ICTlogy

Conference by Martha Cleveland-Innes, from Athabasca University, at UOC headquarters.

Martha Cleveland-Innes: Disciplinary differences and the impact on online design and delivery

Martha Cleveland-Innes

Different disciplines have different approaches on e.g. what quality is. And there is little research assessing what are the points of view of such disciplines concerning digital learning. So, there is a need to investigate the disciplinary effects on quality definitions, what are the quality factors, etc. Can we draw a common online quality matrix?

The practitioners’ point if view is that we have to focus on the student and his learning experience. On the other hand, while there doesn’t seem to be a unique use for a specific technology, evidence shows that peer-to-peer working enhances collaboration, sharing and a better output in educational terms.

How are disciplinary differences affecting online learning?

Disciplines were sorted in two axes: hard vs. soft, pure vs. applied

• Hard-pure: pure sciences. Knowledge is cumulative, atomistic, concerned with universals, quantities, simplification; driven by observations, discovery of new facts… e.g. Physics.
• Soft-pure: humanities. More reiterative, holistic, concerned with particulars, qualities. Critical thinking, apply theories, experiential, personal constructions of knowledge… e.g. History
• Hard-applied: technologies. Pragmatic. Field is unique, and must be treated as such, interdisciplinary but required skill standards… e.g. Engineering
• Soft-applied: applied social science. Functional, utilitarian. Theory into practice, mastery of applied knowledge… e.g. Education

The essential pedagogy of… and their pedagogical model

• Hard-pure: content focus and text-based. Well-written presentations and hands-on labs
• Soft-pure: critical thinking and reading, logic, argumentation, discussion. Dialogue, deep learning, constructivism
• Hard-applied: collaborative yet objective and exact. Multi-modal, simulations interactive, case based
• Soft-applied: collaborative skill development. Experiential, problem based

The debate began here and was richest. It dealt with how to design different methodologies according to different disciplines, whether “one-size-fits-all” is a good idea, or it might work well as a starting point that need evolve in the future, etc.

Professor Lourdes Guàrdia correctly points that sometimes this “starting point” is designed from an economic sustainability point of view, more than from pedagogy, so faculty can do little to have their voices herd during this first phase to build a model and make it sustainable.

Manuel Castells is a scientific I admire. There are things I share — most of them — and things I don’t. Right now I’m working hard with two works of him:

which I find really interesting and a recommended reading for everyone.

This is why I find so disappointing when an author of his stature can so unexpectedly slip out of the road by writing:

the Internet is quickly becoming a medium of interactive communication beyond the cute, but scarcely relevant practice of chat rooms (increasingly made obsolete by SMSs and other wireless, instant communication systems)

[bold letters are mine]

Of course, I’m not questioning him for not foreseeing that SMS would not replace instant messaging — which is what he’s actually meaning by the general concept of chat rooms —, two technologies that now live together in perfect harmony, especially in teen environments. It’s about the scarcely relevant practice of chat rooms.

This is 0% evidence, 100% value judgment.

Evidence about the relevance of such practice is way easy to be checked. First of all, we should remember the origins of both e-mail and instant messaging: high-tech scientific laboratories — there’s plenty of literature about this issue. But once it went out of the scientific environment and got popular, there’s more and more evidence about the relevance of such tools: the Pew Internet & American Life Project issued in that same year, 2004, the report How Americans Use Instant Messaging about 53 million American adults using instant messaging programs. Well, this is quite a lot of people doing scarcely relevant practices. But just at the end of last year, 2007, Garrett and Danziger analyzed how instant messaging was used at work for work purposes in their article IM=Interruption Management? Instant Messaging and Disruption in the Workplace, finding positive uses — yes, you read right: positive. So, evidence absolutely shows that there are good, interesting, useful practices around instant messaging.

What about value judgment? Well, I’d personally agree on assessing as useful, effective, efficient, etc. the use instant messaging for criminal purposes: phishing and pharming, organizing terrorist attacks, seducing minors for sexual purposes, etc. Actually, the main security concerns nowadays about the Internet are precisely in this line: how to avoid the effectiveness of tools like instant messaging, social networking sites and e-mail for criminal purposes. Hence, what is to blame is the criminal who uses these tools, but the tools are working great — even if in bad hands, because tools know no ethics, no law (well, Lessig would complain about this last point).

Summing up: a tool is useful, efficient, effective or relevant besides the fact that we like or dislike the way it is used, but based on its performance.

Same with social networking sites. In a work I’ve already talked about by David Beer and Roger Burrows, they write about Facebook. Even if they are quite open minded, there’s a full chapter about the bad uses of Facebook concerning teachers’ privacy issues which, from my point of view, is almost a digression that really does not deal with the sense of ‘democratization’, as stated in the title of that chapter.

While the authors complain — more than criticize — about the fact of having some colleagues exposed to public dishonor, they lose focus on the subject of analysis: Facebook, social networking sites, shifting towards the (bad) education and practices of such students, which was (supposedly) not the matter of debate in the article.

Day after day I am surprised by the recurrent exercise to blame on the Internet things that belong to “real” life: Law, Education, Business Management… And, even worse, to state about Internet applications and uses things that are absolutely false, taking as evidence what, all in all, was just lack of deeper knowledge and prejudice. Even in the most brilliant scientists. We all have bad days everywhen.

Framework

When framing all the impact of ICTs in society — and not only at the economic level — it is unavoidable to speak of Manuel Castells’s work, maybe the most acknowledged scholar in this field. Summing up and focusing on what is of interest here, Castells presents a society structured in three layers — relationships of production, experience and power — that by acting over matter (i.e. nature) — the former — and establishing relationships amongst them three layers, end up shaping a culture in a specific configuration of time and space. As technology plays and important role in both the relationships amongst layers and in the creation of culture, Castells theorizes on how ICTs are actually shaping nowadays culture in a very broad sense. His thesis is that the Informational Paradigm leads to a globalized Network Society that pervades each and every aspect of human life. Besides the effect on the Economy, it affects all the way the society shaped, thus the way we work, how culture and communication take place, a redefinition of politics, and even the concepts of time and space.

We can summarize the preceding ideas in the following figure, which presents the three layered society structure in a drastically simplified way:

[click to enlarge]

Concerning development, Welzel et al. (2003) describe in their work a framework that, to our appeal, is very interesting as it goes beyond economic development, overcoming the usual focus on infrastructures.

Their three tier approach is based on the three main trends in development studies. The first one is socioeconomic development, mainly based in Economy issues (translated into indicators) plus some others mainly measuring Health or Education. Socioeconomic development ends up measuring the resources the individual actually has, thus enhancing his objective means of choice. The second one is value change shifting to emancipative values. In this case, what is enhanced is not the objective but the subjective ability towards human choice. The third one is democratization that, if accompanied – as it would be expected – by an increase of freedom rights, would actually make possible the objective and subjective power of choice that the two former development trends explained.

Again, next figure tries and pictures these ideas:

[click to enlarge]

If we add both frameworks, on one hand Castells’s Network Society and on the other Welzel et al.’s, we come up with the following figure, a figure that I have already presented here:

[click to enlarge]

The case of Spain

If we take Ferran Sabaté’s work (2007a, 2007b) after the World Economic Forum’s Networking Readiness Index 2006 for Spain, we clearly see that infrastructures are not the problem (they are undoubtedly and still a problem, but they are far from being the problem). As it it put clear in his two articles, as a quite e-developed country, Spain has reached a certain satisfactory degree of e-readiness based on a deep and wide development of infrastructures. What is lacking, and impedes a further e-development, is everything else that should accompany the deployment of infrastructures, namely a proper political strategy, digital literacy and, above all, a strong demand driven by private (mainly individual, but also corporate) interest — it is my opinion that, at the state we are in, lack of interest and digital illiteracy are almost the same thing and can be generalized as lack of e-Awareness.

What to do about it?

Let’s take the previous figure, let’s only keep the central column and let’s put two layers on top of it: first layer is how the web (we could actually speak of ICTs in general) has developed, from 1.0 — based on infrastructures and one-way information — to 2.0 — based on content and services and participation. Second layer is about two kinds of policies, one based on push strategies (wire cities, subsidize computer acquisition), the other one based on pull strategies (make people aware of their needs and how computers can help fulfill them, empower Administrations so citizens know they can ask for more public e-Services).

[click to enlarge]

It is my opinion that Spain — as many other (almost) e-developed countries — is just at the hinge between an Information Society based on infrastructures and the creation of a strong ICT sector, and another one based on highly digitally literate people that demand high quality digital content and services in an adequate regulation framework (adequate not for incumbent carriers, but for digital content and services provision: privacy, intellectual property rights, cyberlaw, etc.).

Not to stay forever at that hinge, the transition from 1.0 to 2.0 must be boosted. And it is my believe that, after a successful push strategies to set up the basements of a first phase of the Information Society, what is needed is pull strategies so that the growth, both in depth and width, of the Information Society is made socially sustainable according to citizens’ needs and, at the same time, economically sustainable according to customers’ will to pay.

More about this

I have kindly been invited to speak about this at the conference Difundir las TIC en la época 2.0: nuevos formatos, nuevos interrogantes y nuevas perspectivas [ICT diffusion in 2.0 times: new formats, new questions and new perspectives] (the event on Facebook).

More info

• Castells, M. (2000). “Materials for an exploratory theory of the network society”. In British Journal of Sociology, Jan-Mar 2000, 51(1), 5-24. London: Routledge.
• Welzel, C., Inglehart, R. & Klingemann, H. (2003). “The theory of human development: A cross-cultural analysis”. In European Journal of Political Research, 42(3), 341-379. Oxford: Blackwell.
• To get the Networking Readiness Index 2006: World Economic Forum. (2007). Global Information Technology Report 2006-2007. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Sabaté, F. (2007a). “¿Tan mal estamos de conectividad? [1]”. In Estrategias 2.0, 14 Noviembre 2007.
• Sabaté, F. (2007b). “¿Tan mal estamos de conectividad? [2]”. In Estrategias 2.0, 16 Noviembre 2007.
• Peña-López, Ismael (2005) “Digital literacy: push or pull strategies?” In ICTlogy, #19, 2005. Barcelona: ICTlogy.
• Adolfo Estalella y Edgar Gómez: ¿Difundir la ‘Web 2.0?, o como pasar de la tecnología a las prácticas, video on Blip.tv
• Ramón Sangüesa: Divulgación de la tecnología: ¿la construcción antes del 2.0?, video on Blip.tv
• Ismael Peña-López: El papel de la TIC y la Web 2.0 en el desarrollo: de las estrategias push a las estrategias pull, video on Blip.tv

Teemu Leinonen posted on Monday at FLOSSE Posse both an acknowledgment and a critique to the One Laptop per Child project: Thank you OLPC – Maybe now we may start to talk about education again.

While I’m no unconditional defender of the OLPC initiative — i.e. there are things I like, things I don’t, so I still don’t have a strong position for or against — I believe there are some statements Leinonen makes in his post that, IMHO, are not absolutely fair with the project.

I share most of his arguments but I don’t agree with some of them:

On one hand, I don’t think the project pretends that children “own” (in the sense of exclusive ownership he talks about) a computer. I honestly think is a matter of identifying the main user. Actually, the reason — I guess — behind giving the child a laptop and not giving it to the school is so he can take it home. By doing this, it is the whole family that receives the computer, and not only the child, so there is — at least potentially — a multiplier effect. Considering that the project is intended to serve mainly rural, isolated areas, providing a household with such a tool makes sense to me. I personally find the point that in general children do not own things quite excessive.

A second derivative (critique) of assigning not an institution but an individual — the child — the computer is that it goes against all values that foster sharing, community building and so. I would fully agree with such a critique if the XO computer had not a strong bet on mesh networking. I absolutely believe this does make a difference. By mesh networking sharing is boosted to the maximum — at least potentially, of course — and what could be seen as an individual tool becomes a networking node with many implications, including educational implications in both the field of knowledge and values.

Thus, the knowledge exchange that can take place in such an open and collaborative network is only enhanced by the huge amount of content embedded in the computer by default. Besides the fact that, as the software, this content can be localized — and this is a (soft) countercritique to the project’s (supposed lack of) sensibility towards different cultures and traditions — by bringing such content home, at least two things happen: the first one, as stated before, the whole family benefits from having that laptop home and not at the school; the second one is that that content stays with the student. If this student lives away from the school and spends there little time — specially compared to developed countries — it is not trivial that the more time he has access to content, the better. And just a remainder: if he is connected with other students wirelessly, the sense of “classroom” still exists, even if virtual.

There’s a last statement on Leinonen’s article that caught me by surprise and might be due to my ignorance on the project: the OLPC seems to believe that learning programming is the key to all other learning. I must confess it’s the first time I read this argument. If it were true, I’d be sharing most of the criticism around it. Nevertheless, I’d rather add some clarifications about this issue. Regardless if coding is a key issue in one’s education, digital literacy absolutely is. And besides my own thoughts on how literacy will evolve in the future closely tied to digital literacy until they both become “just” literacy, evidence shows that skilled individuals — and this includes by large digital literacy — will have it much better to work and socialize in a Network Society. Just in economic terms, employability and productivity will rely very much in digital skills in a world where ICT-based services will be the locomotive of development, above all in emerging economies.

I want to insist that I share and find most of Leinonen’s critiques really relevant, but I also believe that most of the buzz around the One Laptop per Child project has taken place in geek environments, thus shifting the debate towards technological aspects, and hence infringing a technological bias to the project that, in its origin — and this is my own, personal opinion — the project had not.

As in a pendulum movement, the reflections about the impact of ICTs in the Economy have swung from enthusiasm to realism and back to optimism, being each of these states really subjective and implying a wide range of shades within.

After a first period of cyberoptimism, people that “wanted to see” and people that thought “waiting to see” was a bad strategy because “it will then be too late”, followed a timespan where scientists — mainly economists — stuck to strict evidence from reality, being their main conclusion that the more you spend/invest in ICTs the more they affect both the share and the growth of the GDP — an obvious conclusion to many, I’d dare say, as it’ll happen with sweets if you spent half your national budget in candy.

In the last years, due to more data available and more and better analyses, we have been seeing new findings that, at last, seem to bring more light to the issue of the impact of ICTs on the Economy. In the following table I present a summary of a good bunch of such positive impacts. One caveat is due: as it is clarified in most of the documents listed below, evidence is not always subject to generalization. While sometimes it actually is, some findings apply only to specific contexts such as countries, economies, moments of time, constellations of conditions and so forth. I nevertheless believe that these impacts are worth listing because some were predicted — or expected — ten years or more before they could be measured. On the other hand, some caveats about the applicability of these findings are mainly based on (non) availability of data. Last, but not least, because even if some results only apply, as we have said, to specific economic setups, some of these setups could be reproduced in other contexts — e.g. in developing countries — in order to try to provide the same results.

Surprisingly — or not — there are few papers stating the negative impact of ICTs in the Economy. Some of them do not dare talking about negative impacts but of changes in the Economy: change of paradigm, organizational changes, turbulences in international markets, etc. and speak of them quite neutrally: they are neither positive nor negative on their own, but it will depend on a firm or a sector strength and position to benefit from them or to suffer them.

To be true, the only potential negative impact I have been able to find in economic papers — and also in sociological papers — is about employment. Again, a caveat: as I have shown before, most authors predict that the net effect on employment will be positive, and will be in the lines shown in the table. Nevertheless, some — among them Greenwood (1999) and Castells (2000) — picture some drawbacks of ICTs entering workers’ life. While the first one describes an impasse scenario where skilled workers will benefit while non-skilled will have to adapt to new technologies — losing productivity, competitiveness and earnings in the meanwhile — Castells is certainly more frightening, as he depicts the segmentation of workers in two axes: networked vs. switched-off labor, and self-programmable vs. generic labour. The conclusions are similar to Greenwood’s, but presumably to stay in the long run and with deeper consequences that spill from the labor market over the social and cultural arenas in a not really promising future for the switched-off and/or generic kind of workers.

References

Royal D. Colle wrote in 2005 an article that I now recovered: Building ICT4D capacity in and by African universities and that reminds me of my last experience with telecenters.

Colle’s thesis is quite simple, which does not mean that it is hence less true: reflection and practice, practice and reflection, must go hand in hand. Colle states that telecenters can function in at least three ways for universities:

• A means for reaching beyond their “ivory tower” to extend their knowledge and learning resources
• A laboratory for faculty and researchers
• A learning environment for students

The first point is interestingly ambiguous: on one hand, it means that universities should open their output, content, knowledge outside of their academic environments and revert or bring back the investment that society makes in universities. On the other hand, it also means that faculty should open their minds and realize there’s a real world outside and not just statistics and survey reports.

Reversely, telecenters could benefit from universities in many ways:

• Research about ICTs and information needs
• Local and relevant content, especially tailored for telecenters’ users
• Training and Learning resources — obvious
• ICT skilled human resources

Again, the corollary for the University is that it should (once more) get out of the ivory tower, disclose its practices and, over all, open its outputs, in the line of what open access, open science, open content initiatives promote.

My own conclusion is twofold: engage in the conversation, in the projects and in reality and, to do so, open and disclose your procedures, your findings, your networks to the limit.

Straightforward? Not really. In a world of web 2.0 philosophy and applications, it took 13 pages to David Beer and Roger Burrows to state (demostrate?) that you have to run your own blog, or have 100 friends in Facebook, to be able to write — with grounded arguments and evidence — about blogging or social networks. And I wonder if they succeeded in convincing anyone but the already convinced.