Understanding trends around ICTs

And so it’s onto chapter 2 of the set text for the ICTs and Pedagogy courses I’m going to be teaching.

To be honest, I have some reservations about the text. Not because it is bad, but because it clashes with the approach I would have taken. That may say more about the limitations of trying to write a generic textbook than the limitations of this specific book. For example, it’s the end of chapter 2 of the text and there’s been no move to get students to actively use ICTs or get them to use ICTs for learning and teaching.

Instead the aim has been on somewhat theoretical perspectives on keys questions and themes around ICTs and the current trends and challenges. For example, the second chapter has lots of material about various government policies and frameworks. While this is useful material, it does strike me as likely to prevent students worried about the upcoming prac-teaching from seeing the relevance.

Changing world and fixed curriculum

The chapter starts off with the de rigueur observation that the world is changing and will continue to change. But at the same time there seems, at least in parts, to remain an acceptance of the place of having a fixed curriculum set at the state or national level that drives what is being learned.

Surely a fixed curriculum, especially one set at a national level, is to difficult to modify in response to a dynamically changing world. Especially one where student-centered learning is seen as a key component of good learning.

The need for design theories

My thesis contribution was the formulation of a design theory. A type of theory increasingly accepted within the Information Systems discipline, in no small part due to the work my PhD supervisor on the nature of theory (Gregor, 2006). A design theory is described as giving explicit prescriptions in terms of methods, techniques, principles of form and function. i.e. a design theory says how to do something. This is seen as important in information systems (IS) as IS is largely about building systems. Knowing how to do it is important.

I have some interest in thinking about Shirley’s taxonomy of theory types (Gregor, 2006) and how it applies to education. After all, from one perspective education is about how to build learning environments, experiences etc. With the rise of ICTs and the “new digital world” it seems that “how” questions are becoming increasingly important. The text reinforces that perspective by continually repeating that it’s no longer a question of whether or not ICTs should be used in learning and teaching, but rather how to do it effectively.

Design theories seem to be a useful tool for figuring this out.

Of course, education is a very different discipline.

The focus isn’t technology, except it is

In both chapters the text has repeated the mantra that the incorporation of ICTs in learning and teaching should not be done simply because the technology is there. In a case study in chapter 2 the text examines work on teachers with laptops in New Zealand schools (Cowie, Jones and Harlow, 2005) and suggests that

responses to an innovation are shaped by a system that consists of people, tools and organisational structures operating at the level of the classroom, subject department, school and the policy

I generally agree to some level with these perspectives and remain somewhat confused why most research and implementation projects fail to engage with these suggestions. Instead most of these projects are driven by a particular technology. Whether it be a new LMS, an e-learning tool, a mobile device, or a new literacy program most of these projects are focused on the evaluation or implementation of that new project with only very limited regard for the specific context.

This problem seems to me to be a major contributor to complaint made by the text (p. 45)

This resonates with the life of many ICT initiatives and projects. There is often early excitement, injection of funding, a proposed research or evaluation model (or in some cases no accompanying research), but this is mounted without considerations of developing sustainable, long-term structures. Some anecdotal comments from school leaders refer to this as a ‘scorched earth’ strategy, where people are attracted to a project and obtain their funding for that specific project, ‘scorch that patch of earth’, and then move to the next project or piece of earth. The result is small events occurring in disparate ways and, when the funding or project life is complete, energe moves elsewhere

It seems to me that the very nature of research projects and government interventions in research projects are inherently focused on a particular technology or outcome. I think there is some benefit in breaking this approach, but remain unsure about just how to do this within a system that is so focused on the ‘scorched earth’ approach.

Top-down or bottom-up sharing?

One of the government reports mentioned in the chapter talks about “substantial momentum had built in Australia between 1998 and 2002 in terms of:” various bits and pieces including “development of national collaboration, strategic planning, sharing of information and projects in the use of ICT in education”. I have a rather large suspicion about the long term effectiveness and sustainability of top-down projects aiming to encourage collaboration and sharing. In part because they often take a ‘scorched earth’ approach, but also because of the nature of people. i.e. people like to share with people they know, often in a context of need. Conditions which top-down projects are unlikely to create.

Surely someone in the education field has worked on this. Even done some comparison studies between these top-down approaches and more bottom-up approaches. Especially given recent developments around social-media which lend themselves towards supporting more bottom-up collaboration.

This is getting into my area of interest around the Pre-Service Teacher Network (PSTN) project. Along these lines the book mentions a report
from DEST (2002) titled Making better connections something to follow up in terms of #PSTN.

So what knowledge do student teachers need?

The chapter also quotes a 2005 government report that mentions the need for

ensuring university teacher training courses equip new teachers with required ICT knowledge and skills

The obvious question from this is what are the required ICT knowledge and skills? One simple answer would be the learning outcomes of the ICT and pedagogy course I’ll be teaching, at least if its been designed appropriately. The other obvious solution is the various sets of competencies and standards being proposed and required by various government agencies.

But don’t these suffer the same problem as national curriculum? If ICTs and the new digital world are dynamically changing, aren’t the required ICT knowledge and skills also dynamically changing? Doesn’t this make the act of creating by committee, promulgating, and testing these compentecies a long-winded way of enshrining what was required a couple of years ago? Doesn’t creation by committee tend to ignore the important of respondingn appropriately to the local context?

Questions to ponder.

References

Cowie, B. Jones, A. Harlow, A. (2005). Teachers with laptops in New Zealand: impacts on teachers and their practice. paper presented at AERA 2005, Montreal, 11-15 April

DEST (2002). Making better connections: models of teacher professional development for the integration of information and communication technology into classroom practice. DEST, Canberra

Gregor, S. (2006). The nature of theory in information systems. MIS Quarterly, 30(3), 611-642.

Reflections on understanding context

After a couple of weeks off-line, I’m slowly catching up on making public some writing. This post is a follow up to a previous post with some initial thoughts on the ICT and Pedagogy course I’m teaching this term. There were some great comments on that post which I need to think and write about, but later. This post is a collection of some impressions and reactions to the first chapter of the set text for the course.

Knowing where you are going

Page 3 of the text leads off with this quote from Forcier and Descy (2002, pp. 15-16) – I’ve added some emphasis

Any lasting changes and reforms will need to be preceded by a vision of what future learning environments will be like. What expectations will be placed on the learner? What will the role of the teacher be? What will the physical structure of the learning environment be?

The book’s argument is that “the most exciting use of technology by the students of the future will be an enhanced ability to produce authentic, meaningful work”. i.e. what we now know about education (i.e. a constructivist view of learning) provides the vision for lasting changes and reforms.

I have a lot of time for authentic learning, but I am troubled by this idea that we start with a vision of what the future holds. In part it takes me back to the false/pointless argument about whether how technology is used to transform learning and teaching should be driven by the technology or by education. For me this false argument assumes we can know, it assumes that this process of change is knowable. Instead, I prefer Markus and Robey’s (1988) view where technology is just one of a number of components of an emergent process of change where the outcomes are indeterminate because they are situationally and dynamically contingent.

Sure, there is some value in informing applications of ICT in education with knowledge of what works in education. But there is also value in critically exploring new technologies and ways of doing to see what happens. Terms such as emergence, exaptation (Gould, 1991), and bricolage (Ciborra, 1992) spring to mind.

Implication: How could a course in ICT and pedagogy effectively marry both perspectives? Having students show how their knowledge of education informs their use of ICT in pedagogy and get them to engage in emergence/bricolage.

Technochoice and the death spiral of defining definitions

After a few pages the book does mention its adoption of the technochoice approach suggested by Sachs, Russell and Chataway (1990). An approach which

accommodates the process of evolution and continual selection from a spectrum of technological alternatives; the selecting creates tension and leads to opportunities for exploring and experimenting with alternative institutional and organising forms of education

There are good noises about rejecting a linear perspective on process, but in the end the argument is that thinking about ICTs need to be informed by educational rationales. I’m not suggesting that this should be totally removed, but there needs to be some room for uncertainty.

Are our current educational rationales – rationales that evolved in a pre-digital world – the best we can do or will the digital world require the development of new educational rationales/theories? It would appear that the connectivism folk, at least some of them, are arguing this.

Even this early into my career as an University education academic I am finding myself slowly drawn into the “death spiral of defining definitions”. i.e. the situation where each education academic has their very own, very nuanced, definition of common terms. The death spiral where 99% of argument is about those individual definitions.

Linear stage models, incremental and radical innovation, and complexity

Having briefly claimed some problems with “linear”, the book then seems to reference a lot of models that are linear. e.g. Newhouse, Clarkson and Trinidad’s (2005) “Stages of teacher development”, a five stage model

1. Inaction – no interest in using ICTs in pedagogy.
2. Investigation – initial actions arising from an interest in using ICTs in pedagogy.
3. Application – regular, competent, and confident use of ICTs in pedagogy.
4. Integration – ICT in pedagogy has become critical to learning.
5. Transformation – teacher takes on leadership roles around ICTs in pedagogy and knowledgeably reflects on its integration.

Using something as simple and linear as this to explain something as complex as figuring out how to use ICTs in your L&T always gives me pause.

Barriers to ICT integration

First, the question of what ICT curriculum integration is presented as problematic. Then a list of barriers is given apparently from Shelly et al
(2004)

• Lack of teacher training and professional development.
• Lack of curriculum, technical and administration support.
• Limited time for teacher planning.
• The difficulty of computer access.
• Budget constraints.
• Resistance to change by many educators.

The course I’m teaching can really only hope to address two of these, the first and last. With the last being somewhat questionable.

For student teachers – based on my own experience – I would guess that limited planning time would be the major problem. A student teacher is still developing their knowledge of the content and pedagogy they need to use and struggling with time to harness this. Add in technology….

The solution to all this is proposed as strategic planning. I don’t believe that strategic planning within the confines of an existing formal education system is sufficient for the type of transformative change people are talking about. The nature of the people responsible for strategic planning are not likely to have the mindsets ready for such change.

The need for authentic experience

The first chapter closes with an interview with Michelle Williams an experience ICT teacher and teacher education. Michelle also happens to be one of the USQ TTF folk working on this course. The interview closes with an important point that resonated with me.

Teachers who do not have opportunities to use smart and complex digital systems and networks do not see the imperative to duplicate these information and workflow processes in curriculum tasks. They are unlikely to believe such processes are authentic because they are not aware of their existence, let alone have experienced how such processes and thinking change work practices, and community and society culture.

Increasingly I have a desire for this course to provide student teachers with that experience. However, I hestitate somewhat at the thought that the standard University LMS could be claimed as providing experience with using “smart and complex digital systems and networks”.

I’m currently wondering about this sort of structure for the course

1. Spend the first week or two or three running the course fairly traditionally with a focus on students thinking about whether their experience with ICTs
   in their Unviersity study and their own prac teaching is transformative or not.
2. Use increasingly different approaches as the term progresses to illustrate what might be considered transformative. Initially have some of this connected with “lessons plans”. i.e. change the course via mechanisms they are expected to use in teaching.
3. By the end the students have been led to use of a variety of technologies
   targetted at producing something different. i.e. it’s the students job to use ICTs to design something transformative around ICTs and pedagogy. Probably aim to keep this fairly broad and open, but require demonstration of significant use of
   “smart and complex digital systems and networks” and the production of
   some public output/contribution.

In essence, the underlying aim is to provide an environment in which student teachers can become, or at least make progress toward becoming, digital residents through applying the theories and technologies to their own experience studying this course and teaching in schools.

This by Cathy Davidson and her work better captures what I’m learning toward.

References

Ciborra, C. (1992). From thinking to tinkering: The grassroots of strategic information systems. The Information Society, 8(4), 297-309.

Gould, S.J. (1991). Exaptation: a crucial tool for evolutionary psychology.
Journal of Social Issues 47, 43–65.

Markus, M. L., & Robey, D. (1988). Information technology and organizational change: causal structure in theory and research. Management Science, 34(5), 583-598.

To get

Forcier, R.C. & Descy, D.E. (2002). The computer as an educational tool: productivity and problem solving. 3rd edn, Merrirll Prentice Hall, Columbus, OH.

Newhouse, P., Clarkson, B. & Trinidad, S. (2005). A framework for leading school change in using ICT, in Using ICT in education: leadership, change and models of best practice, S. Trinidad and J. Pearson (eds), Pearson Education Asia, Singapore, pp. 148-64

Sachs, J., Russell, N. & Chataway, G. (1990). Technology and education: forging links with business and industry, Dupe M (ed), Making the links: technology and science, industry and education, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra, pp. 49-60.

Shelly, G.B., Cashman, T.J., Gunter, R.E., & Gunter, G.A. (2004). Integrating technology in the classroom, 3rd edition, Thomson, Boston.

Initial thoughts on an ICT and Pedagogy course

In a little under a month’s time I am meant to be in charge of the course EDC3100 ICT and Pedagogy at the University of Southern Queensland. The first time I’ve taught a course since in almost 6 years, should be fun. This is one of the responsibilities of the new job that I haven’t quite yet started. For various reasons, however, I can’t help be start thinking about the course.

As part of my thinking, I’m going to try and blog. To some extent as an attempt to model what I preach. The following is a quick overview of the little I know about the course, the direction the course appears to be taking and some questions I have for you and for reflection.

The course

The course is taken in the third year of a four year Bachelor of Education. The students have a 2 or 3 week stint of prac-teaching towards the end of the course. To some extent the course is the fairly standard “how to teach with ICTs” course found in many education degrees.

The course is offered a couple of times a year. The largest offering has up to a couple of hundred students spread across three different physical campuses and studying via online/distance education. It appears that each cohort gets the equivalent of lectures and tutorials (more on this in the questions).

The key sentence from the course synopsis seems to be this one

Students will engage with the design and delivery of learning experiences for individuals and groups employing a range of developmentally appropriate and flexible teaching, learning and assessment strategies and resources in ICT enriched environments.

The other point made is that students will be able to qualify for the Queensland Department of Education’s ICT certificate.

I’m yet to see a weekly schedule. That and getting access to previous resources, course sites etc is a priority.

Course objectives

The following is my summary/revision of the course objectives. Feel free to insert the appropriate higher level Bloom’s verbs and other verbiage.

1. past and present (inter)national policies around ICTs in education.
2. theories and frameworks that inform ICT pedagogies.
3. ideas about knowledge generation and the knowledge economy and implications for curriculum and pedagogy
4. role of ICTs in curriculum, learning, and teaching
5. personal beliefs and practices that impact on the use of ICTs in L&T
6. design worthwhile student experiences where ICTs are integral to the curriculum and where learners use ICT for higher order thinking
7. students develop strategic pathways to continue their learning journey and professional recognition.
8. spell good and use grammar good etc.

If one applies Bigg’s (1996) concept of constructive alignment, then the last outcome would seem to suggest that the course provides students the opportunity to learn about good spelling, grammar, referencing etc.

I wonder if you can read anything into the fact that actually teaching with technology is left until objective 6.

No changes…yet

My plan was (and still is) to essentially teach the course as it stands. Mostly because there are only four or so weeks between when I start work at a new University in a new discipline and when the term starts. This potentially creates three problems:

1. Not allowed to make changes?.
   I didn’t think University policy would allow me to change anything this close to the start of term. A course this complex usually has lead times for the production of materials, assessment etc. I expect USQ – as an institution with a history in industrial distance education – to have policies preventing willy-nilly changes to courses in the last four weeks before the start of term.
2. Ignorance.
   USQ is a new university for me. I’ve never taught within a Faculty of Education before. This combination does not provide a firm foundation of informed insight upon which to make changes. I want to know a lot more about the students, the course etc before making changes.
3. Laziness.
   I’ve just moved town. My kids are settling into new schools. My wife is preparing for a career change. We’re still playing around with real estate and I’m trying to make my way in a new job. I don’t want to complicate that with the task of radically changing a course.

The TTF changes

As it happens, USQ’s Faculty of Education – like all the other Australian university Faculties of Education – are using Teaching Teachers for the Future (TTF) funds to examine and improve the use of ICTs within their teacher education programs. As part of this the USQ TTF project folk are keen to make some changes to EDC3100 before it’s next offering.

One of the rationales for these changes is influenced by one of my broader questions below about the role of ICTs in education (not to mention more generally). i.e. it is expected that the use of ICTs should become embedded throughout the courses taken by student teachers. If this is the case, why then have a separate course like EDC3100 that teaches ICT and pedagogy? Haven’t the students gotten this already? What does/should EDC3100 add?

The folk pushing these changes are good people with a lot of experience. It’s a great opportunity to listen and observe. Even if the situation challenges my ignorance and laziness explained above.

Questions

The brief discussions I’ve had with a couple of USQ staff and the TTF project staff and some skimming of the set text for the course are starting to raise a few questions and remind me of a few others. These are the types of questions I’m keen to engage with when I eventually get around to making some changes to the course.

An initial list includes

1. Engaging the students.
   Apparently this course and other Faculty of Ed courses suffer the traditional attendance/engagement cycle. i.e. everyone attends the first week, no-one attends subsequent weeks, except for the odd week where an assignment is due. I’m not sure this is a problem I can solve, but it certainly seems to indicate a mismatch somewhere between the course and students.
2. Treating it more like a design course and less like a theory course.
   The first chapter of the set text focuses on topics more related to the first three or four learning outcomes described above. I can see how this could seem to students to not help them with the main crux of the course. How to use ICTs to teach.

   If the aim is to get students designing effective learning experiences with ICTs, then I’d want them doing lots of designing, examining and critiquing lots of different learning designs with ICTs. Starting from the very start. This experience can then be used to talk about national policies etc.

3. Modelling good practice.
   One way to do this is to make the design of this course and its various learning experiences transparent and use those designs as part of the critiquing process. One of the aims here would to show that the course doesn’t always model good practice and provide students with the ability to offer modifications. But also for them to be aware of and reflect upon the constraints and different perspectives that influence the idea of what “good” practice actually is.

   One of the barriers to this approach would appear to be the significant difference between the context/practice within a University course and within a school setting. One has lectures/tutorials, the other has 40/50/70 minute lessons. At least one (in theory) expects pre-prepared lessons plans while the other doesn’t. I do wonder whether having parts of this course (or even the whole course) outlines in a set of lesson plans that students can examine and modify as part of the assessment might offer some interesting possibilities (and difficulties).

4. The question of transformation.
   The set text talks about the transformation of learning enabled by ICTs and yet discussion of lectures and tutorials feature heavily when talking about the course. The course doesn’t seem to show much evidence of transformation.
5. The need to know more about the nature of technology?
   It appears that there isn’t much talk about the nature of technology and its impact on society. This sort of thing could quickly become boringly theoretically pointless, but could be useful. Wonder if this would be revisiting a previous version of the course?
6. Making it public and authentic.
   The course seems to have a bit of group work. But it’s all presented within the virtual or physical class. I’m keen to see this go outside the class. What can these students do for assessment that would be valued by their mentor teachers, other student teachers and the broader
   community?
7. Why is ICT and pedagogy still separate?
   I’m escaping the information systems (IS) discipline and moving into education. In part, because it appears that information systems is shrinking due to ICT becoming part of everyday life. Instead of there being a separate discipline (IS) examining the integration of technology and organisational/social life, the organisational and social sciences are examining technology.

   I can see echoes of this in this course, as mentioned above. If technology is part of every day learning and teaching, why have a separate ICT in pedagogy course? Shouldn’t it be part of all the courses?

   The obvious answer at the moment is that it really isn’t embedded in many of the other courses and there may remain some useful experiences to provide in this sort of course.

8. How can I get the Pre-Service Teacher Networking (PSTN) project connected with this course.
   There are some good folk trying to get an interesting project up and going. I’m keen for this course, or at least some of the students within it, to engage with the project. I need to figure out how/if this can be done.
9. Read more about the TTF.
   It’s a big thing in the sector/discipline at the moment.

References

Biggs, J. (1996). Enhancing teaching through constructive alignment. Higher Education, 32(3), 347-364.

Teaching computer science considered harmful?

This is interesting (hat tip to @timbuckteeth). English schools will no longer be teaching Information and Communications Technology (ICT) study – a situation where students are bored out of their minds learning Word and Excel by bored teachers – and instead will be taught “more rigorous computer science and programming”.

While the fundamental idea can be seen as worthy, its implementation will be difficult to impossible. I hope they can pull it off.

But for all the reasons expressed below and others, I can’t but think that this move is going to be somewhat harmful.

Background

I have a double major in Computer Science and a PhD in Information Systems. I taught Information Technology for about 10 years at a University level. I have just spent the last year as a trainee high school teacher. One of my teaching areas was IPT. i.e. the “computer science” course taken by senior high school students.

Problems facing England

Some of the problems England’s school system will face include

1. Intro computer science at University is troubled.
   Do a quick literature search in the area of computer science education – especially around the first year and programming – and you will find some problems. In this paper I reference a range of literature quoting failure figures of 30/40/50% in first year programming courses. Remember, the cohort in these first year University programming courses is significantly more selective than what you are going to find in high school.
2. IPT at Queensland high schools is failing the relevance test.
   In this post I references research that shows that Australian students are finding high school “computer science” courses boring and irrelevant.

   Now both this and the previous problem could be ascribed to poor quality courses. The English are suggesting they’ll take a better approach. But that better approach is still going to have to be implemented in a large number of schools and overcome existing student beliefs. This is going to be hard. I hope they do it well.

3. Where are the teachers going to come from?
   If English schools are anything like Australian schools, then I would suggests that one of the reasons why current students are bored with the current ICT training is that many teachers are recipe followers and not chefs when it comes to using computers. i.e. they can follow the 10 step process to create an Excel spreadsheet that does X, but problem solving and creative applications of the technology is beyond them. If teachers are struggling to do this with Word/Excel, are they going to be better placed with programming? This is a point made by some of the experts quoted in the article.

   While students can learn quite well without teachers. The teachers will influence the roll out of this exciting new curriculum.

It’s still separate

This curriculum appears to still create programming/computer science as a separate discipline distinct from the rest of the curricula. The suggestion is that the change will help produce students “able to work at the forefront of technological change”. This assumes that technological change is the most important spot.

The trouble is that what’s important is how to harness technology effectively within existing disciplines. Rather than making every student a computer scientist or games programmer. How about placing the ability to manipulate computers within the existing school subjects and creating students who are able to effectively marry “technological change” with the everyday problems of the world?

Not many people I know are enthused about technology for technology’s sake. They are engaged and enthused about seeing how technology – and from their the ability to manipulate and program technology – can be applied to their problems and interests.

Ateleological travels in a teleological world: Past and future journeys around ICTs in education

In my previous academic life, I never really saw the point of book chapters as a publication form. For a variety of reasons, however, my next phase in academia appears likely to involve an increasing number of book chapters. The need for the first such chapter has arisen this week and the first draft is due by February next year, which is a timeline to give me just a little pause for thought. (There is a chance that this book might end up as a special edition of a journal)

What’s you perception of book chapters as a form of academic publication? Am particularly interested in the view from the education field.

What follows is a first stab at an abstract for the book chapter. The title for the book/special edition is “Meanings for in and of education research”. The current working title for my contribution is the title to this post: “Ateleological travels in a teleological world: Past and future journeys around ICTs in education”.

Abstract

The Australian Federal Government are just one of a gaggle of global stakeholders suggesting that Information and Communication Technologies are contributing to the creation a brave, new, digital world. Such a digital world is seen as being radically different to what has gone before and consequently demanding a radically different education system to prepare the next generation of learners. A task that is easier said than done. This chapter argues that the difficulties associated with this task arise because the meanings underpinning the design of education systems for the digital world are decidedly inappropriate and ill-suited for the nature of the digital world. The chapter draws upon 15+ years of research formulating an Information Systems Design Theory for emergent e-learning systems for universities to critically examine these commonly accepted meanings, suggest alternate and more appropriate meanings, and discuss the potential implications that these alternate meanings hold for the practice of education and education research.

The plan

The plan is that this chapter/paper will reflect on the primary focus of my research over recent years and encourage me to think of future research directions and approaches. Obviously it will draw on the PhD research and in particular the Ps Framework and the presentation I gave at EdMedia a couple of years ago. It will also draw on the presentation I gave analysing the Digital Education Revolution as part of my GDLT studies this year.

“Scaling” educational innovations

This is an attempt to briefly (and possibly badly) express a disquiet I have with the idea of scaling educational innovations. It’s sparked by a post by Rick Hess titled “Why education innovation tends to crash and burn”.

The post suggests that there are two sets of obstacles that prevent educational innovations scaling

1. Reliance on tough-to-replicate elements.
2. Structural conditions that impede the growth of replicable models.

Structural conditions

This second set of obstacles resonates with me. It suggests that innovations are impeded by obstacles such as

• True innovation challenges existing institutions and ways of doing things and hence likely fails within those existing institutions.
  This is Christensen’s disruptive innovation stuff.
• The lack of price competition (e.g. many/most? parents don’t pay for education, at least not beyond taxes) leads to institutions not having to spend time building cost-effective models.
  There are some questions here, but it’s a factor.
• The difficult of effectively comparing outcomes means you can’t objectively decide between alternatives.
• A discomfort with for-profit companies – which are obviously better at innovation – being involved with education reduces risk etc.
  Not sure I agree entirely with some of the assumptions of this point, but there is an aspect of this which may reduce diversity. Not sure there is a lack of for-profits and also think some of the prior obstacles may contribute to this lack. Not just a discomfort.

Don’t think this list is complete, but it’s a start. It’s the first set of obstacles that trouble me.

The need for pilots – wrong set of “tough-to-replicate” elements

The underpinning assumption in the post is that the problem here is how to scale a successful pilot. i.e. some senior manager has identified a good innovation from somewhere, set up a pilot, it’s worked and now there is a need to scale this throughout the entire organisation. Based on this assumption the “tough-to-replicate elements” include: funding for the pilot, expertise of pilot staff, enthusiasm from leadership, accommodating policies.

The idea seems to be that the nature of a pilot makes it more likely to succeed, but that this nature is missing when you attempt to scale it more broadly.

I agree that these can be a problem, but I think the problems come from the assumptions that underpin this view of organisations. A view that results in the following solutions.

Hess’ solutions

The solutions Hess suggests essentially seek to minimise/negate some of the above obstacles and include

• Pay more attention to innovations that scale easily.
  This is because you don’t have to pony up the resources to make it succeed.
• Don’t innovation within existing institutions.
  More of the Christensen flavour. It’s to difficult to innovation in existing organisations with established cultures, do it elsewhere. This means leadership don’t have to be involved and even if they are, you don’t have to worry about reinvention.
• Focus on cost and outcomes in allocating public dollars.
  Change public policy to avoid formula funding and limited measures of quality. Of course there’s no mention of how to do this, but it is a short article.

Change the type of system

All of the above seems heavily based on the assumption that an education institution is an ordered system. That the best way to scale an innovation is to pilot it, test if it succeeds and then scale it. It treats pilots as something separate, which is in part what the above argues against. But it goes further than this, if you assume an educational institution is a complex system.

Some of the implications of this view include

• Limited knowledge of the existing system is a big problem.
  Pilots identified and supported by senior management are problematic because senior management – by the nature of their position – have little or now idea of the reality of organisational life. The “coal-face” is a mystery to them and so pilots often suffer from unexpected problems generated by clashes with the reality of organisational life, and this is why innovations are often worked around by coal-face workers. Pilot’s work around these clashes by having resources, expertise and leadership buy-in.
• Organisational culture != the hierarchy.
  What senior management usually know about an organisation is based on the existing management hierarchy and the information flows it provides to management. The description of the value of a new innovative IT system given by the head of the IT division is going to markedly differ from the description offered by the people using it every day. Guess which one senior management are more likely to hear regularly?
• The constraints of efficiency and purpose driven design.
  I don’t think it’s the established culture within the organisation (i.e. the recalcitrant workers) that provide the largest barrier to innovation. Instead it’s the “rational” organisational demand for efficiency which results in an increase in top-down, hierarchical policies and practices to ensure that resources aren’t being wasted. This is what constrains change and actively works against innovation from arising within.

  Within schools this can be seen in national curriculum, standardised computer equipment etc.

  This is part of the problem of organisations and their components being overly constrained by a particular purpose. “You are charged with teaching the Year 10 Core mathematics curriculum, any deviation from that curriculum is bad.” A great way to encourage innovation.

• Simplified measurements.
  In order to measure effectiveness and/or learn more about the functioning of the institution simplified, standardised measures are adopted. For example, standardised testing, checklists, quality assurance processes, minimum defaults etc. All of which fail miserably at capturing the full diversity of the institution and instead end up driving the members of the institution toward the visible performance of some minimal default. i.e. it drives out diversity (or at least its visibility) and hence a source of innovation.
• Decomposition.
  Schools as with most modern organisations are decomposed into smaller and smaller blocks. This decomposition tends to make the establishment of lines of communication between people in different blocks much harder. Driving out cross-silo communication limits capacity to innovate.
• Innovation requires radical change and are predictable.
  An assumption behind “scaling an innovation” is that you are changing (possibly radically) the institution and that you can predict the outcome. If you view an educational institution as a complex system, you know you can’t predict the outcome because there will be unpredictable, non-linear effects.

  This means that you not only can’t predict what will happen, it also means that you don’t need radical change projects. Small changes within a complex system can have radical outcomes.

The failures of intuition in education

For some reason I’m in a fairly contrarian frame of mind tonight. So starting a series of blog posts listing and criticising widely held positions in education seems like the thing to do. I’m sure you have your favourite example, feel free to add them to the comments. Also feel free to add pointers to resources – both for and against – the examples.

The spark for the idea comes from this article title “Why Is the Research on Learning Styles Still Being Dismissed by Some Learning Leaders and Practitioners?” from the ACM eLearn Magazine. The article argues that (one of) the reason(s) where the idea of learning styles are still widely given credence within education is because they appeal to intuition and common sense. The idea resonates with people and hence it is hard to convince them of the alternate view.

I’m pretty sure learning styles aren’t the only example of this problem within the field of education. Given that I’m taking up a role as a teacher educator in the new year, it seems a good time to start adding to my list. The following starts with my initial list and I plan to expand on these over the coming weeks. (There’s a connection between this idea and the list of cognitive biases I included in the initial Ps Framework presentation – start on slide 154.)

The initial list

I haven’t bothered to define what it meant by “failure of intuition”, that would only prematurely close off discussion. I’m happy to live with messiness.

So, my initial list:

1. Learning styles.
   Steve Wheeler calls learning styles A convenient untruth and points to a range of additional resources arguing against learning styles. Including a 2010 article from Change that argues for three reasons why learning styles continue to be accepted:
   1. Broader claims (e.g. all learners are different) with which learning styles connect are true.
   2. Learning styles suggest that everyone has strengths, it’s egalitarian, which much be good.
   3. Learning styles have become common knowledge.
2. The learning pyramid.
   The most visited post on my blog is this one that argues that the learning pyramid has no support whatsoever from research. The comments on this post are symptomatic of the intuition/common sense problem. The commenters – including some apparent “gurus” on the education publication/conference circuit – argue for the learning pyramid because it just makes sense to them. This is especially problematic because – as argued by this post (I’ve just read the comments on this post, I recommend them, but that could just be my own confirmation bias) – the learning pyramid resonates with constructivist theories of learning, which as everyone knows must be good.

   Will Thalheimer has a blog post critical of the learning pyramid and associated ideas.

3. People are rational.
   This isn’t specific to education, most other professions assume that people are rationale. Especially when they are in a management role (or from the IT division). This list is based on the idea that people are not rational decision makers. We do not actively search through all the evidence, weight that evidence and make objective decisions. We are pattern matching intelligences, when evidence matches our established patterns, we select for it.
4. Leadership.
   Earlier this week Dean Groom tweeted a link to “What we know about successful school leadership” from the American Educational Research Association (AERA). It starts with the following
   

   Scratch the surface of an excellent school and you are likely to find an excellent principal. Peer into a failing school and you will find weak leadership.

   20 years experience in university (yes, it is only anecdotal evidence) suggests that such a causal link between “good” leaders and organisational performance (good or otherwise) is questionable. But this belief in the importance of leadership to outcomes seems to be a key part of the teleological myth underlying much or modern organisational practice.

   In Managing without leadership: Towards a theory of organizational function argues against the causal link and attempts to develop “a causal, bottom-up account of organizational practice, in place of top-down theories of leadership”.

5. Digital native and immigrants.
   This one is fairly obvious.

So, what other examples of intuition failure exist in the discipline of education?

Some of the learning analytics literature

Am trying to slowly get back into the learning analytics literature as part of writing a paper. The following is an ad hoc collection of comments/reflections on a few learning analytics papers.

Definitions, processes and potentials

This paper was one of the contributions to the LAK’11 MOOC (which was yet another MOOC I engaged with briefly). Here’s the summary of this paper I did earlier this year.

Social learning analytics

Social Learning Analytics (Buckingham Shum and Ferguson, 2011) is something I’ve been meaning to read for awhile.

Three challenges and opportunities for the design of social learning analytics

1. challenge of implementing analytics with pedagogical and ethical integrity given questions of power and control over data
   Draws on existing disciplinary and ethical critiques of “new forms of measurement and classification” e.g. Bowker and Staur (1999)…e.g. if it ain’t measured, it doesn’t exist.

   Expands this to suggest that much of analytics focuses on data generated as a by-product of online learning, not as an intentional form of evidence of learning. Gives 5 “variants on longstanding debates” that apply to analytics.

2. the challenge given by an increasingly turbulent educational landscape
   Identifies 5 phenomena that create a new context for learning and consequently suggest the need for a rethink of analytics. They are
   1. Technological drivers
   2. shift to “free” and “open”.
   3. cultural shifts in social values
   4. innovation requires social learning
   5. challenges to educational institutions

   Some of this I might argue against. But the section on “innovation requires social learning” is much more interesting.

   Uses “the power of pull” to argue the point. This includes the idea that much of the knowledge in the new context is tacit. Which means it can’t be extracted and written down. i.e. analytics can’t measure it.

   Questions/thought: Raises the idea of analytics designed to help the construction/sharing of tacit/shared knowledge.

3. understand different types of social learning analytic. ,/li>

The core proposition is that with the unprecedented amounts of digital data now becoming available about learners’ activities and interests, from educational institutions and elsewhere online, there is significant potential to make better use of this data to improve learning outcomes.

I like this quote because it suggests to me assumptions that can be challenged. e.g. while there may be a lot of data generated by LMS (quality), the overal quantity of the data or the insight about learning that can be drawn from that data is questionable.

A major part of the paper spends time outlining the challenges and opportunities.

Then the initial taxonomy of five types of social learning analytic is introduced.

1. Social learning network analysis
2. Social learning discourse analysis
3. Social learning content analysis
4. Social learning dispositions analysis
5. Social learning context analysis

Finally, potential futures of learning analytics, an interesting list is provided.

Learning analytics

Another overview of the origins of learning analytics.

The evidence is that a growing number of universities are
implementing data warehouse infrastructures in readiness for a future in which they see analytics as a key strategic asset (Stiles et al 2011)

Question: What follows is a brief description of a project at OU that illustrates this organisational trend. It would be interesting to do research that looked at these institutions and found out how they are going, how they are implemented, their impacts and more importantly, how they are being worked around by members of the institution.

Twitter, pre-service teachers and creating networks

Tomorrow morning I have the opportunity to participate in a Skype session around a nascent project looking at how pre-service teachers might be aided and abetted in the creation of professional networks and subsequently learning more about their new profession. It’s likely that my description of the project doesn’t capture the full diversity of views, as mentioned the project is still in its formative stages. The following is an attempt to gather some of my thoughts about the project.

Origins

The initial spark was this blog post from @laurenforner. One of the comments on the post was from @sthcrft and the first I heard of it was a few tweets, including one that pointed to Google doc for gathering comments.

And through the beauty of the tools it seems @acourous is doing something similar, even down to the Google doc.

Resonance

It was this sentence from Lauren’s blog post that sparked my interest

I think Twitter (and social networking with other professionals in general) needs to become a compulsory part of any education course in order to get pre service teachers into the habit of sharing resources with others, seeking assistance, and constantly innovating and being inspired to try new things and take risks with their students.

Like Lauren, I spent this year as a pre-service teacher and many of the insights and resources that informed my practice as a high school teacher arose from the collection of folk I follow on various forms of social media. Beyond that, I believe that it is the ability to grow, navigate and harness just such a network that forms one of, if not, the primary skill necessary for learners at the moment.

A belief that is obviously influenced by connectivism and similar perspectives. It’s not all that new a belief which does tend to beg the question why the people teaching pre-service teachers haven’t embedded appropriate tools and practices into the courses taken by pre-service teachers. This is my interest. In theory, next year will find me taking on the responsibility for University courses being taken by pre-service teachers. From the start I’ve been thinking of how to embed twitter, blogs etc into these courses so that pre-service teachers feel it beneficial to adopt these practices.

What better way to introduce thee practices and tools than via a project initiated and developed using those tools and practices?

Reflections

The following is a mish-mash of reflections on some of the material within the project’s Google planning doc and subsequent reading.

Measures

Lauren asked the question about measures. How do you know if a pre-service teacher has “done well”? What does “done well” mean when using social media?

The value of my network to me as a pre-service teacher, was much like what Lauren reported. It gave me knowledge that was useful. When faced with a particular situation or question, I often had various ideas for actions/responses based on what my network.

Mentors?

Someone suggested that the mentors should get some external recognition for their participation. Or at least that’s my interpretation, and I can see some value in having specific mentor and the potential need to give them some level of reward. But I do wonder if there is a different way?

Having a mentor for each participant strikes me as a very centralised solution being applied to a very de-centralised purpose. The purpose of this project, as I see it, is for each pre-service teacher to develop and start using their very own, highly individualised network. Sure some assistance is needed, but then isn’t that the point of having a PLN in the first place? To provide insight and assistance?

Then again, I’ve observed some of my fellow pre-service teachers struggle getting started with ICTs. A familiar, friendly face/avatar could be useful. The questions of should/how/if you can avoid a “centralised” mentor for this type of project seems somewhat interesting.

Avoiding YACW

+1 for Sarah’s suggestion not to fall into the mistake of creating YACW (Yet Another Community or Website). It seems just about every government or research project around professional development has as its starting point the creation of a brand-new website or new community.

Isn’t YACW simply another form of centralisation? Just like the idea of each pre-service teacher having a mentor?

Should the project adopt the Downes/Siemens MOOC approach? i.e. come up with a unique tag and encourage participants to add that tag to their contributions and to look for that tag when trying to connect to others?

Community and communities of practice

Perhaps it is the anti-social introvert in me, but I tend to shudder when CoP is mentioned. Perhaps it’s the negative experiences of badly organised CoPs? Given the prevalence of CoP within the teacher education community, this should make things interesting over coming years. Especially given the strong resonance that the idea of CoP has with this project.

The other concern I have here is that, at least in my head, the idea wasn’t to set up a single community. Instead the aim was to help students find their own community. This was especially important to me as a pre-service high school teacher, as distinct from a pre-service primary school teacher. At least in Australia, high school teachers specialise in a couple of disciplines. The networks/communities I connected to as a IT/Maths pre-service teacher were very different from what would be useful for an English/History teacher.

A post from Dave Snowden on communities of practice outlines his argument about how to design CoP.

Initial thoughts

At the moment, it seems my interest is in methods/a community to help pre-service teachers start the process of creating and maintaining their own networks through social media in ways that are appropriate to them. This would seem to involve the provision of encouragement and scaffolds, and then letting them loose and responding as time progresses.

Porting BIM to Moodle 2 – Step 1

The wife’s out for some culture so I find myself late on a Saturday night taking the initial steps in the second attempt to port BIM to Moodle 2. Started reading Mike Churchward’s blog series on porting modules to Moodle 2.

Time moves on, and almost a week later I’m putting the finishing touches on this post/development journal entry. It gives a brief summary (mostly for my records) of what I’ve done to get a version of BIM that is being recognised by Moodle 2.1. Not sure how well it is working, but Moodle 2.1 is creating tables and recognising the plugin as being available for use in courses.

The next step will involve experimenting with just how well BIM is working with Moodle 2.1 and fixing what needs to be done. This will involve finishing some of the following.

Upgrading Moodle

Of course, it’s a good 6/7 months since I touched Moodle. So I should probably start by upgrading to the latest version of Moodle, which seems to be 2.1.2.

It is going to take sometime to get back into this.

Oh look at that, Moodle 2.1 requires the next version of PHP. Thankfully some kind soul has produced a dmg file with Xampp and Moodle 2.1 for Mac OSX. Let’s install that.

That was relatively painless. Moodle 2.1 up and going.

The plan for git

The source code for BIM is hosted on BIM. The previous attempt at BIM2 is also hosted there, need to figure out what to do with this new version…..yes folks, I’m that out of it as a developer.

Ohh, there’s a GUI client for Mac OSX now. Looks okay.

This seems to be the approach. More on this tomorrow.

The plan is

• Tag the existing bim code as 1.0 (and v1.0 just for good measure – i.e. re-learning git).
• Create a bim2 branch and then a develop branch from there.
  git checkout -b bim2
• Convert the Moodle 2 branch into a Moodle 2 module.
  This will be the step-by-step process I start from now, with a vague set of steps something like
  • Do minimum to get Moodle 2 to recognise bim.
  • Comment out everything that creates errors.
  • Gradually bring bits back and convert them to Moodle 2 “format”.

  Be interesting to see how long that plan lasts.

Get Moodle 2.1 to recognise the bim module

With the code in place (~/mod), when I login as admin to the local Moodle installation, there is the notice that bim is ready to install. Now’s when we find out what is missing. There’s the error

Plugin “mod_bim” is defective or outdated, can not continue, sorry.

The error causing this is

Missing mandatory en language pack.

If I go looking for the code, it’s looking for the file $fullmod/lang/en/$mod.php. More information here and this checklist

I’d gotten a fair bit of the way through this conversion process when errors were causing me concern. After a few more side tracks I discovered the following.

Oh dear, simply syntax errors. Need to check those. Using this little bit of shell
for name in *.php do php -d display_errors=1 -l $name done

Fixed up all of those and now have a bit of success, good news this late on a Saturday afternoon, bim is being recognised by Moodle 2.1

Language strings

From the the checklist

• DONE rename language folder (en_utf8 to en)
• DONE Change $a to {$a}
• Change popup help files to _help lang strings and shorten.
  Need to run up Moodle 1.9 so I can double check where the help strings are going etc.

  Some of these are quite long, I can see some Moodle docs in my future, including:

  • Manage marking help “manageMarking.html”
  • yourStudents.html
  • opml.html
  • unregisteredDetails.html
  • registeredDetails.html
  • changingosts.html
  • mods.html
• DONE Add $string[‘pluginname’] to lang file
• DONE Add $string[‘pluginadministration’] to lang file

So, does that change the Moodle 2.1 complaints about BIM?

Yes it does. A big green tick and success. You know it’s not going to be that easy. Ahh, internal server error. Have to remove the bim code entirely to get Moodle to start up again. Will remove it via Moodle, stick the code back in to see if the problem was due to a time out issue.

Time to go through the rest of the checklist.

Database

Also drawing on the DB layer 2.0 migration docs

• DONELeave empty db/update.php file
• DONENew $DB global objects with functions replace old db functions
  There is a PHP script that checks for functions.
• $DB parameters swapped to ?
• DONEAdd and strip slashes no longer required
• DONERemove use of ENUM and ENUMVALUES in install.xml file
• DONERemove STATEMENTS section in install.xml file, use db/install.php or db/log.php instead.
• DONE not used..check use of sql_substr()
• Get_records() etc now always returning arrays, empty array in case of no records found.
• Db functions throw errors not return false on error
• DB functions offer strictness parameters e.g MUST_EXIST
• DONE Update version.php numbers (esp required)
• DONEIn version.php add $module->requires = 2010080300; // Requires this Moodle version

More insights from page on upgrading plugin tables

Page display

• New $OUTPUT header and footer functions
  Done the basics at the top level. Need to do more work on this.
• Navigation links need to use $PAGE->navbar
• Make sure that you instantiate the moodle form before any call to $OUTPUT->header()
• Create a renderer
• DONE (not used) Change the way image urls are displayed (not $CFG->pixpath any more)
• CSS changes
  • DONE (not used) Change styles.php to styles.css
  • Change page id to new structure e.g. course-format-studyplan to page-course-view-studyplan

Forms

• Param_clean parameter type removed
• type required parameter for optional_and required_param
• Replace file form elements with new filepicker
• Replace htmleditor with editor form field type
• Change setHelpButton to addHelpButton. (You need to change the arguments, but the new ones are simpler.)

Roles and permissions

• DONE array name to $capabilities in access.php
• DONE Remove references to admin in access.php
• DONE Rename legacy to archetypes in access.php
• DONE Add manager archetype in access.php
• Ensure require_login as well as require_capability checks
• DONE (not used) isguest() is depreicated, use !isloggedin() || isguestuser() instead

Progress

Somewhere in all of that, things got a bit much. Need to do this differently, for now.

Empty slate and slowly copy stuff in, starting with index.php. index.php requires a valid course id with a bim activity to work directly. But bim is showing up in Moodle 2.1 okay.