Says so much - we don't dare talk

CC By SA Mark Leggett

Myths, lies and bullshit

Its time to start (re)exposing the myths, lies and mountains of bullshit around education - especially in relation to social media, openness and online learning. If we don't try and gain some perspective on all this, our efforts to develop appropriate educational practices will amount to changes of no significant difference, resulting from a whole lot of pissing in the wind, pushing shit uphill, and hitting our heads against brick walls. You've heard it all before - the same as it has been for most efforts that have come before.

Social media in education



In 2004 Robin Sloan, Matt Thompson and Aaron McLeran released the video EPIC2014 with the following stand out lines:

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times. In the year 2014 people have access to a breadth and depth of information unimaginable in an earlier age... At its best, EPIC [Evolving Personalised Information Construct] is a summary of the world — deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything ever available before. But at its worst, and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow and sensational... Perhaps there was another way."

There is a role that education can play in the EPIC forecast to help ensure that for as many people as possible it is the best of times, but of course we know it will never be. Commenting in 2005 on the accuracy of the predictions in their video Matt Thompson said, "Robin and I know 2014 won't resemble the future EPIC describes. Because 2005 already does." And in 2009 most people still have no idea how they might use this new media scape to their educational benefit. Most aren't even aware that it exists!

In 2009, 5 years after Youtube became popular in the world, the NSW Department of Education and Training (Australia's largest state education body) unblocked Youtube - for teachers only. Twitter remains blocked for everyone in school, as do numerous other social media platforms that make up the mediascape described in the EPIC video. A situation of censorship, blockage or just poor performance that is common in most educational institutions that have made computing a central force in their practice.

More recently and more famously, anthropologist Michael Wesch released his video The Machine is Using Us that endeavors to explain how and why this new media is significant (his longer videos go into more depth). But over the past 5 years I am yet to met a teacher in Australia or New Zealand who can talk at any length about Wikipedia's role in education. I know only 2 or 3 who use Youtube beyond simple viewing, and only a handful who have 'opened' their practice up for wider participation and involvement. The vast majority of the teachers I work with still have no idea how to make a hyper link, how to use tabbed browsing, what it means to subscribe to RSS feeds, or even begin to imagine what use these things would be in their profession, let alone their students and the wider community. I've given up on the possibility that the education sector might help ensure the best of times for people in the epic future of now. That assurance will have to come from somewhere else.



Open education
And what of open education - currently hijacked by another concept known as open educational resources (OER)? It is the peak of digital and network awareness in the education sector, but what relevance does it have to teachers and students really? According to the two videos, we already have all the access we need, so if we were to answer that question from the perspective of resources alone, we could only conclude nothing! OER has nothing to offer teachers and students at all. A teacher doesn't need OER to make it ok doing the things they do anyway. A normal person doesn't care if the resource they are using is an illegitimate copy in a format that doesn't meet standards of obscure freedom - they just want access, and so far they have it.

OER promises more efficient production of content - based on collaboration; reusability of content - based on copyright; and sustainability of content - based on formats. These are the concerns of the publishing industry, libraries and educational policy makers. Copyright and format standards are nothing more than geeky nuisances to the average teacher I work with, who hours before class is printing off the staple bound A4 photo copy they have been piecing together for 4 years now, or burning illegitimate copies of CDROMs that the library bought for a packet 10 years ago, or slapping together a restricted access Moodle for the first and only time, relying heavily on over time, Google (anything-will-do) search, and technical assistance.

As it turns out, no-one is reusing OER anyway, and this is just evidence that the publishing industry is well and truly asleep at their wheel. Even if teachers had the prerequisite skills, awareness and political disposition for appreciating OER (assuming that person still works in education), we all know that educational content is inherently non-reusable anyway, making collaboration even more difficult and the rest redundant. Let's face it, the concept of open educational resources needs to be very broad in scope if it is to survive the hell ride of implementation, which is why open education is less about content than it is about practice - probably most of all in the process of assessment.

Certainly narrowing open education down to a MediaWiki, the Internet or even digital formats will ultimately cripple progress toward a free and egalitarian education system. Open education is about much more than content...

Online learning
At the beginning of 2008 almost 70% of NZ was not connected to a useful Internet, and apparently 80% of the world had no dial tone - online learning is the practice of a minority, and yet has been the primary focus of most educational development funding over the past 15 years. Why is this? How is it that policy makers and funding agents had the apparent foresight 15 years ago to start investing huge amounts of money into computer mediated online learning? This was long before there was any evidence to say it would benefit people learning? And long long before we had any evidence to say it would be useful to teaching and education - we're still waiting for that evidence.

In 2004, when the Internet was only starting to have signs of persistent impact on our way of life - it would seem that this investment money had all but dried up when it came to ideas about open education and engaging with social media. 15 years later, and billions of dollars down, how can we know it was money well spent? Well it wasn't. We have countless CDROMs sitting under dust on library shelves, we have learning object repositories complete with SCORM compliance and DRM, painfully stupid learning management systems that struggle to work with our even more painful student management systems! And most of all we have a deeply entrenched IT infrastructure that is totally geared towards restricting access rather than granting access to learning and opportunities for education. Today, if you spoke to most people living in the worst times of epic, you'd have to wonder about the wisdom and motivations of the of the education sector.

Age old questions
So my question is this: What is it REALLY that is causing the teacher disengagement from something so apparently important to the meaning of literacy, teaching and access to learning? Why does it seem that the world's greatest encyclopedia, the most phenomenal video library and the most in depth access to first hand experience is made up by everyone except those wrapped up in the education system? Perhaps there is wisdom in the crowd, and that disengagement is the only appropriate response to something that's worth to the education system remains to be seen? Is it really a simple question of policy, incentives and rewards? Or is it something deeper in the psyche of a teacher, a student, human sensibilities of power and the system of education? Could it really be true, that education has never been about the empowerment of people really, rather the survival of an institution? That would mean that me, you and all those good people we've met are all part of that inevitable goal. How undignified it is to know the set up is wrong headed, but there isn't anything you can do about it but help it stay that way.






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Measuring open education - how we value it?

I really enjoy meeting with Russell and Shelagh at the University. I find their conversation stimulating, and I'm excited at the direction they are leading the project to 'measure' Otago Poly's open education work. This is our second meeting, where in the first we agreed to gather data on usage and value. This meeting was to discuss how we would go about measuring value.

Over the past week, I have been gathering usage data such as numbers of views of a resource, responses, and reuses, as well as file sizes with a view to trying to assertain how much we are saving (or not) by using web based services like Youtube and Wikieducator instead of our own. Reviewing this work in today's meeting, we realised that we need to do more of this sort of comparative analysis between "closed" and "open" educational resources and practices - if we want to be able to make recommendations about our open education.

So far I am working with the following questions for the usage analysis:

This is a measure of the usage of OER which includes videos, images, audio files, slide presentations, course outlines, lesson plans, assessments outlines, and other documents based on statistical records maintained by the content management systems that host and serve the OERs, as well as external measurement tools such as Google Analytics and Alexa. It is also a measure of the worth of those content management systems based on how much it would have cost the Polytechnic to set up and run equivalent systems.

1. How many OER are online and openly accessible?
2. How long has the OER been online?
3. What proportion of a course's resources are open?
4. How many enrolled students are in a course, and how many nominal learning hours were on OER?
5. How many views or downloads has each OER had?
6. How many comments, ratings, and other responses has each OER had?
7. What is the individual and collective data size of the OERs?
8. How much would it have cost the Polytechnic to serve the amount of data multiplied by the number of views of the OER?
9. How much would it cost the Polytechnic to install and manage the content management systems currently used for the OER?
10. What is the worth of the marketing gains based on the rate of views and responses to the OER?
11. How many OERs has the Polytechnic sampled and reused in its own OER, and what is the financial worth of that reuse?

Todays meeting was really to start pinning down the harder measure though - that of how our convenience sample value their work in open education. Both Shelagh and Russell are willing and able to video interview staff while in the process of doing what they do in their open education work. "Lived experience" video as Shelagh calls it. From those interviews, we will identify key themes based on what is said and not said - the not-said stuff being what Russell calls "white data", or what Shelagh calls "messy data". From that white and messy stuff .. we might be able to determine levels of understanding or perceived importance etc.

We will likely segment what people say and do in the interviews into categories such as behavioral categories like producers, prosumers and consumers, to see if there is any correlation in what we find and what other research that Shelagh referred to in the marketing sector. This also consciously avoids problematic segmentation such as teachers and students.

It has been extremely interesting for me to explain the purpose and objective of the project (flavoured with my usual opinions on how and why) and to have Shelagh and Russell consider it from their research area perspectives - highlighting areas I hadn't considered before, or seen anywhere else in the educational development writing. I'm confident that because Shelagh works in marketing and Russell in learning (as apposed to teaching and education) this project is going to develop methods and incites quite new to the field.

My job now is to seek ethics approval from our Polytechnic's Research Ethics Committee, and gather up all the forms for us to present a method for ethical consideration.

I know now that we will not be able to complete the study before Vancouver's Open Education conference, but I will have usage data to present, and a method for assessing the value - maybe even a few interview samples to show. I expect we will have a report and recommendations ready in time for the paper to IRRODL however. I'm so excited by the possible descoveries in this project that I don't want to rush it.

Russell, Shelagh and I are meeting each Friday afternoon from now on, and we'll hopefully be recording interviews 2-3 weeks from now.



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Sustainable business course update

We had the first stakeholder meeting since funding approval to develop a sustainable business course, with business support agents from the Otago Chamber of Commerce, Dunedin City Council's Audacious business awards, Inland Revenue, Trade and Enterprise and Polytechnic. We updated on the project that has achieved funding. Reviewing the 3 stages of development:

1. Write a business planning workbook with emphasis on sustainability considerations
2. Coordinate events, seminars, and workshops that align to the topics in the workbook.
3. Set up an accredited course for people wanting to start a sustainable business with local business support agencies helping to assess business plan based outcomes.

The workbook
The first discussion point was around the NZTE text from which the new text will be based. The question was if it was sufficient to be useful in developing a business plan as the final outcome for course participants. It was agreed that it was not sufficient, and that we would need to incorporate the companion text from NZTE as well - Planning for Success. The first text, Starting a Business is essentially a SWOT analysis and feasibility study, and the Planning for Success is more about the formation of a business plan. The basic structure for the combined and new text therefore would be:

1. Business Idea
2. Sustainability overview (looking for a new word with more meaning than sustainability, or simply drop the extra word all together)
3. SWOT and feasibility
4. Create a business plan
5. Pitch the business idea

After the sustainability overview, the ethic, principles and methods of sustainability will weave in throughout the other topics.

The text will be developed on Wikibooks, with Chris Young - a local consultant playing a lead editor role. He is now breaking down the 2 NZTE texts to their chapters and topics, with a view to arranging them under the above 5 areas, and adding new topics where needed.

I am currently finding a space in Wikibooks to begin work there.

The seminars and workshops
Once we have a clear idea of the workbook structure and all the sub topics, we will set to work finding existing media and resources, including local seminars, workshops and events that align to the topics. Ultimately we are hoping to have both face to face events and their equivalent online media or recordings for alternative access. We have the potential to offer the course within prisons for example, so the ability to download offline media to use would be useful - as it would be for community learning centres and individuals studying at a distance.

There was some discussion about all the existing seminars and media:

1. Rae Farrell from Otago Chamber of Commerce recommended Paul Allen as a key person for start up businesses in Dunedin and as a valuable contact in the collecting of resources and negotiating live events.
2. Rae and others agreed that typical weakness areas for local start up businesses are marketing and financials.
3. The Inland Revenue team considered the idea of recording media and making it available to the public. There were some ideas about hosting such media on the IRD website so as to maintain currency. This led to discussion about existing media on other sites such as NZTE. It may be necessary to try and get copyrights on this media so that people can confidently download and reuse for a wider range of purposes...
4. IRD mentioned their Tools for Business but I'm having some difficulty locating it.
5. Rae from the Chamber mentioned the Department of Labour's OSH bins (difficult to locate as welldifficulty in locating these resources or Karl Senky, so I'll need to double check this info with Rae.
6. There was some discussion about how we might go about collecting up local case studies. It was agreed to be more valuable to go nation wide in search of case studies, looking into media outlets for stories.
7. I mentioned my over all disappointment with the lack of good clear guidelines for small businesses to plan and operate. Internationally I have found the Reporting Guidelines and and interesting project known as financial permaculture - specifically the idea of using a structure of ethic, principles, methods and outcomes to plan and operate for sustainability.
8. Bridget from the Polytechnic tabled printed examples from the Ministry of Tourism's strategy document and the Ministry for Environment's case study sheets such as Dive Tutukaka.
9. Some discussion about the virtues of the Qualmark standard and its relevance to participants on
10. I raised the question of how we might pool resources that we find so as to be beneficial to all the stakeholders. DCC Sustainability forums was one suggestion. Other than that it might have to remain as word-of-mouth and email :( - might be my abilities in hearing kiwi accents :) as well as Dept of Labour's Employment Contracts guidelines with a key contact being Karl Senky.

The meeting was quite encouraging, with good levels of interest in where we are going, and very valuable recommendations from the group. At this stage Chris, myself and the graphic designer will focus our efforts on structuring the topics for the text and doing a comprehensive resource collection effort throughout the rest of July, starting to write throughout August, with a first draft ready by the end of August. We should reconvene another meeting at the end of August or early September to review the draft and try coordinating our efforts on seminars and workshops that relate to the topics, and plan new ones, and negotiate recording and media distribution rights.

Thanks all for coming.



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The Edgeless University (and Polytechnic?)

Keith Lyons in Canberra mentioned this report, so I noted it for a read. While its yet another PDF (the format of the academics as they ponder the worth of hypertext), and just as guilty of being a self referential sample of [mostly unheard of people's] opinion (this time UK based), it is still worth a read - even if all you need is a nice little reaffirmation of what edubloggers have been writing about for 5 or more years now.

I found this report quite a clear and to the point argument on how higher education needs to think about changing practices to align with pressures brought about (broadly speaking) by information and communications technology. I feel good in saying that the relatively small proportion of educational development we have been doing the past 3 years, fits all the recommendations in the report (even if we are just a little Polytechnic). George is right to point out that it is not just a technological disruption putting pressure on the universities, but I would say that it is the most significant element - in that it enables so many other disruptive elements and change agents to take shape and strengthen. As the report itself says:

With an increasing diversity of students and student needs,
fierce competition, and a crunch on funding, it is not surprising
that some commentators are predicting the end of the university
as we have known it...

...This [change] is driven by people finding new ways to access and use ideas and knowledge, by new networks of learning and innovation, and by collaborative research networks that span institutions and businesses. It is an increasingly international phenomenon. Across the globe, countries are pushing for greater advantages in education and innovation. There is an ever-growing environment of learning, research and knowledge exchange of which universities are one part.

So to a very large degree, information and communications technology - but more importantly, people's growing capacity to independently use such technology, is stimulating much of that change. For example, in the time I have been here at Otago Polytechnic, it is observable (I think) that as people sign up to broadband and become more accustomed to using the Internet for more and more tasks, the types and breadth of educational conversations are changing along with it.

This report, in the format it comes to us in, is evidence to me that the messages of change are filtering up through the establishment relatively clean and uncorrupted. What the edublogs have been talking about for over 5 years now is making it through unscathed. Either this is a sign of the message being worthy and getting taken seriously - or (considering the self referential nature of these pdfs lately) a sign of a cynical embrace of change at a rhetorical level only! Time will tell, my bets are on history repeating itself I'm sorry to say.

Some perla quotes from the report:

The aim has to be to make those running universities realise that technology isn’t just something that means you build a room full of computers on your campus

Malcolm Read, Executive Secretary, JISC

This is where a university’s values can reassert themselves.
As more content is available, guidance and expertise in sorting
and assessing it become more valuable. As more people seek
flexible and informal learning, they will need the accreditation
and support of established institutions. As researchers and
learners try to acquire the skills of searching, analysing and
sorting information, the expertise of academics will be
invaluable. As learners look to assert the value of their learning,
and researchers their work, affiliation to established institutions
will signal valuable quality.

P12. That has to me too many times before!

This will require a commitment to open content and shared
resources, and investment in the management and curatorship of
vast amounts of data and knowledge. It will also mean offering
new kinds of courses, accreditation and affiliation that use
informal learning and research networks and connect them to the
formal system.

P13. And boy does Otago need to invest in management and curatorship. I've pushed for library services to no avail...

In an expert roundtable conducted by Demos, one participant
used a telling analogy to describe the current predicament of the
higher education sector: ‘This seminar feels a bit like sitting with
a group of record industry executives in 1999.’

P13. Nice one! Sharp and so true. Educational policy is decades behind those who have gone before

Still reading... starting to nod off tho. Pdfs! they're so long! Seeing as Michael Wesch is in there as aninterviewee, I might just watch one of his videos again ;)

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Measuring open education

Ever since Kathy Sierra dropped the idea to mix up marketing with education, I've been looking for a way to mix up their typical research methods. (Yes, I hold on to an idea a long time...)

Last Friday, after I had confirmation that Ako would be funding us to measure the effectiveness of our open education work, I invited Shelagh Ferguson from Otago University's Faculty of Marketing, and Russel Butson from the same university's Educational Development Centre, to help start some thinking about a good method with which to measure open education. Shelagh has a growing interest in social media marketing (in the broader sense of the word) and Russel has an established interest in informal learning. The conversation that followed between us 3 revealed that Kathy was right! The two fields do have a lot to offer each other! Especially informal learning and marketing research methods.

The meeting was to gauge Shelagh and Russel's level of interest in the project. Going from the conversation, I reckon they are interested as long as it doesn't draw on too much of their time. I put it to them that I would like to spend a 1/2 a day with them and a few other researchers from other fields such as open and distance learning, to draw up a research method for measuring our open education work.

Russel and Shelagh agreed that there would be 2 aspects worth measuring:

• Usage is the stuff that managers are typically interested in, it speaks directly to the bottom line and is relatively quick and easy to measure. It involves data such as numbers of page views, response rates, enrollment numbers, completion rates, costs, savings, etc.
• Value has more to do with people's sensibility to the work, how they perceive its importance, usefulness, effectiveness, etc. Value based research would be broken up according to stakeholders such as staff, students, managers probably with a structured survey targeting each group.

Shelagh recommended that a project with such a small amount of funding and with such a tight time line would be better to be based on a convenience sample. We would first identify a sample of open education work we wanted to measure, and then identify individuals from each of the stakeholder groups for the value based research.

Russel has been implementing videography (as in video-ethnography) to gain incites into how students at the university interface with university services etc. It could be that such a method of data gathering could be useful for our convenience sample.

My next steps:
Identify a sample of open education work we want to measure.
Formulate a plan and method for gathering usage data.
Find a date for the half day (or full day if possible) meeting where research experts come together to formulate a method for measuring the value of the open education work




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Ako Regional Hub funding approved

The application for funding from Ako Aoteoroa Regional Hub has been approved. It is now action stations to convene a team of researchers to help us devise an instrument with which we can measure the effectiveness of our open education work. In particular I think it will be useful to draw on the perspectives of marketing and education researchers, as well as accountants and an IT manager. My plan is to get a small group of people together and hash out an effective way to gather data on all possible fronts and use that to report on open education and hopefully compare with some closed educational models. I say hope, because I have to try and to this before early August, as I need time to write a paper on it for IRRODL and Open Education in Vancouver.



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A Framework for thinking about Educational Development

Educational development is the concern of anyone who works in education. For us at Otago Polytechnic, we have established an Educational Development Centre which, as with other units and departments in the Polytechnic, is always a risk of "institutionalising" the notion of educational development, so that educational professionals think of it as something "they do".

The disconnect
Over lunch Veronique, Terry and myself had a pretty intense discussion about some of our educational development work. We had just returned from a session looking at Moodle, and Veronique was expressing some concern about an apparent disconnect between some of the things we say and do. Veronique cited the work in open education for an example - where at a policy level we encourage staff to engage with open educational practices, but on the ground it appears to be not gaining as much traction as we might have hoped.

This may come as a surprise to people on the outside looking in, but we still do not enjoy a feeling of engagement and support from other areas in the Polytech such as our marketing team, our IT team, and our human resources team - not a resistance to it, just a question of support and engagement. There isn't a clear understanding of open education and how the detail in it affects the work in those areas for example. There are too many documents such as media release forms, employment contracts, and presentation templates that do not relay the principles in our copyright and intellectual property policies, and the range of software supported by our IT unit (understandably ring fenced) does not offer much support at all for open or popular media. Some Departmental managers are resistant to developing open educational practices, sometimes for good reasons, but largely due to a lack of understanding. And all this is filtering down to teaching staff, who ultimately have a low level of trust and understanding with regard to open educational priorities and best practices, or an insecure feeling about going out on a limb and developing open education only to have their manager real them in.

An understanding
All of this was hotly contested either way in our discussion today, and I'm sure my colleagues around the wider Polytechnic would all have a range of positions on the matter as well (part of the reason for writing this post). As Terry pointed out, it could all be just a matter of time, and that our efforts to develop open educational practices are still very young, have a long way to go and that we need to 'start where people are at'. I can accept that for sure, but that doesn't negate my feeling that there is a lot more we could be doing to ensure synergy and cooperation between our service areas and departments, and in working towards more openness between each other in our planning and implementation. It could be that we are mistaken about the point where people are at!

A framework for thinking about educational development
The conversation went on for some time, with some valuable ideas. One of which Veronique and I worked on a little afterwards. I set out my appreciation for thinking of things in terms of FOUNDATIONS, PRINCIPLES and METHODS. Ever since looking at permaculture design, I've been quite struck by how useful this type of thinking is for designing systems and workflows. I've been thinking for some time that permaculture is applicable in areas far wider than growing food and designing living spaces...

Veronique seemed to agree with this framework being simple to understand and useful for thinking through complex problems, so we jumped in front of a white board and tried it out in terms of educational development.

Foundations
As a foundation for thinking, we considered what are the core things that make up the intentions of the Polytechnic as it is today. Its highly likely that we missed things or that people disagree with what we have here so far, and that's precisely the point of this process - to work out agreement on these foundational things and then move on to our principles and then our methods.

So we had:

• Vocational training and education
• through open educational practices
• producing sustainable practitioners
• in accordance with our responsibilities to the Treaty of Waitangi

Principles
Using those foundations as our guide, we move on to thinking about our principles.. The things that define our actions, the things we refer back to when deciding on a course of action.

For this we had:

• Education and training that is relevant to a vocation, industry or vocation and industry development.
• Small groups with direct access and contact
• Applied learning in real world contexts
• Open access and standards
• Flexible opportunities to learn
• Culturally sensitive and inclusive learning environments

Remember this is just our start, and will no doubt change. Its here on this post as an attempt to illustrate a process in forming a framework for thinking about educational development, which would hopefully result in a simple, intuitive and usable tool for developing a common understanding about educational development, including an idea of good practice.

Methods
This is where we get quite specific about an endless list of things we do that fit with our foundations and principles. For example:

• Work based learning is a method we employ for people seeking vocational training while on the job. It is applied and real world, vocationally relevant and can help with flexible learning options.
• Use media and documents that are in an open standard format and are copyright licensed Creative Commons Attribution or equivalent. This helps us develop and maintain open educational practices and open access to learning, while ensuring sustainability in the work we do sourcing and producing educational media and documents.
• Negotiated curriculum and assessment is a way that can help us develop a wider range of opportunities for people to advance educationally, relating to open education, vocational relevance even our obligations to the treaty (if I understand that correctly)
  
• Online and distance education helps us offer training and education to people without requiring them to relocate or leave the workplace (necessarily), and is potentially complimentary open education.

This is very early thinking, but my point is that this simple 3 step approach - building from a common, all-encompassing understanding of our foundational thinking, and negotiating agreement on principles that define our methods for action, could develop into a simple and accessible tool for people thinking about educational development. You don't have to look far to see the same tool helping to spread world wide appreciation and implementation of permaculture - which is about as equally complicated interaction of systems and ideas as education.

Off home now. Hope others find this note helpful. Look forward to any comments and suggestions on teh idea.





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