ICTlogy

Larry Cooperman
Higher Education, Virtual Education, Open Education

Martin Trow (Reflections on the transition fro elite to mass to universal access: forms and phases of higher education in modern societies since WWII, 2007) reflects on how attitudes before access and functions of higher education have changed as we move from bringing higher education to an elite (0-15% of the population), to the masses (15-50%) to providing it universally (>50%).

• Attitudes before access move from being a privilege, to a right to some qualified ones to an obligation.
• Functions of higher education move from being a preparation for the roles of the elites, to the transmission of skills and a preparation for some technical and economic functions, to adapting the whole population to a quick social and technological change.

Though, some problems arise: the university system cannot accommodate everyone aiming at accessing higher education. What the university can offer — content, experience, certification — usually comes with a trade-off with quality. And, thus, quality has decreased in the higher education system. More people gets in the system, the level of education remains stable (or decreases) and less (in relative terms) people graduates. There is a new iron triangle: access, cost and success.

But now we have the Internet. Now what? What should be done in higher education, given those problems and the fact that we now have the Internet?

A first answer was open courseware: digitize all the existing “knowledge” and make it available for free.

Now, MOOCs have brought yet another debate on the table, again related to access. But access to what? Is there an instructional path? Does even having an instructional path equal learning? Four aspects for the debate about MOOCs:

• Do they scale?
• How do we manage the huge amount of data that they generate?
• Do they represent a different pedagogic approach?
• Where are the learning outcomes?

Weaknesses of the MOOC model:

• Traditional/handmade model of instructional design. Why are we still working individually in teaching and instructional design? MOOCs reproduce the lecture hall and reproduces it online: videos, quizzes… they are not much different — from a pedagogic point of view — from the traditional way. Not that it is wrong, but can we go a step further? For instance, we know that active learning is much better for the building of new knowledge.
• Inability to produce relevant research. For instance, we do know that socialization plays an important role in learning, but most MOOCs do not take that into account. Many of them ignore the possibilities of study groups.
• P2P virtual environments are based on social networks. Peers help each other to learn how to learn. How are MOOCs approaching this fact?

What about scale? Communities of experts, co-creation models, are very much related with communities of learning. Thus, learning environments should not be intimate.

About research, one has to begin to put the right questions, and then gather data to try to answer them. Like what is the best predictor of academic performance in the last year of undergrad education. Is it family income? Social class? How well they did in their admission test? Other factors?

In the future, one would like to see communities of experts that make up the curricula and then inform communities of learners. A community of learners should be supported at any time by a community of experts that can, in an informal environment, help them through their learning process: peer-based learning environments. We need open information, we need problems that need being solved in groups. There are digital platforms — or mixes of digital tools — that come very handy to create these P2P learning environments.

Combine technology, virtuality and openness, to be used by individuals, by classrooms, by institutions or by groups of peers. This is what is being done at UCI OpenChem.

Discussion

Q: what elements should MOOCs have to (a) guarantee learning and to (b) reduce drop out rates? Cooperman: there has to be interaction among the peers. The key of learning is about facilitating communities of learning, P2P learning environments.

Larry Cooperman
Open education: what is it, why is it, for whom is it and how to begin

Activity: What is the topic more difficult to understand for my students at the introductory level of my teaching? Look for a resource that can help them understand the topic in an easy way and with no additional cost. Answers:

• [my answer] In e-Government, ironically it is difficult to define the context and all the different approaches to the topic. So I invite them to follow some given hashtags (one of them the one belonging to the subject I am teaching) so that they get on with the community of practice that works in this field.
• A video about the physics of power by Foucault.
• Use of mindmapping tools to create conceptual networks.
• See films and then comment them on a hangout.
• Grammar assignments for free available on a website.

Most of the materials that we find online are copyrighted and cannot actually be used for education. The idea behind open education is to eliminate the frictions between copyright holders and users of educational materials. How to use materials without permission? With a license.

But open content is only a small fraction of what constitutes open education. Open education is about resources, tools and practices within a participatory open framework to improve access to education. Without sharing there is no education.

Why should open content be free (as in free beer)? Is it enough for open content to be free?

• Free, but quality content.
• Context matters.
• Knowledge is a social construction, comes from dialogue, thus cannot be captured or enclosed.
• It’s not about being free, but accessible. Again, social context matters: content is neither teaching nor learning.
• Comprehensiveness or completion: content has to be enough to achieve a certain learning goal, not require extensions, enhancements or upgrades.

Whom is open education for?

• For everyone.
• As a support for any kind of learning.
• [my own answer] For the educators, to enable communities of practice by sharing open education resources and practices.
• To enable communities of learning, besides (or complementing) what happens in the educational system.

How do we proceed? Step 1, the simplest one, is to tell the world what anyone can do with your stuff: choose a license.

• OER: 0, BY, BY-SA, BY-NC, BY-NC-SA.
• Not OER: BY-ND, BY-NC-ND.

The 5Rs of Openness, by David Wiley:

• Retain – the right to make, own, and control copies of the content.
• Reuse – the right to use the content in a wide range of ways (e.g., in a class, in a study group, on a website, in a video).
• Revise – the right to adapt, adjust, modify, or alter the content itself (e.g., translate the content into another language).
• Remix – the right to combine the original or revised content with other open content to create something new (e.g., incorporate the content into a mashup)
• Redistribute – the right to share copies of the original content, your revisions, or your remixes with others (e.g., give a copy of the content to a friend)

In an open education project, we should think about who benefits the project. Especificaly:

• The students.
• The community.
• The society at large.
• The promoting institution.

Strategies for open education:

• Audience.
• Institutional change.
• Help people access formal education.
• Etc.

Emilio Alvarado Badillo
Education of the future: Projections into the future

Since 1975 information is growing at an exponential rate. Should education adapt to this increase in available information? Will there be a role for traditional institutions? How will learning be assessed?

There will be a change in what we learn and in the ways we do it.

Corporate universities will seriously compete with traditional educational centres, as will other informal learning environments — including autonomous learning, and social learning.

Stefania Druga
Envangelizing technology for learning. Hackidemia

HacKIDemia designs hands-on workshops and projects for maker education and DIY learning. Our mission is to empower children to become makers of technology, art and science. So far, over 400 workshops, throughout 15 countries, 25 cities and 8,000 kids participating. Workshops are carried on anywhere, not only at schools, because learning happens everywhere.

Hacking, as learning, is not about how to use a given technology, but how to design it. With educators, it is about the same: it is not about training them to use a given technology in their classrooms, but how to design leaning experiences with that given technology.

A lot of hacking is closely related to playing, to games, to having fun. The desire to play is a powerful motivator.

A key to success in hacking for education projects is peer-to-peer collaboration, that the student can shift roles and become an educator, to help their peers at a given time.

Kids are more engaged if they are involved in their community, if they can solve real problems, rather than learning by learning, or trivial approximations to real problems.

Discussion

Q: how do you plan a workshop? Druga: our approach is to have a “library of workshops”, with different goals, designs, tools used, etc. and then present them to the community (usually the parents) and see what are the needs of that given community, what do they already know, etc. Then comes a training of the local mentors — workshops are usually conducted by locals &mdash and then comes the actual implementation of the workshop.

Q: do we need to be kids to learn again? Druga: a dire truth of kids is that they do not care about certification or careers. And this is crucial to be able to correctly set your learning goals, not to kill your motivation, etc.

Q: how can we transpose these workshops in 100% virtual learning environments? Druga: social media is sort of doing this, enabling sharing activities and projects and interests, making easier for people to collaborate and participate in others’ projects, etc.

Hacking for education is about breaking complex things into simpler things, and then putting them together again.

Kenneth C. Green
Use and appropriation of technology in higher education. The Campus Computing Project

There is an increasing acknowledgement that students in distance education are doing better than in traditional education. But, is this true? Or, even more important, is this relevant? Should the how or the where people learn be important at all? And, if it is true, why is it so?

We are living the fourth decade of the ICT Revolution, a revolution that began back in the 1980s:

• 1980s Personal computers.
• 1990s Internet.
• 2000s Wireless and mobility.
• 2010s Social media.

Technology has shifted from being nice and convenient to being compelling and obligatory. And we have shifted from big aspirations of ICTs in education and learning, to assessment and accountability.

We have to balance high tech with high touch. Teaching is a “high touch” profession, and the more tech we put into it, the more touch has to be delivered to balance de output. High tech + high touch = tech-enabled high touch.

Technology is a conversation about change. Technology is also a metaphor of risk. Innovation is about gathering information to reduce the uncertainty about the advantages and disadvantages of innovation itself. Innovation must be safe: we build an infrastructure, a safety net so that innovation is safe for everyone, to let people innovate without people risking too much.

Key issues in technology in higher education:

• The consumer experience now defines (rising) expectations about IT resources and services.
• Rising pressure for education to provide the much promised productivity for all the ICT spending.
• Why don’t teachers and professors make more effective use of technology in instruction?
• Why don’t schools and colleges make more effective use of IT in operations and management?

Some problems or dilemmas of innovation in education:

• We have “legacy systems” that are clear barriers to innovation, to change: professors, classrooms, buildings and campuses.
• We have tried several times in distance education — handbooks, radio, television — and it not always did work.

Innovation requires infrastructure and an ecosystem to support it. How do we assess our infrastructure?

• Minimizing risk.
• Fostering visualizing the horizon we are aiming at.

And we have to provide recognition and promotion to those eager to innovate.

And to assess these infrastructures, we need data. But data not as a weapon, but as a means to know what failed and how to avoid it, and what worked, and how to promote it.

Rules for a Machiavellian change agent (J. Victor Baldridge, 1983):

• Concentrate your efforts.
• Pick issues carefully; know when to fight.
• Know the history.
• Build coalitions, make friends. Who can help you? Build trust.
• Set modest, realistic goals
• Leverage the value of data.
• Anticipate personnel turnover.
• Set deadlines for decisions.
• Nothing is static, anticipate change.

Courtesy of EdTech Stanford University School of Medicine

For the nth time, the OCDE, in its Students, Computers and Learning. Making the Connection report, warns us about how technology is not changing academic performance in schools… unless other variables are taken into account — that is for academic performance as it is (quantitatively) measured today: there are, of course, other outcomes, like digital literacy, e-inclusion and social inclusion in general for the student and the family which, to me, are oftentimes successfully met.

Put very shortly, the thing is that there is quite a lot of evidence that what has an impact on academic performance is changes in methodologies. If ICTs (laptops, tablets, smartphones, interative whiteboards, but also blogging, microblogging, social videos, social bookmarking, etc.) have an impact it usually comes indirectly by having an impact in teaching and learning methodologies.

Unluckily, most projects that aim at putting in the classroom (apologies for this imprecise, generic and especially misleading concept) have been focusing almost exclusively in putting hardware and software in the classroom (that is why the name, all in all, may not be misleading at all) and spend little time and budget to everything else around technology.

But, how does one design a project that has an impact on methodologies? Well, the usual answer is training. But training raises several questions and issues:

• Who trains he trainers?
• How does the trainer build upon experience?
• How does the trainer build a reputation?
• How does the trainer build a legitimacy?
• How is this training sustainable?
• How is this training replicable?
• How is this training scalable?

I think what these questions have in common is a community.

Now, summing up, what educational technology projects usually have done is: they devote all the funds they have to buy technology or digital services, while their main asset, the community, usually remains unattended. Sooner or later, the project runs out of money and thus cannot go on. On the other hand, the asset upon which the project could rely is not put in motion and thus does not trigger the springs and levers that could create the necessary changes for the project to be laid on strong foundations. Yes, this is a cruel simplification, but it is not very far from a general truth: we lose our minds on technology and forget humans.

So, what could be one? It seems that just the opposite direction could be a good starter.

1. Identify a community of interest, that is, find who the motivated people are and see how they are connected.
2. Work to shift the community of interest into a community of practice, by making their members share what they do. This will require resources to make sharing easy, comfortable, worth it. Most resources, though, will not be aimed at technology (e.g. a social networking site or platform) but to engage people and build on trust and reputation. It’s called facilitating. And it mostly relies on humans too.
3. Help the sharing of practices turn into knowledge sharing, so that the community becomes a community of learning: learning by doing, learning by sharing, learning by engaging, learning by dialoguing.
4. Contribute to raise the tough questions: learning is more about asking rather than answering. With luck, a diagnosis will emerge: where are we, where do we want to go, what do we have, what do we have not.
5. Some of the things we have not will be knowledge: bring some structured training in.
6. Some of the things we have not will be technology: bring the technology in.
7. And back to #1.

In my opinion, it is important to stress that points #5 and #6 are not exactly the same training and technology as in traditional educational technology projects. Firstly, because the decision of which training and which technology comes not from a top-down perspective, but from a bottom-up one. It’s the community who produced the diagnosis and, thus, it’s the community who proposed the solutions (either in training or in technology). Secondly, because the diagnosis did not only identified the gaps or shortages, but also the assets. It may well be, for instance, that the collective found out that most students already have laptops or tablets, and thus the funds can be addressed only to buy devices for those who do not have them and only for them. Or, maybe, that there are other community resources that can be put in motion to fill that gap in, such as libraries or telecentres. Or that some people know some things and willing to share them with others in some formal way (course, training session). Many other examples can be found related to technology or — and most relevantly — to training.

Another matter to be highlighted is that the concept of community (of interest, practice, learning) goes way beyond a sectoral understanding of the concept. When thought of from a top-down approach, the community is educators, teachers. When thought from a bottom-up approach, the definition of community is much wider. The good think about a wider sense of a community is that it will take into consideration all the assets available (inside and outside schools) and it will build a much more strong consensus while it is reached. And both — assets and consensus — are the cornerstones of sustainability, in whatever sense (economic, social…) one may take it.