ALTernate reality

This year's Association for Learning Technologies Annual Conference alternated between highs and lows, controversy and comfort. Let me explain: One of the most controversial parts of the conference was the opening keynote, which I and many others have already reported on. I have heard just about every possible reaction to Donald Clark's speech, some mirroring the invective he unleashed, even the profanities. Enough said.

Other (slightly less) controversial aspects included a difference of opinion from delegates about the merits of the live Twitterwall in the main auditorium. Some considered it a distraction, a few thought that it was tempting subterfuge, while many more decided they liked it as an additional amplification feature - a conference back channel if you will. My own session, a panel presentation shared with John Traxler, Frances Bell, Andy Black, Karl Royle and Mark Childs (pictured), discussed issues around ethics in Web 2.0 interventions and research. While arguably less controversial than last year's VLE is Dead debate, the symposium still attracted over 100 delegates, and there was some cut and thrust from all those involved.

Many predictably complained about the poor quality of the student accommodation offered on campus. I suppose I didn't help matters by boasting to anyone within hearing distance that my bed and breakfast room was a double en suite, with wifi, satellite TV, microwave oven, refrigerator and a private car port right outside my ground floor window. And I paid less for it too. I digress.

There were also many highlights during the conference. Besides enjoying the energy generated by a gathering of over 500 passionate, inquisitive and knowledgeable learning technology professionals and academics (heat and light were generated in equal measure), there was the opportunity to meet other like minded individuals from all over the world, and to say - Yes, I have that problem too! It was the start of many friendships, and probably a lot of future collaborations and creative liaisons too. Many met for the first time people they had connected with for months or even years online. It is always a great experience when that happens. The now traditional Fringe ALT meeting of Edubloggers took place at the Nottingham Playhouse, with impromptu debates where participants names (and surprise topics) were drawn from a bucket. We all had to think on our feet that evening.

Sugata Mitra (University of Newcastle) delivered what was promised in his Day 2 keynote. A wry, inspirational and thought provoking presentation on the promise of self-organised learning mediated through 'hole in the wall' web enabled computers. I won't say any more here, as this speech has been better documented by others elsewhere, but I will say that many people left the room smiling, relieved that keynote 2 was as divorced from keynote 1 as Cheryl and Ashley.

The individual Learning Technologist of the Year was awarded jointly for the second time in as many years. Cristina Costa representing Higher Education (University of Salford) and Kevin McLoughlin, working in the compulsory education sector (St Peter's CofE Primary School in Whetstone) shared the accolades of their peers for their leading edge work in learning technology. The team award was picked up by David White and the TALL team at the University of Oxford. The full list of awards can be found here. The conference dinner was a triumph as usual, with cooking, presentation and service of a very high standard from the local catering college students.

Unfortunately, our final keynote speaker, Barbara Wasson, could not attend the conference due to illness. In her place, 6 stawarts of learning technology sat in a panel and took on all comers around the question - what would you concentrate on as the one activity that could bring in a sea-change? Gilly (1000 years of experience) Salmon, John (my middle name is Nigel) Cook and Haydn (shouts across the valleys) Blackey and their colleagues regaled us and provoked us, and the Twitterwall rolled, live on the wall, for all to see.

ALT-C 2010 is history now. All that is left is an empty suite of rooms at the East Midlands Conference Centre, littered with plastic cups, empty dishes and discarded vendor flyers. They will be cleared up by the large team of helpers, but the true detritus of the event will be whether what has been said and done in the last 3 days actually does cause any semblance of sea-change in education, through the intervention and use of learning technologies.


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

Speaking through the holes

At the start of Sugata Mitra's keynote today I joked on Twitter that he was about to speak through a hole in the wall. I have seen one of his previous speeches about his famous 'Hole in the Wall' projects and I know how astounding the results are. But my joke turned out to be quite apposite, because in my estimation, Professor Mitra spoke through many holes that are appearing - in the wall that we call formalised, traditional education.

It's important to grasp the significance and impact of Sugata Mitra's ongoing studies on our concept of education and how it should be conducted. Essentially, he has placed computers in the slums of India, and in remote places in other countries, and has made videos of how children interact and learn when they are left alone with the technology. He has discovered that children very quickly learn how to use the computer to search and find content, and learn from it in a self organised way. In one case he cited, he equipped a computer with voice recognition software, but only flat, unaccented English was acceptable to the machine. The children he observed, not only figured out how to learn to speak some rudimentary English using the computer, they also taught themselves how to eliminate their strong Indian accents too. In another experiment, he discovered that children could learn very complex concepts such as scientific principles, without the attentions of any qualified teacher. He warned though, that the best results were always obtained when children were gathered around the computer in groups of 4 to 6. Some of the teachers who worked with the Hole in the Wall children reported that they were increasing their test scores, and also writing in a deeper, more analytical style, as a result of their exposure to self organised learning using the computers.

Teachers were not redundant, Mitra was at pains to stress. They will need to take on different roles, he said, but the truth is this: All the answers are already out there on the Web. What it takes to enliven this is the teacher asking the right questions and the children finding and then making the connections by learning the answers. In a very endearing, humourous, slightly self deprecating style, and with lashings of great story telling, Sugata Mitra restored many delegates faith in the true place of the keynote at a conference - to inspire, provoke and entertain all at the same time. Just looking around the packed auditorium and seeing the smiles on people's faces showed that he had succeeded. Professor Mitra's work can be explored in more detail here - it includes a link to his excellent TED talk.

Image source

Speaking through the holes by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Donald .... Duck!

Donald Clark's opening keynote for ALT-C 2010 essentially polarised his audience this morning. Some loved his earthy, no-quarter given demolition of an host of established theories of learning. "Maslow's hierarchy of needs is only popular, because triangles are easy to put into Powerpoint slides" he opined. "Socrates was a bully" he claimed, and he also lashed into other long accepted and well established models, much to the delight, and also the chagrine of those assembled. What really rankled though with many of those present (and some of those watching via Elluminate) was his critique that academics do not question learning theories, not are they suffiently critical of them. (Picture above: Donald Clark appeals to the Gods of Pedagogy).

Clark argued that lectures are a relic of the medieval age, and complained that modern university teaching rooms are not tech friendly. Where are the power sockets in this room? he asked. Fair point. And how can you get students to interact when all the seats are bolted down and facing the same way? Another good question. But his outright dismissal of the lecture as a legitimate pedagogical method left many of the delegates reaching for their laptops and harsh tagging him. There was plenty of 'tweckling' from all parts of the hall, and I suppose that by now, Donald Clark has read these comments, and knowing him as I do, is ready for the next round. For he is in a fight, no doubt about it. He cited Donald Bligh's seminal book 'What's the use of lectures?', but failed to mention that Bligh goes on to describe several important ways to improve the lecture and make it more interactive and participatory for students.

Was he too opinionated? One delegate suggested Clark had given ALT-C a 'Glasgow Kiss', but that may be going a little too far. Donald certainly fuelled much disciussion, and became the human equivalent of a hand grenade tossed into an otherwise placid melange of academics and professionals. It certainly had the desired effect. He tore down a lot during his keynote, but many were left questioning whether Donald Clark actually built anything up? When asked what the alternatives were to the lecture, he didn't seem to answer substantially, to the satisfaction of those who were listening.

One final observation: Donald Clark seemed to consider it acceptable to lace his presentation with a number of profanities. It intensified as he became more passionate and warmed to his subject. However, for some in the audience, his style stifled his substance. They were more intent on the language he was using than they were on what he was actually saying. Never the less, whatever your opinion about 'the lecture is dead' rant, it caused a few waves and a lot of dissonance for the 550 or so delegates at this years event. More later. And in the meantime, to lighten the mood, above is a picture of Stu Johnson with an Apple device.

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

New wine in old bottles

I'm speaking at ALT-C this week in a symposium called 'New Bottles, Old Wine?' which will take the form of a debate over the ethics of research and intervention in Web 2.0 environments. I'm going to argue that it is in fact new wine in old bottles we need to concern ourselves with. Let me explain...

I'm going to argue that using, and researching the use of Web 2.0 tools is a difficult prospect to try to work through with many grey areas. There are a number of reasons. I'm going to raise a few issues: For example, users do not always behave consistently in different contexts. Students change their identities as they move from site to site, and the student behave differently depending on the communities within which they are members. Facebookers for example, generally use their real names and images. Flickrites on the other hand are often anonymised, using psuedonyms and images to represent themselves. It is often the same person, but they represent themselves differently. Is being a member of so many virtual clans confusing? Do they perceive themselves as acting differently in different environments, or simply complying with different digital sub-cultures? Such shifting digital identities can be subtle, but with the result that researchers have a problem trying ascertain whether students are presenting themselves truthfully online.

Another issue is whether participants modify their behaviour when they know they are being watched. In conventional research environments, we know this happens. Do such demand characteristics alter the results of Web 2.0 studies? That behaviour has a persistence in online environments. It's not as though the research has observed it once and then it's gone. It's there, archived for all to see and keep coming back to. Do we need a new set of methods to cut through these issues, or is it new wine in old bottles?

Another ethical issue is where students who are creating their own content may wish to keep that content to themselves. When placed within a shared, collaborative environment, such as a wiki, some students may not wish to have their work subsumed into a larger corpus of work. I have published several of my own papers on this topic. Students in my sample groups reported that they wanted to be awarded credit for the work they had done. They argued that they didn't want their work deleted, diluted, extended or otherwise modified by other students. Is it therefore fair to ask them to participate in any study involving openly editable websites, where collaboration was mandatory? Do researchers offer participants in such scenarios the right to withdraw without penalty?

Another ethical problem arises when researchers 'eavesdrop' on Web 2.0 users. In such situations, should researchers have total access to all a user's content? Should they see all a student's Facebook photos for example? Or have access to all their discussion posts, private messages etc? If they don't have access, can a full picture of life online be obtained? When students sign up for this kind of research, are they fully apprised about what they are letting themselves in for? A comment from a recent conference in Spain was about a camera that had been set up to capture and live stream a keynote speech. The camera was open for a long time before the speech began, picking up off the cuff remarks, and broadcasting on the web as the speaker set up his slides. One viewer remarked that they felt a little like a 'voyeur'. How does this kind of event amplification reconcile itself with ethical research? Upon whom is the onus for the maintenance of correct ethical behaviour in such cases? And if it's not research, is it still covered by ethical protocols?

Finally, I want to raise the issue of Twitter as a conference amplification tool and back channel. The tweckling or harsh tagging of keynote speakers has been discussed previously by a number of commentators. My blogpost Weapons of Mass Detraction cited some notable cases where the wisdom of crowds can very quickly descend to the stupidity of mobs, if a few harsh remarks are allowed to take hold. Before they know it, conference organisers have a car crash keynote on their hands. Again, are there any ethical guidelines for this kind of eventuality? It's a new problem, so again, I ask - is it new wine in old bottles? Do the new environments require new guidance, or are the old protocols sufficient?


New wine in old bottles by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Got the bottle?

Another punch-up is brewing at this year's ALT-C Conference, which kicks off tomorrow at the University of Nottingham. Last year, several of us had a dust up on the future of institutional VLEs, and apparently we caused a bit of a stir. This year, I'm on another debate panel, this time with John Traxler, Frances Bell, Karl Royle, Mark Childs and Andy Black, to discuss ethical interventions in Web 2.0. Will this be about the ethics of Web 2.0 use, or the ethics of researching the use of Web 2.0, or about using Web 2.0 tools to research, or about .... er, well, you'll just have to come along and find out...

The title of the symposium/debate, which is scheduled for Wednesday 8th, at 09.00 in the main auditorium, is New Bottles, Old Wine? You can check out this and all the other conference sessions, venues, times and also who will be attending each by going to the conference Crowdvine site. There is also a link for you to participate with the live events online, if you can't get to the conference this year. We are expecting 550 delegates, according to the latest bulletin from ALT. Here's a sneak preview:

Frances Bell will identify private/public as complex reflexive student practice in personal and education use of social media, e.g. Youtube (Lange, 2007) and explore the role of the educator in students’ ethical development.

Andy Black will expose the issues relating to the transnational use of technologies approaches where users will have access to very different levels of technology and even if technology used is the same or similar the way it is deployed is culturally different. The concept is that these differences will decline or morph over time to become transnational & transcultural, resulting in usage that is woven into a global cultural thread.

Mark Childs will raise some of the ethical issues that influence creating learning activities in immersive virtual worlds and offer viewpoints to be debated on the potential responses to students' unease concerning the experience, cultures and perceptions of virtual worlds, the appropriate balance between authenticity and pseudonymity in virtual worlds and the responsibilities of teachers with respect to protecting those within virtual worlds from the impact of our teaching within them.

Karl Royle will argue that the ethical considerations of gaming are inherently bounded and regulated by the inherent rules of 'the game' and that as such are disposed to self regulation, and are about trying to do good or at least minimise harm in achieving a win state.

John Traxler will argue that the universal experience of mobility and connectedness in our societies is leading to transient, ephemeral and overlapping communities each with its own ethics; there are no longer grand narratives of ethics, only partial and local expressions of values and preferences. It's new wine, new bottles, new drinkers.

Steve Wheeler will take a cognitive stance to the issue of ethics in emerging digital environment research. He will hold that users interact and represent themselves in different ways depending on environment and context, switching between identities. Steve will argue that new technologies and tools present new affordances and expectations, and therefore require new approaches.

Do you have the bottle for a debate? You're welcome to join us, f2f or online.

Got the bottle? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Locked and loaded

Next week is the annual bash for learning technologists here in the UK. ALT-C 2010 looms, and Nottingham beckons once again for a gathering of the clans. The last time we all went to the University of Nottingham campus for ALT-C, I met several people for the first time, including James Clay (who had his car broken into), Graham Attwell (who didn't have a car), Sam Easterby-Smith, Josie Fraser and Cristina Costa. I have worked with many of these on a regular basis since, and count them among my most valuable colleagues, as well as great friends. ALT-C (you see) is not just about attending to hear about the latest trends in technology supported learning, or watching cool demonstrations of the latests gadgets and gizmos, nor is it about listening to great (and sometimes not so great) keynotes. It's also about making new friends, forging alliances and extending your personal learning network. And coffee. Here's the ALT-C Crowdvine site delegates are using to connect before the event even starts.

So I'm locked and loaded and ready to drive up the autobahn to Nottingham next week, and here in the picture, is what I'm taking with me: 12 essentials I will be using to keep me out of mischief while I'm at the conference. 1) A four gang mains extension cable. The more sockets you have, the more friends you make. 2) The all important Acer Netbook. Small, but perfectly formed, and powerful when in the hands of the right blogger. 3) Sony Cybershot camera. Small, compact, and very versatile. 4) My trusty Nintendo DS, for use when the keynote speeches get deathly boring. (Look, Sugata, Donald - I'm joking OK?). 5) Power supply for said DS. 6) Power supply and cable for netbook. 7) Camera/netbook cable. I'm not that sophisticated yet. 8) Ethernet cable in case my guesthouse doesn't have wifi. Yes, guesthouse. I am not staying in student accommodation again. Ever. 9) Power supply for iPhone, iPod Touch and other Jobby things. 10) Wireless presenter and laser pointer. For keeping the audience in check. 11) iPhone. 12) iPod Touch. My iPhone is not enabled for internet. Don't ask, it's a long story, involving O2, a bowl of custard and a nun. 13) There is no 13. If there was it would have been my memory stick, but I forgot to put it in the photo.

So there you have it. My travelling companions for ALT-C. What are you bringing? Oh, and I lied about the nun.


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