A digital heretic?

Some people think I'm a bit of a rebel. A non-comformist. You see, I don't take too kindly to unnecessary rules and regulations, and tend to scoff when people try to impose them. I despise bureaucracy and red-tape. 'Why can't I do this?' I ask. 'Because it's against the rules!' 'But what if the rules are wrong?' 'I don't make the rules mate, I just make sure you keep them...' How ridiculous!

I know we need some rules to maintain a semblance of order in society, and we need order to avoid a descent into chaos. But when rules are created for the sake of creating rules (governments and large institutions are very good at this) I am usually tempted to step out of line, just to see what happens. It doesn't make me any better or worse than anyone else, but it causes problems for the 'powers that be'. What do they do with me? I'm on record as supporting the do-it-yourself ethos of Edupunk, and a rejection of the corporate learning platform 'solutions'. I also use this blog as a platform to rant about a whole range of education issues. I don't consider myself to be completely rebellious though - I just tend to get a little too uncomfortable when I'm expected to tow the party line when I don't actually subscribe to it. And when I see something I consider unjust, wasteful or unfair, I have to point it out, and if necessary, shout very loud about it. I'm the little boy watching the emperor walk past in his birthday suit, and I'm the one who points out that he's naked. I'm the one walking out of step in the parade. I'm the conformist's worse nightmare. I would be a very bad party politician, and an even worse soldier. What I think I am good at though, is thinking outside the box, trying to come up with stuff that makes people think, or challenges preconceptions. That's the bit that I like the most, so perhaps that's why I tend not to conform.

I was reading the book 'Tribes' by Seth Godin recently, and although it's rather simplistic in its use of language and doesn't tax the mind much (it's written for corporate types after all), I never the less enjoyed reading it through to find out what his take was on leadership and business. I like his concept of 'sheepwalking' where people blindly follow someone or something without really questioning or understanding what they are doing. I like even more his idea of tribes, as groups of people that have purpose and communication. What I like most of all about his book though, is his notion of the 'heretic'. In more superstitious times, says Godin, the heretic was burned at the stake or at the very least, cast out from the community, undesirable, unwanted, a dissident. In present times though he says, the heretic is now more valued, and is probably the one who asks 'er.... why can't I do this?', and then when told it's against the rules, goes out and does it anyway. It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission, says Godin, and I think he's right. Heretics don't lose their faith, he reckons, they just challenge the established 'religion' - the status quo, the established ways of doing things, and they find another way.

I suppose that makes me some kind of heretic. Anyone who knows me will tell you I'm not satisfied with the learning platforms I see, and I'm not too keen on being complicit to corporate profiteering. That's why I use my own online tools, tapping into free services I know my students will find useful and will enjoy using. I'm opposed to respectable and long accepted theories such as learning styles (Honey & Mumford should hang their heads in shame) and digital natives theory (Marc Prensky has retracted much of what he said about cognitive change, but people still keep trotting out the theory as if it's a fact, hoping it makes them sound knowledgeable), because these models try to categorise students and thereby constrain creativity and individuality. I strongly support user generated content as an effective means of supporting learning. PLE will triumph over VLE. Who's to say that txt language is inferior to standard English? And let's allow children to use mobile phones in schools. Call me a digital heretic if you like, but I'm certainly not the only one.

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A digital heretic? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 International License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

What makes a good blogpost?

I have now been blogging for almost four years, and during that time I think I have learnt a thing or two about what makes a good blog post (and also what doesn't). Here are seven things I believe are important to include if you want to write a blog post that attracts a readership:

The first important feature of a successful blogpost is a good, snappy title. Some of my most visited blogposts have provocative or intriguing titles such as 'Another nail in the coffin' 'Two fingered salute' and 'Web 2.0 Wonderland'. They hold a promise that draws your readers in. Some are wordplays (ala tabloid newspaper style) whilst others simply state what the blogpost will be about.

The second important feature is good content. This content should be well written, easy to read, topical (of interest to your readership, and perhaps tapping into the zeitgeist - the spirit of what is currently happening) and should be informative. Try to find something to write about that informs and educates your readership, or something that makes them think.

Thirdly, controversial content always draws a crowd. Be opinionated if you like, but also try to back up your opinion with evidence if you can. Having said that, I have often been deliberately provocative (playing the devil's advocate role) just to provoke responses in the comments box. If you do get some comments, respond to them - people feel more included. Remember though that blogging is not essay writing, so often you don't have to do much more than speak your mind to attract readers.

Fourthly, adding some good, colourful (or in some cases monochrome) images to illustrate and inform your readership is a good idea. I always try to find one image that is evocative of the topic I'm writing about. It has become a formula for me, and it's expected now. Sometimes posting an odd, or off-beat, or funny image that at first glance has nothing to do with the topic can be a useful ploy too.

Fifth, useful hyperlinks that take readers deeper into the topic or discussion are an attractive feature. Make sure the links are not broken, but only add those links you feel are useful to elaborate or extend the topic for your readers.

Sixth, humour is always a useful addition to a blog post. There are times when you need to be serious in dealing with a topic, but there are also times when you can use humour, wordplay, or even satire to strengthen your blog post, and perhaps also entertain your readers at the same time. It shows you are human too. :-)

Finally, be brief.

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What makes a good blogpost? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Paper cuts

Paper is a wonderful thing. We have enjoyed it in its various forms for centuries, and its history can be traced back to the papyrus of ancient Egypt. When Johannes Gutenburg came along with his wonderful 13th century invention, society was gifted mass produced text based communication, and suddenly, everyone needed to learn to read. Printed text quickly became the first medium of mass-communication. Paper and printing have certainly contributed a great deal to the world of education and learning. Now, living in 2010, time has moved on, but I'm left wondering if some people's minds aren't still mouldering back in the last century. I enter my office space this morning, and I am greeted with a mountain of assignments, half a tree's worth of wood, pulped down to make paper that contains the printed thoughts of my students. They are all bound neatly, labelled, and sit there waiting my attention. I am now expected to plough through this pile of paper in my office (the assignments are too numerous and too heavy for me to trog home with me) and eventually come down on some judgement as to the individual worth of each assignment. I have to write on the assignments with a pencil or pen to try to give feedback to each student.

Last year, I delivered a module for some of my first year teacher students, in which not a single sheet of paper changed hands in any direction. It was the first time I had done it. There were no paper handouts. They were all in digital format. All the transactions were conducted online through wiki, e-mail and blogs, and there were no paper based submissions either. All the assignments for that module were submitted online using our in-house submission system SCHOLAR. It worked reasonably well for a pilot, although there were some problems with unfamiliarity on both sides. The advantages were clear to see. Students didn't need to travel into the university to submit their assignments (many live quite some distance away from the central campus). I was able to see at a glance who had sumitted and who hadn't. I could check very easily for plagiarised work, and ultimately, it benefitted the students because I could colour code my remarks and attach them to their work so they had clear and instant feedback on how well they had done and what they needed to do to improve their work for future submissions. Everyone was happy.

Unfortunately there are colleagues who don't like the system, or are reluctant to use it. I see fellow academics struggling about with boxes full of stapled tomes which they intend to give their students as handouts. Full forests of paper disappear into the classrooms and lecture halls, where they are doled out dutifully to hordes of students, who generally glance at them, leaf through them if they are curious, and then in most cases - they file them under 'B' for bin. Some are inventive and use the shredded handouts to line the cages of their pet hamsters. There's another part to the equation: Some external examiners insist even now, on paper assignments. Are they dinosaurs? That's what they are used to, and that's what they require. Perhaps when selecting future external examiners, a demonstrable lack of aversion to new technoology could be one of the selection criteria.

I say, save the forests and let's go digital. Resources are easier to transport, easier to store and retrieve, and they can be shared more readily. Hernias will be eliminated and repetitive strain injuries reduced. I know there are objections from those who find it difficult to read digital text, or who like the idea that they can have something in their hands to write on, highlight, and file away. But we live in 2010, and technology can do as much for us now as Gutenburg's Press did for people back in 1450. Please, please, let's try to drag our education systems screaming into the 21st Century. Paper has its place. But there is so much more we can do to make our own lives and the lives of our students better if we migrate over to digital media.

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Paper cuts by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Expelled: Woodbury's Second Life Silencing

Occasionally this blog hosts guest posts. Today, Tim Handorf writes about the experiences of one university in Second Life.

We all know that Second Life, the virtual reality world that has become basically indistinguishable from our increasingly unreal physical worlds, is a powerful tool for learning. In fact, it's pretty much a powerful tool for everything, considering the small but growing number of Second Life millionaires. The fact that there are, as of January 2010, 18 million registered Second Life users demonstrates the power of the virtual world to connect, educate, and enhance our daily lives in an almost revolutionary manner.

But, of course, as is true of the "real" world, Second Life does not come without its problems. Most recently, the brick-and-mortar university Woodbury was booted off Second Life —thousands of students were affected—by the virtual world's moderators, a company called Linden Lab. What's interesting is that Woodbury was torn down from the site for the second time, the first time being in 2007

What's even more fascinating about this whole scenario is that Linden Lab did not specify, really, what terms of agreement Woodbury had violated, although this was the accusation. Linden Lab has remained largely silent in the press, a silence that has infuriated many. What Woodbury University is so upset about is the suddenness of the Second Life ban. In a matter of minutes, the virtual university was destroyed, some professor and student accounts were blocked, and thousands of dollars and years of time were essentially thrown away.

Although Linden Lab has not been forthcoming about the problems with Woodbury, users and the media alike speculate that it has to do with the university's too lenient openness. For example, the university's buildings were largely student-created, and it has few restrictions on who can associate with the campus. A supposed result of the university's openness was its attraction of users known as "griefers", usually young or middle aged men who vandalize Second Life property, like placing swastikas in different places. Apparently, because of its acceptance of various people, Woodbury had become a hotbed of these "griefers."

While it is understandable that Second Life moderators would want to control activity that denigrates the efficient functioning of a world rife with useful applications pertaining to the real world, it seems that their measures were a bit too extreme. After all, Woodbury University had fully utilized the educational tools that Second Life provides, and students and professors alike had reaped many intellectual rewards from the process. The university paid good money for it, too. The prime culprit in this debacle, I believe, is the unwillingness of many in the Internet community to fully embrace transparency. Linden Lab should explicitly state their reasoning behind the banning of Woodbury and the two institutions should work out a compromise that doesn't leave so many in the e-learning community without a resource to turn to.

By-line:
This guest post is contributed by Tim Handorf, who writes on the topics of online college rankings. He welcomes your comments at his email Id: tim.handorf.20@googlemail.com.

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Open all OERs

Time to reflect on the Commonwealth of Learning (CoL) workshop on Open Educational Resources, which was held in Windhoek, Namibia this week. Around 50 delegates attended, predominantly from African nations including Namibia, South Africa and Botswana and there were also representatives from Canada, Australia, Holland, Trinidad and Tobago, Malaysia and Jamaica. Many were representing the Quality Assurance Agencies of their home countries. Dr Stella Anthony (Australian Universities Network for Quality Assurance) gave the opening presentation for the event, and spoke about the opportunities and challenges of OERs in higher education. She took a pragmatic approach, arguing that we need to pay attention to a number of issues that threaten the success of OERs, including lack of a common understanding of their purposes and limitations, overcoming infrastructural barriers, as well as ensuring the quality of OERs in terms of content and design.

Jenny Glennie (South African Institute for Distance Education) presented a paper entitled 'Understanding OER in Higher Education' in which she outlined the basics of Openness and provided essential input into what OERs are for those who were new to the concept. A presentation by Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams (University of Cape Town, South Africa) opened up the debate over the benefits and limitations of OERs, and addressed some of the quality assurance issues, as well as issues of financial sustainability and battles over ownership of content. IPR and Creative Commons were discussed.

I was live-blogging throughout these presentations, and during the first panel session presented two questions from the Twitter stream to the panel. The first question was from Mark Power (Bolton University, UK) who wondered why we should pay attention to OERs when reusable learning objects had apparently failed. The panel responded that OERs are not the same as RLOs, for one simple reason - Learning objects are usually decontextualised (stand alone) whereas OERs are generally contextualised within a larger module or course/programme. It is all a matter of granularity, with Open Courseware the most contextualised. The second question was asked about design and content. If content is good, but poorly presented in an amatuerish manner, does this matter? The panel agreed that it did matter, but that many OERs are generally well presented anyway.

After lunch, it was my turn to present my invited paper, which dealt with the wider issues surrounding OERs, such as pedagogy, theoretical and philosophical considerations. I outlined two projects, OPAL and CONCEDE which respectively examine Open Educational Practices and user generated content. I touched on the synergy between Web 2.0 tools and OERs which both espouse openness, and concluded with some ideas about how OERs could benefit higher education in the future. The following panel session was lively, with plenty of questions from the delegates. From the workshop came ideas that included the belief that OERs will improve social inclusion and encourage better student engagement, even to the point where students will contribute to the development of OER content alongside their tutors.

Sir John Daniel (our host and CEO of CoL) summed up the workshop in his closing remarks. He argued that OERs are just another development in the ongoing evolution of education, and should be treated just like any other educational process - they should not treated as a special case, and just because they are created in an open manner and are free, this doesn't mean they are poor quality. OERs, he said, go beyond centralised repositories of learning objects - their ability to be embedded across multiple web sites will mean better longevity and sustainability. OERs will also encourage more widespread repurposing of existing resources across wider groups and communities of practice, he predicted. He concluded with a reference to Apple's new toy, suggesting that the iPad will do to educational resources what the iPod did to popular music.

Learning with 'e's by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

A day with a knight

I spent some time chatting with Sir John Daniel yesterday at the UNESCO sponsored workshop on Open Educational resources. Sir John was hosting the event, organised by the Commonwealth of Learning, of which he is the President and CEO. Sir John was formerly the Vice Chancellor of the UK Open University, and was knighted for his services to higher education by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 1994. His career in HE has spanned almost 50 years, and he holds over 30 honourary doctorates, professorships and fellowships from universities around the globe. To many in education his name is widely regarded to be synonymous with lifelong learning. I had several conversations with him yesterday, and we also debated the notion of user generated content during the panel session at the workshop.

I'm grateful to Sir John for a number of reasons. Firstly, whilst he was VC at the UK Open University, I graduated with a first class honours degree in Psychology, so you could say he was instrumental in launching my academic career. Later, when I was studying for another academic award, I read his book, Mega-Universities and Knowledge Media, which inspired me to learn more about distance education and technology supported learning. I'm grateful to Sir John also for encouraging me to into a research career - when I was invited to chair some sessions at the 2nd Turkish Distance Education Symposium in Ankara, Turkey, in 1998, I met Sir John for the first time. He asked me what I did, and I told him that I was working on a distance education project called RATIO - to set up learning centres in remote rural areas. He told me he worked for the Open University. We got into a conversation about distance education, and then I discovered who he was and what he did. I was impressed. Meeting him inspired me to pursue my studies in distance education, and he was thus instrumental in launching me into my research career in e-learning. The Turkish symposium was quite an event, because that was where I also first made acquaintance with a number of other distance education luminaries, including Michael Moore, David Jonassen, Tony Bates, Liz Stacey, Charlie Schlosser and Mike Simonson. I joined the Faculty of Education as a lecturer shortly after returning from Turkey, and thus began my academic career. So it was a wonderful experience to once again stand talking with this very unassuming man over a cup of tea, and to remember that first encounter (which of course he did).

Later that evening, I was invited along with other delegates from the conference to attend a Gala Dinner in celebration of the launch of a new Commonwealth of Learning initiative - the Virtual University for Small States of the Commonwealth Transnational Qualifications Framework (VUSSC). We all stood for the Namibian national anthem. Then the Namibian Minister for Education stood and gave a speech. The television cameras from a premier African TV network captured the proceedings. And finally, Sir John Daniel walked to the podium and outlined the details of VUSSC.

The history of VUSSC goes back to a meeting in 2000 of the Commonwealth Education Ministers who agreed to address the issues of inconsistency of academic awards and standards across the small states of the Commonwealth. The plan for the newly launched VUSSC is to regulate, communicate, transform or reform, establish consistent standards and promote quality of academic programmes and awards across 32 small Commonwealth nations. It's a tall order, but a much needed initiative to bring all academic awards up to the same standard and comparison. I'm very pleased to have been there to see the birth of this excellent new network of professionals and academics. I wish Sir John and his team great success and thank him for his continued inspiration.

Learning with 'e's by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Opening spaces, open learning

I'm enjoying the workshop on Open Educational Resources (OER) here in Windhoek, Namibia. It took me almost 24 hours of travelling to get here, via London Heathrow, and Johannesburg. But now I'm here, it's a beautiful country, the skies are clear blue, and the hotel we are staying in is excellent. The conference venue here at the Safari Court Hotel is purpose built, and continually hosts events sponsored by the likes of UNESCO, UNICEF and other UN organisations. Today, the workshop for Quality Assurance Agencies is addressing the concept of OERs and how they can be quality assured. Inevitably, under this banner, we are also discussing how content can be standardised in terms of its delivery, design and licensing. Creative Commons and IPR issues have already been raised, and this afternoon we continue round table discussions with representatives from a number of African countries, and delegates from Holland, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Australia, Canada and Malaysia.

We have had excellent speeches from Sir John Daniel (Commonwealth of Learning), Jenny Glennie (South African Institute for Distance Education) and Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams (University of Cape Town) all of whom are positive about OERs, but also cautious about how open courseware, open content and user generated content can, and will be evaluated and used. Later this afternoon, I'm giving an invited talk on the CONCEDE Project (CONtent Creation Excellence through Dialogue in Education) which I am involved in.

Sir John Daniel spoke this morning about the barriers to Open Content and listed three. 1: The 'not invented here/by me' sydrome, 2: Adaptation of materials is often tiresome, and 3: Intellectual Property issues prevent repurposing of content. Sir John argued that OER addresses the last two barriers, and that the first is a psychological/cultural issue that needs addressing. Comments coming in from the Twitter stream suggest that IPR issues may take a long time to address fully, because very few people fully understand how Creative Commons functions. The workshop online forum can be found at this link. I will come back to discuss some of these issues more fully when time permits. In the meantime, I'm enjoying the event, the great company and the excellent weather here in beautiful Namibia.

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Learning with 'e's by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.