The midden

This was an excellent conference – well organised, good venue and interesting speakers (mostly!), but not very shocking. It was the 6th in a series of the Shock of the Old Conferences, organised by the Learning Technologies Group at Oxford University. designed to look at the impact of ICT on teaching and learning.

The theme of this year’s conference was the rise of social networking tools, Web 2.0 software and related collaborative technologies and how best to make use of these innovative tools in teaching, learning and research.

Things got off to a good start with the opening keynote by Terry Anderson from Athabasca University. His presentation , Social Software and Personal Learning Environments: Do they really fit with Formal Education?, emphasised a number of key issues relating to the impact of technology on education.

He set the scene by first reminding us that Time’s Person of the Year was………YOU. This person, a lifelong learner, has a number of characteristics, he:

• wants to learn things
• continuously moves between offline and online
• is learning to recognize and demand quality when investing in learning
• knows there are many paths to learning
• normally uses a wide set of information processing, creation and communications tools

Providing an environment where these characteristics can be met is a major challenge for educational institutions, with change only happening when everyone involved in the process makes it happen. Evangelists, threats and technologies alone cannot bring about change.

He described this environment as an educational semantic web, which was enabled by 3 affordances:

1. abundance of content
2. high quality, low cost communication tools
3. agent assistance

These 3 affordances come together to create a different learning environment to the one that exists in most educational institutions today. They create a connected learning environment where sharing, collaboration and participation are encouraged and enabled.

“Our educational discourse is largely stuck in a time warp, framed by issues and standards set decades before the widespread use of the personal computer, the Internet, and free trade agreements.”
Stewart and Kagan (2005)

The other main theme of his presentation was the evolution and likely impact of Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). He felt that of the VLEs we are familiar with at the moment, only those that are modular, are standards based and provide access (APIs) or source code for mashups and interoperability, and are user-centric have any chance of undergoing this transformation. However, most current PLE applications are difficult to use, are unstable and unsupported, and don’t provide the administrative tools that the current VLEs provide.

In order for PLEs to develop into a tool useful to learners, teachers and institutions it needs to be brought to an “edge of chaos” position, where innovation, creativity and a break with the past are encouraged.

“living systems thrive only when pushed away from their comfort zone, the area in which they must reconfigure themselves” (Dervitsiotis, 2005, p. 925)

One observation of this presentation and of the rest that followed. Anderson was definitely more at ease with the whole concept of new technologies, educational change and pushing the system away from its zone of comfort than any of the presenters that followed him. In many ways there was a timidity from those presenters from UK universities, using the new technologies to do pretty much what they had always done and to maintain their comfort zone. Whether this Canadian/UK divide is real or not, or whether it was only a manifestation of this conference, I don’t know. I suspect the former though.

The other presentations from this conference are worth looking at – but be prepared not to be shocked!