e-language

Seminar: Nothing New Under the Sun
Perth, Australia, 07 May 2007

I’ve just given a seminar presentation entitled Nothing new under the sun? Eight ‘new’ technologies in the service of ‘old’ ideals as part of UWA Teaching Month. In it, I explored the emergent web 2.0 and its relevance to today’s classrooms, focusing on eight interrelated technologies (the first of which predates web 2.0, though it’s fundamentally aligned with it in spirit):

• VLEs (esp. asynchronous discussion boards)
• blogs
• wikis
• new search facilities (incl. searchrolls & blogsearches)
• folksonomies
• rss
• m-learning
• virtual worlds

It was a fairly practically oriented presentation, covering the ease of setting up each technology as well as its range of educational applications. I suggested that appropriate use of social web technologies can enormously enhance our teaching, allowing us to pursue long-established educational ideals in a way that will appeal to today’s students.

After the presentation, two audience members spoke to me individually. Both were interested in what one called the “dark side” of e-learning, a point I hadn’t addressed in much detail. In fact, I spent much of last year talking about the dark side of e-learning at conferences (Cyprus) or writing about it (Brave New Classrooms), so this year’s presentations represent a switch of emphasis!

These questions raise an interesting point, though: how careful do educators have to be when starting out with this technology in order to avoid potential traps and pitfalls?

It seems to me that the main pitfall is a lack of balance, something I addressed in my seminar from a different angle. After all, as suggested by Stephen Bax in his work on normalisation (see summary by Sophie Ioannou-Georgiou), if we are to use computers appropriately in the classroom or anywhere else, we need to stop fetishising them and seeing them either as magic bullet solutions to all our problems, or alternatively as the cause of all our problems. Rather, we need to see them as tools. Like all tools, they do some things very well, some things reasonably well, and some things poorly or not at all. For me, the greatest danger in employing e-learning tools is to overemploy them: to imagine that we must replace everything we’ve done previously with new, e-learning-centric modes of teaching and learning.

Web 2.0 provides us with a whole suite of tools, different combinations of which will be appropriate in any given context. And there are other contexts where it’s appropriate not to use e-learning tools at all, or to use them in conjunction with more traditional face-to-face methods. The role of educators is to be informed about the possibilities and to make judgement calls, ideally in collaboration with students, to suit each individual situation.

Tags: e-learning, web 2.0

Seminar: Challenging How Knowledge is Created with Jimmy Wales
Perth, Australia, 24 April 2007

This day-long seminar organised by education.au gave participants an overview of the current state of evolution of web 2.0 technologies, with the accent, naturally enough, on wikis. The programme consisted of a presentation by and discussion session with Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, following which Mark Pesce introduced and facilitated a panel discussion. The day closed with a workshop involving all participants.

Major themes of the day included the fact that peer-produced networks are beginning to create a seismic shift in the nature of knowledge production and access; that authority is becoming increasingly decentralised and distributed; and that this represents a major challenge to the way things have been done until now, not just in education but in all areas of life. But perhaps the most important theme to emerge from all the discussions was that what matters is not so much technological change, but rather cultural change. On the one hand, some cultural change is necessary to allow new technologies like wikis to be fully exploited; on the other, the new structures of knowledge and authority embedded in these technologies will in time create major shifts in culture.

Jimmy (whose presentation is available in chunks here) described in some detail the operation of the non-profit Wikipedia and the for-profit Wikia, whose aim is to foster a world of free content (free as in speech, not beer, as Jimmy put it). In that sense, the aim is to give every person on the planet free access to the sum of all human knowledge. Wikipedia is already seen by 6.19% of internet users every day, way ahead of major news organisations. Other key points made were:

• monocultures are unsafe;
• it is important to have space for people to disagree safely;
• accountability deals with security issues because you can always see who did what;
• Wikipedia should be a starting point for research, not an end point;
• a number of initiatives are now coming together to create “a base layer of raw cultural materials” online;
• we’re seeing the rise of a new “culture of sharing and creativity which is not based on market exchange but rather on intellectual exchange”;
• wikis are not so much about the software but the culture of the community/organisation;
• Wikipedia is not so much a technical innovation but a social innovation;
• in Wikipedia, authority comes from respect.

For interest, you might also like to take a look at the video of the Chaser’s War on Everything prank 10 Questions posed to Jimmy in Sydney.

Mark Pesce (whose podcast and slides are available here) argued that the question “What is the truth?” has now become “Who do you trust?”. There is a potentially a clash of cultures between the Wikpedia model and the older encyclopedic model; has the culture of expertise, he asked, been out-evolved by distributed authority? He concluded by predicting a coming war between elites (who’ve traditionally possessed knowledge), special interests (who try to shape knowledge to their own ends), and communities (which are just becoming aware of the knowledge latent within them - and are beginning to use tools like wikis to harness that knowledge).

During the Perth panel discussion (a podcast of which is available), Mal Bryce, of IVEC, suggested that knowledge sharing is the lubricant of the knowledge economy, adding that information which is shared is information which is enhanced. Control freaks, he claimed, have no place in the emerging order. He agreed with comments made earlier in the day to the effect that more than anything else, it’s about changing the culture rather than grabbing the tools.

Tags: e-learning, web 2.0, wikis, Wikipedia, distributed knowledge, peer-produced networks, eduausem2007.

Course: ICTs in Teaching & Learning
Hong Kong, 23-28 January 2007

I recently taught a week-long intensive course in Hong Kong, focusing on ICTs in teaching and learning. Hong Kong is obviously one of the world leaders in technology: you just have to look at the lightshow on Victoria Harbour every evening at eight, or take a trip in the underground, or use your Octopus card (or watch) to buy drinks from a vending machine … But having technology is not the same as knowing what to do with it pedagogically. Actually, with the advent of web 2.0 technologies, it’s less and less about the technology and more and more about how to use it. Few of the teachers on the course had used technology beyond net searches and email; only a handful had heard of blogs or wikis. Yet by the end of the course most had begun to create their own technological resources - blogs, wikis, folksonomies, Moodle VLEs, podcasts - and, over the past couple of months, they’ve successfully embedded these in their teaching. There’s a really important message here:

A knowledge of pedagogical principles is more important than a knowledge of technology for teachers who want to make use of web 2.0 in their classes.

Tags: technology, pedagogy, web 2.0

Publication: “Brave New Classrooms: Democratic Education and the Internet”
Peter Lang, New York, January 2007

The publication of Brave New Classrooms by Peter Lang in January 2007 brings to a close a project on which I’ve been working since 2003 along with Joe Lockard of Arizona State University. Together we’ve edited this volume, consisting of 16 papers which critique e-learning from a variety of points of view. Contributors include Darin Barney, Tara Brabazon, Charles Ess, Bettina Fabos, Andrew Feenberg, Robin Goodfellow, Edward Hamilton, Tina Kazan, Mills Kelly, Marj Kibby, Kate Kiefer, Kerri-Lee Krause, Martha McCormick, Mary O’Sullivan, Tom Palaskas, and Robert Samuels. The blurb reads as follows:

The early, halcyon days of e-learning are gone. Many who embraced personal computers and the Internet, and who devoted their work to creating new forms of electronic education, have grown dissatisfied with trends toward commodification and corporatization, a paucity of critical thought, poor quality distance learning, and the growing exploitation of teaching labor. Online learning’s inherent democratic potential seems increasingly a chimera. Brave New Classrooms explores whether and to what extent its original promise can be recovered. It includes sixteen essays from educational practitioners, including some of the best-known theorists of Internet-based education.

We had felt for some time that there was a need for a study of the dark side of e-learning, as it were. The book in no way recommends the abandonment of e-learning, but it does suggest that we need to approach it in a better-informed, more aware and more sober manner. We concluded our introduction by stating:

High-quality public education can be obstructed or advanced by e-learning. [...] it is up to us to engage critically with the technology and work to exploit its most promising potentialities.

As I’ve suggested in other entries on this blog, it’s not so much about the technology itself but about how it is used by people. We need to develop further pedagogical expertise in order to minimise the potential drawbacks of e-learning at the same time as we seek to fully exploit its advantages.

There’s a brief comment on the book on the Law Librarian Blog.

Tags: e-learning, pedagogy

Conference: Learning Technologies in the Language Classroom: A Step Closer to the Future
Nicosia, Cyprus, 26-28 May 2006

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This 3-day event, entitled Learning Technologies in the Language Classroom, was organised by the IATEFL Learning Technologies SIG and the University of Cyprus. It was a chance to explore technologies in the language classroom, with particular emphasis on key issues in e-learning and lots of discussion and speculation about its future directions. Naturally, there were numerous talks and workshops which focused on hardware (especially interactive whiteboards) or software (ranging from Hot Potatoes to wikis), but there’s no doubt about the main focus of the conference: the wetware.

This term, according to Wikipedia, is probably derived from Rudy Rucker’s 1988 novel of the same name, and is used to refer to ” the integration of the concepts of the physical construct known as the central nervous system (CNS) and the mental construct known as the human mind. It is a two part abstraction drawn from the computer related idea of hardware or software”. More simply and more generally, we can say that it refers to the human beings who interact with the hardware and the software.

The core theme of the conference, which surfaced and resurfaced repeatedly in different guises and contexts, was that it’s the people who matter. Yes, the hardware and software need to be in place, but what matters is what we do with them - how we use them to construct knowledge, to communicate, to teach and to learn. Crucially, it’s about people working together, meaning teachers with students, but also students with students, and teachers with teachers … as in a conference forum like this one.

I’ve developed my thoughts on this subject more fully in my article “Hard, soft or wet: Directions in e-learning“, published in summer 2006 in the CALL Review. The same issue also contains summaries of the conference by plenary speakers Stephen Bax and Gavin Dudeney.

My own presentation was entitled “E-learning: From hype to hope”; the PowerPoint and handout are available on the conference website. [As of April 2007, this website was in the process of redevelopment, during which period not all documents are available. In the meantime I'm happy to supply copies if you contact me.]

Tags: hardware, software, wetware