what does studying technology tell us about higher education?

Title Slide

An interdisciplinary collaboration

Martin OliverLondon Knowledge Lab, Institute of [email protected]/MartinOliver

What does studying technology tell us about Higher Education?

mailto:[email protected]

Why should people in SRHE care about technology?

I’m going to offer two answers…– One that’s obvious but weak (and why

educational technology is a bit of a silo)– One that’s messy, a bit obscure, but possibly

more interesting

You’re going to have to pick which bits to spend time on

– Fist answer as context; second as choices

www.londonknowledgelab.ac.uk

The obvious but weak answer

• Technology is an important area of policy, practice and research in the context of Higher Education

…and here’s an overview of it for you…


Where has this come from, pedagogically?

• Connectivism, social media (2000s)• The internet (1990s)• Cognitive sciences, desktop PCs, multimedia,

constructionism (1980s)• Constructivism, systems theory, artificial intelligence,

instructional design (1970s)• Programmed instruction and cybernetics (1960s)• Skinner’s teaching machines (1950s)• US military training in WWII• Tyler’s work on achievement testing (1930s)

…and so on…


What about in terms of UK policy?

Phase one (1965-1979)Application of computers in scientific contexts for research use; National Development Programme for Computer Assisted Learning

Phase two (1980-1989)Computers in Teaching Initiative, Learning and Teaching Support Network, several research centres, ESRC “Virtual Society?” programme

‘let a thousand flowers bloom’


UK Policy

Phase three (1990-1999)Teaching and Learning Technology Programmes 1-3, Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning, National Grid for Learning, University for Industry

Dearing report

Phase four (2000-2010…)HEFCE e-learning strategy, institutional e-learning strategies, Open Educational Resources; ‘mainstreaming’ & institutionalising


…and what have we achieved…?


Education is on the brink of being transformed through education; however, it has been on that brink for some decades now.

- Laurillard, 2008


In the film "Groundhog Day", the protagonist is forced to experience the events of a single day over and over again. He is free to act in any way he chooses, but whatever he does the day always finishes in the same way.

Part of the fascination of this predicament is the awful familiarity of this experience: so often one feels caught in a flow of events which will unfold in an entirely predictable way.


People who have been involved over any length of time with educational technology will recognise this experience, which seems characterised by a cyclical failure to learn from the past. We are frequently excited by the promise of a revolution in education, through the implementation of technology. We have the technology today, and tomorrow we confidently expect to see the widespread effects of its implementation. Yet, curiously, tomorrow never comes. We can point to several previous cycles of high expectation about an emerging technology, followed by proportionate disappointment, with radio, film, television, teaching machines and artificial intelligence.


‘Next Year, Jerusalem!’ was and still is the yearly declaration of hope for millions of Jewish people. For centuries at a time there seemed little chance for many Jews to celebrate the Passover actually in Jerusalem. Yet the hope was sustained.

Educational technology has been characterised by a similar pattern of hope […]. The Jerusalem of improved education is well worth hoping for, and technology may be able to hasten the day when that goal is reached. On the other hand, educational technologists’ hopes have been dashed many times, as this paper will show. There has been an incredible number of false starts.


Is it really that bad?

Problem 1:

Inane comparisons (…that we still get asked to make)

Problem 2:

We don’t appreciate what we don’t notice


The question:

• Is online learning better than face-to-face?(And what about blended learning?)


The ‘no significant difference’ effect

• Russell’s book and website– Lack of evidence of improved chance of

student success associated with any media (radio, television, video, online learning)

• Although…


The ‘no significant difference’ effect

The meta-analysis found that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed modestly better than those receiving face-to-face instruction. […] Analysts noted that these blended conditions often included additional learning time and instructional elements not received by students in control conditions. This finding suggests that the positive effects associated with blended learning should not be attributed to the media, per se.

- US Department of Education, 2010


• We’re probably averaging out all the important stuff– Focus on the medium– Average out ‘noise’ like profile of learners, pedagogic

approach, institutional resourcing, etc.

• The comparison is blunt– Is all face-to-face teaching the same…?

(or does it just look that way if you don’t really understand what you’re grouping together?)

– Ditto ‘online’


The term ‘blended learning’ is ill-defined and inconsistently used. Whilst its popularity is increasing, its clarity is not. Under any current definition, it is either incoherent or redundant as a concept.

- Oliver & Trigwell, 2005


A richness of terminology…

• Computer-based learning, computer-assisted learning, Multimedia learning, Communication and Information Technology, Information and Communication Technology, E-learning, Technology Enhanced Learning, Web 2.0, Web 3.0/Semantic Web…


… but a poverty of conceptions

If someone is learning in a way that uses information and communication technologies (ICTs), they are using e-learning. They could be a pre-school child playing an interactive game; they could be a group of pupils collaborating on a history project with pupils in another country via the Internet; they could be geography students watching an animated diagram of a volcanic eruption their lecturer has just downloaded; they could be a nurse taking her driving theory test online with a reading aid to help her dyslexia – it all counts as e-learning.

- DfES, 2003


Problem 2: what can we see?

• Tacit knowledge (Polanyi)– We know more than we can say, and we know

some things only through attending to others• Routine practice (Activity Theory)

– Activity, Action and Operation– Operations become visible only at the point of

breakdowns: we see some things only when they don’t work


We only see the stuff that isn’t working

• What’s the impact of social networking sites, semantic web technologies or twitter?– Can’t say, still working out how to use it…

• What’s the impact of email, the internet, desktop word processing, etc?– You can tell me, when your network goes

down and you can’t log in


Summing up the obvious but weak answer

• Educational Technology understood as an educational intervention

• Evidence of benefits are mixed at best• Plus it’s a moving target

…is it any wonder people view it askance?

• Any questions, comments, etc?– Was any of this unexpected or surprising?

(…and then, on to the more interesting bit!)


Time for you to choose…

• Various different ways in which technology is important to Higher Education

• Which option(s) do you want to focus on?– Option one: technology, policy and higher

education– Option two: technical fix or pedagogic

subversion?– Option three: technology, roles and identity

politics


The study of the novel as a genre is distinguishable by particular difficulties. This is due to the unique nature of the object itself: the novel is the sole genre that continues to develop. ... The forces that define it as a genre are at work before our very eyes: the birth and development of the novel as a genre takes place in the full light of the historical day

- Bakhtin, 1987, p. 3


Technology as a site of social and political struggle

The study of technology (…and its genres?) is distinguishable by particular difficulties. This is due to the unique nature of the object itself: technology continues to develop. ... The forces that define it as a genre are at work before our very eyes: the birth and development of technology takes place in the full light of the historical day


Option one: Technology, policy and Higher Education


The policy appeal of educational technology

The other reason that the reform elite loves technology is that it can be taken to scale. Great teachers, after all, are also easy to credit for a school that works. But how do we get one in every classroom? The iPad, on the other hand, requires only a checkbook.

- Schneider, 2011


Is that fair?

• To recap: lack of evidence of ‘success’• Almost five decades of policy• What’s going on…?

(Whatever it is, it’s clearly not evidence-based …)


What’s the policy view of educational technology been?

• Analysis of technology-related excerpts from the Dearing report (1997)– Students passive, except when choosing

courses (specified as costs and outcomes; commodification), then ‘developed’

– Lecturers are not teachers; focus on materials development

– Technology described in terms of access to information; resource-based learning as pedagogy


Pedagogy at the (failed) e-University (2000)

As the learner progresses through the courseware, there is the opportunity to ask questions by selecting the associated ‘chat’ channel in the toolbar. In response, a chat window opens and the learner is greeted and invited to describe the assistance sought, in text form. The person who answers the questions is part of a call centre and is specifically trained to answer questions about the courseware. […] If the mentor is unable to answer a question, it is referred to a tutor with superior subject expertise, who returns a full answer to the learner by e-mail within a set period.

(…but it was in a business case, so what do you expect?!)

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Towards a Unified e-Learning Strategy (2003)E-learning exploits interactive technologies and communication systems to improve the learning experience. It has the potential to transform the way we teach and learn across the board. It can raise standards, and widen participation […]It cannot replace teachers and lecturers, but […] it can enhance the quality and reach of their teaching, and reduce the time spent on administration. It can enable every learner to achieve his or her potential, and help to build an educational workforce empowered to change. It makes possible a truly ambitious education system for a future learning society.


It can leap tall buildings in a single bound, stop a moving freight train and catch bullets in its teeth…

(Sadly, not in ‘Towards a Unified e-Learning Strategy’)

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But at least it had a vision…

• Individualised learning• Personalised learning support• Collaborative learning• Tools for teachers and learners to innovate• Virtual learning worlds• Flexible study• Online communities of practice• Quality at scale


But then…• Harnessing technology (2005) – ICT can…

– Motivate learners (“game-like”)– Help people use their time better (efficiency)– Deliver information and advice flexibly; wider access

to resources (digital libraries, open content)– Prepare people for face-to-face meetings– Take pupils, through online conferencing or web

cams, to authentic environments– Personalise online learning space (to store things,

plan and link to professional support), particularly to support educational transitions

– Oh, and a mention of doing more groupwork…


• A return to the material (at least, for ‘virtual education’)– “A new approach to virtual education based on a

corpus of open learning content”, quality controlled, coherently organised and supported by national centres of excellence

– Investment in e-infrastructures– Teachers: “adequately skilled in making effective,

imaginative, widespread and critical use of this”– Some mention of digital literacy, Web 2.0 being

‘expected’ by students, “interactive online tutorials”


Report to the Denham committee (2008)

Where does this leave us?

• A constant preoccupation with the material and the formal

• An information-based (or at best, resource-based) model of learning at the heart of policy

• Simplistic or odd conceptions of teachers• Some broader accounts, but only fleeting

…why?– Tacit practice is hard to represent– Not everything representable is computable


The virtual university is the university made concrete

‘The university’ is a highly heterogeneous institutional ensemble, which exists primarily in the heads of people who constituted it, and in a myriad of locally negotiated practices and interactions. This university, as an institution, often only appears to exist ‘virtually’.

The very notion of information, which sits at the root of the notion of a virtual university and its ability to abstract from the place – the specific, the parochial – contains within it a powerful incentive to formalise, to standardise, to make explicit, to make concrete.


A psychosocial account of policy

• What are the fantasies of policy makers?

Games and game play tend to be treated as “out there,” beyond the school gate, in some better, more authentic, more democratic, more meaningful place, other than the current and failing educational regime. By bringing games into educational practice and theory, the hope is, it often seems, that the diseased, geriatric body of education can be treated through the rejuvenating, botox-like effect of educational game play.

- Pelletier, 2009, p84


To sum up option one…

• A consistent story…– The uniform, purchasable ‘magic bullet’– Allied to economic concerns and

commodification– A site of fantasy – something other than the

‘real’ of education– A preoccupation with the material and visible

• Is this how your institutional/national policy looks?


Option two: technical fix or pedagogic subversion?


An instrumental discipline?

To use the words of educational technologist Rob Koper […] this research tends not to be “theory-oriented,” but rather “technology-oriented” in character. E-learning research, Koper (2007) explains, is not focused on “predicting or understanding events [in] the world as it exists” (p. 356); it instead seeks to “change the world as it exists” (p. 356; emphasis added). E-learning or technology-oriented research, in other words, attempts “to develop new technological knowledge, methods, and artifacts” for practical ends or purposes (p. 356). It is this applied, practical, and technological research that Koper (2007) says is ideally suited to e-learning.

- Friesen, 2009, p.7


• Hammond & Trapp (1992): CAL as a trojan horse for educational change

• Soloway (1997) – “Trojan Mouse”

E-learning is often talked about as a “trojan mouse”, which teachers let into their practice without realizing that it will require them to rethink not just how they use particular hardware or software, but all of what they do.

- Sharpe and Oliver, 2007, p.49

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Technology and the subversion of practice

But does it change anything important?

• Studying teachers (HE) starting to use a virtual learning environment

I’m looking for some kind of contribution, any contribution, I look for basically and if I don’t get that then I know there’s probably something wrong. It’s when people are chipping in their bits and then all of a sudden it goes quiet. That’s the danger sign. You do pick up on odd stuff like that – its just transferring what you normally do in normal situations to a virtual environment.

• Activity (Strategy) – no real change…to responsibilities, values, role

• Action (Tactics) – some differences…changes to tools used to ‘look’ for participation,

changes to pace and time of ‘looking’

• Operation – completely different…scan the room, listen for pauses…

…click to generate list of contributors, look for 0’s…

What this reveals is how the move to teaching online renders the role of the teacher both the same and different simultaneously. The purpose and strategic direction may remain unchanged, but the methods of achieving this alter in significant ways.

(Price & Oliver, 2007: 24)

A conflict of values?

• Does technology subvert teachers’ practices, or do teachers subvert technology’s?

• Or… is this less about technology and more about the values of designers?


Configuring the users

• Grint & Woolgar’s take on the social construction of technology– Science and Technology Studies: various

interest groups compete to shape technologies

– In designing computers, the company works to configure what it means to be a ‘good’ user (training, instructions, addressivity, etc.)


Once faculty and courses go online, administrators gain much greater direct control over faculty performance and course content than ever before and the potential for administrative scrutiny, supervision, regimentation, discipline and even censorship increase dramatically. At the same time, the use of the technology entails an inevitable extension of working time and an intensification of work […] It also allows the administration, which claims ownership of this commodity, to peddle the course elsewhere without the original designer's involvement or even knowledge.

- Noble, 1998

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Flexibility

• Collis et al’s 19 dimensions of flexibility, covering:– Time (starting, finishing, assessment, pace)– Content (topics, sequence, resources)– Entry requirements (prior knowledge, experience,

qualifications)– Pedagogy (approach, social interaction, language,

design)– Delivery logistics (schedule, location, interactions,

communication, support)


Flexible learning

The flexible student is not a spontaneous occurrence. Students (including full-time students) have been engineered to become more ‘flexible’ as a result of policies, which have put more financial pressures on them to work in particular ways. It has also the created conditions under which the only way for many adults to access higher education is via ‘flexible’ modes of delivery. In this sense, students are forced to become ‘flexible’ and the flexibility to which they are supposed to conform is a particular pre-determined set of learning practices or process.

- Clegg & Steel, 2002


For example…

• A study of students’ non-engagement with an online course

(Holley & Oliver, 2010)

• Learners struggling with new barrier• Unfamiliar expectations• New cultural norms to engage with


• Charles – ‘ideal’ student – Colonisation of home space for study, with notes “as

far as you can see”; no mention of family, constraints; purchases resources “even when they’re not essential”

• Kwame – non-engaged– struggled, but tried to avoid bothering those “in

authority” (who were merely another resources to Charles); struggled to use shared access machines; knew answers but not how to communicate them; eventually helped when he finds a friend


Those with social advantage find it easier to take advantage of new opportunities; advantage can be perpetuated, not eroded, by introducing new forms of learning and teaching.

- Holley & Oliver, 2010


To sum up option two…

• Positioned as a neutral technical fix to educational problems

• Operates as a site of conflict over values– Rethinking pedagogy or sustaining it?

Supporting flexibility or requiring it? Eroding privilege or perpetuating it?

• Personal interest: technology as text, subversive readings, etc.


• Does technology make you/your colleagues do anything different? (How does the ‘making’ happen?)

• Is this a good or a bad thing? (And from whose perspective?)


Option three: technology, roles and identity politics


Educational technology and role conflict

• Who gets to decide on curriculum matters?

• What is the appropriate role of lecturers and others in Higher Education?

• What is Higher Education and how should it operate?– An economic concern, best served through

industrialisation?– A cultural concern, best served through professional,

craft knowledge?


Instructional design

Too often instructional designers leave these important what-to-teach decisions to so-called subject-matter-experts (SMEs). Often a SME knows how to perform the task that is the goal of instruction but is unaware of the knowledge components that are required to acquire this knowledge and skill. A primary role of the instructional designer is to determine these granular knowledge components and their sequence.

- Merrill, 2001, p293


It is hard to read such accounts without recalling the alarmist predictions of Noble (1997) in which academics are systematically marginalised in the interests of economic efficiency.

Requiring academics to produce metadata becomes an interesting exercise of power. This might be interpreted as a beneficent act, empowering lecturers to describe their own practice without reliance on information specialists such as librarians. However, the way in which academics are allowed to describe their materials is telling: it must follow set rules and use a controlled vocabulary, which (by virtue of being ‘generic’) cannot precisely reflect their practice. - Oliver, 2004


An alternative: educational technologists

• An example of the ‘new professionals’ emerging in UK Higher Education– Mentioned in policy from 1997; first described in

literature late 1970s

• Echoed internationally– Learning technologist in the UK– Educational technologist in Commonwealth– “Shepherd” in Scandinavia– Sometimes recognisable in ‘instructional designer’

roles in USA & Canada


…so, what do they do, exactly?

• Collaborative work with academics to support the use of new technology within curricula

• Often located outside of departments– An expensive resource, so shared– Creates a boundary crossing role– Share practice as they go


Collaboration as pedagogy

– Invited to help (with something technical)– Technical (digital, pedagogic) assistance while

learning (about context, practices)– Offering pedagogic suggestions (sharing

stories of practice; both learning)

– Establishing relationships of trust and credibility across disciplines

– Linking people who wouldn’t otherwise meet– Disciplinary, inter-disciplinary, or undisciplined?


How many lecturers does it take to change a lightbulb?

• As a case study: support for digitisation of image collection– Small, departmental team– Management of academic resources– Updating existing collection, groundwork for

new materials– Technical support, troubleshooting and advice


The existing collection

– A familiar service to its users– Images loaned, returned and then filed– Resources created on demand– Formal rules (e.g. for turnaround time) often

waived in practice– Analysis of practice using Activity Theory

revealed efficiency (avoidance of breakdowns, timeliness) involved preserving ignorance (innocence?) of academics about technical and legal matters


Roles and power

• How exactly did the old system work?– Division of labour: slide librarians do some

jobs so academics don’t have to– Leads to specialisation (expertise): having to

understand things academics don’t (metadata, copyright, technical standards)

– Value to academics because specialists kept them ignorant of things they felt weren’t their problem

• Preservation of academic role, burden of development on support roles


Why should they care?

• People focus on things they care about• People ignore stuff if it’s not their problem• For example…

– Consultation about metadata (rules for electronic filing) for the collection; no response from academics

– Not something they thought affected them, so a meaningless idea

– If it’s a meaningless idea to academics, why should they discuss it?


Things only changed when…

• Metadata becomes an academic problem– Can’t find an image with the current classification -

soon develop an opinion!• A solution to a problem they want to solve

– Problem creating materials for teaching tomorrow; international students and access

• Someone respected treats it as ‘normal’ work• Until then, why learn to use a new system (an

investment of effort) when they know how to use the old one and it seems to work perfectly well?


How many academics…? None, but it’s not my job either, anymore…

• Couldn’t update the system while it worked– Stop it working so well… (Activity Theory:

breakdowns as prompts for expansive learning)– Change what has to change (“bulb projectors will be

phased out as they break…” – if the technology can’t ‘expand’, something else needs to…)

– Get people to imagine new practice is normal (“when so-and-so used this with their lecture last week/international students/etc…”)

• Enhancing academic capacity, or coerced role change…?


To sum up option three…

• Old roles, new roles and jostling for accommodation– Is new better? Worse? (…because it

threatens the status quo?)• What values?

– Industrial, economic, cultural, other…?

• …what about in your institutions?– Whose roles change around technology? How

were groups re-positioned as a result?


Conclusions

• So, what does studying technology tell us about Higher Education?– And why should people in SRHE care about

technology?

• 50+ years of work – surely worth recognising, even if problematic

• An important site in which issues of wider concern can be recognised


Conclusions

• Different ways of thinking of technology and higher education– As an intervention (or even a “fix”)– As a projection of fantasy– As a site of managerial struggle (…and other

roles…)– As a subversion of pedagogy (…or a site for

its replication)– As a way of configuring others
