Cupboard Notes

Over the past couple of days my thinking about the idea of a 'knowledge economy' is changing. I have long accepted tacitly the idea that we are living in a knowledge economy but I have not really thought too critically about it. It is received wisdom, a meme. But involved as I am with the connections between teacher training, HE education, learning, studying and computers it is clearly a key notion.

What are we educating new teachers for if not work in computer rich schools? What are we educating students for if not to work in a computer-rich world of work? And what are computers if not ‘knowledge machines’. And if ICT is a knowledge tool then surely technology-enhanced-learning is really knowledge-enhanced-learning?

Interestingly, the idea of a 'knowledge economy' is quite old, dating back at least to the late 1960s. I had forgotten that until I looked it up just now and was surprised to be reminded of its relative age. Many years ago I did read Daniel Bell (one source for the idea along with Drucker) but I had forgotten how old the idea is. I am beginning to suspect that ‘old’ equals knackered and worn out! What I do recall about the earlier version of the idea was that we have moved, or are still in the process of moving, from a manufacturing economy to a predominantly service economy. On this basis the idea of a 'knowledge economy' was developed to suggest that services are somehow based on a different kind of knowledge, or are knowledge oriented, and are less reliant on older type hand-eye skills. 

What triggered this train of thought is this link that came though my email: http://www.minddump.org/higher-educations-3-part-challenge. That post is a summary of this longer post: http://campustechnology.com/articles/2010/03/03/jobs-for-graduates-in-the-knowledge-economy.aspx.

What is written in these posts began to irritate me a little. Moreover, the notion of a knowledge economy seems to have morphed somewhat into an idea about the relevance and importance of what working with ICT means for the future employability of our students. In these posts we find the idea taken for granted, that future work will rely on sophisticated intellectual and creative aptitudes, which of course it does, but in this morphed idea we find that 'Web 2.0' becomes a symbols for a discontinuity with the past, that there is new way we need to do things and to educate people. (See my other posts about discontinuity and technology disruption).

Concerned as I am about the future of education in general, about how HE must change to meet the future and not dwell in the past, and about how technology can effectively enhance learning, I was surprised to find myself scornful of the often repeated and readily accepted ideas about the knowledge economy and 21st centuryness that are so often expressed by fellow academics. This kind of stuff is easy to say and write, an easy rhetoric that now feels to me like it rests on platitudes more than reasoning. (Batson's post for example contains a list of "skills necessary to working in the knowledge economy" but which in fact contains nothing new, only slightly tweaked versions of 'traditional' skills that any educated person should possess).

It is contradicted by history. The story of the industrial revolution in Europe is not a story about knowledge per se, nor is it a story about education per se. It is a story about engineering and about self-taught artisans, an 'experience economy' perhaps

More significantly, it is contradicted by experience. I see no evidence that our economy is based on, or is driven by, or makes money out of knowledge, any more than it has been in the past … and perhaps less so than previously because while we aspire to be working in a knowledge economy we are clearly failing! Thus what I found written in those links is typical of the genre – the web is crowded with this sort of commentary. And I have realised it may well be largely wrong.

Shouldn’t a 'knowledge economy' be a more intelligent economy? But for goodness sake that clearly isn't true. And if we have supposedly been moving in this direction since the 1960s, well, where is this knowledge economy?

It isn't here because there is no such thing! So it may well be a huge mistake for HE to work for the goal of transforming ourselves so that we become players, drivers, in a 'knowledge economy' as our American colleagues above suggest that we should. There is no such economy to drive!

And speaking locally, Welsh HE and Welsh society could lose out if it clings to a mistaken myth about key economic drivers – a myth that informs policy and strategy. A new kind of vision is required. While Universities are all about knowledge - its creation, justification, application and communication - this does not mean that they are driving the development of a 'knowledge economy'. I find that now an empty and deceptive phrase. 

Examples and notes for further development:

(i)  There is the problem of the use of words, particularly the word 'knowledge'. It is clearly being used with different meaning from the one I am used to. HE is about a different kind of 'knowledge' than that of the 'knowledge economy'. The latter reference to 'knowledge' is a poor shadow, skeleton, caricature of the idea of knowledge. A major objection to the phrase 'knowledge economy' is that it is based on a reduced idea of knowledge, one built around ideas about decontextualised cognitive aptitudes. But such knowledge is not about anything - it is a mode of operational working rather than a mode of thinking and understanding. That's why the 'knowledge economy' is deceptive - it much more about training than about education.

(ii) Then there is the problem of the reification of human knowledge. The argument goes something like this: computers make us more ignorant because they mechanise knowledge. I suspect that we almost all of us at some point have encountered this problem when dealing with product help lines where the advisor on the company help line works not from knowledge about the product and its history but from a script. Or the standard cliché about the way in which wordprocessing subverts knowledge about syntax and grammar, or how calculators and spreadsheets subvert knowledge about numbers and arithmetic. Etc. These all express our anxieties about the way that human knowledge is reified, reduced, and separated from its human context.

In other words the phrase ‘knowledge economy’ hides a terrible truth – that the workers in that economy are in fact dumber than they should be – for the vast majority of economically valuable work, employers and corporations do not want their workers to be knowledgeable at all; all they need to know is how to follow a script, how to let the machine walk the talk. A ‘knowledge economy’ in fact relies on making people more stupid by replacing ordinary intelligence with database-driven models enacted by machines – and asserting the authority of the machine and its outputs over human judgement.

There’s nothing new in this observation (it’s pretty much what Marx said). But we must not forget it. For could it be that in preparing students for work in the 'knowledge economy' Universities deceive everyone, ourselves and our students? We tell ourselves we are aiming higher, but in fact we are simply helping our students adapt and adjust to a world where, in the pursuit of economic well-being, we need to be just a little more stupid than we were.

(iii) ESDGC may be an interesting case study for how the idea of a 'knowledge economy' is failing us. If we really had a knowledge economy then knowledge would have driven the debate about planetary degradation to some necessary conclusions, based on fact and truth. Yet we still, even now as the oceans swell and threaten to engulf costal cities, argue in the realm of belief, principle and politics. That's why I like the main thesis of Stewart Brand's Ecopragmatist Manifesto - according to that we can only address these issues by using knowledge not by arguing about or sticking to principles.

(iv) If only it were that simple - if knowledge really was a driver, then presumably we'd be OK. But of course knowledge is always contested, it is never static and it has varying degrees of reliability. Therein lays a deep and fundamental absurdity about the idea of a 'knowledge economy' if by that it has come to mean and economy built on the use of knowledge a process and a commodity.

An example of this aspect of the issue came up in a recent radio discussion about the relationship between social and pedagogical behaviour and the architectural spaces in which it takes place. Universities in the UK are and have been spending millions (billions) of pounds on new buildings. Fair enough. But often the designs of these new buildings are built around notions of pedagogy and particularly the 'new pedagogy' outlined by academics such as Charles Crook: constructivist, collaborative, personalised, independent, lifelong, client driven and facilitated not taught. (It may be this new pedagogy that Batson is struggling to define).

(By the way I note the irony here in using apostrophes to enclose 'knowledge economy' in such a way as to imply criticism, but the apostrophes used to enclose 'new pedagogy' has a positive tone, in this case they are intended to imply not criticism but a useful though informal or provisional label. What power that little dash has!)

As I write hundreds of millions (billions?) are being spent on building new University estate, frequently new buildings designed for education, or learning as the current paradigm puts it. A great deal of architectural conceptualisation that has gone into creating learning spaces, hubs, centres, studios, hothouses and 'serendipity spaces' (which of course have to be booked!). All this design has been informed by the percolation of knowledge about the new pedagogy. These buildings are designed to promote or enable it.

Two problems: what happens if it turns out that the 'new pedagogy' is wrong, or at least a passing fashion? That means we are stuck with buildings designed not on functional principles but on ideological principles. What happens if it turns out that the physical architectural spaces we create bear little or no relation to the pedagogical activity that goes on within them?

This may be happening. For example we know that the fashion for open plan offices, designed into new academic buildings in order to promote collaboration and serendipitous exchanges, is at best contested and occasionally rejected outright. No doubt academic workers will and probably must adapt themselves to these new spaces, but to suggest that they are pedagogically better may certainly be doubted (See: Leader: Open plan risk to collegiality, Open plan or open warfare?, Open to error: letter responding to previous articles, Say goodbye to the office, Open Plan Needs Good Planning, Laurie Taylor's satire 1, Laurie Taylor's satire 2, ... and more recently Shared space: good for collaboration or too noisy?. To track this issue search THE with "open plan").

Interestingly, some sociologists are rethinking this issue. Where once the justification for re-designing academic spaces rested on notions about how authoritarian and hierarchical relationships between staff are reflected in the more 'traditional' academic spaces built around corridors linking individualised offices ('cells') reflect, this view may be subtly changing. For as we move into these new buildings, while there is bound to be some gains and some losses, it is the organisational culture that may turn out to be a more important determinant of pedagogical practice. Re-configured spaces alone will not render an academy non-hierarchical and non-authoritarian. (Note: there's an irony here too in that frequently the adoption of such new spaces is driven more by coercion than by voluntary response - like Lenin's old conundrum about the withering away of the State we can only hope that this coercion is benign, a necessary step in the path to enlightenment and that once open-plan academic spaces are in operation, coercion will give way to a more relaxed, non-hierarchical style of organisational culture. If coercive cultures persist then presumably the power of collaborative working will not be fully realised).

So where once sociology critiqued corridors as literally 'corridors of power' studies that have revisited these spaces have developed a more sophisticated view. Indeed corridors are now recognised as powerful and important serendipity spaces! Where once corridors were deemed bad and have been designed out of new academic buildings, a revisionism is taking place where we realise that such spaces may have great benefits ... provided the organisational is conducive. (See here for a related observation about the way in which email can seemingly reduce such important, serendipitous interactions, particularly from managerial point of view; so these new kinds of spaces may not only be unsatisfactory from a pedagogical point of view they may also be unsatisfactory from a managerial point of view - the hidden variable is of course the use of technology, including email and hot-desking, which may contradict and undermine the collaborative aspirations of new architectural spaces. Of course we will all get used to it ... but ... ).

Listen to the discussion about this on Laurie Taylor's Thinking Allowed, 24/2/2010. And here is the paper by Rachel Hurdley: The Power of Corridors: connecting doors, mobilising materials, plotting openness and the Loughborough Academic Workspaces research here. Openness of space does not equate to openness of social interaction.

The point of this slightly extended discussion about architecture and pedagogy is that it exemplifies the problem of using knowledge as the basis for some kinds of economic decisions. If the knowledge base turns out to be wrong, or in need of revision and correction, you may be stuck with some outcomes (in this case buildings) that are hard to change. Stewart Brand by contrast advocates an adaptive engineering approach (I think that's what he calls it) that should apply here - they key idea is to make sure that when you try something it can be unengineered or reengineered, that we should approach all solutions based on theories and ideas with the idea in mind that "Doubt is uncomfortable, certainty is absurd". (Voltaire).

An economy based on this principle might save education, and through that it might save the planet. But to me this is not a knowledge economy but an intelligent economy (or intelligence economy).

The growth of a Hive Mind (see also Borg) which is at least in part the product of certain ideologies of technology. (A Hive Mind by the way, equals Cloud Computing, often promoted the successor to Web 2.0). These ideologies are subverting individual creativity and favour the growth of monopolies while claiming to be promoting culture and creativity (that's what makes them ideologies after all; they are a form of deceit). They also have the (unexpected) consequence that advertising is one of the few ways to make a living out of it, the Hive. But advertising, especially in its online form, is a destructive cultural force (discuss!). That these ideologies are so negative is a little odd by the way because they were spawned by the 'counter culture', the playground of the baby boomers and Generation X, all of whom regarded themselves as radical, progressive, and libertarian.

The crisis in creativity. Lanier is a musician as much as a technologist so this part of his polemic is close to his creative heart. I don't know enough to evaluate the details of this argument about whether or not there is any new music coming through the generations (I admit to not having kept up with music very greatly in the past twenty years). Lanier says no, there is nothing new, and he lays the blame squarely on the rise of the Hive Mind. There are several aspects to this. One is that the ideology of ’information needs to be free' (particularly the Stallman version of it) is killing creativity because it is so hard to make a living being creative. We are in danger, he argues, of being forced back to a time when artists relied on patronage to survive. One of the great benefits of recent economic development is precisely that it has been more possible than ever to earn a living doing creative work. But that is disappearing in a world of 'free information' and music is its first victim. Books and writing will be the next. This is a great danger that we need to avoid.

Today (19 Feb 2010) a fascinating story in the Independent, 'Publish and be Damned, about a first novel written by a young author which has been a best seller, film rights sold already and the same author working on the film adaptation. Turns out that the novel is seriously plagiarised from several sources, particularly a blog, Strobo.

(More on this story here, here, here, and loads here.)

And the response to this charge from the author and her publisher? The intertextuality defence:

“...she is a member of a different generation of writers which is used to adapting and using the abundance of information available online for its own creative purposes”

[quote from publisher] "This novel follows the aesthetic principle of intertextuality and may contain further excerpts,"

[quote from author] "There is no such thing as originality anyway, there is just authenticity."

What do I make of that?

Not quite a story about the death of the author since of course in this case there is an author making a good living out of using other people's words and ideas. Now I know that this is historically a fact – intertextuality has long been with us (see this article from the Observer) and it can be genuinely difficult to avoid it (e.g. Ian McEwan ran into an issue like this with Atonement and similar defences were put forward then.)

I know that if I were writing stuff of my own and someone lifted whole passages, enough perhaps to make several pages in a well paid novel, I would certainly like some of the income from that.

In other words it's kind of deceitful to put forward a philosophical argument that intertextuality is art but 'interfinanciality' is resisted. I know that could be complicated but intertextuality if OK, paying for it is not OK. (I am reminded here of the discussion in Virtual Revolution about the tension between open-source and free, and corporate and paid for).

Is intertextuality a reality: generally yes, it's difficult to deny the fact that more than ever we live in an ocean of 'texts' and let's face it most academic publishing in the humanities and literary fields is highly intertextual but in that domain there are rules and conventions about recognition and citation.

When does it become ripping off rather than just intertextuality (the textual equivalent of sampling)?

Well , the classic definition of plagiarism is of course 'passing off and so this example may well turn out to be an old-fashioned case of converting the public and common intellectual property of the open-source publisher (bloggers etc) into private property. That's the difference. And that may be the offence. Especially if someone earns a living from it - feed me first then let's talk ethics.

Of course the reverse also happens: the discussion in Virtual Revolution touches referred to above covers Bill Gates' response to the Home Brew Computer Club about their use of his BASIC interpreter (see this Wikipedia article) - and Lawrence Lessig in Free Culture (page 53ff) descibes how Hollywood got started at least partially as a response to the controls over film making equipment exercised by Edison patents - Edison was East Coast, but at the time federal law had relatively limited reach - by the time the law caught up with the early Hollywood film makers on the distant West Coast Edison's patent were expired or expiring!

 Note: TurnItIn, widely used in Universities as a "plagiarism prevention tool" is, I guess, really just an 'intertextuality reduction tool'. Presumably intertextuality can be more quickly and more easily discovered on the Net? But prevented?

Note added 28/2/08: Intertextuality is happening all the time. Look at this story about Avatar and whether or not James Cameron 'borrowed' from the Strugastky brothers. Interestingly, in the way of the Web I stumbled on this story by accident as follows: just borrowed a Sony e-Reader from work. Looking for a book or text to upload from my PC and I  found a TXT version of Roadside Picnic  which I got from the Web a few years ago. I thought it came from Project Gutenberg. I visited that site but couldn't locate it so while googling for the source again, instead I came across the Avatar story.

Serendipity.

But it gets a bit more focussed in that while searching I evautally came across this PDF version of the same text from this site http://www.cca.org/  where the site author tells us that he got the original text from Project Gutenberg.

But it isn't there! Honest.

I wrote Gutenberg an email just asking the questio: it if it withdrawn could you tell me why - copyright? Will update this post with the response if/when I get one.

Been at the SRHE conference this week. Held at the Celtic Manor (what a strange building that is: Xanadu on the inside, Stasi HQ on the outside).

Very interesting time and I listened a lot, and concentrated too, thinking through many of the things that were being said or reported.

After 2.5 days of this I am very, very weary.

A valuable lesson: learning is actually hard work - students get tired!

I seem to recall that someone like John Holt discussed this issue of how to balance the work of learning with the rest from learning. We rarely talk about how important it is to take a break. But taking a break from learning is pretty crucial. (Some theologies make use of this: the greatest insights are achieved when doing absolutely nothing!).

Anyway - this experience reminded me that learning takes effort.

Here's some notes I wrote at the about some of the ideas and events that I picked up:

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Here’s a a few comments that are left over in my mind from the SRHE conference last week. As with all large conferences as I sit and skim the proceedings I realise that I missed far, far more than I listened to, and some of it looks far more interesting to me now!

Sessions I joined (couldn’t do Thu PM - clashed with teaching).

Denzin’s Elephant.

Symposium A1: I didn’t understand too much of this session but it was all papers by past colleagues from Sussex. Nice to catch up.

One paper was very clear - a depressing tale about the trading of sex for grades in the National University of Ghana (i.e. female students exploited by male faculty; ironically some quite deep resentment from male students who see this as an unfair advantage!).

Picked up some nice words: quotidian (means everyday, basic, common); doxa (means common belief, opinion); metonymy (means using the name of one thing for that of another with which it is closely associated – e.g. I read Shakespeare, or London has decreed).

Denzin’s elephant came from a paper by John Pryor about being a peer reviewer. Quite interesting, though quite a personal story. Methodology: autoethnography (is that just ‘writing about myself’?).

‘Linear’ and ‘non-linear’; Chains and Networks.

Here I went to Session F5 “Using Knowledge Structures as a lens to consider the development of university teaching”. Ian Kinchin et al King’s College.

This was v interesting and a clear exposition about concept maps and it explored aspects of how lecturers model teaching.

However.

“The method highlights the negative influence of linearity in promoting an environment where non-learning is the norm ... [where] ... dialogue between teachers and students is not seen to have a purpose”.

This is the sort of thing I want to argue with.

The situation described in that quote is not backed up by any serious data. There’s a whole lot of unprovable assumptions before we start. (You could argue instead that this is simply a description of bad teaching and that linearity has little or nothing to do with it.)

There is some evidence to suggest that when asked to describe how they teach lecturers will often describe a ‘chain’ or ‘linear’ model of the teaching and learning process. But again, what does this really tell us about the issue of non-learning?

Thus linear thinking is represented by linear chains of logic; non-linear thinking is the network of knowledge (though chains are embedded in the network). Linear is bad! It implies certainty and closure. Non-linearity is good. It is how experts think. It is open. Experts can move between these representations freely and rapidly (this thus offers part of a model of problem-solving) but the novice cannot. We need to encourage non-linear thinking in our students.

Yes but … while enjoying the framework for this paper, I am not convinced by the polarisation between (so-called) linear and non-linear representations of knowledge, and I am particularly not convinced by the value system that gets laid on top of it – i.e. linearity is the dark side! It leads to non-learning …

Which is better? To learn by being told (in chains) or by learning through exploring networks (or concept maps)? Answer: there is no real choice here.

So I find myself speaking up for linearity and the out-of-favour lecture. Being told is not a bad thing, and may often be a necessary thing. (Here though we need a discussion about the situated nature of ‘learning by being told’ – it is more complex than some of these straw dogs suggest).

Nicola made a related point in her’s and Rachel’s paper about the academic writing experiences of students. There, ‘memorisation’ is repositioned as a fundamental part of learning. I have always seen memorisation, repetition and, importantly, imitation  as basic components of learning. However, as pedagogical concepts they seem to have acquired such bad connotations; perhaps because of their implications of power? But why so squeamish?

I think this is bad news for any discussion about pedagogy because it skews everything before we start, and rules out, uncritically, some key concepts. Maybe I am imagining it but there seemed to be a subtle kind of orthodoxy running through parts of this conference – a received wisdom (doxa) that linearity, lecturing (a chain mode of delivery supposedly), learning by recall etc, are all ‘bad’ things and that we are striving for something higher and better, more student-centred.

But this received wisdom is uncritically absorbed and becomes a subtle but powerful orthodoxy in its own right. I wonder if a paper about the effectiveness of rote learning in Eng Lit classes would be accepted for the SRHE?

Similarly I heard several references to poor old PowerPoint as being nothing more than a linear presentation tool and thus not fit for purpose in our aspiration to achieve non-linearity in learning.

NO, POWERPOINT IS NOT MERELY A LINEAR TOOL!

It's non-linearity however is all too rarely exploited, even by those who argue that HE is too linear! Have they not noticed? If not, why not?

Footnote: I am also reminded that in the VLL symposium there was a brief reference to the notion that the lecturer is often seen as a ‘perfect narrator’. This is an interesting perspective. It connects, among other things, to the books I am reading about plagiarism currently one by Rebecca Moore Howard where she describes how lecturers rely entirely on plagiarism as a basis for their lectures; they tend to convey the impression that it’s all their thinking and ideas that are being presents. We rarely, if ever in the context of a lecture, display our sources. Lecturer as perfect narrator. (And then, says Rebecca, we go on to punish students for doing the self-same thing!).

The crisis in academic capitalism; the failure of the neo-liberal mission to democratise education.

Wow! My take on this is to apply elements of this thesis to our own situation, as came up in the follow-up discussion group: after 1979 The Tories began the long process of commandeering education through a paradoxical combination of privatization and extreme centralisation. They and their neo-liberal (?) descendants (new labour?) justified all this on the grounds of improving equality (aka, widening access etc.). Now we realise that inequality is worse than ever and that HE has made little difference. The ideology of market forces, of student as consumer, the supposed power of choice, does not work.

Question: what is the replacement? how do we change direction?

The lecture as a failed educational form (traditional) vs. new learning spaces (progressive).

(See also notes on non-linearity above).

Under this theme I put Symposium L5, “Creating and Developing visual learning spaces for tomorrow’s universities”  presented by a team from The University of Nottingham’s Visual Learning Lab. Some interesting stuff – e.g. that art history and design lecturers like dimly lit, low-ceilinged rooms to teach in; or the use of multi-screen displays for teaching design and art history.

A couple of nice details about the history of art history pedagogy– see Heinrich Wolfflin (introduced double projection using lantern slides); also Mnemosyne (the goddess of memory) and Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, Picture Wall etc.

But all rather strongly technology focussed, and admitting that a fair degree of technical support is required. Thus not scalable.

No strong evidence is forthcoming about the effectiveness of these hi-tech learning spaces, apart from fairly anecdotal data about preferences, ambience, classroom organisation etc. All these are good of course – students and teachers need to like and enjoy their physical spaces – but technology-rich learning spaces like these can only form part of a repertoire. Question is: how big a part?

Incidentally, one of the talks used the ‘linearity’ critique of PowerPoint as a small part of the rationale for multi-screen displays. I also found the presentation about interactive whiteboards surprisingly limited particularly in that there was know focus on the value of the ‘interactivity’ that these tools provide. I sensed that this was partly due to slightly undeveloped or unsophisticated conceptions of digital information flows and re-use. I don’t mean to sound snotty – I am always making mistakes about these more technical aspects of the tools we use, why only the other day I found myself arguing that a physical computer is more likely to be stable than a virtual one … I was promptly corrected by those in the know. But too often our conceptions of what IT will do for us in our teaching and learning rest on weak or woolly understanding and skill of what IT can actually do.

We teach what we know. If we believe that PowerPoint is linear then so will our students, and of course everyone is denied the opportunity to realise the great potential of the non-linearity that PowerPoint (and all similar tools) affords. If we believe that PPT is linear then that’s how we will use to to support out teaching.

Similarly, if we don’t believe, or have no conceptions of the importance of managing and using data files as a foundational skill underpinning the effective use of IT in learning and teaching then of course our file management will be crap and everything that depends on file management will be crap. This at least partially explains the relatively slow take-up of VLEs – they depend on a decent level of skill in handling data files.

A related talk was given in Session G12.1 “New Spaces for New learning in HE”, by Paul Martin et al Brighton University, a report on the work of the Brighton Creativity Centre. (Here’s some links to related work at Brighton: InQbate; SPACES FOR LEARNING in ART and DESIGN; CETLD etc.

The talk was strongly from the viewpoint of design and fine art teaching. Here we were presented with a digitally facilitated studio space rather than a conventional teaching room. It’s a completely flexible space etc.

The speaker was a little critical – the technology is quite complicated to use, and there is a limit to how messy you can be in the learning space (speaker is a fine artist, hence presumably likes to make a lot of splashes!).

Again, no real evaluation of the effectiveness of this sort of space was offered and as with all presentations of this type, the question of scalability and replication is barely touched on.

Besides, this speaker made a strong assertion to the effect that outcomes are determined by the teacher’s attitudes, knowledge and motivation as well as those of the students. The use of ‘determines’ is rather strong and if this is true, as I suspect it is, then we are left with only a marginal contribution from the physical learning space – so why invest all this time and money in experimental spaces?

This talk also left me wondering what their real value is apart from the obvious (fun, fresh, funky) but we don’t know anything much about things that might have lasting value. Particularly of course as the history of education is full of attempts to reform and remodel the physical environment around pedagogical principles but we see little real change from the basic models laid down in the 18/19 Centuries.

‘Creativity’ as an icon of learning.

I only mention this in passing, as an example of some sort of social rhetoric. The concept of ‘creativity’ seemed to be in frequent use in many of the talks and conversations I heard. But it’s one of those odd ideas that is used more like a kind of ‘placeholder’ for a set of values that are intrinsically positive, but at the same time vague and difficult to define. Without realising it your interlocutor has invited you to fill in the blank which you obligingly do.

“Our aim is to make our students more creative” is code for bright, lovely, environmentally aware, non-racist, happy, bouncy students whose potential has been more fully realised. ‘Creative’ is also contrasted with ‘lectures’ (and hence linearity) as the negative force in teaching and learning. ‘Creative’ is good.

How can you not fill in the blank this way?

But in fact ‘creative’ has a far more mechanistic aspect which makes it less attractive. This aspect is rarely addressed. Learning one’s first language is ‘creative’ only in a technical sense; thinking itself is ‘creative’ but as a process it cares nothing for values.

Creativity is a Janus. We like to use it to signify the beautiful, the desirable, the good. But evil too is generated out of creativity.

Sort that one out!

ESDGC as a new ideology.

I am worrried that there is potentially a great threat to liberty and to democracy (such as it is) which may come from an authoritarian and orthodoxical repetition of received wisdom (doxa?) about the state of the planet. ESDGC may be a key policy to unlock the future (I hope it is), or it may turn out to be a key power-tool for reaction and repression. (See this THE op ed piece for a related discussion).

The stakes are that high.

Thus, while I found Brendan’s Session H9 illuminating and relevant I am worried about the suggestion that ‘developing sustainable behaviour’ is an aim of HE. This feels closer to indoctrination whereas a more proper orientation for HE must be towards the critical evaluation of behavioural choices, without prescription.

After all, we have a relatively poor understanding as to what genuinely sustainable behaviour is, if only because all solutions turn out to generate their own problems that require solutions. So the notion of ‘developing’  sustainable behaviour is fraught with moral and political dangers as well as, more obviously, environmental dangers.

[Sidenote. Take for example our council which has recently introduced a recyclable waste collection. Very good. But the other day I realised that now we have two collection vehicles visiting our house – one for the regular rubbish (now a smaller load of course) followed by another (admittedly smaller) vehicle to collect the recyclables.]

Why? Is that  sustainable behaviour?

So, the role of HE is not to change behaviour. The role of HE is to enable reasoning about choices so that the choices that people do make are based on reasons and principles rather than hearsay of propaganda.

The People’s choices may not be the right ones … but we certainly cannot design a curriculum that can know in advance what are the right behavioural choices for students. All society can ask of HE is that we empower students to think about things. We have to leave their behaviour, their actions, to them.

Is that an old-fashioned view of HE?

One obvious and major problem with this view is that nevertheless HE does in fact create prescriptions on behaviour, academic, moral and political. But (a) not all these prescriptions are assessed or measurable outcomes of the curriculum; and (b) many are contested.

Indigenous knowledge

Nicola reminded us that indigenous knowledge should be valued. This is a vital aspiration. It is conceptually connected to the notion that we need to understand much more about where all our students start (their prior learning as it were). And of course, in some sense all knowledge is indigenous.

But we still have to sort out the wheat from the chaff, the trash from the recyclables. Not all indigenous knowledge is worth keeping as knowledge. Some is interesting only as a museum piece …

The same goes for indigenous values, customs and practices. All are open to question.

Isn’t that what HE is for? Not merely to validate beliefs and practices on the grounds that because they are held by some one or some group they should be respected for their intrinsic value, but to dissect, analyse, critique and reassemble indigenous knowledge into a relevant and appropriate way of life.

Finally

Listened to an interesting PhD project about how and why students engage with academic reading. This paper used the idea of threshold concepts quite a lot (these came up in other papers too). Must look this up. Ensuing discussion also addressed the issue of to what extent lecturers model reading for their students.

This topic resonates with my own recent interest in plagiarism which grew out of some measure of hostility towards the adoption of tools like Turnitin.

Authorship, writing, reading, ‘relationship with text’, deja-lu, copying, replicating, sharing. The whole screaming paraphernalia of textuality is up for grabs it seems to me. One of the many prescriptions about that HE tries to enforce and which is increasingly contested.

... while waiting to get some coffee, I got into conversation with a chap. Somehow we got onto the good and the bad about email. He told me about his son, a senior civil servant who hates email because it keeps him in his office all day. "My son remembers a time", he says, "until even quite recently when he was in much better touch with what was going in in his department because he spent so much more time speaking directly to people, popping in an dout of offices. He says that it's the nuances that matter if you want to know how well your department is working ..."

Moral of this: the over-use of email can become a hindrance, a source of inefficiency. Which of course is ironic because unitil quite recently email was tacitly if not explicitly adopted and accepted as more efficient and a more effectiev way to handle organisational communication.

Now we are less sure. There is more and more data smog. Just like the motor car which at first brought great beneifts but now pollutes the planet, so email brought great benefits - but we are beginning to notice that it brings with it its own kind of  pollution.

It's the nuances that make for effective communication - but ICT filters them or blanks them out. And where do nuances come from? From the context. And context of course is what gets lost in email.

In my MA group we have been discussing the educational issues about how to teach young people and adults about managing their online identity. We came across this website http://www.123people.co.uk/.

It's quite surprising what is out there and can be trawled. Search for your name and see what you can find.

Is this the kind of tool that might be used by HR when vetting job applications?

In one search we did in class the student was surprised to find her Amazon Wish List alongisde her LinkedIn information. The latter is a site used for professoianl networking - the students uses it to attach business for her unit in the MoD (so this student could be involved in some highly sensitive defence work). The Amazon Wish List of course is a personal list of entertaining items that one might like to buy. The wish list in question at the time of the search stored items which I will describe here as items of deliciously salacious literature.

But would you want your private and personal interests in reading matter to be publicly conjoined with your professional profile as a MoD contractor?

That's what 123people does.

So - we need to learn and to teach something about identity management.

There is more and more emphasis in the press and TV at the moment about the managemen tof Facebook or Bebo profiles (e.g. an item on the TV news today), so awareness is growing. But I did not realise that there are privacy settings on my Amazon wish list - should I be more careful?

Perhaps - as a well informed and hopefully reasonable adult I do occasionally read politically radical material, sexually dramatic material, and obscure nerdy stuff about certain toys. Could such data be misinterpreted if presented in the rather pot-pourri style of 123people?

After all, as far as I can tell, 123people is only accessing publicly available material, but presents it all, no matter how disparate, in a single context

(The author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age starts the book with a documented case study of a US teacher who lost her job because of one easily misunderstood photograph on the individual's Facebook account).

Independent 31/10/09

In the early days of the WWW we used to believe that being online was anonymous, that "no-one need ever know if you had been looking at pornography". (Naughton, p35)

There was an early cartoon, now fairly famous: "On the Internet no-one knows you're a dog". Followed a small few years later by another showing a dog looking at his online profile - in other words, everyone knows you're a dog! (Berners-Lee, p157)

Then there came the WayBack Machine - the first attempt to plug the void in the cultural archive of a transient web - an attempt to stop the web forgetting itself through simple erasure; (it's a little disconcerting to find web pages archived there that I produced in 1999). For a contextiualised discussion see Lessig, Ch 9.

And now, we are perhaps more sophisticated about all this. The Internet never forgets, and perhaps this damages us as human beings. Now we have to learn to be in control of our digital footrpint (also see this US report from 2007, and this report too about how employers may well search for you on Facebook etc. - sorry for the US example, will find similar UK story).

So while you may forget - the Web does not. Though you make remake yourself, through atonement or reconstruction, the Web sits there like some supra-conscience, biding its time, setting its snares ...

Reading Susam Blum's "My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture". I had not realised how interesting a subject 'plagiarism' can be!

I am struck in particular by the notions discussed in the book about identity formation as well as the character of the culture in which we live. Our culture is a culture of sharing, swapping, quoting, cross-referencing etc. Processes all made more routine and perhaps invisible by the presence of the Internet. Identity formation too is rather diferent for young people growing up in this kind of world (uh-oh, old fogey talk coming on). Performance, so the argument goes, is a key motif on which identity is built, connectedness is crucial. (Old fogey speak: "in my day it was the search- for-self concepts embedded in a culture of identtfy politics".)

This all needs thinking about.

A couple of points stand out. First, academic norms regarding plagiarism have to be taught. I doubt that we do anything like enough to teach these norms, we do not educate our students sufificiently in these matters. We tend to assume that when we berate our students about the 'crime' of plagiarism (yes, I have heard of colleagues telling students that plagiarism is against the law!) that they know what the hell we are talking about or that they think it is a metter of concern. Originality, individiuality, authorship, intellectual property - these are all concepts born of earlier times (perhaps born of a 'print-based' mode of cultural transmission). What we, Unieversities, have failed to internalise and to reconstruct is the reality of life in an audio-visual culutre. This is partiucalrly sad since this culture has already been with us for a good 50 years and we should have caught up. But now the digital enlightenment is upon us and we need to grasp the issues full frontal. The full effects of a network culture in which influence and cross-reference are its essence, must be understood.

Second, and closer to my own area of work, ideas about "reflection on practice" seem suddenly out of time. These ideas, the "reflective practitioner" are born of that earlier generation conscnered with identify politics, the search-for-self, the who-am-I-as-a-teacher concepts of effective practice.

I wonder if that notion has had its day. The rationale for the reflective practitioner remains, but it has changed its modus vivendi. Somethign to do with performance and connectedness, but not exactly how. 'Performance' after all is not the same as 'Performativity' (an ugly word but one used in connection with compying with stadnards and targets).

Incidentally, professional connectedness is an important theme, though I'm not sure if it is quite the same thing as Facebook connectedness. Since the emergence of the 'Every Child Matters' (ECM) policy in England (and echoed in Wales and elsewhere), which largely arose in response to several prominent and terrible cases of child abuse and murder, it is now policy that in order to protect children and to do what is best for them all services, education, welfare and legal, should be connected, should talk to one another, share information and data about cases, strategies, responsibilities. Yet today there is, inevtiably perhaps, another inquest this time into a mother who killed herself and her daughter as the result of several years of anti-social bullying. That inquest has found, apart from the lack of structures inside the various professional agencies (welfare and poilice) that they do not yet work together as they should, they are not connected.

What is the connection between the connectedness in which personal identity is supposed to flourish and the connectedness that is supposed to operate at the socio-political level?

According to a story told by Socrates, as attributed by Plato in the Phaedrus, writing was invented by Theuth, an ancient Engyptian god. Socrates, of course, coming from and perhaps standing at the end of a long oral culture, did not like the claim made for writing that it would give people better memories. Thamus the Egyptian king to whom Theuth presented his great invention said ... "this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.." (Source)

On the whole I doubt that we agree with Socrates, we are so used to externalising our memory, but it is always worth remembering (if we can that is!) that all technologies of thought do involve a displacement from every day 'meat-memory' to the externalised medium of symbolic storage (clay, papyrus, paper, bits). And once externalised it is easilty forgotten (blogs? twitter?).

There are gains of course. Donald Norman talks about the value of checklists for airline pilots - they are powerful precisely because there is too much to remember. Without the externalisation of memory there would be many more airplane disasters.

Oliver Burkeman recently lamented the same sort of point, starting from the observations made by some scientists somewhere that a third of people under thirty don't know their own phone numbers; they are significantly worse at remembering birthdays etc. etc.

One response is, why bother when the Web stores it all (or in the case of phone numbers when my mobile stores it for me)? He quotes from another journalist: "The line between where my memory leaves off and Google picks up is getting blurrier by the second. Almost without noticing it, we've outsourced important peripheral brain functions to the silicon around us."

He goes on to discuss the existential aspects of storing all your stuff out there in the cloud ... "it's worth thinking hard about the forms in wchih we store bits of ourselves in the outside world; it may affect us emotionally more than we realise."

Added 1 Dec 09: another recent commentary from the Independent talks about the effect of Wikipedia on our memory.

Sorry, this is obvious, but needs saying.

Assessment has almost nothing to do with learning. Worse, assessment can undermine, even contradict learning. 'Learning' however is a core value of education. Therefore all education institutions that demand an assessment of outcomes (too frequently confused for learning) are inherently flawed and could even be subverting one of education's core values.

This anti-education moment intensifies as assessment becomes increasingly 'high-stakes' which is to say that the consequences of not passing assessments, of not gaining qualifications, are perceived to be ever more negative. What happens, quite simply, is that the aim of education for the learner becomes little more than the aim of passing assessments - the higher the grade the better.

Of course, it is never absolutely one or the other - students do learn stuff they never knew before and they become better at stuff they arelady knew even as they progress towards high stakes assessment events. Thus, some core values of education are preserved and of course education as carried on in schools, colleges and universities is expected to fulfil a vast range of aims and aspirations, so it is not altogether a simple formula. But always the risk is that as assessment becomes ever more high-stakes, 'real' learning declines.

But what is 'real' learning you may ask? Ah, there's a topic!

Here's a recent  observation about assessment and its effects. Some assignment retrievals were required following an exam board this year. A few students had failed a small part of an ICT assignment. As final year students this failure and retrieval was very high stakes - not only was their qualification under threat but so too was their employment opportunity (we are talking about teacher training here).

The task involved organising and analysing some fairly simple statistics using Excel. Naturally, we are as supportive as we can be in situations like this and a colleague and I organised a quick turnaround workshop where they could come along, diagnose their errors and put them right - they had a small window of opportunity to do this retrieval. One student in particular who turned up to the workshop session was in a state of some distress, had already cancelled her planned summer holiday, and was behaving as if the world was at a standstill - which I guess it was for her at that moment.

We sat together and looked at her spreadsheet. Some simple errors which were easily corrected, and a couple of important things she did not know how to do (in spite of the course of study she had been through already). After a little one-on-one instruction she finally put things right, produced a much better worksheet and graph and was able to make some statements about the graph (a requirement of the assignment) which were both accurate and surprising (in this case that obesity among Key Stage 2 child is rising quite a bit faster since 2002 than overweight).

File saved, retrieval complete she stood up, literally beamed at us and said "Wow, that was really interesting I have learned so much today, I'm really glad I came in ... can I go on holiday now?"

Paradoxically in this high stakes setting there was, I hope, some real learning.

THE, 7/5/09 Internet is fostering a 'want it now' culture among students

The article summarises a report to be published 12/5/09 by The Committee of Enquiry into the Changing Learner Experience. (www.clex.org.uk) .The report is here.

See also Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future. See the Work Packages for detailed material. (See my notes on this).

JISC Google Generation Project: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/resourcediscovery/googlegen.aspx

Some common themes:

Doubts about students' ability to critically evaluate information from the web. Information literacy is a “significant and growing deficit area”. Searching and retrieval tends to be shallow and relies on using the most immediate material (compare the CIBER research noted above).

We have to ask ourselves – is this such a new concern? Hasn't every generation worried about the effects of some new technology on the younger generation;s capacity to learn?

Compare this concern across the history of, books, film, television and now computers.

However, we can dismiss this concern. First: it is really a symptom of change and generational difference (see “The Sabre Tooth Curriculum”); it is a transient truth. Second: it wrongly attributes the failure to the student and not to the more important finding that Universities (schools too, but at least they are now starting to catch up more quickly) should take responsibility for modifying their pedagogy.

A second theme is about the lack of teachers' willingness and skill with ICT.

This is clearly important. There are different ways of addressing the need here, different kinds of solutions. But change we must. However, if it is true that students lack critical skills with digital information, then surely must the majority of teaching staff in Universities. Therefore the 'information literacy deficit' must also appl to teaching staff and therefore it is a pedagogical problem for us to solve.

A third theme is the Universities have lost their monopoly over scholarly and scientific information. To quote Stephen Heppell, “learning is leaking out all over the place” and the cartel that is Higher Education in the UK, (and the world), is losing control over the definition of learning and perhaps over the validation of learning.

There are some interesting consequences of this effect. One is that if Universities are to maintain a special position in the education game they have to recognise that the key feature is the validation of learning. The what and how of learning they cannot control nearly so well, although assessment and evaluation of learning remain key tools in differentiating the very successful from the elementary, the expert from the novice.

But what a student does to earn a degree whether low or high is inevitably much more diverse. ICT can provide tools to help both the recording and the validation of the learning process. Note e.g. the perceived significance of work-based learning for Universities. Significant learning is now recognised to take place outside the University. How do we capture this more practice-based or life-based aspect of learning, and how do we integrate it into the more conventional role of awarding degrees?

An further observation reported in the THE summary, is the value placed on face-to-face contact by students: “students want traditional approaches in a modern, web-based setting.”

A suggestion is that we involve students more directly in the training of staff. An interesting one. Why not?

There's a couple of ways this might be done. By a scheme similar to the student mentor scheme but extended into training support. Or by an extended induction period at the beginning of every programme where students and staff work together to develop the ICT infrastructure appropriate to the course. So this might include as in SHSS, training new students in the tools and resources provided by the school, and it would include a bespoke element in which a repertoire of tools and techniques were shared between staff and students. A kind of Pedagogical Fair that lasts about a week.

See also:

Research Information Network (RIN)

Work-based learning

This anecdote is about how innovation in the application of digital technology to the enhancement and enrichment of learning can be both progressive and absent at the same time and in the same context.

Of course anecdotes are hearsay and clearly the details would need to be investigated empirically. I cannot say that this is true exactly as described but as a story it is not an uncommon scenario in education where the old and the new often live side-by-side (in varying degrees of comfort).

At a conference not too long ago a colleague from University X gave a presentation in which he described some interesting developments in the creation and use of podcasts as learning resources for students. As in many University departments these developments are embedded in wider strategies for promoting the use of ICT to enhance and enrich learning in higher education. In Wales, for example, we are currently implementing a new 10 year strategy for Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL). Such strategies usually have some level of senior management engagement and in this example the promotion of podcasts as a form of technology enhanced learning has weight, importance and value to the department as a whole.

Within the department, a business school, a particular target group for the podcast project was the business faculty who teach on a range of programmes including MBA. The outcomes of this were positive. Podcasting techniques were enthusiastically embraced by the business faculty following though this followed a fairly typical pattern of sceptical reluctance and anxious first steps. After all, in its basic form podcasting is of course a fairly simple technique as it involves little more than the recording of an audio file, uploading it to a website, and then offering the read a link in order to play the file. (In this project there was no attempt to actually ‘cast’ the ‘pods’ through the use of RSS). Once the ease of production and the general value to the student had been demonstrated (students reported favourably in a questionnaire) podcasting in this form indicated a positive take-up and implementation of TEL. Success as perhaps more pronounced because the subjects were typically the least likely to respond, the dyed-in-the-wool non-adopters.

After the presentation I caught up with a colleague from the same institution who just so happened to be undertaking a part-time MBA in that very department. In conversation we got talking about how technology seems to move in waves of high profile, ‘new’ techniques, while the ‘old’, tried and trusted technologies are disregarded. No-one seems to regard the use of the wordprocessor as TEL, though not so many years ago similar conference presentations were being given about the impact of the wordprocessor on students’ writing.

Anyway, in this conversation my colleague suddenly said “You know that’s absolutely right. I started a financial management module the other week and in the first session the tutor gave us a list of equipment that we would need to carry outhe coursework – two H pencils, a calulatorr and a pad of special graph paper – he gave us the name of the shop where y we could buy it. At the beginning of the next session he checked that we had in fact brought the right equipment and we then proceeded to learn how to construct a financial forecast graph.” It would seem, as this conversation continued, that there isn’t a PC or spreadsheet in sight throughout the module.

It is, however, quite real. The new and the obsolete always co-exist.

One could probably second guess some of the arguments that might be put forward in favour of the use of pencils and graph paper (at least the calculator is a bare nod in the right direction) and these presumably rest on the slightly dubious pedagogical premiss that constructing financial graphs manually is the best way to understand how graphs are made and how they work. Maybe. But to never move beyond this method into the realm of 'what-if' seems incredible.

And what of technology enhanced learning? Why is podcasting seen to be a successful implementation whereas the absence of a fundamental tool is not even noticed? It is also about the way in which elements of practice and technology can stand for the whole. A certain ‘object’, in this case podcasts, acquires a certain value, a status, a level of symbolic importance in the context of a strategy. It comes to stand for technology enhanced learning.

Technology is never a simple either/or process nor is it simply a matter of piecemeal progression, of incrementally adding in the new and thus replacing the old. There is simultaneously conservatism and progressiveness here.[2]

Posting about SL here from Mike Simmons:

https://my.newport.ac.uk/cs/blogs/msimmo01/archive/2008/12/17/348372.aspx

See the link to the article in Therapy Today ...