Technology Enhanced Education
Notes typed up from the excellent Technology Enhanced Education conference in Cardiff on 6th May. Though day to day will be looking after the actually software delivery lifecycle, like to understand the users and domain working in as much as possible. So was quite fortuitous this popped up on my second day. It was well attended (70-100 people?) with a good mix of lecturers, students, librarians, tech people and others staff. Education is a brand new domain for me, so all quite new and these are just initial thoughts. Though a lot of the issues felt familiar. The introduction covered the drivers for using tech in learning and teaching - from political, economic and institutional angles. Not sure how much of that is public domain or Cardiff specific, so will skip over some of that. But some issues will be very common. With the introduction of higher fees people will expect more - depite cuts means those fees aren't actually extra money. Even though students in Wales are spared the full brunt of fees, half of Cardiff's students are from England. The challenge is providing a high quality and inspiring experience throughout the university. Technology, and smart use of it, could help in some areas.
Digital Literacy
This was was a big theme of the day. Not computer literacy, the basics of how to use the blasted things, but rather how to manage information and your online presence. Seems to be analogous to the difference between being able to read & write, and English lessons. Education needs to not just provide current subject-specific knowledge, but equip students for sifting though and dealing with the increasing amount of information that is available. And possibly even more importantly - the amount that will be available to them in the future, so they can carry on with lifelong learning.
Also needed is an awareness of technology use, social networks, privacy issues and such. This need varies between subjects. With some it's key like Journalism, the importance of Twitter and networking being highlighted. While other courses it's a potential minefield of privacy and professional conduct issues, like Medicine. It's not like just publishing a paper at the end of a course now - with blogs, networks & comments all potentially online and spread instantly, a career could be started or ended before even leaving university in some cases.
How these skills are picked up is an issue. Are they indeed, just "picked up", or specifically taught? And do lecturers know more about these emergent areas than students? Again, varies massively by subject (see open v closed below, where this resurfaced). For what it's worth, my view would be it needs to be treated like other soft skills and professional conduct topics by integrating into a course, even if just half a module. Actually my real view is this stuff should be taught in secondary school syllabus, but that's in no way guaranteed!
Student Views
There was a student panel - was really impressed by them, Cardiff must be churning out some good students. Confident and thoughtful, they had some interesting opinions. Shame they weren't there for the whole day though - other sections were naturally biased towards lecturers & staff. Not only for the benefit of their input, but for them to see & disseminate around some of the issues the lecturers were thinking through. It's like a lot of businesses now - collaboration across departments, areas and roles seems to be pretty key to successful organisations.
Learning Central, Blackboard under the hood I gather, is the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) of choice. VLEs are new to me, but there was a lot of discussion about their use, along with the traditional (normal in my day, now I feel old...) paper handouts or chalk & talk. Views on best techniques varied from school to school - understandably. What works for English wouldn't work for Chemistry, which wouldn't work for Law. Most lecturers seem to put presentation up for download, so can be viewed online (on an iPad in class if particularly swish) or printed out before a lecture. There's some use in certain schools of recording lectures (see Law in the demos below) - this seemed particularly popular with practical subject like Chemistry. Being able to rewatch a session afterwards must be invaluable over just reading notes. That of course opens up the possibilities of iTunesU type experiences.Anecdotal evidence, but a whole pile of anecdote, that University email is rarely checked. Maybe once every couple of days. Makes sense. Back in the day, when I was at uni, that was my only email address. And had a pager, no phone! Now everyone starting will have their own personal email already, and with Facebook, Twitter, mobiles etc, a uni only email is pretty low down the must check list. One possibility could be to forward elsewhere, or integrate portal style into an overall dashboard (that has other more compelling reasons to check).
Timeliness was another issue, both notification of lecture changes/cancellation, and of work feedback. A lot of that is outside how tech can help - only so fast a lecturer can mark 300 students! Use of mobile, online communities between students/staff and so on could certainly mitigate some of the concerns though.
One interesting nugget, apparently the largest percentage of students use Blackberries, which seemed surprising (will need to follow up those stats). To do with upfront costs as much as the tech. Obviously such things will need to inform mobile development approaches - web apps vs native apps, which OS etc.
Demos & More
Some interesting demos were on display. Panopto looked great - a way to record lectures, either with a camera or simply syncing of slides with audio. A bit of investigation afterwards shows it can generate standard MP4 video files, along with RSS feeds. So a student could subscribe to a whole series of lectures. It also makes an MP3 feed available for those just wanting the audio.
Used Adobe Connect for live lectures, first a the Head Conference a few years ago - Panopto seems very similar. Currently the Law School is using it (hosted on own data servers). That led onto noting that most of the demos were being done by individual schools. Was interesting to see that Universities have the same issue all large companies have with vertical silos and centralised vs decentralised IT. How much should go through the tech area? How much autonomy should each area have. Personal view is quite happy for individual areas to be pragmatic, especially if the central area isn't large enough to develop everything. The benefit of the central area can then become part consultancy and awareness - being able to suggest certain existing solutions to problems (either "we're aware of but haven't trialled", or "we or xyz school have used successfully" - interesting chat with Joe Nicholls about the importance of the distinction). So if a school uses some new technology/idea, the central area should be aware of it to help communicate it to other areas. Or review it to see if can improve - in the example above perhaps moving to a central data store so all could use, and with common backups, resilience etc.Important for the awareness to be there early though, so the (always common!) issue of area A doing something similar to area B thing can be highlighted. Or any massive warning flags raised (DPA, governances issues etc).Without a fairly open approach you just get a massive hidden shadow IT - would believe how much key business software is hidden in Excel. Or perhaps would. All that said, not a uniquely IT thing. Similar thing with any area trying a new technique, style or process (nothing to do with tech say) - how do other areas find out about it? S'all about the communication channels.
Open vs Closed
This was another recurring theme. Do we taken teaching and learning to places where students are - eg Facebook groups, Twitter, Google Apps or provide a walled garden internal only software such as the Lotus suite & Blackboard.
From a couple of presentations and figures it seemed that students much more readily adopt, say a Facebook group than an internal wiki. But would be interested to find out the reasons - simply familiarity? Already using it? Lack of training? Not being yet-another-thing-to-check? Different by demographic/subject (would expect new media/marketing students to be happy with Facebook)? And there's a host of privacy and boundary issues too. Lecturers being Facebook friends with students seems like a tabloid headline in waiting. Though use of groups as a common DMZ, along with privacy settings can overcome some of this. Then there's the whole image/branding issue over an internal hosted app over a generic external one.
There seems to be a lot of existing discussion in the open/closed area - an old post from AnneMarie, and there's a lot of thought on this from the Open Uni folks in particular. My first instinct would be not to replicate existing external sites, but there seem to be really quite strong arguments both ways. There's probably an answer somewhere along the scale, rather than at the extremes, or in a mix of uses. Pretty sure both will get used, it'll be more about the information flow between them.
Educational Theory & Lectures
Some afternoon session covered educational theory, with practical experiences, while the final lecture was about, well, the lecture. Different formats & how tech could be incorporated. I'll readily admit some of the talk of cognitive theory and constructivism went a little over my head, but it's sparked some interesting areas to read up on. Though interestingly seems to be quite an overlap with my previous life working on User Experience stuff.
There were some real life figures on the take up of wikis and collaboration tools by students. Admittedly by new media, PR and business areas, so a biased sample! Tying back to earlier comments from students about not using email much - lecturers confirmed they would get little response to emailed questions, while on something like a Facebook group or message there would be instant feedback. The downsides of these things vary, from time consuming wiki-gardening to the whole kettle of monkeys of professional/private life boundaries.
The lecture-lecture used an interesting Goldfish bowl format. I've used this in meetings before (it's an Agile thing - along with trying conch shells and de Bono's thinking hats game), but not seen in a lecture. Was interesting, though if I was a student think I'd like to see the lecturer as host/lead, perhaps with students in the goldfish bowl - again back to the "Oi! I've paid money for this" thing.Not sure how many lecturers would be brave enough to have a twitter backchannel during lectures. And of course that exposes a lot - back to the open/closed networks debate.Incidentally there's a halfway point with a backchannel between totally open Twitter and an internal Yammer style second network - twitterfall lets you specify a list along with a hashtag (just enter @lecturer/classList in the "Lists" box). That at least restricts people appearing on the wall to the class - otherwise students will definitely highjack a tag to insert hilarious (sic) tweets into friends' lectures. It happens at most conferences and events!
Overall
Very good conference though, everything appeared to run like clockwork too. A good turnout and mix of people. About a dozen areas want to read up on, which is always a good sign.
And nice to have chats with @joenicholls, @mrsimonwood, @egrommet, @sarahnicholas, @beckymogg and many others without @ symbols!Also, the word pedagogy sounds a bit Welsh.
