Epic show report

e-learninternational 2004 Edinburgh

February 2004
Report by Donald Clark, CEO, Epic Group plc

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?

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:

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

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.

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?

1. The freedom to choose
2. Need to break down barriers
3. Reliable systems
4. Changing traditional systems
5. Teachers as mentors
6. Have fun
7. 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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