Category: Uncategorized

AI,Self driving cars, and the joy of getting lost: thoughts from #connectmore17

hans-m-62126

(image: unsplash)

Martin Hamilton, Jisc’s “Futurist” gave the keynote talk at yesterday’s connectmore17 event held, very handily for me at my institution, GCU.  Martin gave an entertaining overview of some technological developments weaving his way from computer games, to drawing (cats) programmes, to space rockets to self driving cars.  All of these developments said would, and are have an impact on education.  As he was talking I couldn’t help but think about the talk Audrey Watters gave at the University of Edinburgh earlier this year called Driverless Ed-Tech: The History of the Future of Automation in Education.  I could end this post here by saying -just read that post, but I’ll add a bit more context.

Throughout the day there was a lot of really useful collective sharing of practice, issues, challenges and you know, all the face to face, networked,  discursive “good stuff ” this kind of event engenders.  There was a real feeling of “the collective”.  To use Audrey’s analogy, it felt like the majority of us were all on the same bus.

During the closing panel session (which was sadly only save from being a manel by including me) it probably won’t surprise you that the issue of the future of education  and the role of learning analytics  came up.  And again we came back to self driving cars, that narrative that with a little automation we could really make impacts on the personal journeys of our students. Now, I may have had a rant or two about this over the day and during the session, but as it is typical with me, it’s only later that I actually figure out what I should have said – hence this post.

Drivers-less cars, using data from us “real drivers” have the potential (are-ish) to get us from A to B in the most efficient manner – personalised of course to our individual preferences, without us realising that our personal experience is a default setting that a couple of million others will be experiencing.

I’m quite good at getting lost – even with sat nav – but I generally manage to get where I need to go. Sometimes my detours are very frustrating and waste lots of time, other times they take me to really unexpected places and people.  So although I do admit to enjoying the safety net of GPS I’m not reliant on it. I find road signs, street names and at times even people are pretty helpful in finding places.

That’s my fear for education, and again Audrey writes about this far more eloquently than I ever could.  The illusion of personalisation, the ever growing demand for successful ‘learner journeys’  from enrollment to graduation in the most efficient way should worry us all. Education should take you to new, sometimes unexpected and challenging places.  I’m not saying there shouldn’t be support and guidance available,  We’re pretty good at providing the educational equivalents of road/street signs, and people to ask help from. It’s just that sometimes it’s really good to go for a wander, to get lost.

The more we try and lock journeys down, monitor and measure things, we may lose some really interesting people because they will just not be able engage because their profile doesn’t fit, or we may loose more people from “the system” as they may go completely off grid. That in itself may be really exciting, but for me just now, I find that a bit sad.

 

 

Being with the BOLD-ers #ETBOLD17

I was delighted to join colleagues at Glasgow University yesterday for their Transitions into blended and online learning enhancement themes/BOLD showcase.

The BOLD (blended and online developments) project is an £2.3 million strategic investment by the University to develop its capacity to develop and deliver more blended and fully online programmes.  It is also a quite splendid acronym, as Professor Frank Cotton highlighted in his opening address. What University committee can say no to a bold project 🙂

In my keynote I gave an overview of the approaches we have been taking here at GCU to develop our capacity for blended, online and increasingly what we are calling digital learning.  We don’t have a dedicated strategic investment programme (just now), so we are taking a much more “ground up” approach.

I could only stay for half of the day but it was great to hear from some of the projects about how they have been developing their programmes.  You can also view some of the work in a series of case studies.

It was great to be able to share and learn from colleagues – we are all facing the same issues around time, technologies, digital capabilities, sustainability etc, and I know there are a number of follow up conversations I am going to have as a result of the day. So many thanks to Vicki Dale for asking me to present.

 

To list or not to list? #creativeHE

glenn-carstens-peters-190592(Image: Unsplash)

I fear I may I may have inadvertently started #listgate during last nights’  #creativeHE and #LHTEchat  tweet chat around creativity and assessment.

In answer to the question  what would be at the top of your being more creative list and why?”  I responded somewhat flippantly “first rule of my creativity is no lists”

Now this provoked a few tweets such this and and this

What I then said was that lists generally are made up of things I need to do – not want to do. In the context of creativity and the conversations last night, that’s how I felt. If I am feeling creative I just do “stuff” –  I tend not to need a list. At other times I do need lists, in fact I like lists, well maybe I like making lists and then actually don’t use them and end up recreating them. . .

Anyway, back to creativity. I’m not sure you can checklist creativity . . . you could have all the elements from a list, but that still might not give you the spark of inspiration.  I could be wrong. . . I might have to make a list of the reasons why  . . . what do you think?

Getting #creativeHE

If you need a bit of inspiration this week then you should check out the #creativeHE google+ community. A week of activities to stimulate discussion, sharing and production of creative learning and teaching ideas.  I signed up for the last iteration of the event earlier this year, but didn’t quite manage to participate, however yesterday lunchtime I dropped into the google+ community and I’m glad I did.

I think creativity can be quite a scary word for many.  It has so many connotations, and an awful lot of associations with visual outputs. As I was exploring some of the selected resources yesterday, and admiring some of the creative works already being shared, one word kept coming to mind – care. To be creative you have to care.  You have to care about the process of creativity – not just the end product (sledgehammer analogy with learning and assessment, I know)

Anyway,  today’s theme is around play and games.  One of the suggested activities is to think of game you enjoyed as a child and think about how you could re-purpose it for a teaching context. I find this very difficult. I’ve never been much of a game person, still don’t know how to play chess, or WoW, or any other game really. I have to confess to a bit of candy crush habit that I’m managing in my own way – I don’t actually have to play it everyday, but it seems to help.

Maybe I have been a victim of too much enforced corporate fun.  This episode of A Point of View from Will Self, “The fun of work – really?” captured many of my feelings in the insightful, laconic way that Self brings to everything. I was also fascinated by this report of research into creativity that showed that attempts to force creativity might actually have just the opposite effect.

There are of course many ways to introduce fun into all of our lives,  one simple thing we can do is just change our location and go outside (weather permitting). It’s actually sunny in Glasgow today so that’s why that came to mind.  Just wondering if I dare suggest going outside my meeting this afternoon . . .

 

caitlin-oriel-31955

Today's post is brought to you by the letter P – more leaking from the #porous uni

I guess when you have a title like “The Porous University” you are probably inviting a bit a alliteration at some point.  A number of big words infused through the conversations and twitter back channel from the #porousuni event earlier this week.

In addition to permeability (shout out to Alan Levine again bringing this to the table), praxis (which makes me think of Catherine Cronin’s research) and pedagogy, I was introduced to new P word –  paragogy (thanks to Neil Mulholland, Edinburgh College of Art).

From a quick google search I got this definition:

“Paragogy is a theory of peer learning which endeavors to both describe the phenomenon of effective peer learning, and to prescribe key aspects of its best practice.”

and an open book on Paragogy by Corneli and Danoff  which I’m exploring just now, and have discovered that paralogy means production in Greek.

Maybe we really are moving across the alphabet in open, with less Cs and more Ps.

What does open mean beyond releasing content? #porousuni

I’m really looking forward to the Porous University Symposium being held at UHI, Inverness next week.  The event is fundamentally an opportunity to create some space to create/extend conversations around open-ness.   There are no formal presentations or papers instead:

the symposium will be structured around a number of short provocations that address specific questions or issues, followed by break-out discussion and opportunities to further explore and synthesise the thinking that emerges.

In the spirit of open-ness here is my provocation. It’s much more about stimulating and continuing an already rich dialogue. Please feel free to add any of your thoughts in the comments and will incorporate them into the discussion, or tweet using #porousuni.

What does open mean beyond releasing content?

This blog post from Alan Levine gives a helpful definition of the differences between porosity and permeability.

when you say porosity it really means just the volumetric measure of open space. If you want a metaphor, maybe this is measure of “openness” in terms of 5Rs.

But when you say permeability you are talking about the ease of moving something through that space, and while the amount of space is a factor, others influence whether that can happen. Specifically that could mean if the spaces are well interconnected, like pathways, like networks? Maybe that is practice or pedagogy?

So in terms of the porous university maybe we need to be focusing on the permeability of people (staff, students, the wider community) and the ways we navigate through university spaces, both physical and digital.

So what does open porosity actually look like in practice? Is it about formal (licensed) open content and infrastructures or is it human processes, practice and connections?

During April there has been quite a wide-ranging debate on the definition of open pedagogy facilitated through the Year of Open. Should it be defined and aligned only to the 5Rs of retain, reuse, revise, remix, redistribute? Does using the term pedagogy actual create more exclusion? Is open practice far more permeable, inclusive and powerful?

In these challenging times open has to mean more than content it has to be building and sustaining open networks and connections. However, is an obsession with licensed content, our academic discourse(s), our research outputs actually narrowing the opportunities for open education outwith the academy?

Recommended viewing/reading.

 

Open pedagogy and open resources, curiouser and curiouser . . . #YearOfOpen

Curiouser and curiouser!’ cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English) (Alice in Wonderland)

I have to confess to feeling a bit like that during last nights #YearofOpen hangout on Open Pedagogy.  There was such a great line up of people in the hangout space, and an even greater line up joining via YouTube and Twitter, that every time I spoke I think I ended up forgetting what I really wanted to say.

Since the end of the chat and most of today I have been having the reflective, “I wish I’d said that” thoughts.

One thing that we touched on which really resonated with me is the importance of open (support) networks, open collaboration, and open communities which was raised by Mike Caulfield

David Wiley proposed that the open pedagogy was somehow seen as more exciting than OER and he felt quite sad about that.  Open pedagogy and practice was in some way the new “shiny” thing was sparking peoples interest. OERs are just boring now.

I don’t think it’s that binary. But people do get bored with things. If you have been at the cutting edge of innovation once whatever the shiny thing is becomes mainstream it can lose some of its sparkle.  There are lost of people who like to be at the cutting edge all the time. For me the loss of that initial sparkle is actually the most exciting part of any innovation. Helping people see the potential of new “stuff”, and watching them go off in directions I couldn’t have thought of is one of the best parts of my job.

What I think is happening is now that OERs are becoming mainstream we need to explore how they are actually being used and created. That naturally leads to open practice. The reflection and articulation of that practice through  pedagogical frameworks in HE is a natural evolution imho.  However pedagogy brings with it a set of assumptions and privileges, particularly in relation to higher education.  Exploring practice then is perhaps a more equitable and meaningful starting point.

During the hang out, Robin de Rosa  made some really excellent points about the need to leverage open in terms of infrastructure to ensure access to public education in the US context. I think we have the same concerns here in the UK. Open infrastructure isn’t just about technology though undoubtedly that is a very important part. It’s also about people and practice, the sharing of the where, what, why, when and how we use that infrastructure in our practice.

The conversations and bonds that open (as in open in the web) networks forge are hugely important and for me. They form a significant part of my open practice and my open infrastructure.  As we all struggle with increasingly closed political environments we need to fight for open conversations and sharing of ideas and practice.  These are things that don’t need to be openly licensed but form an increasingly important layer around, above, below, alongside licensed OERs.

This morning I did an interview with another open education researcher Helen Crump. It was very timely  happening just after the hangout.  Helen’s areas of research is around the notion of self OER and we discussed how I felt that manifested in my interactions with open scholarship, education, practice and networks. I truly believe that people are educational resources, and the some of the best resources that we have. We can’t forget that.

I have really struggled with open this year as I shared in this post. Being able to tap into my network (which is full of some fantastic open researchers and practitioners) has helped keep me sane;  allowed me to be able to be part of a workshop session at #oer17; kept me informed about new work, and examples of practice – all of which I can store until I can find a way to (re)use.

Open pedagogy, practice, OERs are equally boring.  It’s the connections, confidence, increased access to, and extension of knowledge that open education and open networks create that are exciting.

Many thanks again to Maha Bali and the #YearofOpen for organising the hangout which you can view below. Maha has also started curating a really useful collection of recent blogs posts and conversations around this issue of open pedagogy – well worth exploring and bookmarking if you are at all interested in this evolving discussion.

Thinking about open pedagogy

emily-morter-188019

(image via unsplash)

The question “what is open pedagogy?” is this months  Year of Open  perspective.  A really rich variety of voices have shared their views on the site. They are all worth a read.

As the waves of #oer17 are still washing over my brain, I’m not sure I really know, the answer to the question, but I have been thinking a lot more about over the past week or so. Partly because of the really excellent presentations, discussions and reflections at and after the conference and partly because of some other discussions and definitions that have been causing some healthy (maybe slightly heated) discussions in certain quarters. (See this post for a summary of the whole “he said, he said” thang).

Maha Bali has also organised  a google hang out on Monday 24th April which I’m taking part in, to try and unpack the question and maybe get a bit more “she said” into the discussions too!

I have equal feelings of  excitement and fear about the session. I am excited as I think it’s really timely,  and I admire and respect all the participants. Coupled with that I have a bit of the old imposter syndrome creeping in in terms of thinking “wtf can I bring to this party?”

However, as someone who self declares as an open practitioner, and as I pointed out way back in my #oer15 keynote, someone who is from the middle of the mainstream in the UK HE sector, then I think that actually my take on this is actually quite important in terms of the widespread adoption and understanding of open education, open resources, open pedagogy and for me the most important, open practice.

Whilst I fully recognise the need for definition and rigour, I also am very aware of the pragmatic needs of practice.  So I was a bit concerned with my relationship and practice in terms of the 5 R definition of open pedagogy from David Wiley.   Partly I think that is because most of my practice isn’t content (book) based. A lot of it is actually about giving people confidence to try new things, to share their practice and resources.  There are, as Maha and I have been chatting about in our prep for the session, some things you can’t put a license on.

So whilst I  strive to meet the 5 Rs  I can’t always meet all of them. So if I am not practicing open pedagogy does that mean I am not an open practitioner is the questions circling through my brain? If I am having doubts then how the heck can I extent, support, be part of an open education community in my institution and beyond?

After a small cry for help on twitter I was pointed to this article on  Attributes of Open Pedagogy by Browyn Hegarty which probably resonated more, and articulated some of my challenges particularly around the overlapping nature of the 8 attributes discussed in it.

My #Iwill message from #oer17 was to be “be generous, inclusive and extend notion of open hospitality in everything I do”.   But in our definitions of open pedagogy are we inadvertently being exclusive? Josie Fraser highlighted some very pertinent questions in her reflections on #oer17 post,  I can’t put it any better than this (thanks Josie)

I’m suspicious of the current distinction between open pedagogy and open practice, and in particular, how little explanation is being given to the privileging or even just use of the term pedagogy over the term practice. Is the use of pedegogy being used as shorthand for educational practice? Is it being used to underline the importance of formal education, or the primacy of teaching? Why not open heutagogy? Is it being used as a form of interpellation, a signal to include and exclude specific groups within open education? What is wrong with ‘practice’? How do we benefit from continuing to insist on a break between theory and practice, or theory and politics? Is this distinction as harmful as the disavowal of the relationship between the personal and the political?

It should be a very interesting discussion on Monday – more information about how to join in is available here.

Now I am ten (in twitter years)

(My first tweet)

James Clay wrote about his 10th twitter birthday recently, and this week I have reached that milestone too.  10 is quite a milestone, it’s double figures, it’s a decade, it’s 38.2k tweets – multiplied by 140 that’s a lot of words, 3,330 followers.  Like James my use the service the has evolved over the years.  From the initial what’s this all about, to the fun of connecting, using hashtags, archiving and swirly twirly diagrams.

On reflection it has been a bit like growing up. Starting out as a baby trying to figure this new, 140 character, slightly random connections, world out. Then toddling along and finding new, useful things (hashtags, swirly twirly SNA); figuring out how and when to use it in a way that worked for me. How to balance work, learning, v the Eurovision song contest.  Finding my voice, making my rules  about language, tone, open-ness. From about 5 years old  starting to pull back a bit, reclaiming my weekends and non work time aka using Instagram to share pictures of food and other random things instead. . .

I think Twitter is now a habit for me.  Whilst I don’t like many of the changes it has brought in over the years it does still offer me a connection and conversation channel other services don’t. I  still don’t want or need the service to recommend anything to me.  I really dislike the web interface now – it’s too much to see every second the number of new messages. I prefer the ipad/iphone app and the serendipity of scrolling through. That gives me a feeling of being a bit more in control. I’ve never really felt the need to trawl back through twitter – if I miss a tweet, I miss it. If it contains something important to me the message will get to me in some way or via someone else – probably via twitter.

I am obviously aware of the negative side to twitter, the trolls, the bullying, the commercialisation. However I do still think that just now, for me the advantage outweigh the disadvantages. If we all retreat from twitter then the bullies and the advertisers have won.  At the beginning of this year I blogged around some of the reasons  I am still on twitter

For me, Twitter has always been about the conversation, about making, sustaining and developing connections. My professional life has been greatly enriched through the many conversations and connections I’ve made using the service. And I’ve always been careful to draw my own lines around my personal and professional use of the service.  Using Twitter has also helped me to open up some of my practice around learning and teaching.

After last week’s OER17 conference I have really been thinking open hospitality.   I have no illusions about my influence and visibility (pretty tiny), but if I wasn’t on twitter a large part of my professional practice would disappear. It’s maybe too easy for those of us who have easy access to this type of service to abandon it with out thinking about the luxury it is.  Though after reading this post from Jim Groom maybe I am going to have to rethink my whole approach to open – but that’s for another post.

My OER (open emotional response) to #oer17

That was my response to the #Iwill challenge given as part of the final plenary session at the #OER17 conference this week.  Starting with the end in mind seems apt for a post reflecting on the conference.   But how did I get here? Why did I end up selecting generosity, inclusivity and hospitality?  There are plenty more that are still swirling round my brain.

I think the answer is these are things that I think I can do, and in doing so can maybe start to address some of the bigger issues politics, power, criticality, definition and action that wove their way through all the presentations, discussions and conversations over the two days of the conference.

Thanks to Kate Bowles and her contribution to the panel session I took part in, the importance of hospitality needs to be highlighted.  If we want to extend practice to embrace open then we need to provide hospitable spaces – both physical and digital. Spaces that are welcoming, where you can choose where and when to enter, that make you  want to explore and more importantly want to stay, come back to and bring others along.

I think we are all a little bit (and a times quite a big bit) guilty of presuming hospitably in our open spaces without really considering how they are experienced by others. What we might assume is an open, hospital place because we know how to navigate it, can actually appear to be quite hostile to those who don’t come from our context, who aren’t privileged to our understandings of how those spaces work and how to interact within them and with “us”.

There’s an old saying in Scotland that describes the difference between East and West (Glasgow/Edinburgh). In Glasgow people will say “come in, you’ll have your tea” and in Edinburgh “come in, you’ll have had your tea”.  There’s a subtle but important difference in terms of hospitality which, never mind the geographical stereotypes,  we all need to be mindful of. Open spaces, even with appropriate open licenses, can be appear to be scary, at times aloof and distance, places you enter with a bit of trepidation or just by pass all together.

As an example from my personal experience,  I had until this conference, always felt a bit like that about Virtually Connecting. Although open, it just seemed to me  a bit of a space for “those and such of those” the great and the good of OER, and those that were involved in what I call “proper” researchers.  However, as I have previously explained, I did end up joining one of the sessions at the conference thanks to the hospitality of Autumn and Maha pre, during and post conference.  That hospitality extended the digital open space in this reflection on user perceptions, to an invitation to participate and to the warmest, welcoming hospitality in the open physical space of the conference.  That little experience of open hospitality is what we all need to ensure we all continue to foster.

Maha is probably one of the most hospitable and generous people I have the privilege of knowing. However in her opening keynote she made a really important point about generosity the need to think very carefully about what we give.  As Maha pointed out, if you are hungry but have no teeth and someone gives you an apple, that apparent act of generosity can actually cause anger, hurt and show lack of understanding of context.

So as I try to be generous I will now make a more of a concerted and explicit effort to ensure that my generosity – in whatever form it takes – is appropriate and inclusive and given with understanding and care.  This may take some time and I might not succeed all the time but I will try.

I really hope that all of the people who attend the conference both physically and virtually found it to be an open, hospitable and generous. But if they didn’t we need to know why so we can change things.

Another issue that bubbled throughout the conference was that of definition. What does open education actually mean? Have we created our own open silo, with our own cozy spaces and discourse? Why aren’t all educational systems (from nursery to universities ), governments fully embracing open-ness?  Many of the reasons of course echo the theme of the conference “the politics of open”.  I’m sure they will be reflected on far more eloquently than I am able to today over the coming weeks but if you want a bit of a taste just search for #trexit.

What is sure is that we need to keep extended the conversations, sharing our research, our practice, working with organisations like wikimedia to extend open knowledge creation and sharing, and seriously think about more creative forms of activism as described by Diana Acre in her inspiring keynote. We need to allow others to help us define open. We can only do that if we work together with our wider communities to keep extending our hospitality and giving people appropriate, inclusive safe spaces to learn, share and grow.

There is so much more I need to reflect on but for now this is about as much as I am capable of.  I’ve been trying to find an image to use that sums up hospitality, but they are all just so culturally bound it doesn’t seem quite right in this context but I think hot beverage is almost universal  . . . once again thanks to the Unsplash community for the generosity of their open images.

morgan-sessions-6264

 

 

css.php