The space between us all

In this new series I will discuss how distance education has developed and the influences it has had on our current education provision. Comments are most welcome. Here's the first installment:

A few years ago I heard a funny remark at an e-learning conference in Germany. Someone suggested that small area nations such as the United Kingdom have no need for distance education, because they have no ‘distance’. I laughed at the time and replied that if we followed this line of reasoning, there would be no need for any education either. More laughter. Of course the UK has distance education! I have already made the case for a significant British contribution to the development of distance education, both in terms of its conceptualisation, and also in terms of its innovation of technologies such as telephony (Alexander Graham Bell), television (John Logie Baird), correspondence courses (such as Sir Isaac Pitman's shorthand courses), the World Wide Web (Sir Tim-Berners-Lee) and of course the British Open University model (Wheeler, 2005).

Although light-hearted, the conversation at the German conference led me to re-examine the notion of ‘distance’ and in fact ultimately launched me into seven years of study culminating in a research degree in the field. A key question for distance educators to ask then, is – what is distance? Distance is almost always conceived of as being geographical in nature. In class I often ask my students ‘what is the distance between you and I?’ Their first answer is always an approximate measurement of feet, yards, or (if they live in continental Europe) in metres. I then ask them to reconsider their response. I ask them what other distances there are between us. After a little consternation and head scratching, the light comes on and they begin to respond in terms of other 'distances'.

There may be an age gap, or a gender gap. These distances are based on the premise that people of different age groups tend to see things in different ways, and have different values – which leads to a ‘distance’ being perceived between them – what was once called ‘the generation gap’. This may have been the basis for the controversial assumptions made by Marc Prensky's 'Digital Natives and Immigrants' theory. The gender gap may be a little more subtle, but the distance between males and females can be just as tangible. Ask anyone who is married. Then there is the intellectual distance experienced between students and their instructors. This perception often leads to a power differential between the two, and (some would say an appropriate) distancing. Other distances may also come into play including cultural and particularly language distances. These may lead to misunderstandings or misconceptions about the motives or intentions of people, and may create a psychological distance. I go on to tell the students that there are always ‘distances’ between each of us, no matter what the nature of the transaction.

In distance education, the geographical distance does not have as much influence as it once had, as interactive technologies are now quite sophisticated. Beatle George Harrison once wrote ‘We were thinking about the space between us all…and the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion...’ One of the most important distances to overcome is the perceived distance between each of us and those we attempt to communicate with. Michael Moore (no, not that one) once theorised that there is a distance between us and others which is one of a transactional nature. My theory is that depending on how a technology is used, it has the potential to either amplify or reduce such transactional distances (Wheeler, 2007). As educators we need to address many of these issues particularly if we are operating within a distance education context...but it also applies in face to face teaching and learning contexts.

Distance education is of course best conceived of as a method for delivering and supporting learning opportunities to students who can't be present on campus or in a classroom. It is an ideal strategy for the promotion of inclusive education, where those who cannot travel to a university or college for some reason can still participate in a community of learning. In an organised format, one of the first beginnings of distance education was in England in the Victorian era....

Tomorrow: Part 2: Short hand, long distance

References: Wheeler, S. (2005) British Distance Education: A Proud Tradition. In Y. Visser, L. Visser and M. Simonson (Eds.) Trends and Issues in Distance Education: An International Perspective. Greenwich, Connecticut, USA: Information Age Publishers.

Wheeler, S. (2007) The Influence of Communication Technologies and Approaches to Study on Transactional Distance in Blended Learning, [Abstract] ALT-J: Research in Learning Technology, 15 (2), 103-117.

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Very social software

A veritable feast of articles on social media is appearing in the academic press at the moment.

Two articles that have caught my eye deal with social software in education, and both have landed on my desk in the last few weeks.

If you're interested in the impact blogs, wikis and social networking can have on the social and cultural dimensions of education, then take a read of them. Below are the abstracts, references and links to both full papers.

Social Software: new opportunities for challenging social inequalities in learning? by Gwyneth Hughes

Enthusiasts for new social software do not always acknowledge that belonging to e-learning communities depends upon complex and often unresolved identity issues for learners. Drawing on the author's previous research on belonging in social learning, the paper presents a theory of identity congruence in social learning and brings to the foreground the importance of identities which arise from expressions of gender, class, ethnicity, age, etc. in the social, operational and, in particular, the knowledge-building aspects of learning. These three dimensions of identity congruence are used to evaluate the potential of new social software. While social software might encourage some learners to engage in social and operational identity work, there are disadvantages for others, and learner-generated knowledge and e-assessment practices can be divisive. Inclusive e-learning depends upon pedagogies and assessments which enable learners to shift and transform identities, and not solely on widening the range of technologies available. Such caution should underpin future research.

Keywords: social software; Web 2.0; inclusive; inequality; belonging; identity.

Reference: Hughes, G. (2009) Social software: new opportunities for challenging social inequalities in learning? Learning, Media and Technology, 34 (4), 291-306.

Culture, learning styles and Web 2.0, by Bolanle A. Olaniran

This article explores Web 2.0 in interactive learning environments. Specifically, the article examines Web 2.0 as an interactive learning platform that holds potential, but is also limited by learning styles and cultural value preferences. The article explores the issue of control from both teacher and learner perspectives, and in particular the cultural challenges that impact learner control. From the control perspective, the issue of access to Web 2.0 technologies from both cost affordability and government censorship is also addressed. Finally, the article concludes with implications and recommendations for Web 2.0 learning environments.

Keywords: Web 2.0; interactive learning; cultural preferences; learning styles; learner control.

Reference: Olaniran, B. A. (2009) Cuture, learning styles and Web 2.0, Interactive Learning Environments, 17 (4), 261-272.

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The long and the short of it

We've had the Oscars, the Tonys, and of course, for education bloggers, the Eddies. What next? Well, you'll just love the Shorty Awards. It's a celebration of all that is great, whacky or downright weird on the real-time service Twitter.

This is the second year the Shorties have run, and frankly it's all a lot of great fun. The strapline on the Shorty Awards Website says: 'Honoring the best producers of short and real-time content'. There are several 'official' categories including Arts, Music, Humor, Celebrity, Education and Tech. I'm particularly interested in the last two as they relate to the themes of my blog. But it's a lot of fun watching Twitter users scrabbling and canvassing to try to gain votes from their fellow twits, so they can edge their way to the top of the 'leader board' in each category. There is even an unofficial category emerging, I see. It's the 'egocentric' category and seems to be awarded to those twits who think a little too highly of themselves, or who are perhaps just a little too enthusiastic in trying to solicit votes.

Here's the hilarious bit: Anyone can devise a new category to nominate someone. If enough people do the same thing, that category then becomes 'official', and an award is made for it. I can see people's imaginations running wild now. How about categories for 'boring', 'drivesbadly', 'lunatic', 'mostlyasleep' or 'drunkard'. I gave @davecormier a nomination in 'convolution' for his meandering but brilliant theory on rhizomatic learning. I don't think anyone has picked up on the irony of it yet. I also gave Tom Caswell (@tom4cam - one of the tallest men I have ever encountered) a nomination in the 'tall' catagory, which for the shorties is ... well, appropriate I think. He got it. :-)

I'm flattered to have received 8 votes for @timbuckteeth so far in the 'education' category, which puts me in 18th joint equal place alongside such luminaries as @ollie_otter. How good is that? I'm on a par with a river dwelling rodent, but not half as cute. Excellent.

I don't stand a cat's chance in hell of winning anything of course. There are just too many great people (and some awesome ones too). Currently heading the leaderboard in the education category by a mere 1750 votes ahead of place two, is some bloke called Brother Eli Soriano (who should perhaps more fairly be placed in a 'religious' or 'preacher' category to give the teachers a chance. He also appears to have at least 7 accounts - check him out Shorty Awards). Some nutcase who will remain nameless (@simfin) has just nominated me in the 'humor' category. That's a laugh, that is. How about several of you nominating me in a new category - let's call it 'obscurity'. If enough of you vote for me, it may turn out to be the most ironic award of the whole Shorties. There's also an interview for you to complete which is displayed next to your buddy pic. Do have fun with the Shorties - 'cos that's exactly what they are.

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The song remains the same

In the 1960s and 1970s several musicians tried to change the world through their music. The 'protest songs' of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Neil Young and The Byrds gained a lot of air play, particularly on the pirate radio stations, as they sought to raise awareness of the dangers of nuclear weapons, the futility of the Vietnam War, or the need for greater equality, justice and freedom.

The late 1970s saw the emergence of an even more angry genre of music - punk rock exploded on the scene, grabbing attention, causing controversy and piquing our social awareness through the raw energy of The Sex Pistols, The Clash and Patti Smith, and political awareness flowed freely from the lyrics of Billy Bragg, UB40 and a number of other home grown UK bands in the 1980s. They railed against corporate greed, and called out for equality, justice and freedom (again). If we were cynical we would point out that they also became wealthy off the back of their record sales. Most recently, Hip Hop outfits such as Public Enemy have tried to tap into the power of the beat to challenge the status quo, change people's minds and drag them from their comfortable lethargy into political activism but they have a limited audience. Pink's 'Dear Mr President' held currency for a while, but a new president with a new agenda may have drawn some of its potency.

Political movements have risen from songs. Remember 'Stand Down Margaret', and 'Free Nelson Mandela', or 'Biko' (Peter Gabriel). But ultimately what has been the legacy of these music movements? Did they really change much at all? And what is the alternative now that music seems to have lapsed into its own lethargic morass of the X-Factor style 'karoake' culture?

Gil Scott-Heron sang 'The Revolution will not be Televised', but the times they are a-changing, and people now have mobile TV and Radio studios and newspaper presses in their pockets. We have witnessed the evidence that the use of mobile phones by citizen journalists has raised public awareness to the injustices, tragedies and disasters occurring across the globe - as they happen, and at the scene. Sometimes several hours ahead of the major media channels - instant messages, texting and other live networking has raised our awareness that there are riots on the streets of Iran, or that a major incident is happening somewhere in the world. YouTube videos, Flickr photographs and blog reports provide us with the content that informs, circumventing the mainstream media, and undermining the repressive control methods of those in power.

In the next few years there will be a rise in the use of citizen journalism, just as there will be a rise in the number of free internet channels that will be open for all to use. Perhaps we don't need the protest song anymore. The song remains the same, but the tools have changed. And they may be a lot more effective. Government ministers and those who wield the power will be looking over their shoulders with increasing regularity, as citizen observers with powerful links to the world ensure that they do the best for their country.

And that can only be a good thing, can't it?

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The future is the Web

I'm putting together my invited presentation for Learning Technologies 2010 later this month. I have been asked to talk about the new smart technologies that we will be using in the next year or two. These include touch screen technologies (iPhone, Touchtables, etc), augmented reality (AR) devices (6th Sense, Layar etc) and other emerging technologies such as QR tagging, GPS and wearable computers. I will talk about how I think these might be used to support, enhance and extend pedagogy in the future. It's quite a tall order, but if you know we well, you also know I relish a challenge.

I'm going to use Web 2.0 (and the emergence of Web 3.0) as my starting point. I know a lot of people don't like these terms, but as I have previously commented (see Lost in Translation), even if it isn't the right one, the name evokes meaning and makes the concept comprehensible. At least most of us will know what I mean by Web 2.0 (the read/write Web - connecting with others) and Web 3.0 (The semantic Web - connecting with knowledge content through 'intelligent' search/filtering). I'm starting with them because whatever technology we will use in the future for teaching and learning, we can be assured it will have a social element and that we will increasingly rely upon intelligent (agent) systems to get us from where we are to where we want to be. The future is digital, and the future is the Web.

The future will be interactive. The way we interact with the Web will be different from the way we interact now. We are already seeing signs of shifts in use, moves away from mouse and keyboard toward natural hand and finger movements, such as multi- and pinch-gestures. The iPhone was one of the first handheld devices to capture this, but we already had interactive whiteboards in classrooms that could operate on a touch basis. It's now one small step away from that to interaction in 3-D, where we move around in physical space, and the computer tracks and responds to our hands, eyes and voice. AR tools will recognise what we are doing and then enhance it by adding information to the world around us.

The future will also be mobile. I have already elaborated on why we need to be more mobile and agile in a previous post, but I will emphasise here that learning and working on the move is going to increase exponentially in the coming years. It will increase because we are more mobile as a society than ever before and we need to maximise the limited time we have each day. The demands on an individual's time are increasing to the point that many people now need to learn how to work smarter not harder, by doing more in the down-time that is otherwise wasted waiting or travelling. Increasingly we will see people using handheld smart devices to augment personal reality, access information, communicate, navigate their way through physical space and create and share content while on the move. Many of us are already starting to do this.

Finally the future will be sensory. One of the words we will increasingly hear in 2010 is the word 'haptic.' Haptic - pertaining to the sense of touch - describes the manner by which some new technologies are providing tactile feedback to users through handheld controllers. When it's your turn on Wii sports, your handset makes a small sound, a blue light flashes, and it vibrates. The handset alerts several of your senses simultaneously. Mobile phones also have a built in vibration alert when you want to go silent but still want to know a call or text is incoming. We are witnessing the early stage of haptic consumer technology. It will get better as it becomes more widely available, and more control will become possible using haptic tools. Humans have more than the 5 traditional senses Artistotle talked about. At least three - equilibrioception (balance), proprioception (sense of limb juxtapositions) and kinaesthesia (motion) - are there waiting to be tapped into, to make our interaction with digital media more natural, responsive and effective.

I'm going to try to make some sense of all this for my audience. Together, we will discuss ways in which new smart technologies can enhance education and training, and make learning more exciting and relevant for our students.

Learning Technologies 2010 will be held at Olympia 2, London, on January 27-28.

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Wisdom of clouds

This is the first time I've done this, but it's a new year and a new broom. Here is the first Learning with 'E's guest blog post - it's by Manish Malik, who is based at the University of Portsmouth. He has some interesting ideas, and I am happy to host these on my own blog. You can find Manish's poll on his Edublend blog. I think it's an important discussion - so please read his post and then make your vote!

I have been meaning to write this for quite some time now. To be honest, at some point in the run up to the ALT-C 2009 conference, I got this idea. There is a shorter version of this post too. There were many people at a session titled "the VLE is Dead" hosted by James Clay, Josie Fraser, Graham Attwell, Nick Sharratt and Steve Wheeler aka Timbuckteeth :). Martin Weller blogged about the death of VLE/LMS too in Nov 2007.

Scott Leislie coined a term Loosely coupled teaching a month before that. Martin's prediction about a move towards loosely coupled teaching tools has examples in practice today. However, there is more to it. Let me explain:

PLE...a set of tools that the learners enjoy full control on and choice of. The tools within a PLE are most likely not used for the purpose of formal education of all learners within an educational institution. Each learner may use a different set of tools to support/enhance their informal learning.

VLE...a set of tools that the learners enjoy very little control over, if any, or choice of and is an institutional system that is mostly likely for formal education. Academics and the institutions have the most control on this learning environment. Learners may have a say in it to some extent.

Loosely coupled.....to quote Scott, "courses taught using contemporary social software/web 2.0 tools outside a course management system." - again the learner may have little control over these tools but the academic is the owner and has most control/choice. As it's a non institutional learning environment, it is most likely to support informal teaching and learning but may be used for formal teaching and learning too. I have blogged on this type of tools as my own personal teaching environment.

CLE or Cloud Learning Environment....The cloud can be seen as one big autonomous system not owned by any educational institution. Let the Academics or Learners be the users of some cloud based services, where all equally share the privileges like control, choice, sharing of content etc on these services. This is different from a PLE, a VLE and a PTE. For example Google Apps for universities is hosted on the cloud, not fully controlled by any educational institution and certainly not owned by one. The tools on it are to a great extent academic or learner controlled. Each "Google Site", for example, can be owned by an academic or a Learner and both users be given the same rights/control by one another (depending on who creates first). Likewise Google Docs can be owned and shared between learners themselves or learners and academics under their own control.

This gives all parties the same rights on same set of tools. This clearly has potential to enable and facilitate both formal and informal learning for the learner. Both the academic and the learner are free to use the tools the way they wanted and share and collaborate with anyone they wanted. This would not have been possible if either the academics or the learners or for that matter the institution designed and developed the set of tools or bought it from any one supplier. Google Apps was not designed just for institutions or for individuals, it was designed for collaboration both within and accross institutions.

CLEs also make it very easy to generate content and share it with the rest of the world in a DERPable (Discoverable, Editable, Repurposable and Portable) manner, in the spirit of the UKOER programme. With a bit of search engine optimisation it could work magic in terms of making the educational material that sits on a CLE visible and usable by the rest of the world.

Lastly, students at my institution love the Google Apps interface, which makes it very easy to get them to engage with their work using online tools. This can be seen from the crazy usage statistics of Google Sites where I now host my Examopedia.

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2010: The year we fake contact

Warning - This one is a bit of a rant. Social networking tools create contacts. That's what they were designed to do. It's in their job descriptions and they do exactly what it says on their can. Problem is, just how many people can I connect with who are actually people I know? Do I need to have any kind of connection with my Facebook 'friends' beyond the fact that we are linked on the site? When does it become a problem that you are sharing your photographs and your innermost thoughts with friends of friends of friends (I mean total strangers). Just where do you draw the line?

It's just possible that the guy who cut you up on the way home yesterday (you know, the one you exchanged angry words with from the safety of your own driving seats) is the same one you are having a poke exchange with tonight on Facebook. The woman you looked daggers at this morning at the superstore when your trolleys clashed could be the same one who sends you a pomegranate tree this evening on Farmville. You just don't know for sure, because a lot of your Facebook friends aren't really friends at all - they are actually strangers. And if you did meet them in the street, they wouldn't have 'Facebook user' stamped on their foreheads that's for sure. Some are just people you have casually clicked 'yes' to on a friend request, without checking out who they are because you didn't have the time ... at the time. They may have requested friendship status with you simply because you have been auto-suggested by Facebook or because they have a causal acquaintance (i.e. a Facebook link) with one of the people you also have a Facebook link with. And you are now eternally linked, because you can't bring yourself to unfriend them, or you simply forget to do so. And then others with even more tenuous links request friendship. And on it goes....

What does it really mean to have 4000 friends on Facebook? Well, fortunately, unlike Jesus, you won't have to feed them all. Most of them won't be invited to your daughter's wedding and they won't be on your Christmas card list either. They might come in handy if you wanted to besiege Carthage or recreate the T-Mobile Flashmob dance provided they were all living in spitting distance. But with 4000 Facebook friends you might have to face a shed load of requests to join the 'Prevent Ferret Strangling in Equador' Campaign or 'I love Robert Pattinson but I think Twilight sucks' Fan Club. It's no joke. I have well over 100 requests waiting for me on Facebook as I write this. It thrills me, it really does, going through each one, and being told accusingly: 'You have ignored a request from Mother Theresa to prevent Baby Seal Culling in Nova Scotia'. I guess it's fine if you want to feel popular, but ultimately, I think it's all just a big fake having so many 'friends' on your social networking site. I closed down my Bebo, Plurk and MySpace accounts in 2009 because I was being overloaded by so many friend requests and spurious linking to things I couldn't be asked to spend time on. Call me an old humbug if you like, but I'm through with poking, vampire battles and food fights. It's for these reasons I may take the plunge and also close down my Facebook account in 2010. Any reason why I shouldn't?

A happy new year to you all!

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