Not so tasty now

"You are salt for the earth. But if salt loses its taste, how will it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything except to be thrown out and trampled on by people". Matthew 5:13 (New Testament)

The Delicious social bookmarking site used to be one of my favourite social media tools. Not any more. When Yahoo bought Delicious back in 2005 for an estimated $18 million, we all expected great things, and we got them. It was a great place to post a link, share it and watch it blossom. The tagging facility was second to none, and it was easy to see who else was interested in the same links as you, and then discover what other links they had bookmarked that might have passed you by. It was both creative, and a voyage of discovery. A lot of that functionality has changed since Delicious has been sold on to AVOS (known as founders of YouTube) for a reported $5 million. This represents a significant loss of capital for Yahoo.

Since the launch of new Delicious this week, the Twitterverse and blogosphere have been buzzing with scathing commentary and complaints, stories of lost bookmarks, mislaid tagging bundles, personal networks that have simply disappeared. This post from Pulp Tech is particularly critical of the new Delicious. The old maxim, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, seems to have passed AVOS completely by. People don't like change, so when AVOS relaunched Delicious on September 27 this year in a 'back to beta' state, it went down like a lead balloon. Too much change too quickly is a big mistake. Many are migrating their content to other bookmarking sites such as Diigo, because they can't see any point in using Delicious anymore, given that much of the useful stuff they spent years becoming familiar with, is gone. That also has a compounding influence on the personal networks users have built up of course. Many of us wish that AVOS would put Delicious back to its previous state, where everything was familiar and where we knew exactly where our tags and networks were. AVOS has done more harm than good changing things so radically and so quickly.

It is annoying when you rely on a service as a knowledge tool, and then suddenly, your content isn't there anymore, or it's there but you can't find it easily. To be fair to AVOS, they gave advanced warning that changes would be made. What they didn't do very well was inform users fully to what extent those changes would affect everyone. Now they have a bit of a crisis on their hands. Amidst the storm of criticism they are weathering, Delicious is struggling to put things right and while it's doing so, appears to be leaking many of its previously loyal followers. I don't blame people for leaving. Delicious just isn't that tasty anymore.

Have your say: What do you think about the new Delicious?




Not so tasty now by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Talking to camera

I seem to be doing a lot of interviews lately, many of which are on video. No-one ever warned me that I would be doing video interviews when I first became a teacher. No-one came up to me and offered me media presentation training like they do for politicians. I have never been briefed on what to do when standing (or sitting) in front of a camera. I have had to learn all about it by trial and error. Error more than trial actually. I can now tell you what a noddy is (no, it's not a Toytown character) and what a cut-away does (best not to ask, really). It has very much been informal training on the job, and I'm sure I've screwed up now and then. Yet my most recent video interviews seem to be watchable, and I appear to be reasonably coherent and not talking too much gibberish. I'm now at the point where I don't care anymore if someone comes up to me and asks for a video interview. I'll do a talk to camera at the drop of a hat. That actually helps when people suddenly walk up to me and shove a mobile phone into my face and ask for an impromptu interview. Talking to camera doesn't make me sweat or tremble like it used to when back in 1992 I did my first ever TV studio interview. Back then, I remember feeling physically sick, and spending a lot of time prior to broadcast in the toilet (yes, the TV interview was a live broadcast and there was no room for error .... scary).

My time spent later working for the RATIO telematics project from 1996-1998 gave me plenty of opportunities to sit on the other side of the microphone, and I suppose was a kind of on the fly media training. I had to learn fast. I even had my own Training Hour show once each week, which went out live by satellite to the whole of Europe. It helped me to think on my feet and cope with most situations (dead air with guests clamming up and not speaking, technical problems such as failed phone-ins, mouse droppings on the carpet, etc....)



When James Clay invited me at the recent ALT-C event in Leeds to sit in as an interviewer, and converse with guests for the live webstreaming ALT-C Live Beta TV programme, it all came back to me. I would have no more than a minute or two to find out a little about them and formulate a few questions and then it was straight in with the live streaming interview. It felt quite natural to do the intro direct to camera, and then turn to the guest and try to get some interesting snippets of insight from them. John Traxler was probably the best to interview because I only had to ask him one or two questions and then he was off, talking twenty to the dozen until we eventually hauled him out of the studio kicking and screaming (OK, I exaggerate, but John did most of the work for me). Above is a brief, unscripted one minute elevator pitch interview I did for my own university, about some of the research I'm currently engaged in. And below is an on the spot interview I did while over in Dublin at the EDEN Conference in June. There are several more in the pipeline that will appear on the web in the next week or so that were recorded in Lisbon and Cologne recently. I'm getting to be an old pro at this video lark now. I even managed to video myself smashing a can of baked beans down onto my finger to make a point for a student group. Look, don't ask - just click on the video link and watch it for yourself. That's the kind of stuff I get up to in the classroom when there's a camera to perform in front of.




Talking to camera by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Sharp practice

During my keynote for the Zukunft Personal event in Cologne, I publicly announced that I would no longer publish my work in closed journals. In truth, the last time one of my papers was published in a pay-to-subscribe journal was quite some time ago. I'm not the first academic who has made this stand and hopefully I won't be the last. Many others now only publish their work in open access journals, and I intend to do the same. I will still also continue to write for professional journals and magazines such as Learning Technologies. I'm also going to continue writing these blog posts for as long as people like you find them useful, and continue to come back for more.

But my days of helping to fill the academic publishers' coffers are over.

For a long time I have felt very strongly that some academic publishers are operating a sharp practice by exploiting the goodwill of scholars. Large groups of lecturers and researchers act as journal authors and reviewers without payment, and then the publishers sell this content on to other academics at grossly inflated prices. Other highly knowledgeable academics give up their time, also for no payment, to review and advise editors on the content, and this can be painstaking work - read this by Martin Weller on the real cost of 'free reviewing'. This is not sustainable and must change. The publishing industry should no longer be allowed to operate such cynical, profiteering business models. The content they sell has been given to them for free by exceptionally skilled academics who have spent their valuable time and energy researching and writing their reports. The price we are expected to pay to read the work of our own community is unjustifiable. How much does it cost a publishing house to create and maintain an online journal? The cost of reading journal articles should be reduced or eradicated completely, or academics should vote with their feet. What would happen if we all pledged to no longer patronise the publishing houses in future? What would be their response if we all promised we would no longer publish our work in their journals? Actually, I articulated these very sentiments in What if they threw a party and none of us came? on my blog last year. If all academics withdrew their labour, the publishers would have to think again. Here are some of the facts and figures taken from the publishers' websites:

Taking out a personal subscription of a Taylor and Francis journal can be particularly expensive. Learning, Media and Technology (4 issues a year) comes in at around £70 per issue. Sister journal Technology, Pedagogy and Education (3 issues each year) is much cheaper at £18 per issue. Another T and F journal Interactive Learning Environments (currently 5 issues a year) works out at just over £26 per issue for an individual subscription. Taylor and Francis also offer individual online articles for download at just £21 per copy. Wiley's British Journal of Educational Technology will cost you between £232 (or £403 for the rest of world) for 6 issues. That's more than £38 (£67) for an issue, each of which is on average 175 pages in length. A slightly better deal is Elsevier's Computers in Education journal which at 8 issues a year works out at just £34 per issue for a personal subscription. Why the fluctuation in prices? Only the publishers can explain that one. I ask again, why do publishers charge such high prices for knowledge? If we continue to allow knowledge to be commoditised to such an extent that it is only available to the privileged few who can afford it, we are in effect, perpetuating an unjust society. In the long term, this can only damage the academic community.

Image by Pieter de Vries


Sharp practice by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Business games

I gave a keynote speech at the Zukunft Personal - a massive HRM Expo and conference - today, in Cologne, Germany. One of my presentation themes in the main arena was 'openness'. My keynote went well and afterwards I was asked during the discussion whether companies would be wise to give their ideas away for free. I had previously explained that increasingly, many teachers and lecturers are sharing their content freely, because we are aware of the need to improve learning while reducing cost. Its not completely altruistic. Many of us are handsomely rewarded for this free giving. If the content is open for re-use and repurposing, it is almost always more widely and more quickly disseminated than it would be if it were closed. Some academics share their content through social media to get it 'out there' to the public more quickly, and in a more visible way, so that dialogue is encouraged and amplification can occur. Giving away content therefore makes sense to a lot of teachers and lecturers, because they want to gain a larger audience for their ideas.

But does it make good sense, my conference host asked, if commercial organisations were also to give away their products with no charge? Would this not result in lost revenue for those companies? The predominantly corporate sector audience waited expectantly for my answer. There were more suits on view than at Moss Bros. In my response, I echoed what I had earlier said in my Zukunft Personal keynote - Open Educational Resources are the start of a movement that is already transferring itself to the business sector. It is already happening not just in companies such as Google and Facebook, whose business model is to advertise on the back of free products in a pay-per-click strategy. I pointed out that some major players in the gaming industry are participating. One of the leaders in the game engine world is Unity, who sell their Unity Pro developer software package for $1500 but give away a lower level version of the same package for free. How can they afford to do this? The reason is quite clear. Unity wants games developers everywhere to use their software, and wants to encourage a community of interest to form around its products. It gives them a competitive edge over their rivals. Unity does so by not only offering free software but also an evaluation service on games that have been developed using their software. Last year the company announced its Union partnership scheme. If your game is deemed to be commercially viable, Unity will market it across a variety of platforms, and takes 20 per cent commission on all subsequent sales. Other gaming companies are following similar business models. How long will it be before companies in other sectors of business and industry begin to give their products away for free to become even more competitive in their niche sector?


Business games by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Grand residence

The annual conference of the European Foundation for Quality in e-Learning did not disappoint. From the grand location of the conference at the Marquês de Pombal Palace, to the eclectic and fast moving conference papers, workshops and demonstrations, there was plenty to see and do during the two day Efquel Innovation Forum. A palace is defined as a 'grand residence', and this week the grand men and women of e-learning from all over Europe and farther afield took residence here to discuss, explore, expound and celebrate. The beautiful town of Oieras is a wonderful location for any event, and if you like good weather, sumptuous green surroundings and good food (seefood is the speciality) then I am sure you would agree. It is no wonder then that the Efquel crew return again and again to hold their conference in this picturesque Lisbon suburb. Morning keynotes from Wayne Mackintosh (see Wayne's World) and Asha Kanwar (Commonwealth of Learning) set the scene, leaving delegates with visions of free worldwide access to learning, thoughts of openness and inspiration from accounts of education initiatives in developing countries.

A welter of discussions, workshops and presentations followed, focusing on the accreditation, certification and internationalisation of learning followed, with subjects including open models, self evaluation, quality aspects for virtual schools, all before lunchtime. After lunch, it was business as usual with more sessions on topics such as how to integrate informal and open learning into higher education, the use of quality labels for e-learning and the benefits and limitations of academic gaming. The evening was closed off by a thought provoking keynote by Yves Punie, who address the challenges and opportunities for certification and assessment in future learning scenarios. Day one ended with a great al fresco evening in the grounds of the Palais, with live music and a short award ceremony.

My own keynote on digital learning futures started off day 2 of the forum, where I addressed some of the possible scenarios we see emerging in education, including open education practices, mobile learning, personalised learning, social media networking contexts and the use of augmented and mixed reality. As with all the sessions, there was a lively discussion, and this continued after the coffee break in other parallel sessions. I recall one brief discussion where one of the delegates, a journalist and self confessed e-learning non-expert, made the error of saying within my earshot that academic blogs were a poor substitute for peer reviewed traditional publishing. Talk about red rags and bulls. There was no blood on the carpet, but there could well have been. To say this view is misinformed would be an understatement. There are many blogs I would read in place of closed journal content. Blogging is more immediate (some traditional journals take many months to publish papers, which by then are well out of date) which also means it is timely and up to date. Blogging also enables immediate dialogue which means that readers can join in and discuss directly with the author. Blogging is also peer reviewed, but by multiple reviewers, not just two. Open and public forms of discourse need to be encouraged, not disparaged by ill-informed assumptions. This kind of debate that is the essence of what Efquel stands for, and I am grateful to have been invited to participate in this years event. My thanks go to the Efquel crew, and not least to Ulf-Daniel Ehlers, the conference chair, for allowing me to join in with a very memorable and inspirational event.


Grand residence by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Wayne's world

Wayne Mackintosh's world vision of free learning for all is one that is shared by countless educators around the world. We all want to see quality learning provided, especially to the populations of the less well-off nations of the world. The difference though, is that he's going to make it happen. Born in South Africa, and now working in New Zealand, Wayne Mackintosh is chair of the WikiEducator Community Council, and is a strategy innovator with a passion for making learning futures happen. Trained as an accountant, he is in his own words, 'an educator by choice.' He has more than a passion. He also has the pragmatic wherewithal to realise his dream, cultivating many connections and in the process, helping to establish a powerful worldwide consortium of Open Education Anchor partners. These are universities across the globe who are willing to open up their courses and programmes to any learner for free. What's more, they have also agreed to provide free accreditation of learning in the form of degrees.

Speaking at the opening plenary of the Efquel Innovation Forum in Oeiras, Portugal, Wayne asked the delegates: Why do we ask people to pay more than they can afford for education? This is of course an important question to ask, even if it is unpalatable to many in the higher education sector. It's one that many institutions worldwide would be wise to begin asking themselves. Wayne didn't pull any punches in his keynote. Citing Sir John Daniel's iron triangle, he argued that the biggest challenge for free open worldwide education is to lower the cost while widening access and raising quality. We WILL provide free education for all, he declared. This will be done by creating a growing network of partners who have enough influence and reach to create the critical mass with which the Open Educational Resources movement will gain purchase. Recognition of prior learning, whether credentialed or experiential, will be a key part of the success in achieving this vision, he said. His key question was that we already have all the ingredients to provide free learning for all at university level, so why aren't we doing it?

There is a long way to go to achieve this vision, but Wayne warned that those who do not subscribe will be left behind. It is a red herring question, he assured us, to ask whether providing free and open education for all will put universities our of business and lose teachers their jobs. Another red herring, he suggested, was that open educational resources were poorer in quality than the traditional course delivery currently offered by most universities. If the quality is poorer, he remarked, then the institution is unlikely to risk its reputation by offering it.

Image source


Wayne's world by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Fire and brimstone

I spoke earlier today at the Concede User Generated Conference in the venerable surroundings of the old Palace of the Marquis de Pombal, here in Oeiras, Lisbon. In my presentation, entitled The Good, the Blog and the Wiki, I tried to paint some broad brushstrokes on how students (and their teachers) are creating and sharing content that supports their learning, both socially and academically, through a range of social media. I pointed out some of the tensions that exist between what the institution requires (course accreditation, structure, security and other formalised activities) and what the individual does (chaotic and unstructured, informal and rule-free). I gave some examples from my own recent research with students using blogs and wikis in authentic learning contexts. The talk seemed to go down well, but one of my remarks, about creativity seemed to ruffle a feather or two. I suggested that in school, we are taught to follow rules and that colouring outside the lines is frowned upon. I was of course, referring to the inherent need that all institutions seem to have of establishing order, compliance and ultimately, a lack of freedom to experiment, take risks and make mistakes.

One of the speakers who followed me remarked that 'colouring outside the lines' never helped anyone gain any course credit. As there was no time to challenge her in a question session, I responded on Twitter by stating that colouring outside the lines actually helps many students to go beyond the course requirements. I also remarked that if we don't teach in creative ways, then no wonder our students are bored and demotivated. I fail to comprehend how some people, having spent a lifetime in education, are still reluctant to give their students licence to experiment, ask the what if questions, and ... yes, colour outside the lines. If you facilitate freedom to learn, students will - and do respond, and it is often astounding what they can achieve when given such freedom.

And so we move from the mildly irritating to the absolutely bizarre.... Earlier today one of my colleagues here at the Concede conference (Anthony Camilleri) found an outrageous blog post entitled Blogging is sinful and hampers your research productivity and tweeted the link after my keynote. Now, you can take this blog post one of two ways. You could surmise that the author is being deliberately provocative and is taking a stance that is ultimately indefensible, simply to provoke debate. The somewhat archaic language and the hectoring tones are possibly a give away. All power to him if he is promoting debate. On the other hand, and this is the disturbing part - he may actually be deadly serious when he declares:

Scholars who write blogs obviously try to avoid the harshness of the peer review system and to air their half-baked thoughts through a less demanding publication channel than a peer reviewed journal. This modern opportunity creates a public bad of immense proportions as it invites an endless stream of reactions from other colleagues who do not want to live up to the publish or perish reality that even starts to exist in the sleepy European social sciences. 

Sinful, I ask you.... Good grief. I for one have never been shy of criticism, even of the harshest kind, from some over opinionated journal reviewers. I blog because of the immediacy of the medium - I can publish my ideas and questions instantly, and can receive back 'reactions' from my peers that are valued, relevant and timely. The publish or perish reality above is not a reality at all - it's more likely to be publish and be jammed with the backlog some traditional journals suffer from. You can consider yourself most fortunate if you manage to get your article published in under a year from submission to publication. The absolute irony that should not escape you is that the author is using a blog as his platform to preach this anti-blogging madness. What he is doing in a great Elmer Gantry parody, is using archaic words such as Purgatory and Hell, and rhetoric likely to bring tears to the eyes of a puritan, to hammer home his particular brand of Fire and Brimstone fervour. Either way, it's a seriously inflammatory post designed to get your back up, and it's worth a read of the brief article just to take sample a flavour of some of the lunacy the anti-social media brigade like to peddle.

Image source


Fire and brimstone by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

From atoms to bits

The final keynote speech at ALT-C 2011 was given by Professor John Naughton, who read directly from his notes with his head down, and used no visual media to support his at times somewhat mumbling and occasionally difficult to hear presentation. The message however, was quite compelling. The key theme in his 'the elusive technological future' speech, was that the future has already overtaken the music, advertising and publishing worlds, because they were completely unprepared for what was coming. He summoned up the words of author William Gibson, who famously said 'the future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed' to drive his argument.

In a taciturn style, Naughton cited Napster and other music sharing sites as disruptive innovations that changed our world and the way we do business. He harnessed the 'atoms and bits' argument (first offered by Nic Negroponte in his book Being Digital) as an illustration of the rapid progress of web based delivery of content, direct from the originator to the consumer. He gave evidence that the digital future has supplanted the analogue quickly, remorselessly and unexpectedly. For Naughton, Craigslist had caused a dramatic and irreversible downturn in newspaper advertising revenue, and Wikipedia was hammering the nails into the proverbial coffin of the encyclopedia industry. Whilst this was perhaps a little sweeping and dramatic, Naughton's message still resonated with his audience. The almost unspoken question was whether the digital future would soon overtake the world of education. Are teachers and lecturers prepared for the brave new world of the digital? Are we still wasting time and energy shipping atoms when we should be dealing in bits?


From atoms to bits by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Turning up the volume

We have enjoyed an interesting, intense and invigorating few days at the ALT-C event in Leeds this week. It was wonderful to encounter face to face so many people who I have previously got to know on Twitter. The days were filled with papers and demonstrations, symposia and workshops, some excellent, some thought provoking, and a few that could perhaps do with a little more development.... 


There were some interesting new features at ALT-C this year too. A fair amount of my time was taken up working with James Clay and Darren Moon (LSE) on the live streaming TV channel ALT-C Live Beta, which I helped to present. Throughout the conference, a small studio was used to interview delegates, speakers and guests, and James occasionally foraged among the crowd during the breaks to capture some of the vox pop ambience of the conference. The results of these hours of live video will be available on demand very soon on YouTube for all to revisit. For now you can view some of the interviews on this site. ALT-C Live Beta was an experiment that I feel worked extremely well and one that I hope can be a feature at future events. The content from the interviews in particular is rich and varied, and worth a revisit, and I am sure it has already been instrumental in amplifying the conference. Congratulations to James and Darren for adding an extra new dimension to the conference, and thank you both for involving me.

On the final day of ALT-C, in the first session I was pleasantly surprised to see a room full of delegates attending my own future pedagogy session. On the morning after the Conference Gala Dinner - commonly referred to as 'the graveyard slot', you are lucky to have half a dozen resilient punters present. On this occasion, surprisingly, every chair was taken. Three papers were presented, and a lively discussion ensued. Below is my own slide presentation on group blogging, entitled Learning Together Online.

Learning together online

View more presentations from Steve Wheeler

Turning up the volume by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Food for thought

Gather round everyone, it's Day 2 of the ALT-C 2011 Conference in Leeds. I'm meeting lots of folk today and doing a number of interviews, while trying to fit in as many of the paper and panel sessions as possible without keeling over. Sadly, my laptop Keith and I are on our own now. My faithful iPod Iggy passed away last night, and is now in a much better place (at the bottom of my case).


Yesterday was also a busy day, with plenty of food for thought, including two (yes two) sessions featuring the ubiquitous Richard Hall. The first session was a panel presentation where Frances Bell, Josie Fraser, Helen Keegan (both wearing bright red dresses), and Richard (sadly not in a red dress but wearing instead the obligatory learning technologist check shirt) held forth on the paradox of openness, covering issues of authenticity, misappropriation and identity in digital environments. It was cut and thrust all the way, and the packed room responded with questions, comments and ... er, more questions about what we should really be doing and saying online.


The second session was an interesting rehash of the infamous VLE is Dead symposium we conducted a couple of years ago at ALT-C 2009 in Manchester. This time, Richard and his colleagues discussed whether the VLE should be rebirthed. Again, as is usually the case when institutional tools are discussed, the audience was polarised and a healthy discussion ensued. It was all food for thought indeed.


Food for thought by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Broadband is a human right

The 2011 ALT-C Conference is being held at the University of Leeds on a campus that is as convoluted as the maze of arguments and discussions we are enjoying. This year's event is co-chaired by John Cook and Sugata Mitra, and the programme and as always, is packed with far too many choices, you are bound to miss something you would really like to see. Too much choice is not the only problem we have to face. Just trying to navigate your way around the Leeds campus to find the rooms can be difficult, and there is a lot of walking around outside, up and down many steps and slopes.  The intermittent rain showers don't help either, but as they keep telling me - it's grim up north. Finding your choice of sessions then, certainly requires stamina and tenacity. And we will need these in equal measure throughout the conference, because all of the sessions I have attended so far have sought to go beyond the run-of-the-mill conference papers of old, to challenge preconceptions, problematise old knowledge and generally rattle a few cages along the way.... of which more in later posts from ALT-C 2011.

Miguel Brechner's keynote this morning focused on the CEIBAL one-laptop-per-child project in the schools of Uruguay. Uruguay is only a small South American country, about the size of Wales, and with a small population, and in the past it has not been particularly well known for its educational achievements. But today the spotlight was well and truly on Uruguay. In a gently humourous style, and laced with football analogies (he delighted in reminded his audience that Uruguay had once beaten Brazil to win the Soccer World Cup), Miguel Brechner demonstrated how giving a free laptop to each child has liberated them to learn in their own way and in their own time. Children now really want to go to school he said, and are upset if they miss even a day. He showed how the education landscape has been changed in Uruguay, and how social equality is being achieved among the youth of his country. Clearly very passionate about his cause, Brechner argued that not only is access to broadband absolutely essential for education, in today's connected world, it should also be considered a human right. While many of us had heard these mantras before, given that Negroponte's vision has been in existence for well over a decade, we were all nevertheless impressed by the manner in which this project had been implemented, in humility, with a great sense of purpose and with an eye on the future for Uruguay's youth. 


In some ways, OLPC could be said to run counter to the ideals of Sugata Mitra's Hole in the Wall Project. OLPC is very focused on solo learning, where each child uses his laptop in his own way, and is more or less autonomous, against the Hole in the Wall project where learners work together around a social space which involves a single computer. The minimally invasive education of Mitra's work, when measured against the individualised and personalised learning approach of OLPC leaves a lot of questions open. What is the best way for children to learn? With a communal technology that forces social contact, or with individual technologies where social contact is optional? This has indeed been the subject of discussion throughout the day during the breaks. It would be good to get Sugata Mitra (who is here on Thursday) and Miguel Brechner together to debate this, to hear their respective arguments.


Broadband is a human right by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Cut price education?

There is a discussion kicking off right now over on the TES pages. It's about the front page story covering the announcement that some colleges are planning to offer 'cut price' qualifications that rely on a combination of podcasting, online learning and remote self study. If you can manage to manoeuvre your way past the journalese and read between the lines, you might just surmise that this decision has been made due to budget cuts and economic expediencies, rather than as a decision to enhance the quality of the experience. Call me a fool, but I would rather offer no courses at all, than put my name to a course that is inferior due to cost cutting. But let's put the quality issue aside for one moment and consider the economics of this plan. 


Do the leaders of these colleges really believe that shifting learning activities completely over to online distance learning mode will actually cut teacher time and save money? From my own professional experience, I would very strongly suggest that when online learning (in any of its forms) is conducted appropriately, teacher workload actually increases rather than decreases. Adrian Prandle, education policy advisor at the teaching union ATL gets it right when he says: 'Developments such as podcast learning should be in addition to time with lecturers, not instead of it. What is important with projects like this is that they have input from those in the classroom at every stage.' We live in tough times, but whichever way this 'project' is viewed, it is simply false economy.

Just how was the decision to offer 'cut price education' arrived at? Are the managers of these programmes so naïve they cannot see that teachers will need to be on call to answer endless queries and address never ending concerns from remote students? Are the managers of the colleges so lazy, so complacent that they have failed to check the online learning and distance education research literature? It is bordering on the myopic if managers think they will be reducing the costs of education by hiving learning off into a distance delivered, online experience. Forget the many, many hidden costs for a moment and consider this: It is an established statistic that 30%-50% will be the expected attrition rate for the majority of distance education programmes, worldwide. Will colleges who wish to cut the costs of their programmes stomach such a dropout statistic? I think not.

Image by Steve Wheeler


Cut price education? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

I think, therefore I blog

There seems to be a growing divide between teachers who share their content, and teachers who don't. In a recent blog post, I gave seven reasons why teachers should blog. It was subsequently expanded to 10 good reasons by the contributions from readers - which is actually an eleventh reason why teachers should blog - you get back such great comments, suggestions, arguments and advice, it would be crazy not to share your content. I followed that post up with another highlighting some of the reasons teachers don't blog. Again, there were interesting comments from those who read but don't write, offering further reasons why teachers don't share their content. 


Blogging for me has many clear benefits for professionals. Putting your ideas 'out there' as a public performance can be risky, but also very rewarding. The comments alone are worth the risk, but even if no-one else reads or comments on your blog, you still get the chance to clarify your thoughts in your own mind, and as you write, they become even clearer.

Perhaps the prime practical reason teachers don't share their content is time pressure. Most teachers are passionate about education, but can't stand the idea of even more work added to their load. For some, blogging and other content generation is just extra work. But let's be frank - all teachers create content on a regular basis including lesson plans, assessment tools, learning and teaching resources and new ideas for plenaries, starters or revision. It would be another small step, with very little extra effort, to share these resources through some social media tool. This leads on to another objection - many teachers feel they don't have the skills or the confidence to share their ideas and content once they have them.

The seemingly impenetrable jungle of social media tools, the strange and quirky names, the alien concepts of content sharing are all quite daunting to the average teacher. Again, in reality, many social media tools are quick and easy to use, and don't cost anything in terms of hard cash. If you like using post-its and getting kids to comment during lessons, then Wallwisher is the ideal tool. If you wish to find out who else is bookmarking the same websites as you, then Delicious fits the bill. Want to keep an archive of all your note-taking? Evernote is a great tool for that purpose. For sheer crazy visual inventiveness, try Blabberize - you'll laugh your socks off. There are many blogging tools available - the one you are currently reading is Blogger, but Wordpress and Posterous are just as simple to use. There are so many tools for so many teacherly jobs, making life easier and more organised, so that you can get on with the daily task of shaping young minds. You have plenty of thoughts and ideas that would benefit the rest of the education community. So why don't you share them?

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I think, therefore I blog by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Creative learning

I took some risks today during a workshop I gave at Plymouth University. The workshop was all about creativity and how we can tap into imagination in learning contexts. I tried out several things I had not attempted before in workshops, but that was the idea - often, creativity requires some kind of risk. 


The Your Idea, Our Health event was a health related conference, so there were lots of delegates of the nursing and midwifery persuasion in attendance. My session was a two part session, with a Devon cream tea intervening, and incredibly, almost everyone came back for part 2 - so I guess I was doing something right and the risks were paying off. I revisited the concepts I wrote about in my last blogpost, including the idea that creativity takes a lot of time before any eureka moment is achieved. The workshop was lively with plenty of activity and discussion, and participants were encouraged to write on the paper tablecloths, circulating every so often so that others could read each others' comments, questions, ideas and graffiti. Below is the slideshow, with a few annotations for clarity (...and to my workshop participants - yes, I did write this post in about 5 minutes)

Creative Learning

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Creative learning by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.