Category: PsFramework Page 1 of 7

Strategic plans, theoretical models and just doing it

On August 15, 2014

Suffering a minor malaise brought on the strategic/operational planning process currently underway at my place of work. As a process it always seems an exercise in futility and frustration, but at least the current process is significantly better than some I’ve observed.

The problem is that it’s all based on a faulty assumption. That an institution can respond to an incredibly complex and rapidly changing context by having some smart people go away for a few months and create a theoretical conception of the way forward for the institution. A theoretical conception informed by their own existing schemata, which in an incredibly complex and rapidly changing context are always going to be insufficient. Especially when those smart people are those that have been successful in the current system which is based on old ideals. Some (many?) of which are unlikely to be relevant in the future.

As it happens one of those smart people came across the following tweet/image which essentially summarises what is wrong with this approach.

Wisdom pic.twitter.com/5zmhDk0RLH

— ibrahim (@iok) August 8, 2014

I’d suggest some additional related statements

A prototype is worth a thousand strategic plans.
A prototype is worth a thousand theoretical models.

and also the definition that a prototype is NOT some toy system that no-one uses. It’s a system that has been used in anger and been used to learn real practical lessons.

The illusion of the “one university”

Much of this practice seems to emerge from the belief that it’s important that the institution take center state. The institution has to have a plan, a set of graduate attributes, a set of systems for doing X etc. Perhaps an artefact of the rise of the Vice-Chancellor as CEO approach to leading universities.

I find this increasing importance of “one university” way of doing things interesting when talking about personal/personalised learning and the inherent diversity and flexibility inherent in such a concept.

Leadership as defining what's successful

By admin

On January 21, 2014

In cognitiveEdge, complexityLeadership, distributedcognition, highereducation, PsFramework, research

After spending a few days visiting friends and family in Central Queensland – not to mention enjoying the beach – a long 7+ hour drive home provided an opportunity for some thinking. I’ve long had significant qualms about the notion of leadership, especially as it is increasingly being understood and defined by the current corporatisation of universities and schools. The rhetoric is increasingly strong amongst schools with the current fashion for assuming that Principals can be the saviour of schools that have broken free from the evils of bureaucracy. I even work within an institution where a leadership research group is quite active amongst the education faculty.

On the whole, my experience of leadership in organisations has been negative. At the best the institution bumbles along through bad leadership. I’m wondering whether or not questioning this notion of leadership might form an interesting future research agenda. The following is an attempt to make concrete some thinking from the drive home, spark some comments, and set me up for some more (re-)reading. It’s an ill-informed mind dump sparked somewhat by some early experiences on return from leave.

Fisherman’s beach by David T Jones, on Flickr

In the current complex organisational environment, I’m thinking that “leadership” is essentially the power to define what success is, both prior to and after the fact. I wonder whether any apparent success attributed to the “great leader” is solely down to how they have defined success? I’m also wondering how much of that success is due to less than ethical or logical definitions of success?

The definition of success prior to the fact is embodied in the current model of process assumed by leaders, i.e. telological processes. Where the great leader must define some ideal future state (e.g. adoption of Moodle, Peoplesoft, or some other system; an organisational restructure that creates “one university”; or, perhaps even worse, a new 5 year strategic plan etc.) behind which the weight of the institution will then be thrown. All roads and work must lead to the defined point of success.

This is the Dave Snowden idea of giving up the evolutionary potential of the present for the promise of some ideal future state. A point he’ll often illustrate with this quote from Seneca

The greatest loss of time is delay and expectation, which depend upon the future. We let go the present, which we have in our power, and look forward to that which depends upon chance, and so relinquish a certainty for an uncertainty.

Snowden’s use of this quote comes from the observation that some systems/situations are examples of Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS). These are systems where traditional expectations of cause and effect don’t hold. When you intervene in such systems you cannot predict what will happen, only observe it in retrospect. In such systems the idea you can specify up front where you want to go is little more than wishful thinking. So defining success – in these systems – prior to the fact is a little silly. It questions the assumptions of such leadership, including that they can make a difference.

So when the Executive Dean of a Faculty – that includes programs in information technology and information systems – is awarded “ICT Educator of the Year” for the state because of the huge growth in student numbers, is it because of the changes he’s made? Or is it because he was lucky enough to be in power at (or just after) the peak of the IT boom? The assumption is that this leader (or perhaps his predecessor) made logical contributions and changes to the organisation to achieve this boom in student numbers. Or perhaps they made changes simply to enable the organisation to be better placed to handle and respond to the explosion in demand created by external changes.

But perhaps rather than this single reason for success (great leadership), it was instead there were simply a large number of small factors – with no central driving intelligence or purpose – that enabled this particular institution to achieve what it achieved. Similarly, when a few years later the same group of IT related programs had few if any students, it wasn’t because this “ICT Educator of the Year” had failed. Nor was it because of any other single factor, but instead hundreds and thousands of small factors both internally and externally (some larger than others).

The idea that there can be a single cause (or a single leader) for anything in a complex organisational environment seems to be faulty. But because it is demanded of them, leaders must spend more time attempting to define and convince people of their success. In essence then, successful leadership becomes more about your ability to define and promulgate widely acceptance of this definition of success.

KPIs and accountability galloping to help

This need to define and promulgate success is aided considerably by simple numeric measures. The number of student applications; DFW rates; numeric responses on student evaluation of courses – did you get 4.3?; journal impact factors and article citation metrics; and, many many more. These simple figures make it easy for leaders to define specific perspectives on success. This is problematic and it’s many problems are well known. For example,

Goodhart’s law – “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”
Campbell’s law – “The more any quantitative social indicator (or even some qualitative indicator) is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”
the Lucas critique.

For example, you have the problem identified by Tutty et al (2008) where rather than improve teaching, institutional quality measures “actually encourage inferior teaching approaches” (p. 182). It’s why you have the LMS migration project receiving an institutional award for quality etc, even though for the first few weeks of the first semester it was largely unavailable to students due to dumb technical decisions by the project team and required a large additional investment in consultants to fix.

Would this project have received the award if a senior leader in the institution (and the institutional itself) heavily reliant upon the project being seen as a success?

Would the people involved in giving the project the award have reasonable reasons for thinking it award winning? Is success of the project and of leadership all about who defines what perspective is important?

Some other quick questions

Some questions for me to consider.

Where does this perspective sit within the plethora of literature on leadership and organisational studies? Especially within the education literature? How much of this influenced by earlier reading of “Managing without Leadership: Towards a Theory of Organizational Functioning”
Given the limited likelihood of changing how leadership is practiced within the current organisational and societal context, how do you act upon any insights this perspective might provide? i.e. how the hell do I live (and heaven forbid thrive) in such a context?

References

Tutty, J., Sheard, J., & Avram, C. (2008). Teaching in the current higher education environment: perceptions of IT academics. Computer Science Education, 18(3), 171–185.

Does institutional e-learning have a TPACK problem?

By admin

On March 22, 2013

In bim2, design theory, elearning, PsFramework

The following is the first attempt to expand upon an idea that’s been bubbling along for the last few weeks. It arises from a combination of recent experiences, including

Working through the institutional processes to get BIM installed on the institutional Moodle.
Using BIM in my own teaching and the resulting changes (and maybe something along these lines) that will be made.
Talking about TPACK to students in the ICTs and Pedagogy course.
On-going observations of what passes for institutional e-learning within some Australian Universities (and which is likely fairly common across the sector).

Note: the focus here is on the practice of e-learning within Universities and the institutionally provided systems and processes.

The problem(s)

A couple of problems that spark this thinking

How people and institutions identify the tools available/required.
How the tools provide appropriate support, especially pedagogical, to the people using it.

Which tools?

One of the questions I was asked to address in my presentation to ask for BIM to be installed on the institutional LMS was something along the lines “Why would other people want to use this tool? We can’t install a tool just for one peson.”

Well one answer was that a quick Google search of the institution’s course specifications that revealed 30+ 2012 courses using reflective journals of varying types. BIM is a tool designed primarily to support the use of reflective learning journals by students via individual blogs.

I was quite surprised to find 30+ courses already doing this. This generated some questions

How are they managing the workload and the limitations of traditional approaches?
The origins of BIM go back to when I took over a course that was using a reflective journal assessment task. Implemented by students keeping them as Word documents and submitting at the end of semester. There were problems.
I wonder how many of the IT and central L&T people knew that there were 30+ courses already using this approach?
In this context, it would be quite easy to draw the conclusion that the IT and central L&T folk are there to help people with the existing tools and keep their own workload to a minimum by controlling what new tools are added to the mix. Rather than look for opportunities for innovation within the institution. Which leads to..
I wonder why the institution wasn’t already actively looking for tools to help these folk?
Especially given that reflective learning journals (diaries etc) are “recognised as a significant tool in promoting active learning” (Thorpe, 2004, p. 327) but at the same time the are also “demanding and time-consuming for both students and educators” (Thorpe, 2004, p. 339)

A combination of those questions/factors seem to contribute to recent findings about the workloads faced by academics in terms of e-learning (Tynan et al, 2012)

have increased both the number and type of teaching tasks undertaken by staff, with a consequent increase in their work hours

and (Bright, 2012, n.p)

Lecturers who move into the online learning environment often discover that the workload involved not only changes, but can be overwhelming as they cope with using digital technologies. Questions arise, given the dissatisfaction of lecturers with lowering morale and increasing workload, whether future expansion of this teaching component in tertiary institutions is sustainable.

How the tools provide support?

One of the problems I’m facing with BIM is that the pedagogical approach I originally used and which drove the design of BIM is not the pedagogical approach I’m using now. The features and functions in BIM currently, don’t match what I want to do pedagogically. I’m lucky, I can change the system. But not many folk are in this boat.

And this isn’t the first time we’ve faced this problem. Reaburn et al (2009) used BIM’s predecessor in a “work integrated learning” course where the students were working in a professional context. They got by, but this pedagogical approach had yet again different requirements.

TPACK

“Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) is a framework that identifies the knowledge teachers need to teach effectively with technology” (Koehler, n.d.). i.e. it identifies a range of different types of knowledge that are useful, perhaps required, for the effective use of technology in teaching and learning. While it has it’s detractors, I believe that TPACK can provide a useful lens for examining the problems with institutional e-learning and perhaps identify some suggestions for how institutional e-learning (and e-learning tools) can be better designed.

To start, TPACK proposes that successful e-learning (I’m going to use that as short-hand for the use of technology in learning and teaching) requires the following types of knowledge (with my very brief descriptions)

Technological knowledge (TK) – how to use technologies.
Pedagogical knowledge (PK) – how to teach.
Content knowledge (CK) – knowledge of what the students are meant to be learning.

Within institutional e-learning you can see this separation in organisational structures and also the assumptions of some of the folk involved. i.e.

Technological knowledge – is housed in the institutional IT division.
Pedagogical knowledge – is housed in the central L&T division.
Content knowledge – academics and faculties are the silos of content knowledge.

Obviously there is overlap. Most academics have some form of TK, PK and CK. But when it comes to the source of expertise around TK, it’s the IT division. etc.

TPACK proposes that there are combinations of these three types of knowledge that offer important insights

Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) – the idea that certain types of content is best taught using certain types of pedagogy.
Technological Pedagogical Knowledge (TPK) – the knowledge that certain types of technologies work well with certain types of pedagogy (e.g. teaching critical analysis using a calculator probably isn’t a good combination)
Technological Content Knowledge (TCK) – that content areas draw on technologies in unique ways (e.g. mathematicians use certain types of technologies that aren’t used by historians)

Lastly, TPACK suggests that there is a type of knowledge in which all of the above is combined and when used effectively this is where the best examples of e-learning arise. i.e. TPACK – Technological, Pedagogical and Content Knowledge.

The problem I see is that institutional e-learning, its tools, its processes and its organisational structures are getting in the way of allowing the generation and application of effective TPACK.

Some Implications

Running out of time, so some quick implications that I take from the above and want to explore some more. These are going to be framed mostly around my work with BIM, but there are potentially some implications for broader institutional e-learning systems which I’ll briefly touch on.

BIM’s evolution is best when I’m teaching with it

Assuming that I have the time, the best insights for the future development of BIM have arisen when I’m using BIM in my teaching. When I’m able to apply the TPACK that I have to identify ways the tool can help me. When I’m not using BIM in my teaching I don’t have the same experience.

At this very moment, however, I’m only really able to apply this TPACK because I’m running BIM on my laptop (and using a bit of data munging to bridge the gap between it and the institutional systems). This means I am able to modify BIM in response to a need, test it out and use it almost immediately. When/if I begin using BIM on the institutional version of Moodle, I won’t have this ability. At best, I might hope for the opportunity for a new version of BIM to be installed at the end of the semester.

There are reasons why institutional systems have these constraints. The problem is that these constraints get in the way of generating and applying TPACK and thus limit the quality of the institutional e-learning.

I also wonder if there’s a connection here and the adoption of Web 2.0 and other non-institutional tools by academics. i.e. do they find it easier to generate and apply TPACK to these external tools because they don’t have the same problems and constraints as the institutional e-learning tools?

BIM and multiple pedagogies

Arising from the above point is the recognition that BIM needs to be able to support multiple pedagogical approaches. i.e. the PK around reflective learning journals reveals many different pedagogical approaches. If BIM as an e-learning tool is going to effectively support these pedagogies then new forms of TPK need to be produced. i.e. BIM itself needs to know about and support the different reflective journal pedagogies.

There’s a lot of talk about how various systems are designed to support a particular pedagogical approach. However, I wonder just how many of these systems actually provide real TPK assistance? For example, the design of Moodle “is guided by a ‘social constructionist pedagogy'” but it’s pretty easy to see examples of how it’s not used that way when course sites are designed.

There are a range of reasons for this. Not the least of which is that the focus of teachers and academics creating course sites is often focused on more pragmatic tasks. But part of the problem is also, I propose, the level of TPK provided by Moodle. The level of technological support it provides for people to recognise, understand and apply that pedagogical approach.

There’s a two-edged sword here. Providing more TPK may help people adopt this approach, but it can also close off opportunities for different approaches. Scaffolding can quickly become a cage. Too much focus on a particular approach also closes off opportunities for adoption.

But on the other hand, the limited amount of specific TPK provided by the e-learning tools is, I propose, a major contributing factor to the workload issues around institutional e-learning. The tools aren’t providing enough direct support for what teachers want to achieve. So the people have to bridge the gap. They have to do more work.

BIM and distributed cognition – generating TPACK

One of the concerns raised in the committee that had to approve the adoption of BIM was about the level of support. How is the institution going to support academics who want to use BIM? The assumption being that we can’t provide the tool without some level of support and training.

This is a valid concern. But I believe there are two asumptions underpinning it which I’d like to question and explore alternatives. The observations are

You can’t learn how to use the tool, simply by using the tool.
If you buy a good computer/console game, you don’t need to read the instructions. Stick it in and play. The games are designed to scaffold your entry into the game. I haven’t yet met an institutional e-learning tool that can claim the same. Some of this arises, I believe, from the limited amount of TPK most tools provide. But it’s also how the tool is designed. How can BIM be designed to support this?
The introduction of anything new has to be accompanied by professional development and other forms of formal support.
This arises from the previous point but it also connected to a previous post titled “Professional development is created, not provided”. In part, this is because the IT folk and the central L&T folk see their job as (and some have their effectiveness measured by) providing professional development sessions or the number of helpdesk calls they process.

It’s difficult to generate TPACK

I believe that the current practices, processes and tools used by institutional e-learning systems make it difficult for the individuals and organisations involved to develop TPACK. Consequently the quality of institutional e-learning suffers. This contributes to the poor quality of most institutional e-learning, the limited adoption of features beyond content distribution and forums, and is part of the reason behind the perceptions of increasing workload around e-learning.

If this is the case, then can it be addressed? How?

References

Bright, S. (2012). eLearning lecturer workload: working smarter or working harder? In M. Brown, M. Hartnett, & T. Stewart (Eds.), ASCILITE’2012. Wellington, NZ.

Reaburn, P., Muldoon, N., & Bookallil, C. (2009). <a href=”“>Blended spaces, work based learning and constructive alignment: Impacts on student engagement. Same places, different spaces. Proceedings ascilite Auckland 2009 (pp. 820–831). Auckland, NZ.

Thorpe, K. (2004). Reflective learning journals : From concept to practice. Reflective practice: International and Multidisciplinary Perspectives, 5(3), 327–343.

Tynan, B., Ryan, Y., Hinton, L., & Mills, L. (2012). Out of hours Final Report of the project e-Teaching leadership: planning and implementing a benefits-oriented costs model for technology-enhanced learning. Strawberry Hills, Australia.

The life and death of Webfuse: What's wrong with industrial e-learning and how to fix it

By admin

On November 26, 2012

In design theory, elearning, missingPs, PsFramework, thesis, webfuse

The following is a collection of presentation resources (i.e. the slides) for an ASCILITE’2012 of this paper. The paper and presentation are a summary of the outcomes my PhD work. The thesis goes into much more detail.

Abstract

Drawing on the 14-year life and death of an integrated online learning environment used by tens of thousands of people, this paper argues that many of the principles and practices underpinning industrial e-learning – the current dominant institutional model – are inappropriate. The paper illustrates how industrial e-learning can limit outcomes of tertiary e-learning and limits the abilities of universities to respond to uncertainty and effectively explore the future of learning. It limits their ability to learn. The paper proposes one alternate set of successfully implemented principles and practices as being more appropriate for institutions seeking to learn for the future and lead in a climate of change.

Slides

The slides are available on Slideshare and should show up below. These slides are the extended version, prior to the cutting required to fit within the 20 minute time limit.

References

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Behrens, S., Jamieson, K., Jones, D., & Cranston, M. (2005). Predicting system success using the Technology Acceptance Model: A case study. 16th Australasian Conference on Information Systems. Sydney.

Brews, P., & Hunt, M. (1999). Learning to plan and planning to learn: Resolving the planning school/learning school debate. Strategic Management, 20(10), 889–913.

Cecez-Kecmanovic, D., Janson, M., & Brown, A. (2002). The rationality framework for a critical study of information systems. Journal of Information Technology, 17, 215–227.

Central Queensland University. (2004). Faculty teaching and learning report. Rockhampton, Australia.

Davenport, T. (1998). Putting the Enterprise into the Enterprise System. Harvard Business Review, 76(4), 121–131.

Dede, C. (2008). Theoretical perspectives influencing the use of information technology in teaching and learning. In J. Voogt & G. Knezek (Eds.), (pp. 43–59). New York: Springer.

Dillard, J., & Yuthas, K. (2006). Enterprise resource planning systems and communicative action. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 17(2-3), 202–223.

Fleming, P., & Spicer, A. (2003). Working at a cynical distance: Implications for power, subjectivity and resistance. Organization, 10(1), 157–179.

Haywood, T. (2002). Defining moments: Tension between richness and reach. In W. Dutton & B. Loader (Eds.), (pp. 39–49). London: Routledge.

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Introna, L. (1996). Notes on ateleological information systems development. Information Technology & People, 9(4), 20–39.

Jamieson, K., & Hyland, P. (2006). Factors that influence Information Systems decisions and outcomes: A summary of key themes from four case studies. Adelaide, Australia.

Jones, D. (1996). Solving Some Problems of University Education: A Case Study. In R. Debreceny & A. Ellis (Eds.), Proceedings of AusWebÕ96 (pp. 243–252). Gold Coast, QLD: Southern Cross University Press.

Jones, D. (2002). Student Feedback, Anonymity, Observable Change and Course Barometers. In P. Barker & S. Rebelsky (Eds.), World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications 2002 (pp. 884–889). Denver, Colorado: AACE.

Jones, D. (2003). Course Barometers: Lessons gained from the widespread use of anonymous online formative evaluation. QUT, Brisbane.

Jones, D., & Buchanan, R. (1996). The design of an integrated online learning environment. In A. Christie, B. Vaughan, & P. James (Eds.), Making New Connections, asciliteÕ1996 (pp. 331–345). Adelaide.

Jones, D., & Luck, J. (2009). Blog Aggregation Management: Reducing the Aggravation of Managing Student Blogging. In G. Siemns & C. Fulford (Eds.), World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia and Telecommunications 2009 (pp. 398–406). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.

Jones, N., & OÕShea, J. (2004). Challenging hierarchies: The impact of e-learning. Higher Education, 48, 379–395.

Katz, R. (2003). Balancing Technology and Tradition: The Example of Course Management Systems. EDUCAUSE Review, 38(4), 48–59.

Kurtz, C., & Snowden, D. (2007). Bramble Bushes in a Thicket: Narrative and the intangiables of learning networks. In M. Gibbert & T. Durand (Eds.), . Blackwell.

Laurillard, D. (2002). Rethinking University Teaching: A Conversational Framework for the Effective Use of Learning Technologies. London: Routledge.

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The e-learning process – limitations and an alternative

By admin

On June 28, 2012

In design theory, elearning, phd, PsFramework, thesis, webfuse

And here’s the followup to the well received “LMS Product” post. This is the second section looking at the limitations of how industrial e-learning is implemented, this time focusing on the process used. Not really happy with this one, space limitations are making it difficult to do a good job of description.

Process

It has become a maxim of modern society that without objectives, without purpose there can be no success, the setting of goals and achieving them has become the essence of “success” (Introna, 1996). Many, if not most, universities follow, or at least profess to follow, a purpose driven approach to setting strategic directions (Jones, Luck, McConachie, & Danaher, 2005). This is how institutional leaders demonstrate their strategic insight, their rationality and leadership. This is not a great surprise since such purpose driven processes – labeled as teleological processes by Introna (1996) – has dominated theory and practice to such an extent that it has become ingrained. Even though the debate between the “planning school” of process thought and the “learning school” of process thought has been one of the most pervasive debates in management (Clegg, 2002).

Prior papers (Jones et al., 2005; Jones & Muldoon, 2007) have used the nine attributes of a design process formulated by Introna (1996) to argue that purpose driven processes are particularly inappropriate to the practice of tertiary e-learning. The same papers have presented and illustrated the alternative, ateleological processes. The limitations of teleological processes can be illustrated by examining Introna’s (1996) three necessary requirements for teleological design processes

The system’s behaviour must be relatively stable and predictable.
As mentioned in the previous section, stability and predictability do not sound like appropriate adjectives for e-learning, especially into the future. Especially given the popular rhetoric about organizations in the present era no longer being stable, and instead are continuously adapting to shifting environments that places them in a state of constantly seeking stability while never achieving it (Truex, Baskerville, & Klein, 1999).
The designers must be able to manipulate the system’s behaviour directly.
Social systems cannot be “designed” in the same way as technical systems, at best they can be indirectly influenced (Introna, 1996). Technology development and diffusion needs cooperation, however, it takes place in a competitive and conflictual atmosphere where different social groups – each with their own interpretation of the technology and the problem to be solved – are inevitably involved and seek to shape outcomes (Allen, 2000). Academics are trained not to accept propositions uncritically and subsequently cannot be expected to adopt strategies without question or adaptation (Gibbs, Habeshaw, & Yorke, 2000).
The designers must be able to determine accurately the goals or criteria for success.
The uncertain and confused arena of social behaviour and autonomous human action make predetermination impossible (Truex, Baskerville et al. 2000). Allen (2000) argues that change in organizational and social setting involving technology is by nature undetermined.

For example, Tickle et al (2009) offer one description of the teleological process used to transition CQUni to the Moodle LMS in 2009. One of the institutional policies introduced as part of this process was the adoption of Minimum Service Standards for course delivery (Tickle et al., 2009, p. 1047). Intended to act as a starting point for “integrating learning and teaching strategies that could influence students study habits” and to “encourage academic staff to look beyond existing practices and consider the useful features of the new LMS” (Tickle et al., 2009, p. 1042). In order to assure the quality of this process a web-based checklist was implemented in another institutional system with the expectation that the course coordinator and moderator would actively check the course site met the minimum standards. A senior lecturer widely recognized as a quality teacher described the process for dealing with the minimum standards checklist as

I go in and tick all the boxes, the moderator goes in and ticks all the boxes and the school secretary does the same thing. It’s just like the exam check list.

The minimum standards checklist was removed in 2011.

A teleological process is not interested in learning and changing, only in achieving the established purpose. The philosophical assumptions of teleological processes – modernism and rationality – are in direct contradiction to views of learning meant to underpin the best learning and teaching. Rossi and Luck (2011, p. 62) talk about how “[c]onstructivist views of learning pervade contemporary educational literature, represent the dominant learning theory and are frequently associated with online learning”. Wise and Quealy (2006, p. 899) argue, however, that

while a social constructivist framework may be ideal for understanding the way people learn, it is at odds not only with the implicit instructional design agenda, but also with current university elearning governance and infrastructure.

Staff development sessions become focused on helping the institution achieve the efficient and effective use of the LMS, rather than quality learning and teaching. This leads to staff developers being “seen as the university’s ‘agent’” (Pettit, 2005, p. 253). There is a reason why Clegg (2002) references to teleological approaches as the “planning school” of process thought and the alternative ateological approach the “learning school” of process.

The ISDT abstracted from the Webfuse work includes 11 principles of implementation (i.e. process) divided into 3 groups. The first and second groupings refer more to people and will be covered in the next section. The second grouping focused explicitly on the process and was titled “An adopter-focused, emergent development process”. Webfuse achieved this by using an information systems development processes based on principles of emergent development (Truex et al., 1999) and ateleological design (Introna, 1996). The Webfuse development team was employed and located within the faculty. This allowed for a much more in-depth knowledge of the individual and organizational needs and an explicit focus on responding to those needs. The quote early in this paper about the origins of the results uploading system is indicative of this. Lastly, at its best Webfuse was able to seek a balance between teleological and ateleological processes due to a Faculty Dean who recognized the significant limitations of a top-down approach.

This process, when combined with a flexible and responsive product, better enabled the Webfuse team to work with the academics and students using the system to actively modify and construct the system in response to what was learned while using the system. It was an approach much more inline with a social constructivist philosophy.

References

Allen, J. (2000). Information systems as technological innovation. Information Technology & People, 13(3), 210-221.

Clegg, S. (2002). Management and organization paradoxes. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing.

Gibbs, G., Habeshaw, T., & Yorke, M. (2000). Institutional learning and teaching strategies in English higher education. Higher Education, 40(3), 351-372.

Introna, L. (1996). Notes on ateleological information systems development. Information Technology & People, 9(4), 20-39.

Jones, D., Luck, J., McConachie, J., & Danaher, P. A. (2005). The teleological brake on ICTs in open and distance learning. Adelaide.

Jones, D., & Muldoon, N. (2007). The teleological reason why ICTs limit choice for university learners and learning. In R. J. Atkinson, C. McBeath, S. K. A. Soong, & C. Cheers (Eds.), (pp. 450-459). Singapore. Retrieved from http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/singapore07/procs/jones-d.pdf

Pettit, J. (2005). Conferencing and Workshops: a blend for staff development. Education, Communication & Information, 5(3), 251-263. doi:10.1080/14636310500350505

Rossi, D., & Luck, J. (2011). Wrestling, wrangling and reaping: An exploration of educational practice and the transference of academic knowledge and skill in online learning contexts. Studies in Learning, Evaluation, Innovation and Development, 8(1), 60-75. Retrieved from http://www.sleid.cqu.edu.au/include/getdoc.php?id=1122&article=391&mode=pdf

Tickle, K., Muldoon, N., & Tennent, B. (2009). Moodle and the institutional repositioning of learning and teaching at CQUniversity. Auckland, NZ. Retrieved from http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/auckland09/procs/tickle.pdf

Truex, D., Baskerville, R., & Klein, H. (1999). Growing systems in emergent organizations. Communications of the ACM, 42(8), 117-123.

Wise, L., & Quealy, J. (2006). LMS Governance Project Report. Melbourne, Australia: Melbourne-Monash Collaboration in Education Technologies. Retrieved from http://www.infodiv.unimelb.edu.au/telars/talmet/melbmonash/media/LMSGovernanceFinalReport.pdf

A command for organisations? Program or be programmed

By admin

On January 6, 2011

In Chapter 2, design theory, elearning, phd, PsFramework, thesis, Uncategorized, webfuse

I’ve just finished the Douglas Rushkoff book Program or be Programmed: Ten commands for a digital age. As the title suggests the author provides ten “commands” for living well with digital technologies. This post arises from the titular and last command examined in the book, Program or be programmed.

This particular command was of interest to me for two reasons. First, it suggests that learning to program is important and that more should be doing it. As I’m likely to become a information technology high school teacher there is some significant self-interest in there being a widely accepted importance to learning ot program. Second, and the main connection for this post, is that my experience with and observation of universities is that they are tending “to be programmed”, rather than program. In particular when it comes to e-learning.

This post is some thinking out loud about that experience and the Ruskoff command. In particular, it’s my argument that universities are being programmed by the technology they are using. I’m wondering why? Am hoping this will be my last post on these topics, I think I’ve pushed the barrow for all its worth. Onto new things next.

Program or be programmed

Rushkoff’s (p 128) point is that

Digital technology is programmed. This makes it biased toward those with the capacity to write the code.

This also gives a bit of a taste for the other commands. i.e. that there are inherent biases in digital technology that can be good or bad. To get the best out of the technology there are certain behaviours that seem best suited for encouraging the good, rather than the bad.

One of the negative outcomes of not being able to program, of not being able to take advantage of this bias of digital technology is (p 15)

…instead of optimizing our machines for humanity – or even the benefit of some particular group – we are optimizing humans for machinery.

But is all digital technology programmed?

In terms of software, yes, it is all generally created by people programming. But not all digital technology is programmable. The majority of the time, money and resources being invested by universities (I’ll stick to unis, however, much of what I say may be applicable more broadly to organisations) is in “enterprise” systems. Originally this was in the form of Enterprise Resource Planning system (ERPs) like Peoplesoft. It is broadly recognised that modifications to ERPs are not a good idea, and that instead the ERP should be implemented in “vanilla” form (Robey et al, 2002).

That is, rather than modify the ERP system to respond to the needs of the university. The university should modify its practices to match the operation of the ERP system. This appears to be exactly what Rushkoff warn’s against “we are optimizing humans for machinery”.

This is important for e-learning because, I would argue, the Learning Management System (LMS) is essentially an ERP for learning. And I would suggest that much of what goes on around the implementation and support of an LMS within a university is the optimization of humans for machinery. In some specific instances that I’m aware of, it doesn’t matter whether the LMS is open source or not. Why?

Software remains hard to modify

Glass (2001), describing one of the frequently forgotten fundamental facts about software engineering, suggested that maintenance consumes about 40 to 80 percent of software costs, with 60% of the maintenance cost is due to enhancement. i.e. a significant proportion of the cost of any software system is adding new features to it. You need to remember that this is a general statement. If the software you are talking about is part of a system that operates within a continually changing context, then the figure is going to be much, much higher.

Most software engineering remains focused on creation. On the design and implementation of the software. There hasn’t been enough focus on on-going modification, evolution or co-emergence of the software and local needs.

Take Moodle. It’s an LMS. Good and bad like other LMS. But it’s open source. It is meant to be easy to modify. That’s one of the arguments wheeled out by proponents when institutions are having to select a new LMS. And Moodle and its development processes are fairly flexible. It’s not that hard to add a new activity module to perform some task you want that isn’t supported by the core.

The trouble is that Moodle is currently entering a phase which suggests it suffers much the same problems as most large enterprise software applications. The transition from Moodle 1.x to Moodle 2.0 is highlighting the problems with modification. Some folk are reporting difficulties with the upgrade process, others are deciding to delay the upgrade as some of the third-party modules they use haven’t been converted to Moodle 2. There are even suggestions from some that mirror the “implement vanilla” advice for ERPs.

It appears that “we are optimizing humans for machinery”.

I’m wondering if there is anyone doing research how to make systems like Moodle more readily modifiable for local contexts. At the very least, looking at how/if the version upgrade problem can be improved. But also, the ability to modify the core to better suit local requirements. There are aspects there already. One of the difficulties is that to achieve this you would have to cross boundaries between the original developers, service providers (Moodle partners) and the practices of internal IT divisions.

Not everyone wants to program

One reason this will be hard is that not everyone wants to program. Recently, D’Arcy Norman wrote a post talking about the difference between the geeks and folk like his dad. His dad doesn’t want to bother with this techy stuff, he doesn’t want to “program”.

This sort of problem is made worse if you have an IT division that has senior management with backgrounds in non-IT work. For example, an IT director with a background in facilities management isn’t going to understand that IT is protean, that it can be programmed. Familiar with the relative permanence of physical buildings and infrastructure such a person isn’t going to understand that IT can be changed, that it should be optimized for the human beings using the system.

Organisational structures and processes prevent programming

One of the key arguments in my EDUCAUSE presentation (and my thesis) is that the structures and processes that universities are using to support e-learning are biased away from modification of the system. They are biased towards vanilla implementation.

First, helpdesk provision is treated as a generic task. The folk on the helpdesk are seen as low-level, interchangeable cogs in a machine that provides support for all an organisation’s applications. The responsibility of the helpdesk is to fix known problems quickly. They don’t/can’t become experts in the needs of the users. The systems within which they work don’t encourage, or possibly even allow, the development of deep understanding.

For the more complex software applications there will be an escalation process. If the front-line helpdesk can’t solve the problem it gets handed up to application experts. These are experts in using the application. They are trained and required to help the user figure out how to use the application to achieve their aims. These application experts are expert in optimizing the humans for the machinery. For example, if an academic says they want students to have an individual journal, a Moodle 1.9 application expert will come back with suggestions about how this might be done with the Moodle wiki or some other kludge with some other Moodle tool. If Moodle 1.9 doesn’t provide a direct match, they figure out how to kludge together functionality it does have. The application expert usually can’t suggest using something else.

By this stage, an academic has either given up on the idea, accepted the kludge, gone and done it themselves, or (bravely) decided to escalate the problem further by entering into the application governance process. This is the heavy weight, apparently rational process through which requests for additional functionality are weighed against the needs of the organisation and the available resources. If it’s deemed important enough the new functionality might get scheduled for implementation at some point in the future.

There are many problems with this process

Non-users making the decisions;
Most of the folk involved in the governance process are not front-line users. They are managers, both IT and organisational. They might include a couple of experts – e-learning and technology. And they might include a couple of token end-users/academics. Though these are typically going to be innovators. They are not going to be representative of the majority of users.
What these people see as important or necessary, is not going to be representative of what the majority of academic staff/users think is important. In fact, these groups can quickly become biased against the users. I attended one such meeting where the first 10/15 minutes was spent complaining about foibles of academic staff.
Chinese whispers;
The argument/information presented to such a group will have had to go through chinese whispers like game. An analyst is sent to talk to a few users asking for a new feature. The analyst talks to the developers and other folk expert in the application. The analysts recommendations will be “vetted” by their manager and possibly other interested parties. The analysts recommendation is then described at the governance meeting by someone else.
All along this line, vested interests, cognitive biases, different frames of references, initial confusion, limited expertise and experience, and a variety of other factors contribute to the original need being morphed into something completely different.
Up-front decision making; and
Finally, many of these requests will have to battle against already set priorities. As part of the budgeting process, the organisation will already have decided what projects and changes it will be implementing this year. The decisions has been made. Any new requirements have to compete for whatever is left.
Competing priorities.
Last in this list, but not last overall, are competing priorities. The academic attempting to implement individual student journals has as their priority improving the learning experience of the student. They are trying to get the students to engage in reflection and other good practices. This priority has to battle with other priorities.
The head of the IT division will have as a priority of staying in budget and keeping the other senior managers happy with the performance of the IT division. Most of the IT folk will have a priority, or will be told that their priority is, to make the IT division and the head of IT look good. Similarly, and more broadly, the other senior managers on 5 year contracts will have as a priority making sure that the aims of their immediate supervisor are being seen to be achieved……..

These and other factors lead me to believe that as currently practiced, the nature of most large organisations is to be programmed. That is, when it comes to using digital technologies they are more likely to optimize the humans within the organisation for the needs of the technology.

Achieving the alternate path, optimizing the machinery for the needs of the humans and the organisation is not a simple task. It is very difficult. However, by either ignoring or being unaware of the bias of their processes, organisations are sacrificing much of the potential of digital techology. If they can’t figure out how to start programming, such organisations will end up being programmed.

References

Robey, D., Ross, W., & Boudreau, M.-C. (2002). Learning to implement enterprise systems: An exploratory study of the dialectics of change. Journal of Management Information Systems, 19(1), 17-46.

University e-learning systems: the need for new product and process models and some examples

By admin

On August 24, 2010

In Chapter 5, design theory, elearning, highereducation, phd, PsFramework, thesis, Uncategorized, webfuse

I’m in the midst of the horrible task of trying to abstract what I think I know about implementing e-learning information systems within universities into the formal “language” required of an information systems design theory and a PhD thesis. This post is a welcome break from that, but is still connected in that it builds on what is perhaps fundamentally different between what most universities are currently doing, and what I think is a more effective approach. In particular, it highlights some more recent developments which are arguably a step towards what I’m thinking.

As it turns out, this post is also an attempt to crystalise some early thinking about what goes into the ISDT. So some of the following is a bit rough. Actually, writing this has identified one perspective that I hadn’t thought of, which is potentially important.

Edu 2.0

The post arises from having listened to this interview with Graham Glass the guy behind Edu 2.0, which is essentially a cloud-based LMS. It’s probably one of a growing number out there. What I found interesting was his description of the product and the process behind Edu 2.0.

In terms of product (i.e. the technology used to provide the e-learning services), the suggestion was that because Edu 2.0 is based in the cloud – in this case Amazon’s S3 service – it could be updated much more quickly than more traditional institutionally hosted LMSs. There some connection here with Google’s approach to on-going modifications to live software.

Coupled with this product flexibility was a process (i.e. the process through which users were supported and the system evolved) that very much focused on the Edu 2.0 developers interacting with the users of the product. For example, releasing proposals and screenshots of new features within discussion forums populated with users and getting feedback; and also responding quickly to requests for fixes or extensions from users. To such an extent that Glass reports users of Edu 2.0 feeling like it is “there EDU 2.0” because it responds so quickly to them and their needs.

The traditional Uni/LMS approach is broken

In the thesis I argue that when you look at how universities are currently implementing e-learning information systems (i.e. selecting and implementing an LMS) the product (the enterprise LMS, the one ring to rule them all) and the process they use are not a very good match at all for the requirements of effectively supporting learning and teaching. In a nut shell, the product and the process is aimed at reducing diversity and the ability to learn, while diversity is a key characteristic of learning and teaching at a university. Not to mention that when it comes to e-learning within universities, it’s still very early days and it is essential that any systemic approach to e-learning have the ability to learn from its implementation and make changes.

I attempted to expand on this argument in the presentation I gave at the EDUCAUSE’2009 conference in Denver last year.

What is needed

The alternative I’m trying to propose within the formal language of the ISDT is that e-learning within universities should seek to use a product (i.e. a specific collection of technologies) that is incredible flexible. The product must, as much as possible, enable rapid, on-going, and sometimes quite significant changes.

To harness this flexibility, the support and development process for e-learning should, rather than be focused on top-down, quality assurance type processes, be focused on closely observing what is being done with the system and using those lessons to modify the product to better suit the diversity of local needs. In particular, the process needs to be adopter focused, which is described by Surry and Farquhar (1997) as seeing the individual choosing to adopt the innovation as the primary force for change.

To some extent, this ability to respond to the local social context can be hard with a software product that has to be used in multiple different contexts. e.g. an LMS used in different institutions.

Slow evolution but not there yet

All university e-learning implementation is not the same. There has been a gentle evolution away from less flexible products to more flexible produces, e.g.

Commercial LMS, hosted on institutional servers.
Incredibly inflexible. You have to wait for the commercial vendor to see the cost/benefit argument to implement a change in the code base, and then you have to wait until your local IT department can schedule the upgrade to the product.
Open source LMS, hosted on institutional servers.
Less inflexible. You still have to wait for a developer to see your change as an interesting itch to scratch. This can be quite quick, but it can also be slow. It can be especially quick if your institution has good developers, but good developers cost big money. Even if the developer scratches your itch, the change has to be accepted into the open source code base, which can take some time if its a major change. Then, finally, after the code base is changed, you have to wait for your local IT shop to schedule the upgrade.
Open source LMS, with hosting outsourced.
This can be a bit quicker than the institutional hosted version. Mainly because the hosting company may well have some decent developers and significant knowledge of upgrading the LMS. However, it’s still going to cost a bit, and it’s not going to be real quick.

The cloud-based approach used by EDU 2.0 does offer a product that is potentially more flexible than existing LMS models. However, apart from the general slowness in the updating, if the change is very specific to an individual institution, it is going to cause some significant problems, regardless of the product model.

Some alternative product models

The EDU 2.0 model doesn’t help the customisation problem. In fact, it probably makes it a bit worse as the same code base is being used by hundreds of institutions from across the globe. The model being adopted by Moodle (and probably others), having plugins you can add, is a step in the right direction in that institutions can choose to have different plugins installed.
However, this model typically assumes that all the plugins have to use the same API, language, or framework. If they don’t, they can’t be installed on the local server and integrated into the LMS.

This requirements is necessary because there is an assumption for many (but not all) plugins that they provide the entire functionality and must be run on the local server. So there is a need for a tighter coupling between the plugin and the LMS and consequently less local flexibility.

A plugin like BIM is a little different. There is a wrapper that is tightly integrated into Moodle to provide some features. However, the majority of the functionality is provided by software (in this case blogging engines) that are chosen by the individual students. Here the flexibility is provided by the loose coupling between blog engine and Moodle.

Mm, still need some more work on this.

References

Surry, D., & Farquhar, J. (1997). Diffusion Theory and Instructional Technology. e-Journal of Instructional Science and Technology, 2(1), 269-278.

Inside out, Outside in or both?

By admin

On April 25, 2010

In bim, elearning, futures, moodle, phd, PsFramework, Uncategorized, webfuse

During the last week I have been in Canberra for various events, including giving a presentation on BIM at University of Canberra. Somewhat surprisingly (as last I knew, he was in New Zealand), Leigh Blackall was in “audience” at the presentation, and as is Leigh’s wont, he asked some serious questions. I was troubled by those questions and needed time to reflect on what an answer might be.

This is an attempt to develop an answer to why I was troubled. In part, this attempts to pick up a comment I’d made earlier on Leigh’s blog about thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis

The question

The initial question Leigh asked which troubled me is repeated in his blog post on the presentation. It is

I asked the obvious question of why, or if BIM might consider developing outside the framework of Moodle say, as a Firefox based or other Feed Reader plug in, and offering a file that can be imported to Moodle (as well as a spreadsheet, a MediaWiki table, a Wikispaces Table, MySQL database, a text document and a PDF to email), and thereby offering the functionality of BIM to a wider user base than just Moodle.

The immediate answer I gave is reported faithfully in Leigh’s post

David explained that the project was constrained in many ways to the needs of the sponsoring Institution,

(as is the fact that we had broader discussions.

What troubled me (in part) about my response is that the constraints of the sponsoring institution is both more and less than it sounds. In part it is what is simply easiest, the institution pays my wage and it uses Moodle. But it is also, to me, what is the best way in terms of improving L&T.

It appears to be the difference between an “inside out” approach (which I’m taking and will argue has a chance of success) and an “outside in” approach (which is somewhat close to what Leigh suggests). At the very least, it makes for a good title.

Inside out

The main reason I didn’t start with Firefox or some other external way of developing BIM, is that I’m taking an inside out approach to improving learning and teaching. i.e. I’m starting with what is being used within the organisation and trying to change it for the better. The organisation is currently using Moodle, so if I want more people to be thinking about using Web 2.0 and reflective student journals in their L&T, I have to start with Moodle. Doing so lowers the barriers to entry and actually makes it somewhat likely that people will use it. It even fits (with some difficulty) within the constraints of how Moodle is being managed within the institution.

In commenting on Leigh’s post, Peter gets close to the approach

The central question though for an educational developer is how to promote innovation and change and it seems to me that it has to be based on an invitational ethos: teaching staff need be convinced of the benefits of technology adoption, they sometimes come to it slowly, they come to it in surprisingly unexpected ways at times and positive things happen.

I actually think more than this is needed and will pick up on it below. But first..

Outside in

To a limited extent, Leigh’s approach could be characterised as outside in. Start with the outside stuff, support those people and then perhaps change might eventually occur within the institution. However, in responding to Peter’s comment Leigh suggests a perspective that doesn’t really both with the “inside” (current universities)

To borrow your highway metaphor, a bypass is needed, one that goes around that old town, and offers a more direct route for the people in need of credentials with minimal debt. Remember, the experiences in the old town have become irrelevant. An old road can remain for those who like nostalgic tourist routes, but an alternative route is needed.

There are many within current institutions that react negatively to this perspective, however, I can see the need for it. Mainly because, as Leigh points out, there are significant barriers within universities that suggest that an inside out approach may not work.

I don’t believe a passive approach can be effective when considering our dense hierarchies, performance reviews, infrastructure, broken feedback systems, conservatism and the wrong sorts of incentives and rewards.

Limits in developing innovative pedagogy with Moodle

In fact, I’m hoping to use the development of BIM and the limitations of this approach as the basis for a couple of publications, including a presentation at MoodleMoot AU 2010. (still waiting to hear if the submission has been successful). The “theme” for this conference is “without limits….”. Rather than accepting that Moodle is “without limits”, I argue that

e-learning with Moodle, as currently practised, has a number of limits and that progress can be made through the recognition, understanding and removal of those limits.

So, what may you ask, is my problem with Leigh’s comments?

Both-and, not either-or

The questions around the quality of L&T within universities, the requirement from society for different approaches and the future of universities are complex. So complex, that it’s never going to be about a single answer, there is no such thing. For this, and other personal reasons, I prefer a both-and approach. It’s not about outside-in or inside-out, it’s about both.

Actually, I should paraphrase, in terms of improving L&T within universities, it’s a question of both-and. In terms of responding to societies changing needs around learning (or simply recognising a long-standing need that has been ignored), I’m not so sure there is a need for an “inside-out” perspective. However, as I’m paid by a university to improve the quality of L&T, I see the need for a both-and approach for the long-term benefit of the university (and hopefully society…there’s a big question in there).

What this means is that there is a huge need for folk like Leigh and many others (Leigh gives a list of some in this post) who are identifying and creating insights into what the “outside” should be. The value is not just for the “outside” it’s also for the universities and other institutions as it helps identify some options around where we need to be.

However, there is also a need – at least at the moment – for folk who are taking the “inside-out” approach. Thinking about how to effectively make the “inside” a better fit or enabler for what the outside should be like. That need may not exist in the future, but for the moment it does and because this is a complex area, I think we need both.

Inside-out is currently failing

As stated above and numerous times on this blog, I think the current approaches being used within universities are failing. Most L&T at universities is poor quality by traditional standards, let alone if measured by adoption of social media. For me, this is not a sign that it is impossible, it’s a sign that the principles of current approaches are just plain wrong. This is what my current work is looking at.

Why is it failing?

The following diagram represents what I think is a fundamental mismatch (The image is taken from this post by Donald Clark).

As I said above, this problem is a complex one. Based on the above diagram, the best type of solution arises from immersion in the problem. The problem is that most universities are attempting to solve this problem by analysis.

For along time I’ve been saying that learning and teaching is a wicked problem (Rittel & Webber, 1973). Clark’s blog post (source of the image) draws on another of Rittel’s publications to suggest that for a complex problem

This is because as Rittel (1972) discovered — the best experts within these types of environments are those affected by the solution — since they are the only ones to have experienced the complexity of the problem, they are the best experts for helping to improve that environment.

At the moment, universities are only paying lip service to involving the “experts” – the students and teachers. Most of it is being driven by “management” who don’t have in-depth experience of a specific context. Their decisions are driven more by other considerations than in-depth understandings of the current context. Importantly, this isn’t about asking the students and teachers what they want, for me, it’s about understanding what they are experiencing and where they are now as an important first step in helping them go somewhere else.

At the same time, the approach taken by the “outside in” folk – like Leigh – also has the same failure. It doesn’t seek to understand the existing context or practice of the students and staff. But that’s okay, that’s not what they are about, they are about figuring out and creating a better future. (I fully recognise that this is a gross simplification and generalisation. However, I do think it’s a distinction that has some value.)

What is both-and?

As an inside-out person, I believe any success comes from having deep knowledge of the current context (the experience of staff and students) and marrying that with “solution” knowledge from the experts and insights into how the environment can be changed in a way that encourages and enables the staff and students to improve their experience. This describes BIM:

knowledge of current context;
The need for BIM arose out of my need to teach a 200+ student course that had a “reflective” journal assignment which had significant problems (a problem faced by other staff).
expert knowledge; and
I knew about Web 2.0, the benefits of student-owned journals/blogs and the institutional need for and staff/teacher familiarity with the LMS.
environment change.
Add a module to Moodle that enables staff to manage individual student blogs hosted on external services.

But it’s not enough

This is what really troubled me, and now I’m becoming repetitive in the same post. The above by itself is not enough. As a measly e-learning and innovation specialist I have no power to make the further changes in the environment that are necessary to make BIM truly attractive.

I guess the real reason why Leigh’s questions troubled me, is that I’m frustrated at my inability to make the change and the on-going blindness of institutional leadership.

How’s that for a positive end to a rambling post?

A response to Leigh

Couldn’t leave it there, let me return to the original question from Leigh. I believe that an inside-out approach is probably more likely to help improve L&T on a broad-scale within a university than an outside-in approach. I value the insights offered by outside-in folk, but I think I need to value the experiences of the students/staff within a university and build on that experience to help improvements happen. Perhaps, it’s simply a question of purpose. My purpose is to help improve L&T within universities, yours is more about helping those people who are already learning outside of universities.

That’s why I think building BIM on top of Moodle was a better fit for my purpose. A purpose, which I agree, is fairly narrow.

References

Rittel, H. W. J., & Webber, M. M. (1973). Dilemmas in a general theory of planning. Policy Sciences, 4(2), 155-169.

Two types of process and what university e-learning continues to get wrong

By admin

On April 12, 2010

In Chapter 2, elearning, herding cats, phd, PsFramework, thesis, Uncategorized, webfuse

I should be writing other things, but there’s a wave amongst some of the “innovation bloggers” at the moment that I wanted to ride for the purposes of – once again – trying to get those driving university e-learning (and learning and teaching more generally) to realise they have something fundamentally wrong. They are using the wrong type of process.

I level this criticism at most of management, most of the support staff (information technology, instructional designers, staff developers etc) and especially at most of the researchers around e-learning etc.

For those of you at CQU who still don’t get what Webfuse was about. It wasn’t primarily about the technology, it was about this type of process. The technology was only important in so far as it enabled the process to be more responsive.

Empathy-driven innovation and a pull strategy

Over the weekend, Tim Kastelle wrote a post yesterday in which he proposes that a pull strategy is a key for empathy-driven innovation.

What is empathy-driven innovation, well Tim provides the following bullet points about empathy-driven innovation:

It requires a deep understanding of what the people that will use your innovation need and want.
Most organisational e-learning assumes that steering committees and reference groups are sufficient and appropriate for understanding what is needed. This is just plain silly. The people who reside on such things are generally very different in terms of experience and outlook than the majority of academics involved with learning and teaching. If they aren’t different at the start, the very act of being a member of such groups will, over time, make them very different. These groups are not representative.
What’s worse, is the support structures, processes, and roles that are created to sit under these committees and implement e-learning are more likely to prevent “deep understanding”, than help it. For example, different aspects of e-learning are divided along the lines of institutional structures. Anything technology related is the responsibility of the information technology folk, anything pedagogical is the responsibility of the instructional design folk and never shall the twain meet. As these folk generally report to different managers within different organisational units, the rarely talk and share insights.

E-learning is more than the sum of its parts. Currently, there is generally a large gulf between the academics and students “experiencing” e-learning, the technology people keeping the systems going, the instructional design folk helping academics design courses, and the management staff trying to keep the whole thing going. This gulf actively works against developing deep understanding and limits the quality of e-learning within universities.
Using empathy for the users of our innovations is the best way to create thick value.
A deep contextualised understanding and appreciation for the context of the academic staff and students helps develop truly unique and high quality e-learning applications and environment. Without it you are left with copying what every one else does, which is typically pretty limited.
We are creating ideas that entice people.
Almost all of university-based e-learning is based on push strategies. i.e. someone or group who is/are “smart” identify the right solution and then push it out onto the academics and students. They have to do this because their understanding of the context and need of the academics and students is small to non-existent. They decisions are based more on their own personal observations and preferences, or even worse, on the latest fad (e.g. e-portfolios, open source LMS etc.).
They aren’t creating ideas that entice people, they are creating ideas that people have to use.

Researchers are particular bad at this.
Innovations that pull are inherently network-based.
The idea is that to engage in empathy-driven innovation, you have to have connections to the people using the innovations.
As argued above, it’s my suggestion that the structures and processes around e-learning within universities are such that they actively work against the formation of these connections. To have empathy-driven innovation you have to connect the folk involved in teaching, learning, technology and instructional design in ways that are meaningful and that actively strengthen the connections.

At the moment, at least in my institution, there is no easy way for an academic to talk to a technical person that actually knows anything about the system, i.e. someone who can actively modify the system. The technology person can’t easily talk with someone with educational knowledge to better inform technological change. Instead each group retreats to talking amongst themselves. The necessary connections are generally only there in spite of the system, not because of it.

The Webfuse Thesis

I’m somewhat engaged in this discussion because I have seen, for a small period of time, this type of empathy-driven innovation work in the context of e-learning within a University. This is the topic of my PhD Thesis, an attempt to describe an information systems design theory for e-learning that encapsulates this.

At it’s simplest, the Webfuse thesis embodies two aspects:

Process.
There are two broad types of process: teleological and ateleological. I describe the two types here. Empathy-driven innovation is an example of an ateleological process. The table in the blog post describing teleological and ateleological mentions Seely Brown’s and Hagels push and pull distinction.
University e-learning is always too teleological, it needs to be more ateleological.
Product.
Everyone focuses too much on the actual product or system when we talk about e-learning. With Webfuse the product was only important in terms of how flexible it could be. How much diversity could it support and how easy was it to support that diversity. Because the one thing I know about learning and teaching within universities, is that it is diverse. In addition, if you are to engage in ateleological (empathy-driven) design, you need to be able to respond to local needs.
Most importantly, the question of how flexible the product is, is not limited to just the characteristics of the product. Yes, Moodle as an open source LMS implemented with technology (PHP and MySQL) that has low entry barriers, can be very flexible. However, if the organisation implements with technology with high entry barriers and inflexibility (e.g. Oracle) or if it adopts a process that is more teleological than ateleological, it robs Moodle of its flexibility.

Design processes for teaching

By admin

On March 5, 2010

In Chapter 2, design theory, PsFramework, thesis, Uncategorized

The following is a first draft of a section from my thesis. It will form part of the newly cut down section on Process within chapter 2 (170 pages down to 50). The following tries to say something about the design processes used for teaching within universities. It starts with a characterisation of instructional design, looks at the limitations (referring to some earlier work about teleological and ateleological processes) and seeks to describe what the literature has to say about how teaching academics actually design/plan their courses.

As with previous thesis drafts, this is an early draft, I’ll re-edit and improve later, but thought I’d get this out there.

Design processes for teaching

Having introduced a framework for understanding different types of processes and examining the institutional strategic and institutional learning and teaching processes used by universities, this section examines the types of processes used to plan, develop and run individual university courses or units. It starts with a one description of what this type of process embodies, examines the ideal instructional design process before describing what is known about the processes used by individual university academics. The same tendency toward teleological processes is seen. As can the same problems and limitations that arise from such processes within a context that show significant diversity, levels of uncertainty and human agency.

This section and its topic, while somewhat related to the discussion on Pedagogy (Section cross reference), has a different focus. Pedagogy focuses on what is known about learning and how to improve the learning that occurs within universities. This section examines the processes used to design learning as embodied in individual university courses or units. Without question this design process should be informed by knowledge of pedagogy, but the process itself is worthy of description as there are differing options and perspectives.

Reigeluth (1983) defines instructional design as a set of decision-marking procedures that, given a set of outcomes for student to achieve and knowledge of the context within which they will achieve them, guides the choice and development of effective instructional strategies. Reiser (2001) describes how the field of instructional design arose out of the need for large groups of psychologists and educators to develop training materials for the military services. The backgrounds and skills of these people the materials were developed through instructional principles derived from theory on instructiona, learning and human behaviour (Reiser 2001). After the war this work continued and increasingly training was viewed as a system to be designed and developed using specialised procedures (Reiser 2001).

Models of instructional design still have strong connection to the models developed in the 1950s based on the ADDIE (Analyse, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate) process (Irlbeck, Kays et al. 2006). ADDIE is a framework designed for objectivist epistemologies where front-end analysis precedes the development of curricular content (Der-Thanq, Hung et al. 2007). The learning theory used to inform instructional design has moved on from its behaviourist origins, moving through cognitivism, constructivism and slowly into connectivism. However, Winn (1990) identifies three areas where behaviourism still exerts power over the processes used by instructional design: the reductionist premise that you can identify the parts, then you can teach the whole; separation of design from implementation; and the assumption that following good procedures, applied correctly results in good instruction.

Visscher-Voerman and Gustafson (2004) identified four different paradigms for instructional design – instrumental, communicative, pragmatic and artistic – with ADDIE situated within the instrumental paradigm. They found, in confirmation of other studies, that the instrumental paradigm as dominated instructional design and that there are questions about its relevance given recent epistemological and technical developments (Visscher-Voerman and Gustafson 2004). Evidence of this dominance can be found in more recent conceptions of instructional design such as constructive alignment (Biggs 1999). Constructive alignment is based on constructivist theories of learning (Entwistle 2003) and focusing on a shift from teacher-centered to student-centered teaching, (Harvey and Kamvounias 2008) and is an example of outcomes-centred design. Outcomes-centred design is a four step process: definition of learning outcomes; design assessment tasks for students to demonstrate achievement; design learning activities for students to develop the appropriate skills; and identify the content that will underpin the learning activities (Phillips 2005).

This teleological view of the instructional design process has a number of flaws. Some of these flaws arise from the teleological nature of the process. Table 2.1 draws on literature around learning, teaching and instructional design to illustrate that it could be argued that Introna’s (1996) three necessary conditions for a teleological process do not exist in the instructional design context. The following seeks to describe other criticisms of this teleological approach to instructional design that have arisen from the literature, including the observation that it does not match what is known about how teaching academics plan their courses

Table 2.1 – Suggestions that instructional design does not satisfy Introna’s (1996) 3 necessary conditions for teleological processes
Necessary conditions	Reality
Stable and predictable system	Discipline categories bring differences (Becher and Trowler 2001) and are social constructions, subject to change from within and between disciplines. If a student finds a learning strategy troubling, the student can switch to another at will. The designer could not have predicted which strategy the student would actually use (Winn 1990). Traditional instruction design is not responsive enough for a society characterised by rapid change (Gustafson 1995).
Manipulate behaviour	Change in student strategy can circumvent the intent of the design, unless the design is extremely adaptable (Winn 1990) Human behaviour is unpredictable, if not indeterminate, which suggests that attempts to predict and control educational outcomes cannot be successful (Cziko 1989) Academic freedom in teaching refers to the right to teach a course in a way the academic feels reasonable (Geirsdottir 2009) Most teachers believe they have considerable autonomy in course planning (Stark 2000)
Accurately determine goals	curriculum decision making is characterised by conflict and contradictions and by attempts to guard the interest and power relations within the disciplinary community (Henkel and Kogan 1999). As the student learns, their mental models change and hence decisions about instructional strategies made now, would be different than those made initially (Winn 1990). Influences on the choice of teaching approaches adopted are clearly more complex than any simple analytic model can convey (Entwistle 2003) It cannot be assumed that everything is planned in advance (Levander and Mikkola 2009) In the real world, no-one is sure what the instructional goals should be (Dick 1995).

The above description of instructional design as a teleological process represents the dominant paradigm of instructional design, but not the only paradigm. This is representative of the more homogeneous view of instructional design built around the ADDIE framework (Visscher-Voerman and Gustafson 2004). While instructional designers do apparently use process-based instructional design models (e.g. ADDIE), a majority of their time is not spent working within such processes nor do they follow them in a rigid fashion (Kenny, Zhang et al. 2005). The design processes used by instructional designers are much more heterogeneous and diverse (Rowland 1992). Dick (1995) suggestions that models, such as ADDIE, are ultimately judged on their usefuleness, not on whether they are good or bad.

Models, such as ADDIE, are most useful in the systematic planning of major revisions of an existing course or the creation of a new course. However, traditional university academics spend relatively little time in systematic planning activities prior to teaching an existing course (Lattuca and Stark 2009). A significant reason for this is that academics are not often required to engage in the development of new courses or major overhauls of existing courses (Stark and Lowther 1988). The pre-dominant practice is teaching an existing course, often a course the academic has taught previously. When this happens, academics spend most of their time fine tuning a course or making minor modifications to material or content (Stark 2000).

It is also known that academics practice: is not described by a rational planning model; generally starts with content and not explicit course objectives; and does not separate planning from implementation (Lattuca and Stark 2009). Since academics have traditionally not been required to document their teaching goals for a course ahead of time it is possible that the actual teaching and learning that occurs is more in line with the teacher’s implicit internalised knowledge and not that described in published course descriptions (Levander and Mikkola 2009). Formal description of the curriculum do not necessarily provide much understanding about how teachers put their curriculum ideas into action (Argyris and Schon 1974).

As stated earlier, the instructional design process can be seen as drawing on the knowledge of learning and instructional design to identify appropriate instructional strategies to achieve required outcomes within a given context. Most university academics do not have this knowledge of learning and instructional design. In addition, these staff rarely read educational literature or call upon any available expert assistance when planning a course (Stark 2000). In the absence of formal qualifications of knowledge in this area, most academics teach in ways they have been taught (Phillips 2005) and/or which fit with disciplinary norms and their recent teaching experience (Entwistle 2003). These in turn influence the conceptions of teaching and learning held by academics, which in turn influences their approaches to teaching as described in a significant body of literature discussed in more detail in (cross reference to just after Figure 2.2 and section 2.7.1).

In seeking to describe what is known about the approaches to teaching used by academics, Richardson (2005) developed the integrated model shown in Figure 2.1. While useful, Entwistle (Entwistle 2003) suggests that the simply analytic models are too simple to capture the full complexity of the decision making that occurs when choosing teaching approaches. Stark (2000) suggests that instructional design is not only a science, but also a creative act, linked to teacher thinking that must be examined contextually, meaning that it is not amenable to a single formula or prescription. Or perhaps to a teleological process.

Figure 2.2 - An integrated model of teachers' approaches to teaching, conceptions of teaching and perceptions of the teaching environment (Richardson 2005)

References

Argyris, C. and D. Schon (1974). Theory in practice: Increasing professional effectiveness. Oxford, England, Jossey-Bass.

Becher, T. and P. Trowler (2001). Academic tribes and territories: Intellectual enquiry and the culture of disciplines. Buckingham, SRHE and Open University Press.

Biggs, J. (1999). Teaching for quality learning at university. Buckingham, Open University Press.

Cziko, G. A. (1989). "Unpredictability and indeterminism in human behavior: arguments and implications for educational research." Educational Researcher 18(3): 17-25.

Der-Thanq, C., D. Hung, et al. (2007). "Educational design as a quest for congruence: The need for alternative learning design tools." British Journal of Educational Technology 38(5): 876-884.

Dick, W. (1995). Enhanced ISD: A response to changing environments for learning and performance. Instructional design fundamentals: a reconsideration. B. Seels. Englewood Cliffs, Educational Technology: 13-20.

Entwistle, N. (2003). Concepts and conceptual frameworks underpinning the ETL Project. Occasional Report 3. Edinburgh, University of Edinburgh.

Geirsdottir, G. (2009). We are caught up in our own world : conceptions of curriculum within three different disciplines at the University of Iceland, Iceland University of Education. PhD: 326.

Gustafson, K. (1995). Instructional design fundamentals: clouds on the horizon. Instructional design fundamentals: a reconsideration. B. Seels. Englewood Cliffs, Educational Technology: 21-30.

Harvey, A. and P. Kamvounias (2008). "Bridging the implementation gap: a teacher-as-learner approach to teaching and learning policy." Higher Education Research & Development 27(1): 31-41.

Henkel, M. and M. Kogan (1999). Changes in Curriculum and Institutional Structures: Responses to Outside Influences in Higher Education Institutions. Innovation and adaptation in higher education. C. Gellert. London, Jessica Kingsley Publishers: 66-92.

Introna, L. (1996). "Notes on ateleological information systems development." Information Technology & People 9(4): 20-39.

Irlbeck, S., E. Kays, et al. (2006). "The Phoenix Rising: Emergent models of instructional design." Distance Education 27(2): 171-185.

Kenny, R., Z. Zhang, et al. (2005). "A review of what instructional designers do: Questions answered and questions not asked." Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology 31(1): 9-26.

Lattuca, L. and J. Stark (2009). Shaping the college curriculum: Academic plans in context. San Francisco, John Wiley & Sons.

Levander, L. and M. Mikkola (2009). "Core curriculum analysis: A tool for educational design." The Journal of Agricultural Education and Extension 15(3): 275-286.

Phillips, R. (2005). "Challenging the primacy of lectures: The dissonance between theory and practice in university teaching." Journal of University Teaching and Learning Practice 2(1): 1-12.

Reigeluth, C. M. (1983). Instructional design: what is it and why is it? Instructional design theories and models. C. M. Reigeluth. Hillsdale, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Reiser, R. (2001). "A history of instructional design and technology: Part II: A history of instructional design." Educational Technology Research and Development 49(2): 57-67.

Richardson, J. (2005). "Students’ approaches to learning and teachers’ approaches to teaching in higher education." Educational Psychology 25(6): 673-680.

Rowland, G. (1992). "What do instructional designers actually do? An initial investigation of expert practice." Performance Improvement Quarterly 5(2): 65-86.

Stark, J. (2000). "Planning introductory college courses: Content, context and form." Instructional Science 28(5): 413-438.

Stark, J. and M. Lowther (1988). Strengthening the Ties That Bind: Integrating Undergraduate Liberal and Professional Study. Ann Arbor, MI, Professional Preparation Project.

Visscher-Voerman, I. and K. Gustafson (2004). "Paradigms in the theory and practice of education and training design." Educational Technology Research and Development 52(2): 69-89.

Winn, W. (1990). "Some implications of cognitive theory for instructional design." Instructional Science 19(1): 53-69.

Herding cats and losing weight: the vimeo video

By admin

On December 23, 2009

In elearning, herding cats, innovation, presentations, PsFramework, reflectivealignment, Uncategorized

This is in part a test of WordPress.com’s new support for Vimeo video. The video below is of a presentation I gave at CQU this year. The abstract is below. The slides are on slideshare.

Abstract

The environment within which Universities operate has changed significantly over recent years. Two of the biggest changes have been a reduction in state funding for universities and, at the same time, an increased need for universities to demonstrate the quality and appropriateness of their services, especially learning and teaching.

Consequently, most universities have developed a range of strategies, policies, structures and systems with the intent of improving and demonstrating the quality of their learning and teaching. This presentation will draw on the metaphors of herding cats and losing weight to examine the underlying assumptions of these attempts, the resulting outcomes, question whether or not they are the best we can hope for, and present some alternatives.

The video

Change the environment, not the culture

By admin

On December 9, 2009

In elearning, PsFramework, thesis, Uncategorized

I’ve heard a number of folk at ASCILITE’09 claim that there needs to be a change in culture amongst academics around learning and teaching. To me this has always sounded a bit like a deficit model of teaching staff. It’s a model that I’ve heard again and again at ASCILITE’09 and in other literature around learning and teaching in higher education. You know the sort of thing e.g.

Staff spend years getting their PhD in Physics and are then automatically expected to be good teachers.
Most academic staff don’t have any qualifications in education…..

i.e. there are problems with the staff and this needs to be fixed by innovation X (e.g. LAMS, learning designs, PLEs…), practice Y (e.g. all staff must have an education qualification) etc. We need to herd these problematic cats into a more productive direction.

In this situation, culture is being used to describe the academics and what they do. It is ignoring the other component, which I’ll call the environment for the purposes of this post. My proposition is that it’s not the culture you want to change, it’s the environment. The environment is not conducive to the type of outcomes people want, and while the environment remains the same, no amount of changing the culture will have any effect at all.

(As you’ll see below, some/most literature tends to use culture to refer to what I’m calling the environment. Sorry for the confusion, but I’m trying to engage with what some folk have been saying.)

The following discussion may also connect with the cascading change symposium at ASCILITE and perhaps the idea that we need to focus on 3rd order change, not 2nd order change.

The environment

The university environment is not conducive to innovation, improvement or an emphasis on learning and teaching. Simply put, academics get rewarded for research. In terms of learning and teaching, they get words, but not action, about the importance of teaching for promotion and a collection of top down impositions and moves to standardisation. An environment conducive to compliance and corruption behaviour, not improvement in quality.

For example (Twining et al, 2006: p 72)

While the senior management team has an important role to play in fostering an ethos that supports change (see p77 Leadership), it is also clear that the wider educational context plays a vital role as well. At present the culture within education does not encourage people to take risks or innovate. Additionally, many educators in schools are still coming to terms with initiatives that they perceive have been imposed upon them. This can lead to ‘initiative blindness’ (Interview 26 – LA) which acts as a barrier to further change.

Reflective alignment

Academics are knowledge workers. Here’s a quote from Peter Drucker on knowledge workers

The knowledge worker cannot be supervised closely or in detail. He can only be helped. But he must direct himself, and he must direct himself towards performance and contribution, that is, toward effectiveness.

This quote is from the book “The effective executive” first published in 1967.

I would describe the approaches being taken at my institution, and many others, as leaning much more towards the controlling/directing of the academic, rather than the helping. The increasing corporatisation of university are leading to policies, processes and systems that require standardised approaches across units and institutions, that move towards the controlling/directing rather than the helping.

I’ve argued before that there are 3 observable levels of improving learning and teaching (re-purposing Biggs work on learning)

What the teacher is.
This is the old laissez faire approach to teaching in universities. There are some good teachers, there are some bad teachers. The institution isn’t really worried about this. Won’t try to do anything, except perhaps the really bad ones in out of the way courses.
What the institution does.
This is where most institutions are now. A university can’t have bad teachers. So to improve teaching and teachers the institution does lots of stuff. Institutional level policies, practices, studies, systems etc. Management take a big hand in developing and driving these things. They search for fads and fashions. Graduate attributes, LMS, e-portfolios, grad certs in L&T and any other centrally driven, institutional level approach tends (but not always) to fall into this category.
Another symptom of this level of improving teaching is on-going restructures in the learning and teaching support groups (central and faculty). It’s indicative of senior managers arguing about who owns, controls and decides what the institution does. It’s indicative of who controls the agenda and attempts to control the academics and the culture that arises.
What the teachers does.
This is where we have to go (IMHO) and what I talk about below.

What the teacher does?

The simple argument (and yet very difficult to implement) is that the environment should encourage teaching staff to expend effective energy and effort on reflecting on their teaching and learning and acting on that teaching and learning. It should not focus on what the institution does. Some detail follows.

In terms of improving learning and teaching, I follow this perspective

Master teachers are not born; they become. They become primarily by developing a habit of mind, a way of looking critically at the work they do developing the courage to recognise faults, and struggling to improve. (Common, 1989)

The reflection and struggle to improve has to be rewarded. This means that the vast majority, if not all, of the academics need to believe it will be rewarded and not just because senior management says it is.

The institutional environment has to help academics reflect and struggle to change. This has to happen in a contextualised way. An individualised way. A way that breaks down disciplinary boundaries and group think. Top down doesn’t work. An approach that focuses on creating connections between people with the appropriate knowledge and capabilities to help the reflection and the struggle to improve. Generic global analysts and project managers do not help. The network of people has to include people with the combination of knowledge of learning, teaching, technology, the literature and the context. The network of people have to be encouraged to interact in regular and unexpected ways.

The focus of the network has to be on helping the academic reflect and struggle to improve. Not on specifying de-contextualised best practice, but on helping reflection and improvement.

Focusing on 3rd order change

The cascading change symposium at ASCILITE was described in part as

This symposium brings together a diverse and international group of researchers to explore the problems and limitations of using social media as a leverage point for second-order change in higher education. It aims to engage contributors and the audience in theoretical and empirical reflection on possible directions for further conceptual and methodological development in that area.

I wondered whether we should focus on 3rd order change, not 2nd order change. Some definitions of “orders of change” – my re-phrasing of Bartunek et al (1987):

First order change – incremental changes which occur within an existing way of doing things or paradigm. i.e. you tweak at the edges without radically changing the context/culture/assumptions
Second order change – a fundamental change in the way of doing things, or the paradigm. i.e. you change the context/culture/assumptions to something entirely new.
Third order change – you develop the capacity of the system or the components of the system to change the context/culture/assumptions.

I believe that the above suggestion, a focus on what the teacher does and especially focusing the environment on helping the academic to reflect and struggle to improve is more likely to create 3rd order change. i.e. the aim isn’t to help them to undergo 2nd order change, as that assumes you/they have decided what they need to change to. The focus of reflective alignment is on enabling 3rd order change.

Small interventions, fundamental shifts

James Clay wrote a blog post about the cascading change symposium. He makes the following observation

My opinion is that these changes or interventions we make that we report at these conferences are always small and tiny and therefore can’t make a huge differences. We need to make major interventions at a institutional or even at a societal level if we are to effect fundamental change.

I agree. Most of the interventions at a conference like ASCILITE are amongst the innovative teachers or from the support staff people who help them. We can’t make the type of institutional level change that I believe is necessary to achieve the 3rd level of improving learning and teaching. We can’t change the environment. In his post, James identifies one of the reasons

People with the power to effect change do not (in the main) attend such conferences and therefore such changes do not happen at an institutional level.

Until the top level folk engage in this type of thinking and move away from the 2nd level of improving learning and teaching, which perhaps could be described as a focus on 2nd order change, I don’t think there will be any significant change.

Of course, one of the problems in getting management to engage is another aspect of the current environment. Short-term contracts for senior managers which contribute to them wishing to take charge, engage in large-scale projects of “2nd order change” (typically connected with the latest fad going through the community), move on and consequently trumpet the value of what they did before it becomes obvious there were no real change.

Perhaps the ASCILITE conference organisers should actively invite a few institutional leaders to attend the conference – i.e. not do the welcome but sit in the sessions, engage in the discussions as yet another attendee.

References

Bartunek, J. and M. Moch (1987). “First-order, second-order and third-order change and organization development interventions: A cognitive approach.” The Journal of Applied Behavoral Science 23(4): 483-500.

Common, D. (1989). “Master teachers in higher education: A matter of settings.” The Review of Higher Education 12(4): 375-387.

Twining, P., R. Broadie, et al. (2006). Educational change and ICT: an exploration of priorities 2 and 3 of the DfES e-strategy in schools and colleges, Becta ICT Research: 106.

The bureaucratic model and the grammar and future of universities

By admin

On October 26, 2009

In elearning, PsFramework, Uncategorized

Last week I attended a presentation by a colleague at CQUniveristy titled The Bureaucratic Model of Adult Instructional Design. The stated purpose of the presentation was

present and explore the Bureaucratic Model as a narrative that we must understand if we are to influence the direction of adult education.

The talk resonated with me as much of my current struggles/work is trying to make folk aware of a range of unstated assumptions that guide their thinking about learning and teaching within a university context. As Jay says, we have to understand those assumptions before we can think of influencing the future of learning and teaching – and somewhere in that, universities.

Since Jay’s talk I’ve come across and/or been reminded of a range of related work. Please feel free to add more here.

A vision for the future

Tony Bates has recently posted the second of his blog posts title Using technology to improve the cost-effectiveness of the academy: Part 2 within which he gives his vision for the future of universities.

A number of his implications seek to remove many of the basic assumptions that underpin university operation (e.g. semesters, fixed exams). However, a number of them show connections with an existing orthodoxy (e.g. all PhD students will have 6 months training in L&T).

That’s one of the problems I have with visioning. Too often it excludes interesting possibilities because it is held back by the background, preferences, ideas and prejudices of the people doing the visioning. My preference would be to let it emerge through a institution/setting that is flexible, open and questioning. I think much more interesting things can emerge from that situation than can ever happen because of the visioning of experts.

That’s because, no matter who you are, you have unstated assumptions that define what you can think of. Often this is addressed by having lots of different people do the visioning, but too often such attempts use approaches that to quickly focus on a particular vision, closing out future possibilities.

The grammar of school

In this post I mentioned a 1995 article by Seymour Papert on Why school reform is impossible. In this article Papert draws on Tyack and Cuban’s (1995) idea of the “grammar of school”

The structure of School is so deeply rooted that one reacts to deviations from it as one would to a grammatically deviant utterance: Both feel wrong on a level deeper than one’s ability to formulate reasons. This phenomenon is related to “assimilation blindness” insofar as it refers to a mechanism of mental closure to foreign ideas. I would make the relation even closer by noting that when one is not paying careful attention, one often actually hear the deviant utterance as the “nearest” grammatical utterance a transformation that might bring drastic change in meaning.

This sounds very much like what is happening in Jay’s bureaucratic model.

The need for experiments

A lot of the current debate about the future of universities is built on the comparison with print media. i.e. look, newspapers are a long-running institution that are dieing. Look, Universities, they are a long-running institution, they must be dieing also.

Clay Shirkey has written a long blog post title “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable”. A major point that he makes in his post, seems to apply directly to the future of universities and the limitations of attempts at visioning like those of Tony Bates. In particular, this

Revolutions create a curious inversion of perception. In ordinary times, people who do no more than describe the world around them are seen as pragmatists, while those who imagine fabulous alternative futures are viewed as radicals. The last couple of decades haven’t been ordinary, however. Inside the papers, the pragmatists were the ones simply looking out the window and noticing that the real world was increasingly resembling the unthinkable scenario. These people were treated as if they were barking mad. Meanwhile the people spinning visions of popular walled gardens and enthusiastic micropayment adoption, visions unsupported by reality, were regarded not as charlatans but saviors.

He then draws on the development of the printing press to talk about revolutions

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen

Dede’s metaphors of learning

Lastly, the following recording is of talk by Professor Chris Dede and some metaphors of learning. It is the current underlying assumption of consistency in delivery of learning that underpins much of what universities are currently doing which is my biggest bugbear. It’s what is contributing to university learning and teaching approaching what Dede describes as “the worst of fast food”.

Chris Dede: Human behaviours and metaphors for learning

Is there value in strategic plans for educational technology

By admin

On October 9, 2009

In Chapter 2, elearning, herding cats, innovation, phd, PsFramework, thesis, Uncategorized

Dave Cormier has recently published a blog post titled Dave’s wildly unscientific survey of technology use in Higher Education. There’s a bunch of interesting stuff there. I especially like Dave’s note on e-portfolios

eportfolios are a vast hidden overhead. They really only make sense if they are portable and accessible to the user. Transferring vast quantities of student held data out of the university every spring seems complicated. Better, maybe, to instruct students to use external services.

Mainly because it aligns with some of my views.

But that’s not the point of this post. This morning Dave tweeted for folk to respond to a comment on the post by Diego Leal on strategic plans for educational technology in universities.

Strategic plans in educational technology are a bugbear of mine. I’ve been writing and thinking about them a lot recently. So I’ve bitten.

Summary

My starting position is that I’m strongly against strategic plans for educational technology in organisations. However, I’m enough of a pragmatist to recognise that – for various reasons (mostly political) – organisations have to have them. If they must have them, they must be very light on specifics and focus on enabling learning and improvement.

My main reason for this is a belief that strategic plans generally embody an assumption about organisations and planning that simply doesn’t exist within universities, especially in the context of educational technology. This mismatch results in strategic plans generally creating or enabling problems.

Important: I don’t believe that the problems with strategic plans (for edtech in higher education) arise because they are implemented badly. I believe problems with strategic plans arise because they are completely inappropriate for edtech in higher education. Strategic plans might work for other purposes, but not this one.

This mismatch leads to the following (amongst others) common problems:

Model 1 behaviour (Argyris et al, 1985);
Fads, fashions and band wagons (Birnbaum, 2000; Swanson and Ramiller, 2004)
Purpose proxies (Introna, 1996);
i.e. rather than measure good learning and teaching, an institution measures how many people are using the LMS or have a graduate certificate in learning and teaching.
Suboptimal stable equilibria (March, 1991)
Technology gravity (McDonald & Gibbons, 2009)

Rationale

Introna (1996) identified three necessary conditions for the type of process embedded in a strategic plan to be possible. They are:

The behaviour of the system is relatively stable and predictable.
The planners are able to manipulate system behaviour.
The planners are able to accurately determine goals or criteria for success.

In a recent talk I argued that none of those conditions exist within the practice of learning and teaching in higher education. It’s a point I also argue in a section of my thesis

The alternative?

The talk includes some discussion of some principles of a different approach to the same problem. That alternative is based on the idea of ateleological design suggested by Introna (1996). An idea that is very similar to broader debates in various other areas of research. This section of my thesis describes the two ends of the process spectrum.

It is my position that educational technology in higher education – due to its diversity and rapid pace of change – has to be much further towards the ateleological, emergent, naturalistic or exploitation end of the spectrum.

Statement of biases

I’ve only ever worked at the one institution (for coming up to 20 years) and have been significantly influenced by that experience. Experience which has included spending 6 months developing a strategic plan for Information Technology in Learning and Teaching that was approved by the Academic Board of the institution, used by the IT Division to justify a range of budget claims, thrown out/forgotten, and now, about 5 years later, many of the recommendations are being actioned. The experience also includes spending 7 or so years developing an e-learning system from the bottom up, in spite of the organisational hierarchy.

So I am perhaps not the most objective voice.

References

Argyris, C., R. Putnam, et al. (1985). Action science: Concepts, methods and skills for research and intervention. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.

Birnbaum, R. (2000). Management Fads in Higher Education: Where They Come From, What They Do, Why They Fail. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.

Introna, L. (1996). “Notes on ateleological information systems development.” Information Technology & People 9(4): 20-39.

March, J. (1991). “Exploration and exploitation in organizational learning.” Organization Science 2(1): 71-87.

McDonald, J. and A. Gibbons (2009). “Technology I, II, and III: criteria for understanding and improving the practice of instructional technology ” Educational Technology Research and Development 57(3): 377-392.

Swanson, E. B. and N. C. Ramiller (2004). “Innovating mindfully with information technology.” MIS Quarterly 28(4): 553-583.

Thoughts on "Insidious pedagogy"

By admin

On October 6, 2009

In Chapter 2, elearning, phd, PsFramework, thesis, Uncategorized

The following is a reflection on and response to a paper by Lisa Lane (2009) in First Monday titled “Insidious pedagogy: How course management systems impact teaching”. I’ve been struggling with keeping up with reading, but this topics is closely connected to my thesis and the presentation I’ll be giving soon.

The post starts with my thoughts and reactions to the paper and has a summary of the paper at the end.

My Thoughts

In summary, the paper basically seems to be based on

observing a problem; and
In summary, the problem is that because most academics are not expert online technology users they seek to use course management systems (CMS) at a basic level by using system defaults. They system defaults in some CMS (e.g. Blackboard) are seen to encourage limited use and also to encourage academic staff to continue as novices. These novice staff produce learning environments that are less than appropriate, but they are also happy with the CMS.
proposing two bits of a solution.
The two solutions are:
- start novices with pedagogy;
  When introducing a CMS to technically novice acacdemic staff, don’t start by examining the technical features of the CMS. This encourages them to stick with those features without considering pedagogy. Instead, start with pedagogy and work to the tools.
- have the CMS use opt-in, rather than opt-out.
  The default setting for an opt-out CMS is that all of the options are there, in the face of the academic. This can be confronting and lead novices to taking more pragmatic approaches. An opt-in approach has fewer defaults which encourages/requires the academic to think more holistically.

I like the paper, especially in its description of the problem. This is an important problem that is often over-looked. However, while there is some value in the solutions – the distinction between opt-in and opt-out is especially interesting – I wonder about the practicality of the “start with pedagogy” solution. Also, not surpisingly given such a complex problem, think there are other factors to be considered.

Practicality of “start with pedagogy”

My current institution is currently in the midst of adopting Moodle. The institution has implemented the organisationally rational approach of having compulsory training sessions in Moodle being run by both IT trainers and curriculum designers. For various reasons, a number of the staff attending these sessions have asked a common question: “What’s the minimum I need to know?”. Such staff aren’t that interested in starting with pedagogy.

This raises an interesting point that I haven’t thought of for the first time. Given our institutional context, I believe that the number of true novices (i.e. those that have never used a CMS) amongst academic staff is very low. Many of these staff may well have very limited conceptions of e-learning from a pedagogical perspective, however, they have started to develop “their way” of teaching online. They are comfortable with that and all they want to know is how to replicate it in the new system.

In addition to this, most of the staff I know don’t start with pedagogy when they are designing their teaching. This can be due to not knowing about pedagogy or also for vary pragmatic reasons. For example, if you are a casual, part-time being employed to teach an existing course, you are going to stick with what has been done before. You’re not being paid to do something different and any problems that arise because of “difference” will not be treated well.

Other thoughts

Other thoughts/responses include

Is Moodle really different?;
Today’s CMSs can be customized?;
Designed to focus on instructor efficiency?;

Is Moodle really different?

Lane (2008) writes (emphasis added)

This is particularly true of integrated systems (such as Blackboard/WebCT), but is also a factor in some of the newer, more constructivist systems (Moodle).

This seems to accept the view that Moodle, being designed on social constructivst principles, is somehow different and better than Blackboard, WebCT etc. I’m sorry to say that if I haven’t seen anything significant while using Moodle that strongly shows those social constructivist principles.

I think there’s a really interesting research project around investigating this claim, how/if it is visible in the design of Moodle and how that claimed strength influences use of Moodle.

Today’s CMS can be customized

There’s a quote in the paper (Lane, 2008)

Today’s CMSs can be customized, changed and adapted

I question this a little. I think the point of the quote in the paper is from the perspective of the academic. i.e. that when designing your course there is choice, an ability to customize your course in a variety of ways by the breadth of additional functionality that CMS vendors have provided.

I agree with that to some extent, however, this customization has some limits:

don’t break the model;
All systems have an in-built model. You can only customize to the extent that you fit within the model. We had an experience in one course where we couldn’t create enough discussion forums in the right places for one pedagogical design. This was entirely due to the assumptions built into the CMS about how discussion forums would work. It broke the model, so we couldn’t do it.
your installation allows it.
There is an important distinction to be made between what the CMS allows you to customize and what the particular installation of the CMS you are using allows you to customize. The decisions made by specific institutions can further constrain the level of customization. The simplest example is the choice at the institutional level not to install “module X”. But in some CMS there are also installation level configuration decisions that constrain customization.

I’ve argued elsewhere that the basic model of a CMS is based on that of an integrated, enterprise system – a product model well known to be inflexible. In fact, best practice information systems literature suggests that for such systems you must “implement vanilla” to minimise costs.

Designed to focus on instructor effeciency?

The paper (Lane, 2008) includes the following claim about the design of CMSs

Today’s enterprise–scale systems were created to manage traditional teaching tasks as if they were business processes. They were originally designed to focus on instructor efficiency for administrative functions such as grade posting, test creation, and enrollment management.

My position is that most of them were very badly designed to do this, if they were at all designed to do this. I’ve heard lots of folk explain that if you have a class for 30 or 40, then the commercial CMSs work fine, but if you have 800, you are buggered.

The first version of WebCT installed at my institution had an internal limit on the number of students that could be managed within the gradebook – 999. If you had more than 1000 students in a class, you were stuffed. My institution had classes that big.

The nature of my current institution – courses having upwards of 20 different teaching staff spread across the eastern coast of Australia – means that online assignment submission and management is an important task. Experience of staff here is that the assignment submission system in Blackboard is really bad in terms of efficiency. Early indications are that the default Moodle system is just as bad. A locally produced system is significantly more efficient.

All of this seems to bring into question the “efficiency” aspect of CMS. They don’t even do that well. We should write something on this.

Paper summary

The following is a quick summary of the paper

Introduction

Nice quote from Thoreau which I might have to steal

But lo! men have become the tools of their tools.

Draws on historian’s view to argue that technologies tend to have a purpose/objective that can limit or even determine its use.

Course Management Systems (CMS) also do this, through the defaults in those systems. Other literature tends to not to focus on this. The paper suggests that

A closer look at how course management systems work, combined with an understanding of how novices use technology, provides a clearer view of the manner in which a CMS may not only influence, but control, instructional approaches.

The inherent pedagogies of CMSs

CMS designed mostly for administrative purposes. Built-in pedagogy is essentially based on presentation and assessment. The design of these systems make it simple to perform presentation and assessment tasks.

That said, CMSs have been expanded to include other features and this is expanding. Suggests that CMSs can be customized, changed and adapted. But why aren’t faculty tinkering the CMS to make their individual pedagogies work online?

Novice web users and the CMS

Most academics are not web-heads. Most are drafted to teach online. It’s based on top-down directives. Lots more references to explain that they aren’t savvy with technology. At the same time, most have established successful learnig approaches over time.

Interesting points about how much academics use the same research methods they learned in graduate school. Can expand here.

Experts and novices are different.

The fault of the defaults

Basically argues that the defaults of the CMS aren’t designed to make it easy for or fit with the expectations/experience of academics. As they spend more time with the system, they become comfortable with the defaults.

Important: makes the point about the difference of perspective between educational technologists and academics, especially how they view the CMS.

Novices are happier with CMS because – to put it bluntly – they don’t know better. It’s the folk pushing the boundaries that are less satisfied with CMS.

Solutions to CMS dominance

Treat novices, differently from advanced instructors. With novices emphasis pedagogy first. Argues that starting with technology features focuses on the novice instructor’s weakness (technological literarcy) at the expense of their main strength (expertise in discipline and their teaching).

Also suggests that “opt-out” systems – systems that show all the tools and features and expect users to choose which they don’t want – are too overwhelming for novices. Suggests that opt-in systems – like Moodle – are better. Especially in the way they give similar emphasis to discussions and content transmission

References

Fairweather, J. (2005). “Beyond the rhetoric: Trends in the relative value of teaching and research in faculty salaries.” Journal of Higher Education 76(4): 401-422.

Lane, L. (2009). “Insidious pedagogy: How course management systems impact teaching.” First Monday 14(10).

Lessons from Pedagogy for e-learning

By admin

On October 4, 2009

In Chapter 2, design theory, elearning, phd, PsFramework, thesis, Uncategorized

Two thesis related posts in a day, I must be on a roll. This post actually marks a milestone, the following rough bit of material is the last bit of original writing I’ll need to do for chapter 2. What remains will be tidying up, fixing typos/spelling/grammar, “concludings” and some major cutting. Sadly chapter 2 currently stands at 200+ pages and will need some major cutting I think to be a reasonable size. That’s a job for another day.

The following is meant to abstract some lessons for e-learning based on the literature around pedagogy reviewed in early sections (e.g. the one from earlier today. It continues my focus on diversity and change being key characteristics of e-learning, an observation that highlights a mismatch with the standard product and process being used for e-learning.

As I near the end there are an increasing number of cross references from this material to earlier material. Sorry, haven’t gotten around to linking them on the blog. This is likely to be only somewhat less annoying than the poor grammar and dyslexic typing.

Lessons from Pedagogy for e-learning

The above brief overview of the Pedagogy component of the Ps Framework forms the basis for the identification of four lessons for e-learning within universities from the literature on pedagogy. The first of these is that learning is an inherently diverse human activity. The second is that e-learning is only a relatively new human activity and is still changing and adding to the diversity of learning. The third lesson, and one based on this observation of increasing diversity, is that there is no silver bullet, no one universal approach to learning or to e-learning and that instead e-learning should perhaps be focusing on its ability to support this diversity. The final lesson is that any change in learning and teaching at university is reliant on changing the conceptions of the academics.

Learning is inherently diverse

Dede (2008) raises the question of whether or not there is just one pre-eminent way of learning/teaching for every student, for every subject, for all legitimate purposes of schooling? Like everything else in education, a balance is needed – one size does not fit all – even in online settings (Cuthrell and Lyon 2007). Different learners bring to the learning experience: different learning objectives; different prior knowledge and past experience; and, different cognitive preferences (Dagger, Conlan et al. 2005). The diversification and massification of the student body has led universities to shift their education rhetoric from a notion of “one size fits all” to a concept of tailored, flexible learning (Lewis, Marginson et al. 2005). Learning should not be one size fits all and can be customised to meet local requirements and this deviation from a standard model should now be seen as a strength (Cavallo 2004). A “one size fits all” approach ignores the importance of disciplinary culture (Jones 2009). There is no one best way of developing instruction (Davies 1991). Dede’s (2008) answer to his question is that given the spectrum of learning theories, it would appear that “learning is a human activity quite diverse in its manifestations from person to person”. He goes onto suggest that the field of instructional design can only progress if it recognises that learning is a human activity quite diverse in its manifestations from person to person and even from day to day (Dede 2008).

E-learning is new and changing

While, to some extent, Bates (2004) statement that e-learning does not change the fundamental process of learning in that students still need to read, observe, think, discuss, practice and receive feedback. However, e-learning is creating a new environment within which learning and teaching operates and is contributing to the creation of and need for new knowledge about learning and teaching. There is little understanding of the affordances of different technologies and how these might be exploited in particular learning and teaching contexts (Conole and Dyke 2004). There is a need to engage with the affordances and constraints of particular technologies to understand how new technologies can meet specific pedagogical goals of specific content areas (Mishra and Koehler 2006). The rise of e-learning is calling for and generating more than knowledge simply to inform instructional design theories. With the example of connectivism, it is possible to see new knowledge, enabled or required to some extent by the rise of technology, being generated at the other three levels of learning theories identified in Section 2.1.2.

E-learning, diversity and silver bullets

The diversity inherent in learning is not matched by the theories and philosophies around the use of information and communication technologies to support learning. Such approaches treat learning as a simple activity that is relatively invariant across people, subject areas and educational objectives; and, so most widely used instructional technology applications have less variety in approach than a low-end fast-food restaurant (Dede 2008). The apparent high costs of developing educational materials means, that at least for for-profit organizations, a “one size fits all” approach produces economies of scale that is likely to prevail over the potential of online technologies to support customisation for the needs of individual learners (Cunningham, Ryan et al. 2000). This tendency towards one size fits all is contributed to by successive generations of pundits espousing ‘magical’ media, the single best medium for learning or the universally optimal way of learning (Dede 2008).

The difference and diversity inherent in learning challenges managerialism – a rising trend within higher education as shown in Society in Place (cross reference) – which generally seeks to elide ambiguities and to standardise individuals and experiences (Danaher, Luck et al. 2004). The managerialist approach to standardisation is well served by the monolithic or integrated product model on which learning management systems are based (cross reference to procurement and software section in Product). Innovation and diversity are served less well by such a product model. Dede (2008) argues that

from an instrumental perspective, the history of tool making shows that the best strategy is to have simultaneously available a variety of specialized tools, rather than a single device that attempts to accomplish everything.

Improvement comes through changing teacher conceptions

Even with the diversity in learning and the change created by the introduction of e-learning, the practice of learning and teaching in universities remains much the same. While e-learning has provided a new medium, must teaching remains old wine in new bottles (Bates 2004). As shown in section 2.1.4 (e-learning usage from past experience) the majority of academic staff still rely on old, familiar pedagogies rather than actively engaging with the new affordances offered by technology. This is something that is only going to change when the university context encourages, enables and perhaps even requires, changes in the conceptions of learning and teaching held by academic staff. The on-going introduction of new technologies is unlikely to ever bring about such change.

References

Bates, T. (2004). The promise and myths of e-learning in post-secondary education. The Network Society: A Cross-cultural Perspective. M. Castells. Cheltenham, UK, Edward Elgar: 271-292.

Cavallo, D. (2004). "Models of growth – Towards fundamental change in learning environments." BT Technology Journal 22(4): 96-112.

Conole, G. and M. Dyke (2004). "What are the affordances of information and communication technologies?" ALT-J, Research in Learning Technology 12(2): 113-124.

Cunningham, S., Y. Ryan, et al. (2000). The Business of Borderless Education. Canberra, Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs: 328.

Cuthrell, K. and A. Lyon (2007). "Instructional strategies: What do online students prefer?" Journal of Online Learning and Teaching 3(4).

Dagger, D., O. Conlan, et al. (2005). Fundamental requirements of personalised eLearning development environments. World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education 2005, Vancouver, Canada, AACE.

Danaher, P. A., J. Luck, et al. (2004). Course management systems: Innovation versus managerialism. Research Proceedings of the 11th Association for Learning Technology Conference (ALT-C 2004), University of Exeter, Devon, England, Association for Learning Technology.

Davies, I. (1991). Instructional development as an art: One of the three faces of ID. Paradigms rgained: the uses of illuminative, semiotic, and post-modern criticism as modes of inquiry in educational technology: a book of readings. D. Hlynka and J. Belland, Educational Technology Publications: 93-106.

Dede, C. (2008). Theoretical perspectives influencing the use of information technology in teaching and learning. International Handbook of Information Technology in Primary and Secondary Education. J. Voogt and G. Knezek. New York, Springer: 43-59.

Jones, A. (2009). "Redisciplining generic attributes: the disciplinary context in focus." Studies in Higher Education 34(1): 85-100.

Lewis, T., S. Marginson, et al. (2005). "The network university? Technology, culture and organisational complexity in contemporary higher education." Higher Education Quarterly 59(1): 56-75.

Mishra, P. and M. Koehler (2006). "Technological pedagogical content knowledge: A framework for teacher knowledge." Teachers College Record 108(6): 1017-1054.

Category: PsFramework Page 1 of 7

The illusion of the “one university”

KPIs and accountability galloping to help

Some other quick questions

References

The problem(s)

Which tools?

How the tools provide support?

TPACK

Some Implications

BIM’s evolution is best when I’m teaching with it

BIM and multiple pedagogies

BIM and distributed cognition – generating TPACK

It’s difficult to generate TPACK

References

Abstract

Slides

References

Process

References

Program or be programmed

But is all digital technology programmed?

Software remains hard to modify

Not everyone wants to program

Organisational structures and processes prevent programming

References

Edu 2.0

The traditional Uni/LMS approach is broken

What is needed

Slow evolution but not there yet

Some alternative product models

References

The question

Inside out

Outside in

Limits in developing innovative pedagogy with Moodle

Both-and, not either-or

Inside-out is currently failing

Why is it failing?

What is both-and?

But it’s not enough

A response to Leigh

References

Empathy-driven innovation and a pull strategy

The Webfuse Thesis

Design processes for teaching

References

Abstract

The video

The environment

Reflective alignment

What the teacher does?

Focusing on 3rd order change

Small interventions, fundamental shifts

References

A vision for the future

The grammar of school

The need for experiments

Dede’s metaphors of learning

Summary

Rationale

The alternative?

Statement of biases

References

My Thoughts

Practicality of “start with pedagogy”

Other solutions

Other thoughts

Is Moodle really different?

Today’s CMS can be customized

Designed to focus on instructor effeciency?

Paper summary

Introduction

The inherent pedagogies of CMSs

Novice web users and the CMS

The fault of the defaults

Solutions to CMS dominance

References

Lessons from Pedagogy for e-learning

Learning is inherently diverse