Epic show report

e-learninternational 2004 Edinburgh

February 2004
Report by Donald Clark, Epic

Vive la difference!

I had a feeling that this would be a conference with a difference and so it proved. I particularly enjoyed the opening session that took a philosophical view of e-learning, before we descended into practical issues. This was refreshing. Secondly, the scenario planning approach. This gave the conference some unity of purpose. Thirdly, real kids contributing to conference: this was a revelation. They were fabulous... but more of that later.

Philosophy of e-learning
A philosophical riposte
Scenario driven
The best of the rest
Real kids contributing to conference
The panel
Appendix - Donald Clark's slides

Philosophy of e-learning
Having arrived late (courtesy of Squeezyjet) and sneaked into the first session, I was more than a little surprised to hear the opening talk on ‘Philosophy and e-learning’ by Professor Gordon Graham of the University of Aberdeen. He spoke eloquently on a number of issues related to the impact of technology on education and unlike most opening addresses, he posed some deep and thoughtful questions, such as:

Q How good are experts at predicting the future? A Not very. In addition to some historical examples such as the Wall Street crash and the collapse of the Berlin Wall, he also put forward the general proposition that humans are simply not good at predictions.

Q How good are we at anticipating benefits?

A Not very. Costs, he claimed, are often hidden as they are simply displaced rather than eliminated.

Q Will the benefits outweigh the benefits of getting there?

A Not often. Marginal gains are often exaggerated into substantial gains as marginality is easily disguised. He quoted the example of a piece of software introduced into his university that was supposed to improve the utilisation of rooms in the university. This, apparently, proved to be a waste of time.

Q Can we measure speed of change?

A No. There is no sensible measure here.

Q What is education for?

A Education is either useful or valuable, both are a means to an end. Information and knowledge are dangerous terms. We focus on what he called ‘technical education’ at our peril.

He ended with a summarising question. Will technology have a fundamental and radical effect on education? His answer – probably not. As we’ve had 2000 years of lectures and teachers, there is little chance that this will change.

A philosophical riposte
I was the next speaker, and as philosophy is one of my interests, I abandoned the first part of my talk to deliver a philosophical reply. I took up the challenge claiming that technology had already changed education forever and that the change was deep, profound and irreversible.

I applied a different philosophical technique, that of John Rawls, who uses a ‘veil of ignorance’ approach to such questions. Rawls wrote one of the most influential books of the 20th century on political philosophy – A Theory of Justice. Imagine for a moment that no educational institutions or structures existed. Take everything back to ground zero. Now try to imagine what one would do to build the ideal system. Would we have schooling in its current form? Would we have Universities that are closed for much of the year and work to a rural calendar? Would we spend so much money on the few at the expense of the many? I think not.

In fact, this exercise was the subject of an excellent book Reclaiming Education by Professor James Tooley (review of book is on www.epic.co.uk). He found that radical changes would have to be applied if one were to design the system from scratch. I agree.

Q How good are experts at predicting the future? A Getting better. For every surprise, there’s lots of forecasts that are right. In e-learning, although the growth figures were hyped and features such as LMSs, standards and reusable learning objects have not led to trigger points in the market, it is a market that has grown.

Q How good are we at anticipating benefits?

A This depends on how good we are at return on investment planning. There are many examples of e-learning saving time, money and resources. Do we really imagine that those 200 million hits a day on google are a waste of time and result in no increase in knowledge and productivity?

Q Will the benefits outweigh the benefits of getting there?

A Quoting the example of optimising the use of rooms in a university was a bad example. What one should be doing is questioning the very fact that universities should be allowed to get away with a 25% occupancy rate at best. This is waste that in any other area of human endeavour would be eliminated.

Q Can we measure speed of change?

A Yes. Moore’s law: Processing x2 every 18 months. Gilder’s law: Bandwidth x2 every 9 months. Storage law: x2 every 12 months. Network law: 2n (n=people on network). Growth figures for the internet, broadband, interactive television etc. have proved accurate. Indeed, in some cases, such as mobile sales and text messaging they proved conservative. The internet is getting bigger, better, faster, cheaper.

Q What is education for?

A We both agreed on this one. A too utilitarian approach will eliminate much that is good in the western, liberal tradition.

Where we differed was in our view of the future. I’m an optimist, Professor Gordon is a pessimist. Technology has and will continue to radically change the nature of learning. There were pedagogic shifts with writing, book publishing and now the internet, towards the learner. This latest shift moves power from institutions to individuals.

The rest of my talk was about this shift in power. See slides at the end of this report in appendix.

Scenario driven
Prior to the conference, four scenarios had been constructed. These were global scenarios for e-learning. What might the future hold for e-learning over the next decade? A range of issues surfaced in the discussions:

Speed of technology
Demographic trends
Online communities
Role of the teacher
Innovation in education
IP disputes
Convergence with KM
Quality of education
Government funding
Global politics
Attitudes to learning
Economic progress
Brain science
Society and technology New learning technologies
Scenario 1: Back to the future

This is a reversal. A fearful world where progress is thwarted, a world that feels weary with a lower appetite for innovation and standard learning experiences. An increasing sense of fear around terrorism and an unstable developing world. Technology in this scenario is a source of frustration.

Scenario 2: Virtually vanilla

Here power is retained by the existing players such as large corporations and universities. Powerful institutions set common standards and protocols with a few influential players maintaining control. Online learning is pursued as the most efficient method of corporate training. Commoditisation is the norm.

Scenario 3: U choose

This world is full of choices and complexity. A world of breaking boundaries w Here the local becomes more important than the global. Individuals choose and there’s a lack of trust in the technology and institutions that use the technology.

Scenario 4: Web of confidence

This was a future where e-learning plays a substantial role in learning. The technology becomes ubiquitous, and the content and approaches to learning get more sophisticated. Power shifts from institutions to individuals and new ideas come from innovative sources.

As one would expect there was a huge amount of sympathy for scenario 4. Unsurprising, given the audience. But many also had sympathy with scenario 1. Few were pessimistic enough to opt for 2 & 3. In fact, most seemed to settle on a pluralistic world, where technology plays a major role in education yet institutions remain as a means of delivery. It’s a complex world where many forms of learning, technology and opportunities for learning co-exist.

The best of the rest
Jay Cross gave an excellent talk on the way in which people and learning are changing in the face of new technology.

Alan Smith, from the University of South Queensland, gave us some great insights into an advanced use of e-learning in his University, the pros and the cons.

Diana Laurillard spoke about the recent DFES consultation document ‘Towards a unified e-learning strategy’. Diana certainly gets around and one must say that she makes every effort to get the ideas in front of people, even if the ideas are a bit one-sided (education only).

Donald Norris gave an excellent session on e-learning and government. The activity in the Department of Defense in the US is huge, but most modern democracies seem to be pouring money and attention into this area.

Etienne Wenger talked of communities of practice. This tended to drift off into abstract sociology and, unlike the opening session, bad philosophy. At one point the slide posed the question Does a flower know it’s a flower? This focus on communities is fine, but when all language and all human activity is seen as social it becomes trite 60s sociology. Learning is often profoundly personal. One brain on one book.

Groupwork and Groupthink are not always advantageous to learning. Children wallow in groups in primary schools, trainees drift and loaf in breakout groups in conferences. Social loafing is not unusual in group learning. My Irish colleague made an interesting point about group behaviour in Northern Ireland, which he described as a sectarian themepark!

Gareth Morgan gave a bewildering speech about second generation e-learning. However, what he showed looked more like early prototype first generation thinking; all learning objects and clipart.

Real kids contributing to conference
This was a revelation. How often do those in education and training really involve their customers in the debate? These kids had thought about e-learning and put on a show which, in terms of presentation skills, was better than most of the professional presenters, teachers and educational specialists over the two days. They were polished, funny, entertaining and relevant. How often can you say that about conference speeches?

They started by mimicking the classroom teacher, telling the audience off for laughing and not sitting down.

The great thing about this experience was its thought provoking effect. These kids are what it’s all about. We abandon them to bad teaching or bad e-learning at our peril. They didn’t like what they get and they told us!

What did they like?

The freedom to choose
Need to break down barriers
Reliable systems
Changing traditional systems
Teachers as mentors
Have fun
Teamwork
All of this was delivered through engaging drama and audience participation – wonderful! They deserved the rapturous applause.

The panel
The last session was a panel of experts. This was pretty good stuff. Jane Massy, in particular, made some excellent points:

“I’m not sure about learning as consumption. There’s a danger in learning being free at the point of consumption.”

“Time and time again I see the same thing - line managers really matter.”

Martin Sloman of the CIPD also made some good points about staying focused on the actual needs of learners and organisations and not the delivery mechanisms.

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Appendix – Donald Clark’s slides
Future learners

they are not like you
the web is their world (digital natives)
they are media literate
they play computer games
they expect to be in control
they have little patience - for the old ways of learning!
The control revolution

from institutions to individuals
WE decide how we buy, how we entertain ourselves, how we socialise and how we learn
digital abundance
bigger, better, faster, cheaper
largest learning resource on the planet
America’s Army

America’s Army
Future learners
new model - free content
America’s Army - over 2.0 million players
America’s Army now under attack
Under Ash (Syrian game)
the web is subversive
it subverts traditional education
Education can learn from games

Optional tutorials
Zone of proximity (good games operate in this zone)
Goals and sub-goals
Critical (even catastrophic) failure
Reinforcement
Feedback
Use of media (be careful)
Communities
Games and learning

Simulations
Real-time sims
People skills sims
Episodic sims
Software sims
Mini-sims
Collaborative sims
Physical/psychological fidelity
Use game shells
Reuse existing games
Online content is vast and complex

huge spectrum of content types
no single taxonomy of content
different degrees of resource types
different navigational complexity
levels of interactivity
media richness
The future?

New paradigm emerging - free learning
origins in the open source movement
Bibliotheca Alexandrina
Million Book Project
Bookmobile
Project Guttenburg
Distributed proofreading
Search Inside the Book
BBC - Creative Archives
Wikipedia
PLoS
MIT
Learningpool
Web is changing

true focus for learning is the mass media
global archiving, authoring and distribution
Napster and Open source - true catalysts
many hands make light work
drift towards the free
Open Source LMS
Open source

www.openoffice.org
China uses Linux
80% of Scotland’s libraries use OpenOffice
Munich’s 14,000 government PCs
Paris to follow
NATO using open source LMS
Unsung heroes

Shawn Fanning
Linus Torvalds
Sergey Brin and Larry Page
Michael Hart
Charles Frank
Jimmy Wales
Michael Eisen
Harold Varmus
Google - access to archives

window on the web
200 million searches per day
simplest interface on the web
$15 billion price tag
Sergey Brin and Larry Page (30)
Archiving

Books are fragile & difficult to search
Books fall into three categories:
1. In print and copyrighted
2. Out of copyright
3. Out of print and copyrighted
‘abandonware’ or ‘orphans’
lie idle and inaccessible
Lawrence Lessig 98% of books
Archiving

Bibliotheca Alexandrina
UNESCO and Egyptian Government
Library of Congress
10 billion web pages
Million Book Project
Million free books online
Why a million?
much bigger than atypical school library
typical of a large University library
National Science Foundation
100,000 texts at end of 2003
Production

publishers don’t have this stuff in a reasonable state or format
people flip pages - scan
guillotine off the spine - scan
robots turn pages - scan
production largely in India, China and Philippines
Bookmobile

Internet Bookmobile - $1 books
satellite dish, printer, binder and cutter
turns concept of a library on its head
toured US to Supreme Court
Sonny Bono Law (Mickey Mouse Law)
copyright extended from 14 to 80 (40 years)
Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig
Project Guttenburg

pre-1923 texts - over 6000 available
Congressional Research Service - only 2% have any commercial value
from Aeschlus to Wittgenstein
archive once, available forever
searchable, replicable
force for good
free e-books
Distributed proofreading

another angle
distributed proofreading
many hands make light work
back-to-back quality control
huge reductions in cost
into Project Guttenburg
Search Inside the Book
Amazon

search, reviews, personal recommendations
new project - Search Inside the Book
cleverly avoided copyright issues
you search within books
you don’t download
leads to more buying
BBC Creative Archive

BBC - Creative Archives
not the Digital Curriculum
Greg Dyke speech
copyright issues are immense
help from Lessig and Kahle
MIT - OpenCourseWare

www.ocw.mit.edu
Model has huge potential
William and Flora Hewitt Foundation - $11 m
groundbreaking
contributions from staff voluntary
5600 courses up and running - all by 2008
Negroponte, Pinker, Senge, Minsky
Wikipedia - redefining authoring

Encyclopaedia Britannica - 18th century
new ways to create content
‘wikiwiki’ means ‘quick’ in Hawiian
wiki publishing tools
quick & easy to create and edit web content
created by web users
good quality control
truly democratic
more hits than Encyclopaedia Britannica
PLoS
PLoS of science - Public Library of Science

Nobel Prize winner Harold Varmus
Journal of distinction
researchers pay to publish
not for profit
Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation - $9 m
eliminates barriers to learning
Learningpool - P2P Distribution
Napster/Kazaa

$1 billion down on revenues
Kazaa now taking the music industry to court
not altrusitic
learningpool - P2P learning

no repository of content
downloadable authoring tool
shared resources - reviews
In the school

SCHOLAR
BBC bite size and revision
In the university

National Study of Student Engagement
83% frequently use web for their classes
87% cut and paste without citations
download essays at $7 per page
www.turnitin.com
www.copycatch.co.uk
www.pickaprof.com
www.ratingsonline.com
In the workplace

Blended learning
Tools for determining blend
Collaborative learning
KM and training are merging
LMS, KM tools, intranet driven and Google
In the home

23 million have broadband in US
wireless - last mile to last room
networked MP3 players, game consoles, PDAs
broadcast TV in decline (18-34) TIVO
ultimate jukebox - every song, movie, book...
consumers leading business in technology
On the move

Ring tone sales greater than singles
Singles £65m Ringtones £75m
European ringtone market in 1 billion euros
Woolworths have a ringtone Top Ten chart
www.ringtones.co.uk
graphics and Java games
Fossil watch with share prices/weather, news messages
Longetty, text message revolutions, blog politics
On the move

open source - BIG TIME
unimaginable digital abundance
Naptserisation of movies
totally wireless
social networks
voice recognition

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