Global forces

Our society is becoming increasingly globalised; influenced by world events; as we connect into a worldwide web of content, networks, people, media and tools. Many of us do so willingly, but there is a very real underlying tension between the effects of the global and the desires of the individual. We all need to make choices, but how free are we to choose? This refers not only to what we buy (clothing, food, goods) but also how we learn, consume news, spend our leisure time as we are continually exposed to media. Ultimately, what is this exposure doing to our values, our beliefs, our wellbeing?

Globalization can be defined as 'the increasing interdependence of world society' (Giddens, 1991: 520). The effects of globalization are being felt around the world. It is a force that affects our economy, travel, exchange of goods and services, access to information, communication, health provision, education delivery and even the way we have begun to reconceptualise the world about us. According to some observers, we have in effect reached the idealism first suggested by Marshall McLuhan, who in mapping the effects of communication and the 'electric age', had suggested that we would all one day be living in a 'global village', where the concept of 'togetherness' would take on an entirely new set of meanings (See Toffler, 1971: 444). The key implication of this was that as a homogenous 'group' of consumer-actors, we would all adopt a common identity, as we were subsumed into an ever shrinking world.

To a certain extent this has happened as predicted. Wherever we travel in the world, transnational commodities are awaiting us. We can eat in the seemingly ubiquitous McDonalds restaurant (but only if we don't value our health), whilst wearing Nike trainers and drinking Coca-Cola (but only if we....etc). Microsoft has long been the killer software application for computer users worldwide, Google has become the prime search engine tool, and victims lie in the wake of progress: In the 1990s VHS trounced the higher quality Beta-Max format to become the established analogue videotape standard for home entertainment, but the digital versatile disk (DVD) format killed it and quickly replaced it. It's dog eat dog. Any self-respecting hotel chain guest room comes complete with TV news updates courtesy of CNN, SKY or BBC World Service, whilst 'the latest Ford car has probably been assembled in one or more than over a dozen countries' (Dicken, 1986: 304). OK, so open source software, rival news channels and other fast food chains are now vying for supremacy and Facebook is mopping up many of the other social networks, but you get the idea. This kind of 'Macdonaldisation' of society has reached every aspect of our world, especially our social lives.

Homogeneity, it seems, has a dominant influence on much of our lives. Yet the effects of globalization are by no means as clear cut as Toffler and McLuhan were predicting. Alain Touraine offers an alternative perspective on the effects of globalization when he states:

"Our world appears to be integrated as a world market, but the counterpart of this globalization is the more and more aggressive defense of personal and collective identity. Instead of living in a cosmopolitan world as some pretend we do, we live in a dualized world in which not only North and South are more and more distant from each other, but where rich and poor districts in cities are more and more separated universes and in which most individuals are split between their participation in a globalized world and their consciousness of individual and collective identity." (Touraine, 1995: 46)

Touraine is arguing that the sense of personal (and collective) identity is more robust than the seemingly all-powerful forces of globalisation, and that individuals and communities tend to resist these forces naturally. In this context, it is perhaps easier to understand how resistance to technological forces comes about. At Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Marvin Minsky, has argued that intelligence is to be found in the collective behaviour of large groups of interconnected machines (Minsky, 1987). Nicholas Negroponte, Minsky's MIT colleague, applies this connectivist analogy to human behaviour and argues that the process of 'decentralization' (also referred to as 'atomisation') is becoming the antithesis of globalisation. He concludes that it probably has a great deal more power (Negroponte, 1995: 157-159). More recent theorists such as George Siemens and Stephen Downes propose a version of connectivism that describes the many ways we can tap into the huge potential of distributed cognition as and when required through personal and professional learning networks. This is personalisation of content at an individual level within the vast social congregation of the web.

Using these frameworks in a contemporary context, two things become clear: Firstly resistance to technology in general, and technology supported education in particular, may be rooted in the collective and individual identity of those globalisation has the potential to affect. Secondly, individuals will continue to be self determined in their approaches to learning, more or less in spite of the pressures globalisation attempts to exert upon them.

Excerpt from The Death of Distance by Steve Wheeler and Shannon Amiotte

References

Dicken, P. (1986) Global Shift: Industrial Change in a Turbulent World. New York: Harper and Row.
Giddens, A. (1991) Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Minsky, M. (1987) The Society of Mind. Boston: MIT Press.
Negroponte, N. (1995) Being Digital. London: Hodder and Stoughton.
Toffler, A. (1971) Future Shock. London: Pan Books.
Touraine, A. (1986) The Crisis of 'Progress' In M. Bauer (Ed.) Resistance to New Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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

Roadside assistance

Technology supported learning has long been a contested terrain, and there are at least two views about its effects. The first, a long established claim, is that all technology is neutral, and that 'media are mere vehicles that deliver instruction, but do not influence student achievement, any more than the van that delivers our groceries can cause change in nutrition'. This view, first propounded by Richard Clark (1994) was widely accepted, warning as it did of the dangers of failing to differentiate between methods and media. As a result of Clark's position, many researchers decided not to study differences between students whose learning was supported by technology and those who had none, because it was considered a waste of time.

Clark's view was strongly opposed by the likes of Robert Kozma (1994) who countered that media can never be neutral, and that it would be foolish to stop research into the differences that might exist. Kozma's argument was an echo of the work of Marshall McLuhan who was famously quoted as saying 'We shape our tools and thereafter, our tools shape us.'  Kozma considered that media and method were intimately linked and continued to call for more research into the effects of media and technology on learning. The question remains - what exactly does influence learning, and which side of the argument should we believe? Are some media better than others at supporting learning, or are they, as Clark argues, all completely neutral?

We can examine a long history of almost 70 years of studies into the differences between learning with, and without technology. Again there are two views here about the effects of media and technology on learning.  There is an argument that there is no significant difference (Merisotas and Phipps, 1999) and there are those who hold that there actually is a significant difference (both examples are collated on this website run by Thomas Russell). Recent work on the affordances of technology and other media factors by the likes of Koumi (1994) have cast doubt on Clark's position. Hastings and Tracey (2005) also challenge Clark's view by suggesting that new technologies such as networked computers can and do affect learning in a number of ways. They call for a reframing of the debate to ask not if, but how media influence learning.  So are we to conclude that the 'media is neutral' theory has been overhauled by new and richly interactive technologies? Was Clark's original argument framed against technology that has now advanced sufficiently to render his views obsolete? It certainly appears as though Richard Clark's delivery van has broken down... but what do you think?

References

Clark, R.E. (1994). Media will Never Influence Learning. Educational Technology Research and Development,42(2), 21-29.
Hastings, N. B. and Tracey, M. W. (2005) Does media affect learning? Where are we now? TechTrends, 49(2), 28-30.
Koumi, J. (1994). Media Comparison and Deployment: A Practitioner’s View. British Journal of Educational Technology, 25(1), 41-57.
Kozma, R. (1994). A Reply: Media and Methods. Educational Technology Research and Development, 42(3), 11-14.
Merisotas, J. P. and Phipps, R. A. (1999) What's the difference? Outcomes of distance v. traditional classroom-based learning. Change. 31 (3): 13-17.

Image by Museum Wales


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

Learning precincts

The notion of learning spaces is gaining traction across all sectors of education. Learning spaces are not only used to describe places we can learn, but can also be representative of the human mind. The only difference other than scale, is that physical learning spaces have their limits, whilst no-one has yet been able to define the boundaries of the human mind and its capabilities. And it is from our minds that the concept of learning spaces arises. 


The extent to which we model learning spaces on the metaphor of the human mind may indicate how close we can come to creating spaces that are conducive to good learning at a very personal level. There have been many other metaphors used to depict learning. The industrial revolution brought us the clock metaphor, and later the machine (for example the water mill or the steam engine) as a means of processing knowledge. The technological revolution suggested metaphors of learning that included the mind as a computer, and later as a network, which is probably the most aligned we have ever been to representing the neural connections the human brain makes when we learn something new. Another useful recent conceptualisation of learning involves horticultural metaphors - learning as the planting of a garden, and more recently, learning connections that can be mirrored in the chaotic forms of learning we see happening in hyper linked environments, without centre or boundaries - rhizomatic learning.

All of the above are of course merely shadow representations of our collective and clumsy struggle to try to illustrate and define what happens when we learn. It's not an easy task, because we all learn differently, and we all learn different things from the same stimuli. Perhaps that is why we employ metaphors that reflect what is happening at that moment in the world of innovation. We are all made of the same stuff, but somehow, we are all individuals and we all have our own preferences and strategies for learning.

Whether there is any commonality between learners remains to be seen, but a key question for universities is whether we can create learning spaces that are conducive to learning for all. Professor Rob Allen, Deputy Vice Chancellor at Auckland University of Technology believes we can. In an effort to transform the environs of AUT, he and his team have launched a grand design scheme that will transform the inner city campus of the former polytechnic dramatically over the next two years. Today at the Informa Tertiary Education Summit in Wellington, he unveiled his plans. The Learning Precinct is a structure that will join the entire AUT campus from one end to the other, so that students can wander between spaces, in one very large, continuous building complex. It will include multiple glass atria, a tower block, media studios and flexible lecture areas that feature rotatable seating to encourage collaborative work. Within the learning precinct some of the flexible shared spaces are able to be transformed into formal or informal community spaces for collaborative work, or individual places of self-study. The entire structure will be designed using sustainable materials to provide a comfortable, aesthetic and environmentally controlled space for learning of all types to be supported. Professor Allen promises that the new learning precinct will connect teaching, technology and spaces in an effective and stimulating manner. You can read more about this ambitious, multi-million dollar project here.

You can learn anywhere of course, but for me, the most important thing is to create spaces that are conducive to learning, that students come back to, time and time again, because they enjoy being there. We shall see by 2013 whether AUT has succeeded in its quest to provide a mega-campus under one roof. More importantly, we will find out if the learning spaces that are being created will achieve the goal Rob Allen and his team have set themselves - to provide physically attractive learning spaces that students want to populate because they are socially and culturally relevant to their needs.

Images courtesy of Auckland University of Technology


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

Attention to detail

If you are ever in New Zealand's capital Wellington, you should not miss the chance to explore one of the country's most important industries - movie making. New Zealand really is Middle Earth, and Wellington is at its epicentre. New Zealand is of course, where the classic movie trilogy Lord of the Rings was shot, and it is also where other movies including the Narnia saga and the forthcoming movie the Hobbit have originated. Weta Workshop is one of the most influential studios in movies today and provides a one stop shop for movie makers who flock there from around the world. They have been involved in the making of more than one hundred major movies. Recent films credits include the digital effects for The Adventures of Tin Tin, District 9, Master and Commander, The Lovely Bones, Avatar and King Kong.

Today I took a tour around the Miramar district, and visited Weta's showcase - the Weta Cave, adjoining the backlot of the Weta studio complex. Here and in nearby Stone Street Studios, there are rows of non-descript warehouses, some peeling paint and looking a little worse for wear. Just inside the fences lay many intriguing and mysterious discarded items, some of which may (or may not) have featured in famous scenes from the films you know and love. Frankly, in places it looks like a dumping ground. Yet behind the walls of these old buildings lies a fertile hive of imagineering. Here is where all the motion capture work was done on the movie King Kong, and here is where the infamous big screen animation of Gollum was created. Here is where the giant aliens were imagined into shape for the movie Avatar. Hundreds of very talented people work behind these doors, making miniature and 'bigature' models, digital effects, green screen rendering, costume, set and prop design, animation - you name it. If it is necessary for the making of a movie, Weta does it here. It's conceptual design and physical manufacturing capabilities are second to none and have earned them multiple awards. They employ a range of technologies, including computer controlled plasma cutters and 3D printing (additive manufacturing).

As we toured this extensive movie land, and visited the locations for some of the well known scenes of the Lord of the Rings our tour guide told us some of the secrets of how Sir Peter Jackson's masterpiece was made.

We heard that during the shooting of his epic trilogy, Director Jackson commissioned the building of a full set on the site of an abandoned military base just outside Wellington. He tasked his crew to create the village of Bree. It took the crew almost 3 months to construct the facades and sets that would be the backdrop for the dramatic arrival of the hobbits during a heavy downpour of rain. The film crew completed the Bree scenes in a single day, and then the set was demolished. In their entirety, the scenes filmed on the set take up only a few minutes on screen, but they are crucial to the story telling. Such attention to detail is a hallmark of Jackson's films, and have contributed to his raised status as one of the finest cinematographic directors of his generation. We can all learn a lot from Jackson and from the art of movie making, especially the painstaking attention to detail that is involved. How much better could learning environments be if more care was taken over the little things?

Photo taken by Ted Guise


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(re)Designing learning in a digital world

(re)Designing Learning Spaces for a Digital World

View more presentations from Steve Wheeler

My keynote speeches to academic staff at Massey University on the Palmerston North and Wellington campuses this week were accompanied by the slides above. I deliberately inserted a (re) in front of the Designing theme, because I wanted to make it clear that we need to redesign and re-engineer many of our current practices in higher education, including course design, assessment and student support. Things are changing, and so is the nature of knowledge. No longer is it enough for teachers to transmit knowledge to students - much of it quickly goes out of date. In order to prepare students for a coming world of work we cannot clearly describe, we need to instill a flexible set of transferrable skills that include adaptability, change management, creative problem solving, collaboration and a range of digital literacies that will enable them to meet any challenges head on.

In the keynote presentations I tackled some contentious topics, including the issuing of challenges to a number of long standing and widely accepted theories (or beliefs) about how learning occurs. Yesterday's post will give you some clues about my views of learning style theory, but I also challenged a number of 'digital age' theories, including Marc Prensky's notorious Digital Natives and Immigrants theory, Wim Veen and Ben Vrakking's rather more insidious Homo Zappiens model, and Don Tapscott and Anthony William's Net Generation theory. I also challenged Maslow's hierarchy model of motivational needs, and Neil Fleming's VAK modality model of learning approaches. Even Vygotsky's ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development) was placed under the microscope as we travelled through a landscape of emerging pedagogies that are aligned to supporting learners in a digital age. Previous commentary by other more eloquent and eminent critics would be better to pursue than any I could possibly articulate here, but in the meantime, I hope these slides will serve in some small way to illustrate the key messages. If you were at either of the two presentations and wish to add your comments or questions you are most welcome to do so in the comments box below.


(re)Designing learning in a digital world by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

A convenient untruth

What do you think is the teacher's worst enemy? Some would say lack of time. Others would say unsupportive leadership, or the dreaded government inspection. Rigid curriculum, lack of resources and bad student behaviour may also be high on the list for many educators. For me, the worst enemy is bad theory. Bad theory, when accepted without challenge, can lead to bad practice. It's insidious, because bad theory that is accepted as fact without a full understanding of its implications, results in bad teaching, and ultimately, learners will suffer.

One of the biggest myths known to teacherdom is learning styles. Time and time again, the belief that students can be placed into specific categories such as activist or theorist, or that they are predominantly inclined toward one modal category of learning (e.g. visual, auditory, kinaesthetic) is inserted into professional conversations as if the theories are fact. And time and again, such beliefs are the justification for placing students into a specific style of learning so that a class can be 'managed' more effectively. Such categorisation of students is an absolute nonsense and the practice of doing so should be challenged strongly. It is lazy pedagogy, and the only reason I see that such beliefs persist, is that it is a convenient untruth which allows some teachers to stay within their comfort zones.

In an excellent expose on learning styles, Riener and Willingham (2010) argue this:

"...learning-styles theory has succeeded in becoming “common knowledge.” Its widespread acceptance serves as an unfortunately compelling reason to believe it. This is accompanied by a well-known cognitive phenomenon called the confirmation bias. When evaluating our own beliefs, we tend to seek out information that confirms our beliefs and ignore contrary information, even when we encounter it repeatedly. When we see someone who professes to be a visual learner excel at geography and an auditory learner excel at music, we do not seek out the information which would disprove our interpretation of these events (can the auditory learner learn geography through hearing it? Can the visual learner become better at music by seeing it?)"

Clearly one of the problems that emerges when teachers administer a learning styles inventory or questionnaire to their students is that the result tends to become a 'self fulfilling prophecy' (See Rosethal and Jacobson, for more on this phenomenon). One of the most notorious (and vacuous) inventories is Honey and Mumford's LSI, which in essence is nothing more than a repurposing of David Kolb's earlier experiential learning cycle model. Another is Neil Fleming's VAK model (Visual, Auditory, Kinaesthetic) which is basically a reworking of 'tell me I forget, show me I remember, involve me I understand'. Such learning styles theories are based on little more than anecdotal observations, and are akin to folk medicine. But the student doesn't know this, and simply trusts the teacher's judgement. The student then sees the results of the questionnaire which informs them that they are for instance predominantly a 'reflector' or that they are an 'auditory learner'. They then actively seek to maximise their 'learning style' by engaging in reflective activities, or visually rich media. This all progresses to the detriment of the other learning modes, which become deficient and atrophied. Result - the learner fails to gain a holistic learning experience, and misses out on the many rich opportunities to expand and develop their other sensory or cognitive skills. Worse still, as Barbara Prashnig explains:

"....it remains a fact that every human being has a learning style which can consist of contradictory components, often leading to inner confusion and uneasiness. Style mismatches between teaching and learning, physical learning environments not conducive to information intake and unmet physical needs during the learning process can lead to frustration, stress, learning problems, underachievement, low self esteem, discipline problems among younger students, and dropoutism in high schools."

Do we really need to label people and brand them in this way? Riener and Willingham again:

"...learning-styles theory is sometimes offered as a reason to include digital media in the classroom. While including multimedia may be a good idea in general (variety in modes of presentation can hold students' attention and interest, for example), it is not necessary to tailor your media to different learning styles. We shouldn't congratulate ourselves for showing a video to engage the visual learners or offering podcasts to the auditory learners. Rather, we should realize that the value of the video or audio will be determined by how it suits the content that we are asking students to learn and the background knowledge, interests, and abilities that they bring to it. Instead of asking whether we engaged the right sense (or learning mode), we should be asking, what did students think about while they were in class?"

The final nail in the coffin on learning styles comes from a report by Frank Coffield and his colleagues (2004) who reported that not only was the concept of learning styles so ill defined as to be virtually useless in pedagogical terms, the instruments used to 'determine' student learning styles were flawed. They failed to measure accurately what they were purported to measure (validity construct) and they failed to measure learning styles consistently over time (reliability construct). Probably the only reason some teachers (and many training organisations) hang on to the idea of testing learning styles is that it is convenient to do so, and that to ditch the idea altogether would leave them having to work harder with students.

We can conclude that in the selection of digital media (and any other learning resource) teachers should not be dictated to by the fallacy of learning styles, nor should they attempt to measure what turns out to be a moving feast of approaches to learning that are actually dependent more on changing context than they ever will be on any deep-seated human propensity. Would it not be better to simply acknowledge that all learners are different, and that all can benefit from a range of varied experiences that ultimately leads to enriched personal experiences? It may mean more work, but it would certainly be a lot fairer.

References
Coffield, F., Moseley, D., Hall, E., and Ecclestone, K. (2004) Learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning: A systematic and critical review. Learning and Skills Research Centre.
Riener, C. and Willingham, D. (2010) The Myth of Learning Styles. Change Magazine, Sept-Oct.
Rosenthal, R. and Jacobson, L. (1992) Pygmalion in the Classroom, New York, NY: Irvington.


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Fabulous learning spaces

I have been keenly interested in the design of learning spaces for some time. I guess my background as a designer (I attended Hereford College of Art and Design in the 70s) and my professional life as an educator draw me back to this again and again. It was with great pleasure then, that I was able to visit Albany Senior High School in North Auckland yesterday to talk to a group of educators from across the city. The vision statement of the school is simple but powerful: We nurture each other, we inspire each other, we empower each other.

The first thing that strikes you about ASHS when you arrive is the pristine condition of this new build. With an under-building car park, and serene woodland surroundings, it is in an ideal position to provide high class education for young minds. Entering the reception area via the lift, I encountered a cafeteria area similar to any found in the corporate world. Mark Osborne, the deputy principal told me: "We offer the students an environment where they are treated like adults. When they are dealt with in this way, they take on adult responsibilities and behaviour." Moving through from reception into the main school, it was evident to see that open plan, flexible spaces were the key design feature, and personalised learning the norm. Students sit in areas where they can interact with each other and the teachers, and there can be up to three separate classes taking place in the same space, with student able to move around the room, and across the curricular topics seamlessly. Gone is the silo mentality of 'Now you are in a science class'. A central tenet of the school's curriculum delivery is that students know why they are learning something, and can then connect it to real life contexts.

It was refreshing to see that the school is also fully open source in its software use.  Mark Osborne told me this is because the school also practices a Bring Your Own Device option for all its students. He argued that the most equitable way to manage this to avoid any digital divides is to provide Open Source Software to all students. If they have no device of their own, there are computers available in all the spaces. I was impressed with the fully equipped dance studio and next door, another studio for audio and video projects, complete with a green screen room. ASHS even has its own YouTube channel.

Barbara Kavanagh is the principal of the school, and she is a visionary, seeing the school as one of many that will emerge in the next few years across the region. She told me that the 800 or so students have over 50 teaching staff to support them. That by any estimation is a great student to teacher ratio. The free, open, flexible spaces and the policy of BYOD ensure that the school is both an attractive and sustainable place to learn. Furthermore, all the resources the teachers create for teaching and assessment are licensed under Creative Commons for free use by other educators. My hope it that we will still other schools using this model in the future, both in New Zealand, and farther afield.

Image courtesy of Albany Senior High School


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Tools of the trade

I was quite impressed by Joyce Seitzinger's Professional Learning Environment (PLN) model that she presented at Deakin University in Melbourne this week. The first slide on the left shows a quadrant model in which she has used a work/office metaphor to define four discrete functions of a PLN. The first, the Staffroom is quite public, calling on high levels of communication and high profile, and involves the use of microblogging tools such as Twitter. This will work provided the user subscribes to a requisite number of other relevant user accounts, and can share their ideas and converse freely. It will fail if the user does not follow or is not followed by enough other subscribers to enable the benefits of the network effect.

Joyce calls the second quadrant the Filing Cabinet, because essentially, it is low profile and low in terms of the efforts put into communicating with others, and it provides a repository for the user (and their PLN) to store, categorise and possibly share content they think is important to them. Social tagging sites such as Diigo and Delicious can offer this kind of filing cabinet organisation, but so too can wikis and other collaborative tools, which would I imagine, raise the level of engagement and profiling of individuals who organised and shared their content in this manner.

The third quadrant is the Newspaper, which again Joyce sees as low profile and low in terms of communication. I assume that this is because most of the tools she identifies as falling into this category of PLN deployment is push technology (RSS feeds, Google Reader etc). I would imagine that if Joyce placed blogs into this category, (and in the model's present form I see no reason why they shouldn't be there), then a higher profile and higher level of engagement between user and PLN would ensue.

Yet she leaves blogs and other authoring tools to insert into the final quadrant, the Portfolio. This is the quadrant in which a lot of high profile activity is conducted, but I would argue that it is also high in engagement. The question still open to me is whether this model would change from it's current form to represent Personal Learning Networks. Or is there any real difference between these and Professional Learning Networks?

It is worth noting that only the first quadrant of this PLN model is actually performed synchronously, that is, in real time. That may give some a clue as to the latent potential of tools such as Twitter to connect people powerfully and instantly across the globe and to give all of us access to a worldwide network of experts and enthusiasts in any subject for which we have an interest. Everyone should have a PLN, because in today's connected world, without it you are not fully equipped as a professional.

Images courtesy of Joyce Seitzinger


Tools of the trade by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The Melbourne set

We all thoroughly enjoyed our Big Fat Tweetup last night down on the riverside in Melbourne. Even the sudden early summer downpour couldn't dampen our enthusiasm for RL (Real Life) encounters with people we have all know for some years. Many have remarked on this, but it's true - when you eventually meet face to face the people you have been conversing with for years on Twitter, you feel you actually know them. You don't of course, but you can bypass a lot of the awkward social manoeuvring you often experience when you meet someone for the first time. It was a gathering for learning technologists and educators from all around.

Stephen Heppell (@stephenheppell) dropped by to share a glass with us en route to another event. Claire Brooks (@clairebrooks) and Dave Cummings (@daveymelb) were in great form, along with our tweetup host and organiser Joyce Seitzinger (@catspyjamasnz) and the excellent Mr. Mark Smithers (@marksmithers). Even Shelley Gibb (@mollybob) put in a surprise but very welcome appearance, all the way over from Sydney. It was great talking again with Colin Warren (@colwar) whom I first met face to face in Barcelona at last year's PLE conference, and to feel intuitively that we are kindred spirits. Good on ya mate! I met Jenny Ashby (@jjash) and Pam Kamande (@pamarasan) for the first time and we shared our experiences. I also enjoyed my discussions with Megan Colasante (@megacolour) about digital identity, anonymity and blogging as a professional practice. The weather remained warm and muggy, in spite of the heavy shower, and rich and varied conversations went on into the night.

Image by Joyce Seitzinger (from an idea by Mark Smithers)


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Digital footprints

Increasingly, as we ask our learners to engage with social media as a part of their study, we are also asking them to leave a trace of themselves on the Web. Whether it is writing a blog, posting a video on YouTube, working collaboratively on a wiki, or simply bookmarking a site on Diigo or Delicious, students are leaving their digital footprints - evidence of their presence - all over the internet. And there may be ethical issues attached. Digital footprints are persistent, with artefacts and traces remaining visible and searchable for many years. Should we therefore be more careful about what we ask students to do and where we ask them to go on the Web?

These questions were addressed by Dr Jenny Waycott, of the University of Melbourne, who was our final speaker today at the Inaugural Technology for Learning and Teaching Forum. Jenny talked not only of the benefits and potential of social media to enhance learning, but also gave a critical review of some of the issues and challenges. She asked her audience to consider not only the opportunities that are presented to transform learning, but also to think about how we might minimise the risks associated with learning while using the social web. She argued that although social media can change the way students communicate and share their work, there are hidden dangers and controversies we need to be ready to counter.

Dr Waycott told the story of one student who was also developing a fledgling music career. The student was careful that her digital footprint as a musician (which was already well established) was not contaminated by her presence on the web as a university student. She took great pains to separate out her two identities, and made sure that those who knew her as a student did not confuse her other online persona as a musician. The ethical implications of this for university staff are less than clear, but the student's wishes to keep her two digital identities separate need to be respected and treated with care.

Other students, she told us, were worried about copying on the web. Not plagiarism, she added, but other students copying their work and then claiming credit for it at the author's expense. What if another student learnt something new from the writer's work and then gained a higher grade than the originator of the ideas? What would be the ethical implications of this? She counselled that asking students to co-create or share their work on a wiki or other online social space could have detrimental effects on intellectual property if the guidelines are not clear. The jury is still out on these questions. What are your views?

Image by Wesley Fryer (remixed)


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

Down under

I'm in Australia this week to give the opening keynote for the Inaugural Technology for Learning and Teaching Forum, which will be held over two days at the Rendezvous Hotel in Melbourne, just across from Flinders Street Railway Station (pictured). Melbourne, this part anyway, is quite Bohemian, bustling, vibrant and very colourful. You can stand on a street corner and watch the whole of humanity pass by in about ten minutes. The other invited keynote at the event will be Tom Cochrane (Auckland University of Technology, NZ) who will address the topic: Transforming pedagogy with Mobile Web 2.0. Here are Tom's key points:

·         This session will reflect on the impact of over 30 mlearning projects between 2006 and 2011 illustrating how mlearning can be used as a catalyst to transform pedagogy from instructivist teacher-directed pedagogy to social constructivist pedagogy that bridges pedagogically designed learning contexts, facilitates learner generated contexts, and content (both personal and collaborative), while providing personalisation and ubiquitous social connectedness.

·         The session will outline an mlearning implementation strategy, and illustrative case studies. Links to supporting material can be found at http://web.me.com/thom_cochrane/MobileWeb2/, and http://thomcochrane.wikispaces.com/.

My own keynote speech is entitled: Learning Generations: Looking forward, looking back. I'm also going to be addressing how we might transform the learning experience, and will be interested to see what common areas Tom and I will touch on. Here are my topic headings:

·         A history of learning technology, change management and the adoption of new and emerging technologies in education.

·         Possible tensions between teacher and learner needs and expectations

·         Personal learning environments and student owned devices and their role within institutional contexts

·         The evolution of the web and what new roles teachers will need to adopt to harness the power of new and emerging technologies

·       I will argue that teachers and learners need new pedagogies and literacies if teaching and learning is to be optimised in the digital age. 

The rest of my Down Under lecture tour can be found here on this site.

Image by Hradcanska



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

In Flanders Fields

Lest we forget...

In Flanders fields the poppies blow 

Between the crosses, row on row, 

That mark our place; and in the sky 

The larks, still bravely singing, fly 

Scarce heard amid the guns below. 

We are the Dead. Short days ago 

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, 

Loved and were loved, and now we lie 

In Flanders fields. 

Take up our quarrel with the foe: 

To you from failing hands we throw 

The torch; be yours to hold it high. 

If ye break faith with us who die 

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow 

In Flanders fields.


John McRae (1915)

Image source

Double or quits

There are several things I have already learnt as a part of the Twitter dual identity experiment I'm conducting. For those of you who may have missed it, I now have two Twitter accounts; the well established @timbuckteeth account (read about the history of that here) and the 'new' @stevewheeler account (which has my real profile picture and name attached). The latter was a 'sleeper' account I have had for a while, and activated to see what would happen. Several useful and interesting comments have already been received which you can read in yesterday's post Double Agent.

The first thing I have noticed is that because the @stevewheeler account is only following a few other Twitter accounts, it is easier to distinguish the signal from the noise. The @timbuckteeth account follows in excess of 1300 other accounts, and it's sometimes difficult to see the wood for the trees. I have discovered that only following a few influential accounts using the @stevewheeler account, I can more easily pick out the best stuff and RT it. Because the @timbuckteeth account is followed by a lot more accounts (almost 10,000) it is then simple to RT the @stevewheeler tweet, to amplify important messages still further over the @timbuckteeth community.

One or two have complained already that this is 'ego retweeting'. I disagree. For me it's amplification. Interestingly I hadn't actually heard of 'ego retweeting' before it was mentioned, but I would counter that this is not about ego, it's about finding interesting items and links that might be also of interest to the community and then sharing them more widely. A few have threatened to unfollow my accounts because of what they perceive as excessive retweeting between the accounts. Some may already have done so. I have responded that I don't mind if they do, because ultimately, all of the data gathered is useful, including details of whether people decide to follow or unfollow one or both accounts. If they are able to tell me why they decided to do so, that would be even better, giving me a clearer picture of the effect of multiple accounts.

Some tweeps have told me that they hadn't made the link between my blog and my @timbuckteeth account. Others admitted that they didn't realise I was behind the @timbuckteeth account. This suggests that some of what we do online could be superficial or that perhaps we don't always check the source or provenance of our information before we share it onwards. Anonymity is seemingly still a pervasive feature of our digital lives, and we don't always take account of it. The picture above is a little ironic, given that some on Twitter have said they are not sure what the difference is, and what will 'Steve' tweet that will be different to 'Tim'?

Some have commented that digital identity is not just about the names and the profile pictures you use, it's also about how you interact and the context of your interaction. Yes, of course. Yet first impressions are important. I'm therefore interested in how people represent themselves up front, and whether this attracts others to interact with them or avoid them. Do comedy names or humorous pictures attract or repel? How seriously do people take social networking tools such as Twitter? How many others have multiple accounts and how do they use them to interact, and thereby develop their digital identity and presence online?

OK, I know I'm not the first person to use multiple accounts on Twitter, but the reason I'm doing it right now is not to divide up my life into different spheres of activity like many tweeps do with their dual accounts ("my A account is for work and my B account is for fun"). No, I am going to tweet the same stuff from both accounts and see what people actually do with it. A research question investigating digital identity might be phrased as: Are people more willing to follow an account that respresents its owner transparently?

So there you have it. I'm having a lot of fun playing with identity and the experiment is set to continue for a while. The @timbuckteeth account will continue on regardless, because it has, in the words of one of my Twitter pals, become a sort of brand. For the record, I'm not sure what to do with the @stevewheeler account once the experiment is over. Should I continue it? Or does anyone want a spare account, one previous owner, going cheap?

Image source (modified)


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

Double agent

The emergence yesterday of my 'real self' on Twitter (@stevewheeler) caused some confusion and consternation for some tweeps. It came about because of my question about whether people were called by their own names or by their Twitter names (if these were different). I was interested in whether people could separate out one's own personal identity from the digital identity we assume when we are engaged in online discussions.

The appearance of the 'second account' may have caused some confusion, and perhaps some are questioning my sanity, but in truth, I admit that I have already had four Twitter accounts for some time now. Not all have been active, and some are used only occasionally. There is method in my 'madness' though. You see, one of my great research interests is digital identity, and I'm especially interested in how we manage our online presence and engagement. Twitter is one of several tools I use to explore this concept. I have blogged previously on the topic here: (Identity in a digital age), and have also discussed our ability to manage multiple identities online (hence the multiple accounts), and I even blogged as recently as yesterday to tell the story behind the avatar image and name of @timbuckteeth (He's only me). Because I am interested in digital identity, I made a decision as soon as I subscribed to Twitter to explore. I decided I would like to experiment with the tool to see what the boundaries were in terms of online presence and identity, and also anonymity.

So I created an account with the contrived name of @timbuckteeth and an incognito profile picture to accompany it. Initially I had the idea that it should be an anonymous account, but it turned out to be something quite different, and it seems it has developed independently to my own actions. I have been experimenting since December 2007 with the @timbuckteeth account. I did create a second account @stevewheeler with my real picture a short while later, but it was a 'sleeper agent', ready to be activated at an appropriate point in time. Then, writing as @timbuckteeth I began to explore Twitter, and to experiment with all the possibilities. The person behind @timbuckteeth could not remain anonymous forever, so I gave up the pretense. Eventually @timbuckteeth became synonymous with my own professional and personal life online, and I think most people who know me, or follow my work, now combine the two identities into one - as you will see in a moment. There were of course one or two exceptions:

In four years of continuous use, the account of @timbuckteeth has enabled me to send out more than 32,000 tweets, has appeared on almost 1000 user choice lists, has followed in excess of 1,300 people, and has attracted a following of almost 10,000 Twitter friends. Notice I am not referring to them as 'my followers' - rather, I like to think that they follow the brand that is @timbuckteeth. Yesterday, after posting the 'He's only me' post, I posted out a question on Twitter:

Within seconds I received back a few interesting responses and some words of advice from some of those who follow the @timbuckteeth account and were concerned I might ditch it, or who were interested in seeing what would happen next:

Bearing Don Taylor's comments in mind, I then activated the @stevewheeler account to see what would happen next. What was the deal with 'name recognition'? The first interesting thing I noticed was that some of the hundred or so people who have followed this account in the last 24 hours are people I know, but who have never previously followed my @timbuckteeth account. Were they people who did not know I was behind the @timbuckteeth account? The sudden appearance of the 'real me' account yesterday also provoked some interesting comments from several old Twitter friends. Some expressed concern, while others advised me not to keep two accounts. Some even suggested (probably tongue in cheek) that @timbuckteeth was the real me, and that @stevewheeler was actually an imposter.

Notice that the last tweet refers to me as 'Tim', a name some people (including one or two of my students) have also called me in real life. It intrigues me to think that in this instance, and probably in many others too, people seem to become so habituated in engaging with your digital self (no matter how false or contrived it may be) that they eventually have difficulty separating it out from the 'real you'. I plan to write more on this episode, and about what I have learnt from my experiment so far, in my next blog post. Your comments, as ever, are most welcome.

Tomorrow: Double or quits

Image source


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

He's only me

Several people have recently asked why I use the name Timbuckteeth on Twitter, Flickr and Slideshare. Others have asked me about my use of the blue astronaut picture as my Twitter profile picture. Well, here it is - my response to those questions. Let me tell you about the way I manage my digital identity. I hope it resonates with you....

Timbuckteeth is a word play on Timbuktu - a town in the African state of Mali. In ancient times Timbuktu was both an intellectual and spiritual centre and a meeting place for many nomadic tribes and was located at the intersection of two great trade routes. It was quite simply the place to be. For me, writing blogs and tweets, academic papers, poems or fiction, or indeed anything that other people are likely to read (and I have done them all), requires that you are either intellectual or thoughtful in your approach, or spiritually aware (and hopefully both). I strive in some way to bring both of these attributes to my writing, whether it is an 8,000 word book chapter, or a 140 character tweet. And like Timbuktu, I want my blogs, tweets and other writing to represent places people want to come to visit, where they can egage with the ideas, be challenged, inspired and ultimately, where they will learn something new. And if this paragraph is seen by any readers as pretentious claptrap, I will simply say that in all honesty, I want my blogs and tweets to have some 'bite'

That I hope explains the name, but how do I explain the blue astronaut? Blue has always been my favourite colour (don't know why, don't care really), but when the profile picture comes up on say a Twitter wall at a conference, it is easily recognisable because it stands out. The sunglasses are quite random. But all of this is mere trivia. The image itself is a little more meaningful. It is esoteric, yet still holds significance for me - and it's all about dates. Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke is involved (the astronaut image is lifted directly from the Stanley Kubrick film '2001: A Space Odyssey' - an adaptation from one of Clarke's novels - the blue astronaut is the actor Keir Dullea). So is the concept of satellites. (See the connection yet?) In 1945 Clarke proposed the idea of geosynchronous satellites. His vision was not long in realisation because just over a decade later on 4th October, 1957 the first satellite - Sputnik - was successfully launched, ushering in the global communication revolution. The day, the month and the year of Sputnik are all significant to me. You see, I was born in 1957 (I'm the same age as Sputnik, but we did not attend school together), and I was married on 4th October (in 1986). When Arthur C. Clarke died on 19th of March 2008, it was a sad day for me, but it was shortly after this that Timbuckteeth was born, and from that moment on my tweeting, slidesharing and flickring and other online presence has been managed under this identity. 


A lot was discussed around the idea of digital identity at Online Educa Berlin a couple of years ago. The important ideas that came from these discussions for me was that digital identity - they way you represent yourself in digital environments, is an extension of some essence of your persona. You digital identity is your vicarious presence in that place where you are unable to be physically embodied, but where your emotional bandwidth can still be fully exploited. Digital identity has elements of your personal life and memories invested in it, and is the way other people online view you, so it should bear some personal significance for you. To borrow from Erving Goffman, digital identity becomes the channel through which you manage your impression and present yourself in everyday (online) life. So Timbuckteeth is a growing part of my digital identity and will be with me for a while yet, because after all.... he's only me. 

Tomorrow: Double agents

He's only me by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

ALT-C 2011 retrospective

The ALT-C conference held at Leeds University this September was memorable for a number of reasons. Many of these are compiled into a very readable account in this month's ALT Online Newsletter by Julie Voce, who is also co-chair for ALT-C 2012 Manchester. Julie has done an excellent job capturing the essence and the highlights of the conference, which includes blogged summaries of all the keynote speeches, James Clay's successful ALT-C Live Beta TV streaming experiment, the Learning Technologist of the Year awards (Plymouth University's own Oliver Quinlan was one of the winners this year), and high profile paper sessions, all embellished by evocative images from the conference. It's a must read if you were a delegate and wish to revisit those few days in Yorkshire, but also take a look if you are contemplating attending next year's event.

Image by ALT


ALT-C 2011 retrospective by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

20th Century flops?

I have just recorded an interview for my local TV station Westcountry Television. The interview was requested because there has been public outcry about one school in Cornwall called Mounts Bay Academy (very close to where I live here in Devon) that has recently purchased an iPad for each of its 900 students. Here is the story as reported by BBC News. The moaning is from the Tax Payers Alliance, who consider the iPad a 'gimmick' and a waste of taxpayers money. It's to be expected of course. Whenever a school here in the UK announces an innovative scheme such as the iPad project that involves spending money, pressure groups such as the Taxpayers Alliance come out of the woodwork to complain vociferously. But their complaints are ill-informed and certainly not grounded in research.

The headteacher of Mounts Bay, when interviewed, said that she believes that touch screen technologies are the future of learning. She is right. But the future doesn't hang around for long. Schools that do not begin to innovate and adopt new technologies for learning will be left behind in the 20th century. It won't be long, I predicted in my TV interview, before we begin to see non-touch technology in our schools. It's coming, and it's only a matter of time. Our children will sit on our laps and ask 'did you really have to touch a computer to make it work?' That is the future, but for now we have the touch screen iPad and its mimics. Children find touch screen tablets intuitive and easy to use, because they are minimally designed, and there is little to distract them from the real business of education - learning. It is no longer enough for teachers to expect students to passively receive knowledge. Now students need to create their own content, organise and share it, and that is exactly what tools such as the iPad do. Schools such as Honeywood School in Essex (1200 students) and Longfield Academy in Kent (1400 students) and several others around the UK are already forging ahead .... and receiving flak for their farsighted visions. One Australian school in Melbourne - Trinity College - has already done an evaluation study on the 1-1 provision of iPads to their student population. Their Step Forward project findings reveal that iPads can be gamechangers, and can motivate and engage students significantly better than other tools. They have even reduced their paper consumption drastically as a result of the touch screen tools. In the short term, pedagogically, and in the long term, financially, investing in touch screens makes absolute sense. Have a look at this ultimate guide to using the iPad in the classroom, and you will see what I mean. It's a live online document that is constantly being added to by teachers as they find new ways to use touch screen tablets to transform teaching and learning.

It's no good for organisations such as the Tax Payers Alliance to complain about wasting public money on 'gimmicks' and then suggesting that the old tools will suffice. That won't wash at all. Don't they want the best for our young people? Do they want our teaching profession to be stuck in the past as 20th Century flops? Do they want us to prepare our children for the future or for the past?

Image by Ernst Vikne



20th Century flops by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.