Web 2.0 tools in teaching and learning

"I'm not dead"...

Here’s a fascinating discussion that took place at this year’s ALT-C conference. Some deep issues are explored here, including systems implementation, student ownership of learning, commodification of education in the late 1990s, and what, for me, is the core question – is a VLE a learning system in itself, or simply a content management system for learning materials?

At one point a speaker asks three revealing questions:

• “How many of you have a VLE?” (all hands go up)
• “How many of you go to your VLE when you want to learn something?” (one hand goes up)
• “How many of you go to Google when you want to learn something?” (all hands go up)

Amusingly the next speaker replaces question 2 with;

• “How many of you go to a lecture when you want to learn something?” (one hand goes up)

These issues are complex, and start to incorporate social networks, RSS and learner autonomy as the debate progresses. Watch the video and decide which side you come down on.

There are still some who believe that print-based research publication is inherently better than online publication.

Got one!

In a previous post I was discussing the issues of copyright and peer review relating to the publishing of academic work online. Well, I’m delighted to report a lovely example of some progress in my own subject area, Music.

Daniel Leech-Wilkinson has been undertaking an AHRC-funded research project for CHARM (the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music), the outcome of which is a book entitled The Changing Sound of Music: Approaches to Studying Recorded Musical Performances.

It’s a serious and in-depth study of its subject, and contributes new knowledge and debate to our discipline, as all good research must. And it has been published in online-only form – there is no physical book version. I emailed Daniel to congratulate him on successful publication, and he mentioned in his reply that some of his academic contacts were rather alarmed that he hadn’t ‘published’ his book in the print media sense.

Daniel shares my view that the economic arguments for an academic being supported by a print publisher are negligible – sales of such specialist texts being inherently small in number. And he believes that the best way to share his research  with the academic/musical community is to publish it in unprotected form online. The peer review/quality issue is taken care of (presumably by the AHRC funding application process, and the support of the three august institutions that make up CHARM – Royal Holloway, King’s College London and the University of Sheffield.

Medieval music notation - interestingly, this image comes from a Victoria University Medieval studies course - freely available on Blogger. Click image to go to this blog.

And most pleasingly of all, his work is not based around music technology or musical e-learning – he’s a self-proclaimed ‘traditional’ academic researcher working in ‘classical’ music – a specialist in, among other things, Medieval European music. So if colleagues like this are becoming early adopters of online research dissemination, the future for e-research looks very bright indeed.

Contrast this with the print equivalent – Daniel’s list of publications is formidable, but if you want to read his work now, you will run into another locked gate in print-only cases. He’s done his best to circumvent the copyright issues too, by putting as much of his work online as he can, and deleting audio/score examples that are still in copyright.

So Daniel, and all e-researchers like him, still needs to tiptoe carefully around the niceties of copyright. In his multimedia (presumably HTML/CD-R?) publication Multimedia Music of Fourteenth-Century France (1997) he describes “editions of music, recordings, maps, charts, facsmiles of manuscripts, tables and translations” that are unavailable in the online version for copyright reasons. What if he did publish these omitted excerpts online? Who really would be harmed economically?

This work, which is about as specialised/specific as music research gets, has a great academic significance but not an economic one. And the latter has hamstrung the former, as he acknowledges;

UK institutions of higher education are entitled to receive a copy for the cost of the copying. At the moment, again for copyright reasons, it’s not available elsewhere. But if there’s enough interest a commercial release may be developed later.

We need a change in copyright law – some academic version of ‘fair use’, where the knowledge benefit to society outweighs the negligible economic loss to the copyright owner – in cases when the book version of the research is uneconomic to publish. Or better still, some form of digital watermarking/tracking (like YouTube’s previously-used mechanism for paying PRS royalties for music) so that academics, students and copyright owners can benefit from the ‘Long Tail‘ principles of remuneration that only the Internet can provide.

The status quo doesn’t help anyone – new knowledge is effectively suppressed if its dissemination (in print form) is uneconomic or unfunded. We have an opportunity to change this from the inside by simply publishing our research online as a matter of habit. And Web 2.0 tools (blogs, wikis etc) make this as easy as saving a Word document.

I don’t know if anyone caught Peter Day’s In Business on Radio 4 this week. It dealt with the implications of e-learning and social networking for the management of organisations, and made some interesting points about the formation of strategies around staff training.

Helpfully, because of its relative lack of copyright-sensitive content, you can download most of the episode as an MP3 file.

Download BBC podcast from BBC.co.uk

I don’t know how long the BBC will leave this link up – let’s hope for quite a while. Here’s a local version of the same file (any BBC representatives reading this – it’s posted here for educational purposes only but will be taken down on request).
Download BBC podcast from this site.

Day also summarises the programme on his own blog.

Among other things, the programme discusses the issue of asynchronous online interaction, as discussed in my previous post.

Here’s a rare thing – a post about e-learning where I’m not wildly enthused!

Since 2006 I’ve been unable to figure out whether Second Life is a huge opportunity for live real-time collaboration in HE, or whether it’s a declining online video game with a clunky interface that encourages trivial levels of thinking.

My dilemma seems to be shared by the sector, too. Second Life actually predates Facebook but hasn’t grown at anything like the same rate; in fact, adoption of it by HE stakeholders seems to have drifted a little. In 2007 UCAS bought an ‘island’ (a server) in SL – here’s a picture of my avatar (Jon Duvall – find me in-world sometime if you’re an SL user). Look carefully at the picture. You’ll note that the island is currently advising students that places are still available… for 2007 entry.

Think about SL intellectually and you can see immediately why some early-adopter academics got excited about it. It’s a metaphor. Everything in it is a metaphor – even onself. And the quasi-social interactions in-world have obvious parallels in pre-Internet higher education.

5 reasons why SL is like traditional education

• It’s synchronous, real-time interaction. Learners and teachers have to be online concurrently in order to meet in-world
• It’s geographically specific – you have to be within ‘earshot’ of another character/avatar in order to communicate with them
• Educational establishments in SL have auditoriums where large numbers of people can sit
• SL environments are limited to a small number of participants due to the bandwidth involved – only about 60 users can inhabit the same island space. That’s a very small lecture hall…
• It doesn’t support viral growth of ideas, information or concepts because nothing in-world is recorded

Of these, the first point is the most obvious downside – and also, in an e-learning context, the most significant. I’ll come back to real-time vs asynchronous learning in a moment…

Academic researchers, intoxicated by the SL ’sociology metaphor’ perhaps, were keen to explore opportunities. There are even some in-world conferences – and the JISC were keen to fund these investigations so we could all evaluate the possibilities of the technology/game/metaphor/experience. I’ve met songwriters in-world, of course, but never written a song. I’ve met researchers but never read one of their papers. In ‘first life’ (i.e. my real lectures) I demo’d SL live to a group of students back in 2006 (we attended a covers gig in-world with a real singer and an animated avatar), and we discussed whether it might be an intriguing marketing opportunity for nascent bands and artists. A few tried it – but no-one got any more gigs or punters as a result (contrast with myspace and Facebook, which is the bread and butter marketing platform of every new musician).

Lots of Universities signed up to SL in 2006-7. Here I am at the deserted campus of Southampton University. They took an innovative approach, creating a remarkable (looking) campus in-world.

It seems, in Southampton’s case, like their primary strategic motive was marketing. And (IRL) they have an impressive campus. Here I am walking over an interactive 3D map, which builds the environment of the building you’re in around your avatar; this is their concert hall.

It’s clear that someone has seen a possible marketing opportunity to be directed specifically at overseas students. Sitting in the outdoor in-world cinema auditorium, my avatar watched a Quicktime video of some international music students discussing why they like studying at Southampton.

My perception of Second Life is that it’s an amazing technical achievement and an intellectually fascinating social concept. But any user (or learner) benefit it has can be provided more effectively by other online means. Further, the bandwidth requirements of the environment combined with its real-time nature mean that it’s actually a very poor medium for delivering information, learning or social interaction online.

Contrast SL with Facebook (as an example of online interaction between people), which came out around the same time (2006-7).

5 reasons why Facebook is not like traditional education

• It’s asynchronous – users can engage with it when they want to
• It’s geographically all-encompassing – users can access it from anywhere, including mobile devices
• Educational establishments don’t have to ‘build’ communities or virtual presences – they build themselves from fragmented groups of users who find each other voluntarily
• FB environments can have an unlimited number of users
• It survives purely on the viral nature of content – memetic communication. There are no rules of (social) engagement – ideas and relationships live or die based on their popularity

It’s worth noting that points 1, 2 and perhaps 4 are also provided by VLEs.

And now let’s look at the democratic evidence. SL adoption rates (beyond ‘Try Me’ experimenters) are small – see this early article from 2006. Contrast this with the growth of Facebook. To compare stats -

• 42,000 users are currently using SL as I write this, and 1.3 million users have used it during the last 60 days.
• More than 120 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day.

Of course, SL & FB are very different tools – but I think they show an interesting contrast between the relative popularity of synchronous and asynchronous interaction.

IT colleagues often get very excited about the idea of webcasting a lecture, but I can’t see the point of going through all that hassle – the balance between technical setup and user benefit isn’t right. If you’re going to arrange for lots of people to be in the same virtual ‘place’ simultaneously, you’re giving participants a slightly poorer (and often technically underwhelming) version of a real life lecture. You’ve saved them some travel, but beyond the environmental advantage of reducing travel, you haven’t really enhanced learning. Webcast a lecture and people can access it once. Record it and post it online and people can access it forever.

I hope this blog entry demonstrates that despite my often breathless evangelism for e-learning and all things Web 2.0, the SL example shows that just because something is online, it’s not necessarily a better tool than its traditional equivalent. When I teach rock bands about arranging, we work ‘live’ with guitars and drum kits – because they’re the most efficient tools for the job. Even the live lecture/seminar still has a place, despite its limitations as a method of information exchange, discussion and enquiry. But if the lecture has a part to play in 21st century learning, so does the blog, wiki, BBS and email exchange. And these asynchronous methods provide positive advantages for the learner, precisely because they can be accessed at the user’s convenience.

And that, really, is my (e-learning) point – what web users seem to want is asynchronous interaction. When we build e-learning objects we need to empower students by giving them access to learning when the tutor is not online. And this means generating great content, and ensuring people can build online communities around that content – and around each other.

I’m grateful to Megan Poore (online learning consultant to various Australian Universities) for this and other links. Here’s a link to her excellent tumblr blog – http://meganpoore.tumblr.com/. Being a much more concise thinker than I, Megan tends toward microblogging rather than the swathes of prose I tend to spout on this site.

The man in the video  (Jim Groom, University of Mary Washington) is, believe it or not, sponsored by BlackBoard. And even he suggests that the VLE (or the ‘LMS’ as the rest of the world calls it) can’t compete with open-source or other free tools. His prediction BTW is that Google are most likely to come up with the ubiquitous solution for online learning.

VLEs serve certain administrative functions well – particularly sensitive central services like assessment, where identity, authenticity, privacy, Intellectual Property and submission timeframe are crucial in order to achieve fairness. But I’m not so sure that a VLE is the best tool in providing learning – the interface may be (by necessity of technical implementation) just too clunky compared to free web tools, many of which have $millions spent on R&D.

Perhaps there’s a continuum of control that looks something like this.

Centralised account admin ———————————- User-based account admin

Authenticated ——————————————— Unprotected

Closed VLEs ———————————————– open websites

Then perhaps there’s a continuum than comes out of these

Centralised admin ——————————————-user customisation

And, to extrapolate further, perhaps this leads us to a straightforward choice

University-administrated online learning ———- teacher and learner-controlled online learning

Does this equate to a darker, more controversial choice, where centralised University admin systems actually mitigate against optimum online learning? If so that’s a powerful ironic tension between the raison d’etre of a University – to create learning – and the current methods of delivering it online.

This originally appeared in 2007, but just in case readers of this blog didn’t see it at the time (or if you’re new to this stuff generally) the following video provides food for thought about where Web 2.0 might lead us societally. It gets ever so slightly techy in the middle, but stick with it. It ends with love.

It’s not all good news. Some of the principles I’ve been discussing on this blog – notably the advantages of publishing research freely on the Internet – bring with them two attendant ‘issues’ (I used to refer to these as ‘problems’ but then I became a manager, and all ‘problems’ became either ‘issues’ or ‘challenges’ . They are – Data Protection and copyright.

Data Protection is, basically, the right for individuals to see, and to some extent control, personal information about them that is stored on computers. The Data Protection Act 1998 means that identifying individuals online without their knowledge or consent, while not always strictly illegal, can cause potential problems for bloggers/researchers/teachers using Web 2.0 tools – especially when you get into ‘privacy-light’ web applications like Facebook. You’ll note that where I’ve posted photos of students at work on our School website they are not identified by name, or when they are (e.g. in a pop video) this personal identification has been set up by the student themselves. This is one reason (the other being convenience) why we use embedded YouTube code with video-based student work (i.e. use YouTube playlists to find where the student has posted their own work, and effectively link to it – avoiding any issues of content ownership or DPA). If the student graduates and decides for whatever reason that they don’t want their pop video online, they can just take it off YouTube and it will disappear from the School site (this feature was, of course, unavailable to Ricky Gervais in 1983).

The other big issue/problem/challenge/hurdle is copyright. Researchers often own their own copyright on their work (perhaps – though this is open to question depending on the individual’s employment contract with their home University), and are free to publish it online (although technically teachers often can’t – in most cases their teaching materials are the Intellectual Property of the employer). So before you post anything online you have to know who owns it in the first place (disclaimer – I have a decent working knowledge of this area as a composer and writer, and a teacher of copyright relating to musicians, but I am by no means an expert). As my own lawyer says, Intellectual Property Rights are only properly relevant when there’s money to be made – and even then, they can only be enforced by the courts. And given that a great deal of research (in the arts/humanities particularly) is highly specialised, few researchers are ever going to make megabucks out of their work in terms of publisher royalties – the sales are too few in number. Publishers make money, of course, out of Universities’ subscriptions to their academic journals, which is one reason why it’s so difficult to find a lot of academic articles online unless you subscribe to a service like JSTOR. It took me a good couple of hours to unearth a research article the other day using Athens/JSTOR (it was so much hassle that it would almost have been easier to go to the library).

So assuming you’ve figured out who owns whatever you’re posting online, you run into the problem of quality. Who says that a blog/site is any good? In the old days it was easy – peer review was applied by publishers. Now that anyone can post random unresearched opinions online (as in this blog) it’s very difficult for the concept of peer review to apply. But it must be possible; the difference between web and print as text media is that print distribution costs money (and therefore a profit-making entity called a publisher), so surely we must be able to find a better differentiator than this?!. I admire the approach of Radical Musicology, which publishes all the work freely online. Given that most academics are not funded through publishing royalties to any great extent, shouldn’t all journals be openly available?

If I’m being naiive with these ‘open source’ principles as applied to research, then this may be technically and legally true in the current climate, but I’m in esteemed company. Cornell University recently lifted its restrictions of reproduction of its public domain works. UCL now requires all its researchers to publish to an open-access online repository. And scholarly publishers in the USA are seriously miffed about the University of Boston’s decision to publish all of its academics’ research online – although inevitably this has triggered the same peer-review quality debate outlined above.

The recent attempts by the music industry to enforce copyright control (e.g. the YouTube/PRS collision, which Google is effectively going to win, and the removal of DRM on iTunes) demonstrate that it is impossible to enforce electronic restrictions when there is huge demand for online content. Indeed, throughout human history we’ve proved to ourselves – politically, economically, and especially with access to knowledge – that a minority can’t enforce control against the majority interest (for very long). And the demand for open access to online academic materials is certainly there. Every academic has had to tell students that Wikipedia is not a primary source, and many assessors apply penalties for citing it. But perhaps the cultural expectation of the student (or of any ‘digital native‘) is to be able to find anything online – if they don’t get instant gratification they won’t go to a library. And if Wikipedia is all students can find via a Google search, they will cite it. So, if we as academics and researchers make more in-depth content available without the requirement for secure e-portals like Athens, we’ll be spreading the knowledge we generate as effectively as possible…

…which is kind of what the job’s all about.

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Note – if you’re interested in the issues behind this debate, read Martin Weller’s excellent ‘Ed Techie’ blog – particularly this entry about copyright, including the Larry Lessig TED lecture (which I’ve embedded below). Martin’s a Professor of Educational Technology at the Open University in the UK.

What makes a good learning experience? I’d say it all starts with people – the right student on the right course, working with the right tutor, where both parties have enough prior learning for the intellectual/skills transaction to be mutually useful. One of my favourite quotations (frustratingly unavailable on the Internet because it appeared only once in a National Teaching Fellowship print pamphlet editorial in 2005/6) was by Paul Ramsden, chief executive of the Higher Education Academy (and a blogger!).

Higher education is essentially a conversation – between more and less qualified learners.
Paul Ramsden, 2006

It follows, then, that (assuming a talented and knowledgeable/qualified staff team), getting the right students is key. If we have an over-subscribed course, with a surplus of applicants, our admissions process can be selective based on each applicant’s ability to benefit and thrive on that particular course. If we don’t have that surplus (i.e. if we’re merely ‘recruiting’ rather than ’selecting’) then we may be forced into selecting the ‘wrong’ students, leading to a potential mismatch of curriculum, staff and students, and ultimately a weaker course. So that initial pool of applicants has to be substantially larger than the course places available, or we’re compromising the eventual student learning experience.

If you agree with my logic so far, you’ll also agree that it’s in everyone’s interest for that applicant pool to be as large as possible. And the tool we use to achieve this is, of course, marketing. Not just ‘promotion’, because marketing can include tangibles like RAE or NSS results, and these are part of building a reputation, which also counts for a lot among applicants, schools/colleges and parents. But promotion – providing interesting and exciting information about our courses, campus, staff and students – is certainly a large part of the chain of events that leads to a happy and successful on-programme student. My implication here is that marketing and promotion are, at one remove, a part of the student experience.

Studies (including our own) have shown that potential students looking for a course have three tiers of influence on their decision to apply for HE. They are, in order of effectiveness, open days, web searches, and printed prospectuses. Let’s discount open days (because these applicants are already interested in us; once a student has arrived at the campus they are likely to know a lot about the course/institution anyway). So the single most effective method for getting new students interested in our courses is the Internet.

The secret of excellence

Now to the anecdote. I met some visitors last week from a Further Education College, for some preliminary discussions around whether we might be able to run some courses together at some point in the future. We talked at length around their current FE provision (in Performing Arts), and the story was exceptional – partnerships with theatres, excellent student placements, European tours, high retention, and some advanced curriculum content that you might expect to find at HE (FHEQ) level 5, let alone at NQF level 3. The course was run by talented and charismatic staff with extensive experience as educators and practitioners.

The week before, in advance of our meeting, I Googled the course name, the college itself, and the names of the college staff who were to attend the meeting. The only thing I could find was a course page with three or four paragraphs of text, no images, no hyperlinks, and no reference to the estimable staff, industry partners or student performances associated with the course. In my case, this was not a problem – I met the staff and they filled me in on all this excellent activity (but they had it all to prove, considering my first impression of the course was actually fairly negative due to its poor web content). Now imagine I was an applicant, choosing between courses at different institutions. I might not even have applied. Drab, terse and pictureless prose is always going to lose out to dynamic, attractive and vibrant pages with links to projects, staff and student work. Truly, content is king.

The gatekeepers

Ask any HE or FE course leader why their web pages are unrepresentative of the quality of their curriculum or student/staff work, and you hear something like “that’s dealt with by the marketing/web people”, or perhaps “we’re trying to fix this, but the text has to be approved by marketing/committee/webmaster”. So we have a situation where people with an exciting story to tell (a story that would eventually directly benefit the student experience through solid recruitment) are not being heard.

I think there are two reasons for this – a ‘gatekeeping’ mentality on the part of institutions, and a lack of tech knowledge on the part of some academics. The latter solves itself – (some of) those academics simply vote with their feet/mice and set up Facebook accounts, blogs and so on, but these are inevitably and rightly designed for on-programme students, rather than with recruitment in mind. And anyway, academics who are not engaging with these communication tools will eventually die out – in the literal sense – as a new generation of web-literate ‘natives’ become HE teachers.

The ‘gatekeeping’ issue reflects a one-to-many communication method that predates the web by more than a hundred years – that the institution ‘publishes’ online in much the same way it would print a prospectus – a single, annual ‘print run’ which is then set in stone until the following year’s recruitment cycle. This 365-day cycle is in sharp contrast to the way the web works – where pages and content is fluid and in a permanent cycle of change/development. JISC themselves have identified (in their Web 2.0 report) the average life of a web page to be between 44 and 75 days. I’ll post more on the JISC report soon, but for now you’ll find it in ‘links’ on the right hand side of this page.

If you limit the online communication (e.g. on the institutional website) centrally to a small handful of individuals (I call this the ‘print publishing’ website model), you achieve the following advantages for your pages;

• maximum level of editorial control
• accurate course pages (in terms of module content, admissions criteria etc)
• technically correct and standards-compliant pages

But there are attendant disadvantages;

• less content (a small number of gatekeepers have to do everything)
• less relevant content (those gatekeepers don’t have the on-the-ground knowledge)
• less up-to-date content (gatekeepers haven’t got time to update every page)

If you allow a free multi-user environment (let’s say where every member of a course team could update their own pages at any time), you achieve new advantages;

• maximum relevance of content (the content comes from those with the most knowledge)
• more content (the workload is shared)
• more frequently updated content (the information is more up to date)

To achieve these advantages without descending into free-for-all chaos, some user management would be necessary, and this in itself is time-consuming. But a lot of this workload can be thrown back to the user – self-regulated password systems and levels of privs negotiated by line managers, not by ‘the IT department’.

Our own School website puts this philosophy into practice. 45 staff each have their own login, and all can upload student work, change course pages, add links to projects and so on, all driven by a simple browser-based content management system. Does this seem like a recipe for online chaos and contradictory ‘message’ to the world? It seems not. Since 2007, no-one has ever sabotaged a page or posted anything which is out of line with institutional or school strategy. Why? For the same reasons we don’t trash each other’s offices or turn up late for lectures and open days – because we’re professionals with respect for our institution and for each other.

Using this ‘wiki’ method of user administration, we have gradually built an archive of student work, which says more about our courses than any amount of prospectus blurb ever could. Our graduate stories (many of which we discover through Facebook) can be turned into news items quickly and efficiently, and our course pages benefit in similar ways. It’s not the best-looking website in the world (although it is fully standards-compliant) because it’s content-driven, not design driven, but it does have the advantage of being much richer than any centralised solution.

And that’s where Web 2.0 comes in. An academic School doesn’t operate as one monolithic ‘course’ – it’s a community of lots of talented staff and students putting their passions into practice via a plethora of courses, modules, taught sessions, research projects and performances. So its web presence fragments into semi-formal and informal Facebook pages, student blogs, applicant BBS posts, VLE pages, research project pages, FlickR/Picasa photo archives, and personal student websites. (You’ll note that I didn’t post a link to the VLE pages. That’s because you can’t see them, because they’re only available to people registered on that module). It’s never going to be possible to collect all these links completely – the web just moves too fast (Bath Spa’s web team manfully tried, but take a look at the attempt and see how many broken links you find – not surprising given the lifespan of a typical web page).

It’s all beautiful and mercurial chaos – you can’t control it, only observe it and join in. Like the world. And just as in the world, humans achieve greatness through working collectively.

Gatekeepers – you’ve lost your keys. But you can still join the team.

A colleague (let’s call him/her ‘P’) gave a research presentation the other day at the University. The subject was interesting, the research was a result of more than a year of work, and it was P’s first research seminar at this University. For all these reasons I was keen to attend and support P. Unfortunately a meeting over-ran and I couldn’t make it. Of course I sent P my apologies over email, and I learned that actually the presentation wasn’t very well attended because other interested colleagues had teaching commitments at that time.

Undaunted, I asked P if I could see some of the research outputs – a paper or other documentation of this work. Nothing was available – the work had been presented ‘live’ on that day, and had taken the form of a verbal lecture. I suggested that P could put some documentation of the work online and send out a link to interested colleagues – at our University and elsewhere in the subject, perhaps to network with those working in a similar research area, and build future projects. P asked me a question I’ve been asked many times about Web 2.0 skills – “Can I get some staff training to do that?”.

Let’s investigate this perfectly reasonable question. What would this staff training involve and what skills does someone need to put their work online? P already has standard/typical web browser skills, can type text onto screen, can cut and paste between MS Word and a browser, and can save/upload images and documents, i.e. all the necessary skills to get started with a blog. So I suppose we could run a simple demo of, say, Blogger – this would probably take less than an hour, then P would be ready to go. So we’d hire a ‘trainer’, book a room and ask the trainer to put some teaching materials together. They’d probably create something like this – i.e. a YouTube ‘How To’ video for Blogger. But these materials are already out there – and anyone who Googled the term ‘how do I start blogging?‘ would find it pretty easily. So P already has the skills, not only to create a blog, but to self-learn by using a search engine. No training necessary – only the will on the part of the trainee to investigate a new method of communication. Shouldn’t every academic exhibit this hunger to communicate as effectively as possible?

Now look at P’s work itself – it’s the result of more than a year of endeavour, excellent in its field, and ground-breaking in many ways. And no-one knows about it – the chosen method of research dissemination (a face-to-face seminar) has vanished into history, and anyone who wasn’t there has missed out. This research is effectively locked away in the memories of those who attended P’s seminar. The information has ‘died’ – all that work, down the drain.

In the ‘old’ (i.e. pre-Internet) research landscape, P could perhaps have published a paper or spoken at a conference. As we know, much of this culture still pervades in HE, perhaps because many academics remain Digital Immigrants (or even take obtuse pride in being ‘Digital Foreigners’ – personally I find this noble-savage approach irresponsible and even arrogant, given our pedagogical duty to our students). Papers are submitted to peer-reviewed/edited journals, printed, dutifully mailed by academic publishers and equally dutifully filed by libraries, and any suitably tenacious academic or student can discover them (though we know anecdotally that many students don’t do this in practice, preferring simply to use Wikipedia as the fount of all knowledge – it’s not hard to find a grumpy academic who will bemoan this trait). A lot of research content – actually, MOST research content – is still fairly difficult to discover through a simple web search, for a variety of reasons relating to copyright/IPR, but also, I suggest, through a lack of understanding by individual researchers of how to put their work online. Of course, many academic journals are available online, but just try posting an interesting Athens or JSTOR link on your Facebook page, Twitter feed or blog – and see how far the recipient gets without a login. Another locked gate.

Colleagues who present at conferences effectively ‘broadcast’ their work using the ancient Greek model of one-to-many speaking. Almost every academic has the skills to communicate using this method; the job title is ‘lecturer’ after all. But with the academic conferences, you’re left with the same problem as P’s seminar – if you weren’t there on the day, you’ve missed the boat. And realistically how many people can we reach in this way? A few hundred at most.

So, for the last ten years or so we have had a new and revolutionary method of communication available to us as professional sharers of knowledge. During this period it has been easier to publish content online without ‘tech skills’ i.e. HTML coding etc; this is what the world (and this blog) refers to as ‘Web 2.0′. Tim Berners-Lee, by the way, argues that the phrase is meaningless, and that there is really no difference between the two generations of the web.

“Web 1.0 was all about connecting people. It was an interactive space, and I think Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it means. If Web 2.0 for you is blogs and wikis, then that is people to people. But that was what the Web was supposed to be all along. And in fact, you know, this ‘Web 2.0,’ it means using the standards which have been produced by all these people working on Web 1.0.” (arstechnica.com interview, 2006)

In practice, though, Web 2.0 (i.e. the world of blogs, free urls and wikis) is substantially different for us as teachers, because it’s possible for academics who are self-defined as ‘not very techy’ to publish material online using skills they already have. 20 years ago anyone who wanted to publish research on the Internet would, at the least, have had to learn about FTP and HTML. Now that’s just not necessary – anyone who can use a web browser can show their work to the world.

The gates are unlocked. All we need to do is push.

Read this post on The Ed Techie – Martin Weller’s blog (Martin is a professor of Educational Technology at the Open University).

This particular entry is going back a bit (2007) but its discussion points are even more relevant now that more sophisticated web tools are available. Weller identifies a number of pedagogical needs (discussion, content, virtual meetings, posting materials etc) then systematically lists the advantages and disadvantages of hosting them externally from the corporate/university VLE. He’s not a breathless evangelist, though (which Prensky could perhaps be accused of) – this is a measured discussion that deals with the issues of students’ engagement with ‘closed’ University VLE/IT systems, the relationship with student fees, staff awareness of technology generally, and DPA/user authentication.

Weller identifies the advantages of VLEs first;

Authentication – this is quite a big one. Students are authenticated via the University database and this feeds through to the VLE and related systems. Single sign on is obviously a big plus here. For small courses you could manually enrol your students on your wiki (if you didn’t want it to be open to all), but for some of our courses we have 1000+ students, so that isn’t scaleable. Having said that, this is not a problem that is insurmountable. Authentication isn’t really my subject area, but with openid, Shibboleth etc people are moving in this direction. What I want is to be able to apply the OU authentication to any site I want, so if I create a wiki I simply tell the OU authentication system to include that url. Maybe it can do this already? The issue of roles is more complicated, but again if we start on this now, it’s not impossible to crack.

Convenience – there is a degree of convenience for both academic and student in having all the tools packaged in the VLE. However, I think there is also an increasing frustration at being limited to these tools, and also an increased ability to cope with a range of tools.

Support – if you have one centralised system then you can offer centralised support also. If every academic is using a different collection this becomes more difficult. However, these tools are all pretty easy to use, and one could easily have a collection of supported ones.

Reliability – if we house the VLE then we can guarantee the server times and service level agreement. If it is housed on an external system you have no control if it goes down. This is true and something that keeps IT people awake at night, but this surrendering control is going to be one of those things we just have to get used to as we use more third party apps simply because they’re better.

Monitoring -  one of the tools that a VLE offers is the ability to monitor a student or cohort’s progress. These can be useful tools in identifying problems and offering support. While a loosely coupled system wouldn’t offer this at the individual level, there are an increasing number of sophisticated analytical tools available (as Tony Hirst repeatedly tries to get me to realise) which will provide much of this information.

But he then goes on to outline the pedagogical advantages of free web tools, thus;

Better quality tools – because offering each of these loosely coupled elements is what each company does, it is in their interest to make them really good. This means they stay up to date, have better features, and look better than most things produced in higher education.

Modern look and feel – related to the above, these tools often look better, and also their use makes a course feel more modern to a user who is raised on these tools compared with the rather sterile, dull systems they encounter in higher ed.

Appropriate tools – because they are loosely coupled the educator can choose whatever ones they want, rather than being restricted to the limited set in the VLE. This is one of the biggest draws I feel – as an academic if I want a particular tool I don’t have to put a request in to IT and wait a year to get a reduced quality version, I just go ahead and use it.

Cost – using a bunch of free tools has got to be cheaper hasn’t it?

Avoids software sedimentation – when you have institutional systems they tend to embody institutional practice which becomes increasingly difficult to break. Having loosely coupled system makes this easier, and also encourages people to think in different ways.

Disintermediation happens – this isn’t really a benefit, just an observation. If a services can be disintermediated then it will be. In this case the central VLE system is disintermediated as academics use a variety of freely available tools.

This entry led me to Scott Leslie’s term ‘loosely coupled teaching‘. Check the comments below the entry (this, too, is back in 2007). It’s clear that there are many others doing this sort of thing i.e. using free web-based tools as well as (or instead of) formal VLEs to deliver teaching. And in many of these cases the benefits of working externally are clear – including the very fact that we, as members of the wider HE community, can learn from looking at them.