11 conference in Liverpool today, which is attended by nearly 700 delegates from across further and higher education in the UK, China, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, South Korea, Spain and Sweden.
His keynote introduced a day of advice, guidance and future-gazing on the theme of ‘financial challenges, digital opportunities’ to help colleges and opportunities reduce costs and improve their efficiency.
Follow the conference online using the hashtag #JISC11Watch the live streamed sessions online today and after the conference here.
Press release courtesy of JISC Announce Mail Service
The ubiquitous presence of computers in our world can evoke a variety of different emotional responses. Sherry Turkle defined this influence in 'Life on the Screen' when she stated:
“Computers don't just do things for us, they do things to us, including to our ways of thinking about ourselves and other people.” (Turkle, 1997 - sleeve notes)
The artist Pablo Picasso was a little more pessimistic when he declared:
“Computers are useless. They only give you answers.”
His meaning might be seen by some as obtuse, but to me it is quite clear. Computers can be emotive. They have the capacity to create disagreement and consternation. They are both the solution and the problem. This is because computers are electric idiots - with less brain power than a slug. They do exactly what you tell them to do with no question and without reasoning. And yet we invest in them some sort of human intelligence. We talk to the machine, we plead with it, cajole it, we get angry with it, and in some extreme cases, we argue with it and punish it with violence.
Some shy away from using technology because it is so alien and impersonal to them. Others are so addicted to their relationship with the screen they neglect their real life relationships. If we can somehow position the learner within this challenging, dynamic and baffling conceptual field, we may be able to understand why some students have problems trying to use technology successfully. Computers are not much good at teaching - they are much better used as mind tools to extend the mind's ability in terms of memory capacity and visualisation. The provisionality of tools within the standard desktop or laptop are also ripe for use as a means to express creativity. If used well, computers have a deep impact on human elarning. If used badly though, all a computer can do for us is to perpetuate our errors.
"My computer may be able to beat me at chess, but it's no match for me at kickboxing..."
Image source by Todd Stadler
Computers are useless by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
When I talk to teachers about the school curriculum, whether primary or secondary, guess what they want to discuss the most? Correct - assessment. When I crowdsourced for material for this series of blog posts on #learning2020, a lot of the comments I received back were about assessment. It's no surprise that Teachers hate it (marking is time consuming and not particularly useful, given the effort involved) just as much as children hate it (threatening, stressful, not very helpful for their learning). Just about the only people who love assessment are the government and the organisations who ... er, organise assessment. I have ranted several times recently on this blog about the difficulties of standardised assessment, and we have had interesting and thought provoking discussions here on alternative assessment methods. What kinds of assessment will there be in 2020? Will they be different from today, or will we (perish the thought) be lumbered with useless, discriminatory and impractical testing for years to come? Here's what you said:
Madeleine Brookes, technology integrator and ITGS teacher in Beijing, China, predicted that we will move from handwritten exams to online submission, which I think is a reasonable position to take. Regardless of the issues of verifiability of students and technical issues, online submission seems to be an advance on current exam systems. Others, including Ollie Bray, Scotland's National Advisor for emerging technologies, and Adrian Bradshaw, and ICT subject leader in Plymouth, England, made suggestions that assessment as we know it will be completely obsolete by 2020. Whilst I can't second guess their reasoning behind this, I assume it's because assessment in its current form does not prepare learners for the future, and it certainly doesn't add much to their experience of learning in school. Adrian went as far as to suggest that the National Curriculum as we currently know it will face the axe - because again, it is inadequate for the needs of learners. David Truss (an educator based in Dalian, China) agreed, arguing that curricula are overload and should be changed, but admitted that it will probably take a long time.
Will we still need classrooms by 2020? If so, what kind of learning environments will they be? Or will students learn on the move, in their workplaces, at home, and through the multiple connections facilitated by new communication technology? This is a difficult question to answer, because school and education, although not synonymous, are deeply ingrained in our culture and have become a key component of our social, political and economic thinking. Implicit in the question are a number of issues, including the relationship between teaching and curriculum, and nature of state funded education and the role of teachers. Also under the spotlight are the demands of society, work, family and community, and how these are balanced against the needs of individual learners.
I recently used Twitter to crowdsource a number of responses to what would be obsolete in education in 2020. The discussion can be found under the hashtag #learning2020. In this post I would like to present some of the tweets, and provide a critical commentary around them, in the hope that it will provide a useful contribution to the discourse surrounding the purpose of education and the future of learning.
The design and configuration of classrooms was a particular concern for several people. Melissa Brown Boyle, an elementary school teacher in the USA, predicted that school classrooms of the future will have "fewer individual student desks and more tables or open floor space conducive to discussion and movement". She also believes in moving learning beyond traditional settings: "open discussion space must be global not just local, virtual links are just as real as graffiti on desks.” She has a point, because often, classrooms are cluttered with furniture, and provide less space for creative activities to be organised. These are sentiments echoed by another teacher, Vanessa Camilleri, who calls for more creative options through flexibility - the global classroom is already there for the making. So, do we need to redesign classrooms to make them more conducive to personalised and creative forms of learning? Evelyn MacElhinney is even more radical. She envisages 'hologram rooms' where students can 'learn in the scenario' and she advocates doing away with tables and chairs completely in schools of the future.
What about the way education is currently conducted? What about the closed nature of the classroom? Mr Colley, a teacher in the UK wants to see closed door classrooms become a thing of the past. He also predicts that teachers will very soon need to determine the differences between cheating and collaboration. Martin Homola, a PhD student in Slovakia, made the prediction that education behind closed doors will be obsolete by 2020. He suggests that 'online, open channels' will be the building blocks of future education. By this, I assume he means that open content, open source and open learning will come to the fore, and schools will be less protective over their content and classroom methods. Theo Kuechel agrees, and hopes to see 'more CC' and less 'C' on learning content in the future.
Sonia Cooper, also a teacher, wanted to see learning environments where each child had one device that 'did everything' including connecting to each other, the teacher, and content for learning. The scots had a lot to say about future learning: Kenny Pieper, an English teacher in Scotland, saw a future where the classroom was replete with iPads, Kindles and other personal tools for learning. Others such as Fraser Speirs, a head of computing, at a school in Scotland, also called for 1-1 technology provision, but added wisely that children should be presented with challenge-based learning. Yet Ian Stuart, a Deputy Head teacher in Scotland, warned that perhaps the "idea of 1-1 tablets in 2020 is like man in 1900 thinking we'd have really fast steam engines by 2000". He's right of course. When gazing into the future, we should certainly not constrain our thinking to current mindsets and conceptions of technology. Instead, we should try to be like the children in our classes - to let our imagination run riot, because from this can come the creative solutions for the problems of the future. What is your vision for 2020 learning?
Previous posts in this series on 2020 Learning include 2020 Learners and 2020 Vision.
Image source by Shuichiro
2020 Classrooms by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Children who are born this year will be halfway through primary school when 2020 arrives. What will be their experience of education?
If the last few years is anything to go on, we can expect some far reaching changes between now and 2020. We will witness the introduction of many new digital tools and technologies. We will also see changes in the curriculum, teacher roles, and learner needs. But what will these changes be? Will they be good ones? Over the next week or so, I want to explore what possible changes we can see on the horizon, and how they might affect learners and teachers, school and education.
But a word of warning... Predicting the future can be a hazardous occupation. In Biblical times, if a prophet got it wrong, he was stoned to death. Harsh. When clairvoyants get it wrong, the worse they can suffer is possibly having to pay you your money back. Astrologers don't often get it wrong, because they know better than to say anything specific. Everything they predict and advise is just far too vague for anyone to detect if it's accurate. While most of these 'futurologists' are playing games, if politicians wish to decide what is best for children they had better get it right. If they fail to plan properly for the future of our schools and education, their decisions will have a profound effect on our children, our grandchildren, and ultimately on our society.
We can't accurately predict the future of course, but what we can do is watch the trends. So will learners in 2020 be any different from those we see in our schools today? Will their needs and aspirations have changed from our own? It's highly likely they will. My own children have had very different school experiences to my own. My son, who will be 16 this year, wants to become an interactive games designer - a job that was unheard of when I left school. Many of the jobs that will appear in the next 10 years do not yet exist. Most of today's jobs rely either exclusively, or to a large extent, on information and communication technology of one form or another. This trend is on the increase. It follows that children of the future will need even more digital literacy skills than they have now. Does the current curriculum cover these skills fully?
Globalisation is also on the increase. Worldwide systems, nations, communities are more interdependent than ever, and this trend is upward. Employment mobility is also on the rise as borders come down and people move from country to country for work. Whole populations are migrating across continents to seek better living conditions thanks to European Union legislation and other international border agreements. Children of the future will need to learn more about other cultures and how they can maximise their skills in other countries. They may need to learn more languages too, but with intelligent systems providing ever more accurate translations, it may simply be a case of mastering yet another digital literacy.
Children of the future will also need to learn for life - learning to be flexible, adaptable and open to changes that might - for our current generation at least - be perceived as a threat. Of one thing we can all be certain - that change will accelerate in the next few years. Change can be disruptive and can take time, energy and effort to adapt to, but learners of the future will need to see change as an opportunity, and will need the requisite skills to take the opportunities that are presented and turn them into positive and sustainable outcomes.
Finally, children will need to be able to design their own learning spaces, create their own content and learn from it. They will be less reliant on didactic and transmissive forms of teaching and will turn instead to more independent learning from the vast storehouse of knowledge we know as the World Wide Web. This does not preclude some form of 'schooling' however. The teacher's role will change to accommodate these new needs. Teachers will become facilitators, mediators, co-authors and co-producers of content, and ultimately, companion travellers with children on their road to better learning. It is already happening in some schools. In posts later this week, I will explore what possible new roles of teachers in 2020 will need to adopt to help to prepare learners for an uncertain and certainly unpredictable future.
"The arrow of time says the future will be different to the past." - Professor Brian Cox
Image source by 'Back of the Napkin'
2020 Learners by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
I read a post by Tina Barseghian on the Mind/Shift Blog entitled '21 things that will be obselete by 2020' today, which prompted me to start a conversation on Twitter to discuss what we think school would look like in another decade or less. Discussions are still ongoing in projects such as Purpos/ed about what education should be for/about, and gazing into the future challenges our ideas similarly. By thinking about what the future may look like for schools, we reflect on what we would like to see. By doing this, we critically evaluate where we are and where we have come from. I took this picture at a hi-tech convention and trade fair in Germany last month. In among all the shiny technology vendor stands sat this anacronism - a replication of the school classroom that I recall from my primary school days. The only thing missing was the inkwells, knibs and paper. The organisers had obviously done this for a purpose. For me, the purpose was to cause people to remember where we have come from in our personal journeys through education. It was also to remind us never to go back to that kind of education, but instead to move forwards. I am left asking my own question - what is my vision for education in the future?
Last week I sent out a call on Twitter for people to send me interesting education questions for me to discuss, or issues to expose. Over the next few blog posts I'm planning to respond to some of the conundrums that were sent back to me. The first question I'm going to comment on came via Craig Taylor who asked how we should address 'the disconnect between how learners are learning to learn during their formal education years and the lack of tools/opportunities.'
I don't normally enjoy working over a weekend, but I'm looking forward to this one. Saltash.Net School, one of the premier technology early adopter schools in the United Kingdom is holding its annual staff conference down on the north coast of Cornwall this Friday and Saturday, and its Deputy Head Dan Roberts, has managed to get hold of some exceptional speakers for the event. Both 'slum-dog Professor' Sugata Mitra and Afghanistan war hero and double amputee Ben McBean will give keynote speeches on Friday evening, after which there will be a question and answer session, with invited panellists Stuart Ball (Microsoft Education), the blogger and journalist Merlin John, and yours truly.
The following morning, it will be my turn to speak, and I will be providing a keynote entitled: 'Teachers and Technology: The Big Picture' in which I will talk about how teachers can harness the power of new and emerging technology to inspire and engage learners. I will post my slides up on my Slideshare site after the presentation. There will be workshops later in the day led by Dan Roberts and Stuart Ball on how to use Web 2.0 tools in teaching and learning, and the entire event will be searchable under the Twitter stream #saltash11. Much of the conference will also be live streamed at this site. Here is the list of people attending the conference. I'm looking foward to it.
Image source
Writing a good abstract - a brief summary, precis or synopsis that appears at the front of an article - is important. It may be the only thing the reader sees, besides the title of your paper. This is because many event organisers only publish abstracts in conference proceedings. The same applies with journal articles - most publishers, particularly those who put up paywalls, will often allow you a free look at just the journal abstracts. The abstract is therefore quite an important device to promote your article. Get it right, and make it eyecatching, and you will often 'hook' people into reading the full article. Get it wrong, and you may lose your audience.
Several people have asked me to share my ideas and advice on writing abstracts for conference papers and journal articles. If you disagree with these suggestions and/or have alternative ones, you are very welcome to post your ideas and views below in the comments box. I'm sticking my neck out here, as there are sure to be objections about some of the following, but this is my blog and these are my ideas, and they are here to promote some discussion - so here goes:
I always write my abstract last, after I have written at least a full draft of the paper. The reason I do this is because often, my paper doesn't take its full shape until it's close to being finished, and I find it easier to write the abstract then. Alternative advice is to write your abstract first, because it can give you structure, but if you really want some scaffolding for structure, you could use sub-headings which can be removed later if you wish to do so.
There are of course many variations on the abstract, but essentially, any good abstract is fairly concise, and contains five key points (which could be written in as little as 4 or 5 sentences):
1: The background and context of the study.
2: The aims and purposes of the study; may also include research question(s) or hypothesis.
3: The method used to answer the research question(s); may also include brief details of the type and number of participants; sample size.
4: Summary of key research results/findings.
5: How the results contribute to knowledge of the field; main conclusions and/or recommendations.
So there you have it - a formula for a brief abstract that is applicable for use in the reporting of most research reports or academic studies. One final note - keep it brief, because most conference organisers, journal editors and book publishers will reject long and rambling abstracts.
Image source by Pascal Klein
In the abstract by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Increasingly, as technology becomes more personalised, it will also become more personalisable. By this I mean that not only will users be able to tailor the technology (apps, backgrounds, appearance, functionality) to their own needs, but it will also be used increasingly to appeal to their senses, and even to adjust their perceptions and behaviour. Watching a re-run of the 2002 sci-fi movie Minority Report, reminded me of this. The central character, a Pre-Crime Officer by the name of John Anderton is walking down the street, and animated advertising images are calling him out by name as he passes by: "John Anderton - you need this product today!" We assume that the embedded technology within the advertising hoardings is detecting some personal feature that identifies him - possibly the irises in his eyes - and can then call him by his name. Such advertising, if it were technically feasible (and some would argue it already is) would be very powerful, because as all advertisers know, it is the personal message that is the most influential.
At its peak my Elluminate webinar last night attracted a knowledgeable and discerning audience of about 150 people from around the world, which I found very rewarding. At the invitation of Steve Hargadon I spoke about the future of learning, with social media as a key feature. Although it was a rehash of the slides for a keynote speech I had presented last month in Germany for the LearnTEC conference, I was able to repurpose the slides and give a fresh spin on the presentation for my worldwide audience. We covered a lot of ground and there were some great follow up questions. One of the statements I made which seemed to gain quite a reaction contained the phrase 'positive deviance.' I have had some questions about it so let me try to explain a little more:
In any community there are a few people who are not satisfied with the way things are done, and go against the grain. They often try out new and possibly unacceptable ideas that in the end, prove correct, or promote some positive change. So from the undesirable comes the desirable. People who are positive deviants are usually unpopular, or are considered to be lunatics, subversives or anarchists. Consider the little boy in the crowd who was the only one bold enough to should out 'The King has no clothes on!'. Nobody else dared to say it. But he saw it like it is and spoke out. This was an example of positive deviance. It brought about a change in people's perceptions. 'Some things will never change' sang Bruce Hornsby, and then he added 'Ah but don't you believe it.' Changes can be achieved even in the most conservative organisations if they are approached properly. But positive deviance can go farther than individual action.
Positive deviance can also come from collective action - or in the words of James Surowiecki - 'the wisdom of the crowd'. The current radical changes in the Middle East are being caused by collective positive deviance, in this case in the form of mass civil disobedience. Tyrants are being overthrown by the collective positive deviance of those who simply will not put up with being oppressed any more. Sadly, there has been bloodshed, and even loss of life, yet people still seem willing to make the sacrifice so they can secure a better future for themselves and their children. Positive deviance is therefore based on direct action as well as thought. “It is easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than think your way into a new way of acting”. Or in other words, it is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.
Teachers can be deviant in a positive way. All it takes is for one teacher to notice that something is not being done particularly well and can be done better. All they need to do is speak out, blow the whistle. It may not be acceptable to change the way 'something has always been done', but sometimes it still has to be done, regardless of the cost, if a positive change is to be made. Positive deviants get into trouble sometimes, because they disrupt the status quo - they challenge and subvert 'the way things have always been done', and they can be uncomfortable to have around. But ultimately, if we want far reaching change in our school systems, then we need positive deviancy. So do you see things that need changing? Are you disatisfied with the way things are done? And are you prepared to take the risk to make some changes, to try out new things? Are you a positive deviant?
Image source by Nigel Mykura
When we talk about the future of learning, we talk about the future of society. Most will agree that good education contributes significantly toward the wellbeing and prosperity of society. Without a trained, educated work force, nation states are not in a position to compete within the global economy. You only have to look at any emerging nation of the world where there is poor or partial compulsory education provision to see exactly how its economy is faring. Moreover, the higher the number of people unemployed, the more drain there will be on the economic and social resources of the state. This is the main reason why successive governments load their deck so heavily in favour of improved educational provision. It is politically expedient and it is also socially and economically desirable to seek to improve the state funded education provision. And it is why most changes imposed by governments don't actually work. This is because the governments of the world often remain blinded by economic considerations, and fail to see the true value of good education. Our leaders know the price of education, but have no idea about its true value.
Education is not just about preparing children for a world of work, and it is more than an organised attempt to secure the economic future of the nation. Education is far more valuable than that. How can we ignore the simple joy of learning? How can we measure the cultural value of learning about art, music, science, faith - the world around us? What price can we place on leading young people to maturity of thought, where they become discerning and critically aware individuals, able to decide for themselves what is right or wrong in the world? How do we place a price tag on enabling children to channel their fertile imaginations into precious, creative, transformative outcomes?
The answer is, we can't ... and we shouldn't. When the world falls apart around us, what we will be left with - is what we have learnt. And while the good people of Christchurch, New Zealand, are struggling to come to terms with their tragic losses, resulting from yesterday's devastating earthquake, what will they be doing? They will be surviving, escaping, organising, caring, sharing, coping, communicating, collaborating, rebuilding, reflecting and reappraising, and drawing on many other valuable skills they have learnt. Skills that go way beyond the mere acquisition of facts and knowledge. They will be drawing upon their emotional and intellectual resources which do not result solely from immersion in a 'curriculum', but rather through their exposure to the values and mores of their community.
As the news of the Christchurch earthquake broke yesterday, many people drew on their social media communication skills to connect with each other, providing vital information and sharing news, in a virtual community that spanned the globe. They achieved this without the help of the broadcast media, who were once again hours behind in reporting from the scene. We received reports from citizen journalists, people caught up in the drama of the moment, using their mobile phones to send out their pleas for help, and their remarkable but disturbing pictures and videos of the scenes they were witnessing before them. Such actions cannot be taught. There is no curriculum that can be developed to give us an appreciation of what we should do in a disaster or a crisis, no way to teach how we can communicate human tragedy as it unfolds. We learn by doing and we learn by being exposed to these experiences. And as we learn, others learn with us and from us. As a community, we somehow survive and ultimately, thrive. Lifelong learning is what education is made of. It was never about knowing what, always about knowing how. Let us never confuse schooling with education. If we do, what will be our future?
Dedicated to the memory of those lost in the Christchurch earthquake of 22 February, 2011.
Donate to the Red Cross NZ Earthquake victims fund
Image source by Martin Luff
Counting the cost by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
During a presentation in Manchester two years ago, I happened to mention that Illich's 1970s notion of deschooling society could now be achieved through new web based tools, but that we were in danger of turning the Web back into a funnel if we persisted with wholesale implementation of institutional VLEs that constrained rather than liberated learning. He is one of my favourite anarchists, I said.
In an online discussion group later, someone suggested that my mention of Illich was enough to brand me as a member of the 'lunatic fringe'. I smiled, because I wasn't offended by this, but genuinely encouraged. A similar thing happened to me during the plenary session of the ICL conference in Austria. I asked a question of one of the keynote speakers, and cited Illich's deschooling position. He lost his cool and declared "No-one quotes Illich anymore!" It's not always a bad thing to be labelled a lunatic. It often means that people just don't fully understand what has been said. It's the same when someone is labelled an anarchist. It is often used as a perjorative description, without a clear understanding of what it actually means.
The Sex Pistols sang 'I am an anarchist', but I'm not convinced they were really aware of the true connotations of their lyrics. One of the conference delegates at my Manchester presentation asked me to explain my statement that Illich was 'one of my favourite anarchists'. He asked me to say what 'other anarchists' I admired. I responded with a list of people including: Jesus Christ, Mozart, Picasso, Van Gogh, Stockhausen, Einstein, The Beatles and Dylan Thomas. A surprising list perhaps? Few of these, if asked, would have classified themselves as anarchists in the sense that they wished to 'destroy the world'. They didn't of course. Most of them were criticised for being mad, deluded, drug-crazed or drunken, but each of them in their own way broke out from the mould, enabling us to see the world in a new way. They created new concepts that made us rethink our representations of reality. To me, that is what true anarchism is. Not being satisfied with the present, anarchy is about challenging, subverting, removing and ultimately replacing the tired, creaking old structures - a kind of 'destructive creativity' perhaps. It may not all be about smashing the system. It may be about repurposing it - just take a closer look at Illich's ideas:
Here is what Illich (pictured left) actually said: “A…major illusion on which the school system rests is that most learning is the result of teaching. Teaching, it is true, may contribute to certain kinds of learning under certain circumstances. But most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives".
Illich was not saying 'destroy school'. He was saying that the ills of the current state funded school system (read 1971, or 2011 - it makes no difference) far outweigh the good. School is creating far more societal problems than it is solving, he believed. His notion of 'learning webs' reflects his concern that we become more community focused and able to respond to changes, whilst his critique of 'funnels' shows his concern for the bland, homogenous and often irrelevant curricula of his own time and the impersonal, behaviouristic manner in which it was delivered.
On his blog, Bill Ellis provides us with useful insight into the motivation behind Illich's thesis: "Deschooling Society was more about society than about schools. Society needed deschooling because it was a mime of the school system that it engendered and that engendered it. In our current society individuals are expected to work in dull and stultifying jobs for future rewards. This they are trained to do in schools. They go to school so that they can get a job to work for future rewards".
We are seeing some green shoots. Creative curricula and personalised learning environments are the start of the deschooling process Illich called for. The formation of loose networks of practice and virtual communities, professional learning networks (PLNs) and 'user groups' on the Social Web is another. Retiring school systems that inhibit creative expression and individualism, and introducing new forms of assessment that support learning rather than measure it are also the start of the deschooling process. Using appropriate digital media that connect people into expert webs and enable them to negotiate meaning that is relevant to their own specific contexts is infinitely better than direct instruction. I can't see us demolishing the school or university building. What we should see happening though, is building the essence of all that is good from the school and university into each personal learning space, wherever that may be, and whatever form it might take. You can read more about the Deschooling Society ideas of Ivan Illich.
Images: Moon source. Illich source.
Under consideration during one of my tutorials were the affordances of touch screen tools such as Apple's iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. Regular readers of this blog may remember a post I wrote last month on natural gesture interfaces entitled It's only natural. In it I reported that there are a number of ways to interface with a computer now, including touch screen, non-touch (e.g. the XBox 360 Kinect), touch surface (e.g. MIT's Sixth Sense wearable), voice activation, and a number of other operation modes, many of which are spin-offs of adaptive technologies developed to support users with physical disabilities. Even facial feature recognition has been mentioned as a future interface mode.
But it was the Apple iPad tablet and other touch screen tools such as Dell's Latitude laptop that were in our focus today. (A review of the new Latitude 2110 will feature on this blog in the near future) I speculated that it was not only the tactile characteristics of the touch screen that were important, but that haptics could also be a key factor. Non-touch interfaces will no doubt become popular in time, as has already been shown by the rapid rise in popularity of the XBox Kinect. But the Nintendo Wii remains a popular gaming technology, possibly because of the haptic feedback system built into the handset. If you hit a golf ball too strongly for example, not only do you hear the fateful sound of an overhit golf ball, and experience the view of the ball overshooting the green, you also feel the vibration in the handset, which convinces your nervous system that you have made a mistake. Although the iPad screen doesn't vibrate, it never the less provides pressure resistance feedback to the user. It is a sort of middle ground between the flexible 'give' of the conventional keyboard or mouse, and the 'nothingness' of the XBox 360 Kinect. Haptics, I think, will have a big role to play in the future acceptance of natural gesture interfaces and may influence which systems ultimately become the 'Killer App' replacement for the keyboard and mouse. People may not be as ready for the completely non-touch interfaces.
A second point we discussed was that natural gestures such as pinching, flicking and swiping are intuitive, and offer students a tactile, transparent window to manipulation of content and quicker learning. Transparent technologies are those that require learners to invest a minimum of thought and effort into navigating and operating a system, thereby allowing them more cognitive processing capablity to learn. Conversely, an opaque technology (some institutional VLEs fall into this category) is a technology that forces students to concentrate more on using the tools than they do on actual learning. The former is clearly more desirable than the latter, and iPad and iPhone type interfaces provide this transparency. Students 'see through' the technology to more easily find, organise and assimilate the content.
The third important aspect of touch screen interfaces is their capability to support learning, communication and interaction with surroundings while on the move. New and emerging applications such as Augmented Reality, GPS and 3D visualisation also have a lot of appeal, particularly for those who find themselves having to navigate through unfamiliar neighbourhoods. We will probably see a lot of new developments around computer interfaces in the coming few years, but I think Apple have nailed it with the iPad touchscreen for a while at least.
Image source
Very touching by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
If you have a few moments to spare over the next few weeks, you could check out the Manifesto for Media Education site, where educators and media specialists from around the world are being invited to post their thoughts and ideas on best practice, learning philosophy and the future of education, all around the context of media. Here are Pete Fraser and John Wardle, the minds behind the Manifesto project:
Tonight I'm travelling up to Loughborough University to speak at tomorrow's Google Apps for Education User Group meeting. Together with the University of Portsmouth's Manish Malik I will be presenting a paper on our latest thinking around Cloud Learning Environments. Other speakers include Tony Hirst and Niall Sclater (both at the Open University), Nick Skelton (University of Bristol) and presided over by Martin Hamilton (Loughborough University). You can follow the entire day's proceedings by checking the Twitter hashtag #guug11. Here's our abstract:
Manish Malik (Faculty Learning and Teaching Coordinator at the University of Portsmouth) and Steve Wheeler (Associate Professor of Learning Technology at the University of Plymouth) discuss the recent developments and the patterns emerging within the CMS/LMS/VLE product sector. From BB & Moodle 1.0 to BBoogle & Moodle 2.0/Google to Sakai 3.0/Canvas to a GApps based learning environment. Also they highlight and demo an application that shows the potential that Google Apps and other loosely coupled Web 2.0 services have in creating an open Virtual Learning Environment that is cloud based or a "Cloud Learning Environment."
Image source by Marcos Papapopolus
In the clouds again by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
What is the future of education? With the upsurge in ownership of smart mobile devices such as iPhones, Androids and Blackberries, the rapid social penetration of touchscreen computers such as iPads, and an increase in the purchase of Kindles and other e-reader devices, the future of learning is definitely smart mobile. 80 per cent or so of the learning that most of us engage in is of an informal nature. Informal learning is becoming an increasingly enriched experience with personal tools, and there is improved connectivity too, ensuring that anyone who has a mobile smart device is more likely to be able to connect to the Internet quickly and seamlessly. Social networking sites and online media sharing sites are also enjoying exponential increases in membership, leading to the supposition that this generation is a profoundly connected generation. Students will use Facebook when they want to, and their institutional managed learning environment when they have to.
It is clear that education will not share the same future as the state funded school, because education and school are not synonymous. It doesn't end at school either. Those who pursue formal learning to the level of further and higher education will experience a growing gulf between the capabilities of the technology they arrive with in their hands, and technology that is provided in the classroom. They are different tools, for different purposes. The Blackberry or iPhone will be used to connect to informal learning and friends, for fun, entertainment and social purposes. The institutional system will be used for connecting to formal learning, and activities that are more formalised and by their nature, less entertaining and engaging. The personal technologies will be sleek, attractive, must-have, rapid action and intuitive devices, while the institutional systems will be rule-bound, clunky, opaque and bland. It follows that many students will prefer to access learning resources, their tutors and peers through their own personal technologies. We will thus witness a gradual decline in on-campus learning, with an increasing number of blended programmes made available to meet the demand of an increasingly mobile student population. Because students will increasingly rely on smart mobile tools for learning, FE and HE institutions may agree special arrangements with telecommunications companies to offset the call cost for students, as a trade off to the money the save by reducing their on-campus operations.
The blended learning courses of the future will be those that combine formal and informal learning features. Formal learning will be undertaken mainly for the purpose of gaining accreditation, informal learning will be engaged with for the remainder of the waking hours. Unless we can harness the power, excitement and richness of the informal personalised learning experience and translate it into formalised settings, we will continue to see a widening rift between school and education. The slideshow above - a part of the keynote speech I gave at LearnTEC in Karlsruhe, Germany, earlier this month - illustrates these and other thoughts about what we might see in the future of learning.
The future of learning by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
In several previous posts on this blog I have extolled the virtues of open content, and have called for traditional journals to go open access. Recently we heard the excellent news that the flagship journal of the Association for Learning Technologies (ALT-J) which recently changed its name to Research in Learning Technology, will go fully open access in January 2012. It took a change of publisher to achieve it. In future, I predict that the 3 issue a year publication will reach a significantly larger and more diverse audience than it has ever previously achieved. That's what happens when content is made free and open for all. For me and an increasing number of other academics in all disciplines, open access is the way forward, and I am becoming disenchanted with the idea of writing for closed and pay-wall ridden publications.
I therefore sat up and took notice this week when the American publishing house Nova Science sent me an e-mail asking me if I wanted my recently published chapters to be open and freely available to readers. What an opportunity! I thought. It's a no brainer! So I checked the fine print. Here's the deal: Any Nova published author can participate in the open access scheme - it's easy. All we have to do is complete an order form and send it off to Nova with our credit card information. For only $400 I can enjoy option 1. "This feature allows your chapter to be visible free of charge to anyone in the world with internet access. In addition, the Publisher will send e-announcements to up to 100 recipients upon request and provision of the email list." For a paltrey $700 my readers and I can enjoy option 2: "The Express version of Open Access provides Open Access immediately after page proofs resulting in full Open Access 8-12 weeks before publication." Not satisfied with such an unbelievably generous offer, Nova are really pushing the boat out, creatively offering additional options for only a small extra payment, including colour print versions ($300 for the first 10 pages and just a little more for additional pages), video enhancement (a snip at $400 for 10 minutes) and even 'personalised offprints' at $14.50 per item.
It thrills me to think that Nova Science (and hopefully other publishers too) have finally decided to put their authors and readers first, while worrying less about their shareholders, as they fully adopt the ethos of open content and open access for all the content they publish. After all, the content is only there as a result of the hard work of academics and authors, so it's only fair. It warms my heart to think that they are now putting aside their profiteering instincts to ensure that knowledge is democratised and freely available for all. I'm going to sign up to this most excellent arrangement ... just as soon as the pigs that are flying around outside my window stop for a swill break.
Image source by Stephanie Pouyllau
