Interview
Seb Schmoller, Executive Secretary of the Association for Learning
Technology (ALT)
As thought leaders,
Epic is also keen to hear the opinions and experiences of influential
figures within the learning industry. You may remember we ran an
interview with Professor Roy Leitch, of the Interactive University,
in May. This month, Seb Schmoller, Executive Secretary of the Association
of Learning Technology, has generously answered our e-learning questionnaire.
The questionnaire aims to get personal views, rather than general
thoughts on the state of the market and the questions have been
designed acccordingly.
Q What's your INTEREST
in learning/online learning?
I spent 25 years working in Further Education, teaching and developing
TUC courses for trade union representatives. Through the TUC I got
involved in pre-internet online distance learning courses, using
a Swedish conferencing system called PortaCOM. I applied what I’d
learned in the creation of LeTTOL, a web-based online course for
teachers wanting to learn how to teach on-line – http://www.lettol.ac.uk/,
which, several thousand learners later, won a National Training
Award in 2003. My interests now centre, through ALT, on establishing
learning technology as a discipline, and learning technologist as
a profession, and in the other half of the week mainly on helping
organisations implement sustainable e-learning.
Q What interactive technology do
you use and have at HOME?
Several radios and a telly. All four people in my household have
networked computers, one of which is a Mac, and one of which is
used for making music. My sons use iPODs. No Digital TV. No games
machines. No self-filling fridge. I have and use a lot of books,
which you could class as an interactive technology.
Q What stands out as your MOST EFFECTIVE
learning experience?
A week training to be a trade union studies tutor. Extremely challenging.
Plenty of feedback. Combining learning about a curriculum with learning
how to tutor it.
Reading “Inside the Black Box – Raising Standards through
Classroom Assessment” by Paul Black and Dylan William. An
in-a-nutshell summary of why giving learners timely and motivating
formative feedback is the most important determinant of how fast
and well they learn. http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/education/publications/blackbox.html
Q What stands out as your LEAST
EFFECTIVE learning experience?
A year training to be a further education teacher. Diffuse. Lacking
in practicality. Thin on (useful) theory.
Q Any really NEW AND INNOVATIVE IDEAS
out there?
When I see the word “innovative” my heart sinks, even
more so when I see the words “really new and innovative”.
This is because I believe in honing and improving ideas and methods
which work, rather than moving to the next fad, and in e-learning
there are a lot of fads. Of course the danger with this approach
is that you can be blind to necessary or beneficial innovations.
So, if pushed I would say that applications like http://www.jot.com/
which enable users to build Wikis without any special syntax are
worth keeping an eye on, as are tools like http://search.yahoo.com/cc
which finds content across the Web that has a Creative
Commons license.
Q What do you want that DOESN'T YET
EXIST in learning/online learning?
Machine translation! But this interesting piece about “The
Google Translator” - http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-05-22-n83.html
- perhaps shows that something sitting in the background which enables
people to converse with each other online when using different languages
is not that far off.
Q Any views on the phrase and concept
'BLENDED LEARNING'?
The term provided a bolt hole for traditionalists wanting to defend
face-to-face teaching against the encroachment of online learning.
Q Any views on GAMES in learning/online
learning?
I trust my sons’ judgement that the value of games in learning
is exaggerated. But I think I am probably missing something.
Q Any views on INTERACTIVE TV in
learning/online learning?
In a previous role I helped develop “Keep IT In The Family”.
This was a simple quiz – a game, even – to test a user’s
IT knowledge, at three levels of difficulty, and to recommend suitable
IT courses depending on the user’s knowledge. It was served
from The Sheffield College and was freely available over the Internet,
or to Telewest DiTV subscribers. At one point, judged by the number
of users, Keep IT In The Family was one of Telewest’s most
popular interactive services. That said, I feel that learning is
a category of activity which normally requires learners to be able
to concentrate, free from interruption, with a means of making complex
inputs (currently using a keyboard). TVs typically neither have
the necessary input devices, nor is a living room a conducive environment
for learning.
Q Any views on MOBILE DEVICES in
learning/online learning?
I’ve not yet read “JISC Landscape Study on the use
of Mobile and Wireless Technologies for Learning and Teaching in
the Post-16 Sector”. Certainly the pressure is now on content
developers to make sure that content will run adequately on a wider
range of access devices than just a PC or a Mac. And users of mobile
devices are paying for data by volume rather than at a flat rate.
So they may not thank you for media-rich content, even if it is
educationally effective.
Q Any views on OPEN SOURCE in learning/online learning?
Open Source. I use Firefox and Thunderbird as
my main browser and email client. Moodle, for example, is certainly
presenting an interesting challenge to LMS vendors. But in 5 years
time I think there will continue to be a “mixed economy”
of software products in the provision of e-learning.
Open Content. Initiatives like MIT’s Open
CourseWare - http://ocw.mit.edu/
- and the stunning W3 Schools web site - http://www.w3schools.com/
- show the power and significance of freely available e-learning
content.
Q What's your favourite PHRASE/QUOTE/EPIGRAM
in learning/online learning?
Because Jacob Bronowski’s “The Ascent of Man”
was so influential, and because so many of his quotes make you think,
I was disappointed to find that I’d been wrongly attributing
“A word is worth a thousand pictures” to him, including
the accent. It is still my favourite phrase in learning/online learning,
mind.
Q Could you recommend a PIECE OF RESEARCH in learning/online
learning?
Learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning: a systematic
and critical review. This report, by Frank Coffield, David Moseley,
Elaine Hall, and Kathryn Ecclestone, is freely available for download
from the Learning and Skills Development Agency. It critically reviews
the literature on learning styles, and it calls into question the
way in which learning styles inventories are in widespread use,
often with next to no evidence as to their validity. http://www.lsda.org.uk/pubs/dbaseout/download.asp?code=1543
Q Could you recommend a BOOK in
learning/online learning?
The user illusion, cutting consciousness down to size by Tor Nørretranders
(ISBN: 0140230122). More about the nature of consciousness than
about learning, but provides convincing evidence that the conscious
mind is only able to deal with a tiny proportion of the data it
receives - perhaps as little as 30 bits per second. The mind then
creates a “media-rich” consciousness from this thin
data-stream. We’ve evolved to interpret the sensually complex
real world in an effective way; but that does not mean that our
brains are good at effectively interpreting media-rich learning
materials, which should hence be used (if used) with great care.
Q Could you recommend a WEBSITE in
learning/online learning?
W3 Schools - http://www.w3schools.com/.
Q If you were to pick one CONFERENCE
to attend in learning/online learning, what would it be?
ALT-C. Why? I work
for the organisation which runs it. ALT-C has enough depth and breadth
for an astute delegate to be able to plot a varied, interesting,
and rewarding course through it. The booking deadline is 12/8/2005.
Q Any words/phrases/ideas you'd like
to BAN from learning/online learning?
Word. Blended.
Phrase. Compelling content.
Idea. Digital natives and immigrants (which is
not to say that Mark Prensky’s Digital Game-based Learning
(ISBN: 0071363440) has nothing useful to say – both it and
he have!).
Q Anything in learning/online learning
that you strongly believed in, on which you have now CHANGED YOUR
MIND?
I used strongly to believe that learning without some face-to-face
contact between learners is unavoidably and badly second best. Thus
online distance courses just had to start and preferably finish
with a face-to-face session, and if possible have face-to-face activity
in the middle. I now know that if the course design is right, and
if the learners are suitably experienced – both big ifs -
this is not the case.
Q Anything else you'd like to add?
The impact of “always on” wireless connectivity on
learning/online learning will be bigger than many people realise.
Partly because of how access devices will change (getting smaller,
more multipurpose, and in some respects less usable), and partly
because of how different kinds of data will be available to be integrated
into the content (for example positional, location-specific, or
“friends-close-by” data).
Hope you found the questions stimulating.
Thanks for your answers.
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