Web 2.0 and universities

Julian Beckton Web 2.0

Interesting article in this mornings Guardian – http://education.guardian.co.uk/link/story/0,,2279249,00.html

Raises some questions about how universities might manage Web 2.0 applications.  For example, how, exactly, do you manage student assessments in Second Life? That’s an extreme example of course,but it makes the point well enough. I don’t think that this is entirely a technological issue though, it’s more about the problem of individuals innovating.

 Sticking with the Second Life example, if I was a history lecturer, I could build a sim representing (say) the Tudor court, and get the students to conduct role plays where they acted out the various power plays and assess their understanding of the relative power of the church, king, aristocracy and so on by recording their contributions in chat logs. Ok, that’s ridiculously ambitious, but technically possible. The point is though that it isn’t really sustainable. If I moved to another institution could I repeat it with other cohorts. More important, how would the students build on that type of learning experience? How would external examiners review it? How would second marking be dealt with?  My point is that innovation has to be accomodated within a quite complex institutional framework. (And I haven’t even mentioned the issues in running SL over a university LAN!)

Reading between the lines there’s a larger point too in the article, which is about separating the technology from the activities it is being used for.  I quote “One institution reported three examples of serious problems in one year involving students’ use of the new technology including the victim of a student scuffle using Facebook to identify the address of his attacker, and getting his revenge.”  Elsewhere in the media there have been stories about Facebook being used by dodgy loan companies to target vulnerable people. What’s interesting about these stories is that Facebook is cast as the villain, and not the people who are misusing it. I don’t remember anyone excoriating Gutenberg for the publication of Mein Kampf!

I guess we shouldn’t get too hung up on individual technologies – let’s face it, when I was an undergraduate, I used a fountain pen for creating my assessments and a wooden drop box outside the lecturer’s office for submitting them.  Those were far from perfect technologies (especially given my handwriting!)  But we’ve moved on, and we’ll probably move on from where we are now. So, I’m suggesting it doesn’t make sense to ignore a particular technology because it’s imperfect, but I do think we need to think about making it easier to experiment with them.

Sick!

Julian Beckton Assessment, Technology , , , ,

Well, I don’t know where all the text from this went…

 But here’s what I wanted to say anyway. (If this disappears I really am going back to bed)

I’m not now going to the Bbworld 08 conference in Manchester because I am simply too ill to drive there. Which is a pity because there appeared to be some interesting looking presentations about using Bb to support assessment. This is something that does come up from time to time in Faculty teaching and learning committees (e.g. Health Life & Social Sciences the other day). We do have Turnitin’s Grademark of course, but the drawback with that is that it doesn’t really support double marking. (i.e. anonymous marking). Or, if it does, I haven’t found out how yet. I did dream up a baroque routine where students’ work could be submitted to different tutors by admin staff, but technology is supposed to make life simpler, so I haven’t mentioned it yet.

Leads to an interesting reflection on technology in learning though – it very rarely seems to automate a practice in its entirety – certainly some aspects of a process are very well automated – but human beings being what they are, there’s always some other aspect that they want to cling to that the technology doesn’t cover. So our job is really about changing perspectives, not teaching which buttons to press.

Sick!

Julian Beckton Frustrations, Research ,

Well, I finally posted my letters asking for access to the research sites. We’ll see. Unfortunately I have also been struck down with an unpleasant malady which has left me coughing like a volcano on acid (and very painful it is too) and a voice that sounds like a cheese grater being rubbed across a washing machine. And I’ve a splitting headache. So concentration is not my strong point today.

It’s a bit annoying to be truthful. I was supposed to be going to the BBworld 08 conference in Manchester tomorrow, where I might have done some useful networking. But frankly, I’m not fit to drive, and I do not relish the thought of being crammed into an overcrowded train for several hours. (or at least a cramped train – no public transport in the UK provides adequate space for normal sized people). God knows how American tourists get on if they’re really as large as they’re portrayed!  In any case, even if I did get there, I don’t suppose the ensuing Typhoid Mary act would be a huge hit with the other delegates.

But there you are. Another of the frustrations of doctoral research…It’s even difficult trying to read anything at the moment.  I guess I should just go back to bed!

Supervisors’ reactions

Julian Beckton Research

Interesting response to my research questions particularly around the behavioural models I . One supervisor advised me just to drop them, the other agreed that I could but that in doing so I was confining myself to an “objectivist, modernist, masculine, centrist viewpoint”.   That seems to me a fair criticism, but if those are the characteristics of the dominant models of universities, why wouldn’t I base my research around them? What, for example would a subjectivist, post-modernist, feminist, and dispersed university look like. I can see how I might begin to imagine one, but I’m not aware that any actually exist! I’m a little bit nervous about basing my research around an imaginary conceptual framework.

Anyway, I need to get the letters sent off today. The biggest hurdle of all – getting access to the field sites.

Hello world!

Julian Beckton Uncategorized

Welcome to The Learning Lab.

Well, now. What do I talk about here? I think it will be better to take a themed approach rather than a narrative approach, so users will pick up on (hopefully) useful things that I am working on. There’ll probably be more questions than answers though. Still, we’ll see. I’m off to the Blackboard Conference in Manchester next week, so assuming there’s an internet connection at the hotel, I’ll try and liveblog that.

In another (but closely related) life, I’m working on a doctorate about which is investigating how educational development units can fit into existing models of the University – I have a research blog for that, if you’re interested.

Research questions

Julian Beckton Research, Uncategorized

Well, after many lengthy discussions with my supervisors I’ve finally nailed down some researchable questions.  (I haven’t posted for a while because I’ve been writing first drafts – and I do mean drafts. My approach is to knock out quite a lot of text with a view to getting feedback on it, and then I can do a much tighter second draft.) So much for doing the research in early May. Hah!  Anyway that’s done now, so back to the research questions 

Firstly, I’ve become quite interested in the various models of the University – there are the obvious functional models (Research oriented, teaching oriented) and I think we can add an instrumental model to this. Government demands that Universities deliver certain things (not always on any identifiably rational grounds in my view, but there you go) and universities have to deliver them.  An example might be the push for Personal Development Planning a few years ago. Now PDP is not a bad thing, and there’s a good case for students doing it, but frankly, it was never going to be a high priority for most academics, or for that matter for students. Attempts to make it compulsory were never realistic in my view.  (Sorry, hobby horse there.) Back to models of the university. The point about the functional models is that they are influential because they are held by external agencies. Most parents expect the university to give little Johnny and Jane a good education in order to get a good job for example – and that leads to certain expectations of academic staff. (YOu’ll have to wait for my thesis for a fuller account!)

There’s a bunch of structural models too, perhaps the most famous being that of McNay which identifies four different ways of managing a university – Enterprise, Corporate, Bureaucratic and Collegial. There are others, with slightly different perspectives and these models seem to me to be more about the internal operations of a university – but they’re influential because agencies within the university have to identify the dominant models – if the senior management for examples holds to a bureaucratic model, then educational developers will have to too if they are to survive.

There is also a third group, which I am very doubtful about, and these are what I’m calling behavioural models. It owes something to the work of Ray Land who wrote an interesting article about the orientations of academic developers to academic development. Land argues, I think rightly, that these are responses to a situation in which developers find themselves rather than fixed personal attributes, so in fact they aren’t so much models as responses generated by the functional and structural models. On the other hand, people do have personal attributes, and they do have quite a strong influence on the way they work. I suppose we could say that organisations sometimes behave in particular ways – the most obvious behavioural model for an organisation might be labelled “political” – in the sense that it is competing with other resources for funds, or that it is trying to make changes to wider issues. (An example here might be a university that makes a case that all its research should be published under some form of creative commons license)  Another might be “pragmatic” where an organisation decides that it will do none of those things, but cut its coat according to its cloth (I’m told I can’t use metaphor and colloquialism in academic writing, but I can here. So there.) I do think the behavioural models are a bit speculative though.

Anyway, what I am trying to find out is where the EDU sits in this complex web of conceptualisations. What conceptualisations do the staff of EDU’s hold and do they match those above? I think I may well find that EDU staff are focussed on a particular model of the university, which may, after the end of the TQEF funding present it with some challenges, not least relating to its own survival.

Haven’t gone away yet

Julian Beckton Research

But sooo busy. Still, on the bright side the thesis writing is going reasonably well. I’ve got a strategy of sorts, which is just to write and write and write, and it seems to be working . I’ve got the first two and a half chapters in the can, so I’m nearly ready to start the actual data collection. Well, there’s the huge obstacle of organising the site visits, which I’m looking to do in early May, (Might be ready a bit before then, with any luck) but once that’s done, I can then get on with the data analysis part of the project, and ultimately writing up. Might even be finished by Christmas! Still, let’s not tempt fate!

A bit more history

Julian Beckton Research

Well. I’ve been asked to do a seminar in our “Thinking Aloud” Series. This is a series of seminars that is meant to reinvigorate the intellectual life of the University. I haven’t, of course, got the time to do it, (Regular readers, if I have any, will have noticed that this page has been a bit quiet of late.)

Anyway, I thought I’d have a look at how the history of the University impacted on a) our perceptions of the University, and b) beliefs about what the Educational Development Unit might actually do. So I had a little re-read of Pedersen’s “The first universities” Funny what re-reading can do. I hadn’t really got a clear idea of his argument in my head before, but I think I can trace three separate intellectual strands, a sort of vocational training, arising out of the high status of the scribal class in Babylonian, Egyptian and Sumerian training, a much more scientific and philosophical strand of enquiry arising out of Greek thinking, and the codification of law and order arising out of Roman attitudes to knowledge and learning. That’s a massive oversimplification of the picture, but I think it does rather support my argument that Universities (and schools) are not the ivory tower, remote from their societies that they are sometimes portrayed as being.

Nor do they have their origins in the monasteries of the middle ages. The monasteries were the only places where learning could continue (in the West, anyway) after the collapse of the Roman Empire. And even so, they were at a huge disadvantage, because the lack of a Greek speaking Roman elite, meant that much of the Greek world of learning was lost to them. Much monastic scholarship appears to have been concerned with the collection and copying of books – which did help preserve the tradition of learning. But there’s no real concept of empirical research in the monastic tradition. (In fact that appears to have been limited to the Hellenistic concept of learning – The Romans seemed to concentrate much more on practical knowledge too, going in for encyclopaedias and Handbooks. There is no concept of a “museion” (A place in which objects for research and study are collected) as there is in Aristotle’s Lykeion

But I suppose the question now, is how do we get from the Monasteries to the studia generales of the later middle ages, and from there to the Universities of today. And what influence exactly does Islamic scholarship have on all this. And what does it tell us about the modern perspectives of the University and indeed the EDU? But before going there, I’ve just had a little thought. I think there is a perception that Universities remain in the business of producing elites, even though in the UK at least, there are targets about 50% of the population undergoing HE. Like it or not, in marketing terms, exclusivity remains an important dimension to our product. Aren’t we just now talking about bigger elites? And have we really come all that far from the Babylonians? Did we ever say “Come to University and get a big advantage in life?” I think we probably did. But are we now having to say “Come to University so you won’t be disadvantaged?” I think that’s more a shift of emphasis, than a change of policy. Nevertheless, it might lead to an EDU changing its priorities from, say, developing technological enhancements to the curriculum, to say, redeveloping the curriculum to make it more attractive to a wider constituency.

Just a few thoughts really. There’s much more to go at here. I think I’m going to be in some trouble if I am to keep my seminar down to 25 mins!

“Academic Development” or “Educational Development”

Julian Beckton Research

Haven’t posted for a while, but I have been desperately busy with my real job. I’ve got a sort of chapter 1 in some sort of shape, but it still needs some work. So, now I’m beginning to think about writing the literature review. Now, I’m not short of literature! There are two skips full of photocopied articles in my attic, nearly 300 references in my Refworks database. But, one thing that struck me was that there wasn’t much on “educational development”. I did another search though and turned up an article that kept talking about “academic development”. So I did a search on that.

Uh oh! There were hundreds of articles, books, chapters, although, a cursory glance at the literature, still suggests more interest in legitmising the profession of academic development, than in how units actually do interact with their host university, Of course, legitimising the profession, inevitably strengthens the position of a unit, but it looks like I am going to have to rethink my research questions a bit. I did find some interesting arguments. One article (by Lynn McAlpine) actually proposed that development units be situated within the disciplines to reduce the danger of top down initiatives being foisted on academics who weren’t interested. (Presumably they’d be based within faculties) Admittedly I think there was a bit of Devil’s advocacy going on there. But, another think piece (by Angela Brew) quoted another doctoral dissertation which argued that developers operated in a sort of liminal environment (neither one thing nor the other. But quite definitely something!) I can’t see how a faculty based unit can occupy a zone of liminality for very long.

I did like McAlpine’s critique of the “fixing the teacher” model which she says informed educational development. Actually, I think that model is still quite powerful in some quarters, although perhaps not in educational development itself. (I guess there are probably still poor teachers around…) I much prefer the idea of jointly developing and evaluating innovative ideas with teaching colleagues.

I’ve got to read all these articles in a lot more detail over the holidays and begin to answer some of the questions I have about what the literature is actually saying about educational development units.