2013 has been quite a year for me professionally so I thought I’d better mark it with some kind of reflection here. As I’ve been thinking about what I should write, I did wonder if I could sum up my year in 140 characters and actually I think I kind of managed it.
My 2013 in less than 140 characters: MOOCs, analytics, redundancy, oerresearchhub, ALT learning technologist of the year, new job
Of course the highlight of the year was being named ALTs Learning Technologist of the Year. I title I fully intend to exploit until September 2014;-)
In case you haven’t seen it, here’s the video of my invited speaker slot at ALT.
The low point this year was the decision by Strathclyde University not to renew the Cetis contract which led to redundancy for myself,Lorna Campbell and Martin Hawksey. However, as they say every cloud has a silver lining and I was fortunate to be able to be in a position to work with the OER Research Hub team over the summer, and then I got my new job at Glasgow Caledonian. Lorna and Martin are both now gainfully employed too.
Anyway if you are interested here is a quick summary of my year in blog posts.
January : lots of MOOCing, Larnaca LD declaration, learners rights
February : widget authoring, moocing (digital cultures and olds mooc) , bit of Tin Can API
March: More MOOCing, badges, analytics and #cetis13
April : digital literacies, the MOOC agony aunt, disengagement with MOOCs, #lak14
I’ve just come across IBM’s 5 in 5 predictions for the next five years. A neat idea where they share their vision of in the future “everything will learn” and how their cognitive,cloud based systems will impact on five key areas:
I have really mixed feelings about all of this. On the one hand,it is really exciting to see what would be deemed Star Trek technology actually becoming part of our daily lives. But on the other, particularly with the emphasis on big data and intelligent systems I am have some serious concerns about data ownership and use. Particularly by the digital guardian prediction, who in the accompanying video is turned into a ‘Men in Black’ type security agent, called Steve. Steve knows my habits so well he can predict my every move and detect any abnormal behaviour in my spending habits and so for example notify me of any abnormal behaviour in my bank account and so prevent online banking fraud. Hmm . . . actually I think even Steve might be a tad confused by my shopping habits but that’s another story.
So “the system” will keep me safe and secure. But who owns the system? What else are they going to do with my data? Who else will have access to it ? How can I set my privacy and notification levels? Who pays for all this? Who really benefits? The banks and business who want to know us all better to sell us more stuff personalise our everyday experiences? I’m not convinced it is such an obvious win win situation. I’m afraid this vision makes me want to put on my tin foil hat and not engage with the system the answers to these questions are more transparent.
Or as Mark Power put it (feel free to sing this part)
@sheilmcn “It sees you when you’re sleeping. It knows when you’re awake…IBM Digital Guardian is coming…to toooown” #festive#tinfoil — Mark Power (@markpower) December 18, 2013
This is my final post from down under and the Ascilite 2013 conference. My former colleague Bill Johnston and I had a short paper accepted based on the series of blog posts we started about 18 months ago called “a conversation around what it means to be a digital university“. As with all the short papers we only had 15 minutes to present, but we were very pleased with the number of delegates who came to our session. Luckily we had much longer to share our thoughts at a workshop at Macquarrie University, organised by Panos Vllachopoulos from their Teaching and Learning Centre.
As I commented in my earlier post, networks and connections were a common theme across the conference, and this workshop was an example of this in action. For the past year Bill and I have been critical friends to Edinburgh Napier University’s Digital Futures Working Group chaired by Keith Smyth.
Keith read our blog posts and used our matrix as a basis for their work. Panos also used to work at Napier alongside Keith and was keen to find out more about the working group and the thinking behind it, so seeing as we were all in Sydney for Ascilite he arranged a session for staff at Macquarrie. Once I’m back from down under, Bill and I will be writing a longer post around developments at Napier, and the final recommendations from a really inspiring cross institutional project, but in the meantime, here are the slides from the session.
As a follow up to my previous post on the keynotes and overarching themes from the Ascilite conference last week, I thought I’d highlight a couple of the sessions that resonated with me.
Open education was a theme running through sessions, and I attended a number of sessions around institutional approaches to fostering open practice. Martin Weller’s “the battle for open – a perspective“, which I saw last week too, gives a really good overview of the current struggles around open-ness in general in education. I like to think of myself as an open practitioner, but I am aware of how my open practice has evolved, driven not only by the altruistic drivers of open, but also by my previous role in Cetis. Now I am in an institution I can only too clearly see some of the practical difficulties around developing openness. Cultural issues, time, and not quite on the radar are some of the key issues. So continue with Martin’s military metaphor although the battle may be won, many of the troops actually might not even been aware of the battle and the negotiated settlement aka institutional policy.
One of the key ways to change practice is through professional development of staff, and I particularly enjoyed the paper and symposium from Keith Smyth, Panos Vlachopoulos, David Walker and Anne Wheeler around cross institutional development of an online course for educators: confronting current challenges. and imagining future possibilities. Their collaboratively development Global Perspectives in HE course is not only exploring some of the very real challenges to developing cross institutional staff development, but is also doing so in a truly open manner. I think their work and the fact that a number of them have moved institutions since the project highlights the importance of individual practitioners to actually get things done. They also won a best paper award too.
There was quite a lot of discussion around learning spaces, blended learning and mobile learning. I particularly enjoyed the Revisiting the definition of mobile learning paper by Helen Farley, Angela Murphy and Sharon Rees and being introduced to their work around creating a framework for defining mobile learning. More information is available on their website.
As ever with a conference it’s hard to make sense of everything, and as usual I did tweet a bit and that will be a large part of my shared, and open (with the usual twitter open caveats) memory of the conference.
Next post will be about the paper and workshop I was involved in.
So this year, I finally managed to make it to Australia and the annual Ascilite Conference. What a great time I’ve had in Sydney catching up with old friends and colleagues and connecting with many new ones.
In this post I’m gong to try and summarise some of the many thoughts that the conference (and in particular the keynotes and opening debate) raised for me. Get set for a bit of ramble with the occasional bit of ranting.
The theme of the conference was “electric dreams” celebrating not only that classic tune, but also Ascilites 30th birthday. The conference started with one of the most entertaining conference debates I’ve ever been to (it’s not often that DVP don wigs and shades) where the panels debated “the dream of technology assisted learning has been realised”. Convincing arguments from both sides, but the nays won out in the end.
Although I fully acknowledge that we still have a ways to go with integrating technology fully and effectively into education, it was (as these things are) a pretty loaded debate statement. My dreams are generally a bit confused, sometimes brilliantly technicoloured and truly amazing, sometimes darker tones of sepia, and more disturbing – a lot like my experiences with technology. But isn’t that a good thing? Depending on what your vision was/is isn’t most of what keeps us all going the challenge of sorting the confusion and then seeing what else we can do? There are a lot of dreams I really don’t want to see realised, particularly the ones around fully adaptive systems where data rules our every move, failure is not tolerated and existing paradigms are reinforced. But more ranting about that later.
The keynote speakers were asked to present past, present and future visions of technology and education, which (with one exception) gave a sense of continuity to the conference. Kay O”Hallaron started with the past and a history of computers and human interaction. Illustrated through her work in multimodal analysis she reminded us that although our world is increasingly awash with data, we are at the very early days of understanding how we all create and interact with information and each other. Our understanding of networks that provide both weak and strong ties needs to increase. Kay made the case for the need for inter-disciplinary teams of educational technologists and computer scientists to develop a strong, stable research community to build on our knowledge from the past to take us into the future.
Gregor Kennedy, University of Melbourne, then gave us a view of the present by focusing on the question “how well are we designing technology based experiences to enhance teaching and learning?”. I really enjoyed his presentation as it put the teacher squarely at the forefront. All too often we are sold a dream of technology enhanced learning that seems to have us almost sleep walking into a place where the role of the teacher, their knowledge and experience, is diminished from the “guide on the side” (which, btw to do well is no mean feat) to as Gregor called it, the “pleb on the web”. Gregor made a pretty convincing case that the move to student centred design maybe unintentionally designing out the most important interaction of all – that of teacher-student. So although in our present we have some really good examples practice, they are still relatively small scale, not consistent across departments, faculty, institutions or scaling.
Another vision of the present where teacher-student interaction was central came from Pare Keiha, Auckland University of Technology. Pare shared a great example of “living the dream ” of technology assisted learning through the development of a number of Māori language and history courses. In Māori there aren’t separate words for teaching and learning, just one Ako, the terms are synonymous. A lesson from the past we should maybe all be working towards in the future?
Sorel Reisman, California State and MERLOT by contrast gave me nightmares with his “educational technology: the impossible dream?” keynote. I’m afraid it was all a bit too US-centric, instructional design, big data and the cloud will save us all for my liking. Education being reduced to homogenised number crunched instructional designs all shared via a ubiquitous cloud isn’t a dream I want to be living in. However in the final keynote, Mark Pesce gave a more entertaining and plausible vision of the future based on the increased ease of sharing knowledge and the expansion of new types of networks.
Marc argued that technology is no longer the question. We are living in a moment of existential crisis that only be answered by a change of practice. And central to this change of practice (particularly in teritary education) should be about courses providing connections and gateways to “networks of excellence”. The classroom needs to become the place students go to deepen their networks. As he put it “who you know is now what you know”. A pretty convincing argument was made, however as was raised in the Q&A session by my colleague Bill Johnston, will these new networks really bring around any significant change to our wider society? Or will they just reinforce existing elites which support our current failing economic and social norms? Something we all need to think about.
I know in my professional life that networks have become increasingly important to my career development. However taking a step back, am I part of a cosy educational technology elite? I’m sure there are many who think so. I’d like to think that any network I am part of is inclusive, extensible and open, but I think we all need to question how our networks are formed and developed and whose voices dominate.
So some overall thoughts from the conference. I presented a paper around work with Edinburgh Napier on the development of a digital university but more on that in the next post.
I’ll leave you now with the song that has been ringing round my brain all week.
