Matthew Allen

New Challenges in Education: Online learning, knowledge networks, ‘edgeless’ universities

Kennesaw State University, 6 October, 11.30 am KSU Center (Room 300).

I will be visiting Kennesaw State U shortly to present on e-learning, Web 2.0 and changing nature of education on 6 October, courtesy of Dr Keith Herndon, the university’s Institute for Global Initiatives and the Department of Communication, and the Technology Association of Georgia.

Abstract

Online learning has been part of the provision of university education since the emergence of the internet. However, in recent years, there have been more intensive efforts to marry together traditions of university learning and academic excellence with the flexibility and creative possibilities of online delivery. This paper summarises the benefits that Internet-enabled learning has brought to distance and off-campus university education in the past decade or more, noting that Australia has a rich history of distance education. The paper also explores the way in which the so-called Web 2.0 revolution in online affairs has, to some extent, created a false sense of novelty in online learning. Nevertheless, Web 2.0, with its emphasis on social media and user-generated content, has made a difference and opens up new approaches to learning. The paper concludes by exploring some of the new challenges and opportunities for educators and institutions when seeking to harness technologies for online learning, especially given the growing dominance of knowledge networking in contemporary society.

Paper

New Challenges in Education

I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at the first TEDx event in Perth – called TEDx Nedlands to locate it more precisely. Here’s the modestly great idea I was able to share, slightly edited for online presentation…

It is a pleasure to be here. Thank you for your attention and interest in this event – my thanks to the organisers for being asked to participate! Feel free to tweet and blog during my brief talk – augment the reality of the event through whatever channels you desire. I’d almost feel offended if you were not multitasking at some stage. [Refer to the great TED talk by Renny Gleeson on anti-social phone behaviour that had preceded me]

When you research and analyse the Internet professionally, as I do, it can be quite daunting to be asked to come up with ‘a great idea that is worth spreading’. So many people around the world have incredibly good ideas about what to do with the Internet, and on the Internet that I am more likely to want to hear others’ ideas and not present my own. Indeed, the Internet so easily allows those good ideas to spread around that there is a very wide audience for them: an audience of which I am an enthusiastic member. If you have a great idea, it’s easier than ever to bring it to people’s attention, directly and without having to rely on the filtered, controlled and limited channels of traditional media and knowledge dissemination.

Of course TED is one of the best examples of this phenomenon – what a great idea it is to use the Internet to spread around great ideas! And, you see, in this event today not only the spreading of ideas – definitely modest in my case – but also the spreading of the very idea of TED. It’s a synergy between content and process, between information and meta-information. This synergy is what the Internet is all about. Data does double-duty: it is itself, and a reference to itself.

Today’s theme is “Opportunity. Resource. Endeavour”. While we can think of many ways to explore it, I am struck by how, in this one short phrase, we have a really clear statement about the power, potential and challenge of the Internet in our society today. The net is a profound opportunity – opening up new lines of communication and collaboration, new social, business and political possibilities for action and innovation. The net of course is also a tremendous resource – frustrating at times in its multiplicity and chaotic distribution – but wonderfully fulfilling as a source of information.

On these two points, I suspect there is nothing more to be said. But the third, Endeavour, is perhaps less obvious, more open to interpretation, question and debate. It is the inspiration for my presentation, because it reminds us of the direct, personal role that we must take. To have endeavour is to strive, to make something of those opportunities, with those resources. It is both reassuring and demanding all at once.

So, what is the modestly great idea I am sharing today, inspired by this call for endeavour? It’s simple. My idea is that, we all need to care for the Internet. We, meaning us…you and I, collectively and individually. We don’t need to be careful of the Internet – we do need to tend it, help it, nuture it and give expression through our caring for it of the importance it plays in our lives. To care for the Internet suggests we value it and express or enact that value by being present, mindful members of the Internet.

So what can we do to ‘care for’ the Internet? It’s easy: the injunction upon us all should be to contribute to, not just take from, the Internet. Let’s look at Wikipedia for an example.

Wikipedia is a great resource, multiplying and expanding constantly, but only as good as the contributions made by all of the people who create, edit and sustain its content. It has gaps, it has errors, it has disagreements. What should be done about it? Rather than constrain its use (the foolish advice, often passed out in our high schools and universities, ‘don’t use Wikipedia’), we should embrace it and value it, but only on the condition that we always seek to improve it. I looked yesterday at the Wikipedia entry for TED and thought – there’s a project! It needs a lot of work and could be so much richer and more informative.

Wikipedia, more than any other of the early online innovations from the first wave of the Internet in the last last century, models for us the idea that individuals, working without centralised control and direction, could nevertheless collaborate on a shared endeavour. It also models for us the fundamental basis of the Internet’s power to change the world: the effort invested by one individual is, because of the global reach of the Internet and the internetworking of content, capable of realising disproportionately high returns on that investment. Finally, Wikipedia shows how the Internet – especially when conceived as a read/write web, in which consuming and producing content are conjoined and equally available in the same techno-cognitive moment – reduces the cost to the individual contributor to the point where that investment is worth making.

Because Wikipedia empowers the individual work as part of a collective without the overhead costs of that collective, and leaves open to the individual the calculation of investment and return (in whatever currency matters, but most usually regard and reputation rather than cash), it best models the revolutionary rise of user-generated content which has marked the last five to ten years of the Internet in our lives. But, despite this empowerment of the individual, Wikipedia remains a collective enterprise: the individual is only able to participate because of everyone else who is doing the same thing and we can observe them at work, in the traces of activity on the Wikipedia pages. We see everyone, someone and ourselves among them all at once.

It is not just Wikipedia of course. I use it as an example. There are so many opportunities for contributing to the Internet that I can barely summarise them. We can write blogs, we can comment on blogs, we can promote blogs and share them. We can create social movements, networks, and communities as well as join them, shape them and make them work. There are countless special interest groups that exist and work to enrich their members’ lives through online forums and other interactive web environments. Literally thousands of emergent Web 2.0 sites exist whose sole purpose is to call out to you, the user, and say ‘hey, we’d love you to add something here’. You can originate content in many forms; you can recreate it through mashups. You can build the tools which others use to be creative. You can rate, rank, annotate, comment on and otherwise amplify that content. You can extend that content by sharing, forwarding, embedding and otherwise reusing it. You can curate that content by maintaining it, managing it, defending and interpreting it.

Originate; Recreate; Build; Amplify; Extend; Curate

Taking care of the Internet is not just about ‘adding content’ or streaming one’s life online. There is, to be frank, too much narcissistic sharing of the self, and not enough sharing of usable knowledge and information. Social media exchanges through Twitter and Facebook (to name the most important two at the moment) is important for connecting people’s lives, but we must be careful that the Internet is not reduced solely to this kind of exchange. I have long thought that the computer screens through which we connect with the Internet are also mirrors, reflecting back ourselves far more regularly than being the windows to the world we are often prompted to imagine. So caring for the Internet means: contributing content that is designed for others to benefit from rather than being designed for our own consumption. Social media needs to be ‘we’-media, not ‘me’-media.

Equally, however, we must care for the Internet by contributing to it so that its inherent potential for diverse voices, opinions, actions and engagements is not overridden by sophisticated conglomerate media producers and managers. There’s a lot to like about mass media – print, TV, radio and so on – but even as these forms are now delivered via the internet, mass media is not and must become the Internet. Caring for the Internet is about taking individual responsibility to ensure that the net remains common property, not the dominion of a few who can drown out much of what they find there: this responsibility is exercised by writing the Internet, producing it, in the way we desire as diverse individuals, and not just by consuming it. Otherwise we become the apparently passive, undifferentiated audience so desired by mass media [I say apparently because - of course - no audience is passive].

So, before I conclude today, let me ask of you three things you can do, sometime in the next month, to care for the Internet in this way: to contribute to it, to build it as the common, collective network of people and information which ensures it continues to offer resource and opportunity. Here are three things you should endeavour to do.

• Go to wikitravel.org. Find the page relating to Perth or, if you live somewhere further away from our glittering metropolis, your ‘home’ page. Make it better. Think about who will read this page, what they want to know and have at it. It’s easy. Even if you add one sentence, or correct one mistake, you have made a difference. Reflect on how your ‘home page’ might now be where you are or what you do, and just ‘my space’.
• Go to flickr.com. Before you do, have ready some great pictures of things you like, places that inspire you, events that move you. Share them. Give them away. Make a profile and a collection for yourself, and tag the photos so people can find them and use them.
• Go to hubpages.com. Read an article you need or want. Imagine you wrote it: wouldn’t you love to have a comment – detailed, useful and extending – added to your article? Go ahead and show respect for what you have just consumed by commenting.

I should add, I gain nothing at all by mentioning these three examples – there are many others you can use too! Perhaps more than anything you can take care of the Internet by finding the place, the people, the network where your contribution will make the most difference.

The Internet is, and can be sustained as, a commons: an information commons. Its resources are non-rival and cannot be consumed or spent; it is a commons which will not suffer from the traditional tragedy of the commons that Hardin outlined in 1968 in which the common availability of resources free for all will lead to the destruction of the very thing we value. But it is at risk nevertheless; the new tragedy, perhaps the farce, of the information commons will emerge when a lack of care and maintenance of its content begins to render it unusable as a commons.

The Farce of the Information Commons?

The sweeping all-consuming infoverse which now emerges from networking and communication may be non-rival, but it has thrown into sharp relief just how limited our resources are for engaging with it. Our will, our attention, our insight – all these resources are scarce and can only be used once at any time. But devoting a small amount of them online, to care for the Internet, is a necessary duty now.

In conclusion, let me rephrase this idea, that we all need to care for the Internet. What motivates people most of all to engage with ideas, knowledge, information, creativity is the thought that they are communicating with others, making and presenting themselves through what they say and to whom they say it. Caring for the Internet is, then, really about caring for those we rarely or never see and to whom we do not often or ever speak with: when we care for the Internet by contributing and curating online content we must always imagine the users, like us, looking online – we reach through the Internet to create connections between people based on the generosity of spirit with which we give freely of ourselves.

In my capacity as Chairman of the Library Board of Western Australia, I spoke last night at the ceremony to award the 2009 Sharr Medal – a presentation to recognise “an individual who has just completed their final year of a library and information degree or diploma – or is in their first year of employment – and who exhibits the most potential to have a positive impact on the LIS profession” (ALIAWest). Here is what I said:

Address on the occasion of the award of the 2009 FA Sharr Medal
Matthew Allen, Chairman of the Library Board of Western Australia

It is an honour to be here tonight to give a brief oration as part of the 2009 FA Sharr Medal presentation. I speak both as Chairman of the Library Board of Western Australia and as one of the countless people whose everyday lives are enriched by the presence in our society of ‘the library’, be that a building, a service, or perhaps more importantly, a deeply held cultural idea of improvement through knowledge.

My brief this evening is to speak about an important contemporary issue relating to the delivery of library and information services. Given recent events, there is nothing more important within Western Australia for libraries at the moment than the matter of money. Funding: or, more precisely, the provision, by the government, of sufficient funds that an effective, engaging and expanding library service can be provided to the people of Western Australia, both at a local level and more generally for the state.

Funding for libraries, as I have commented elsewhere, can be a challenging business for state and local governments. Libraries are successful community services, much loved and valued, thanks mainly to the hard-working professionals who run them and work in them. Libraries, on the whole, involve a modest investment from the public purse, when compared to the rich returns they generate for the common wealth of social inclusion, learning, and community development. So they often do not attract the kind of attention that we see devoted to health, education and so on: these areas of public administration often seem beset by crises and are more high profile in their demands for improved funding. Libraries I think are the quiet achievers: sometimes being quietly successful can be its own challenge.

It is also the case that all public expenditure in WA in recent years has been tightly constrained: measured and trimmed as Manning Clark might have said. Our public expenditure is necessarily at the whim of market forces, in these days of hypercapitalism: if the banks sneeze, and the world catches pneumonia, then libraries too will find that sneeze to be an ill-wind. As everyone in the public service knows, over the past two years several cutbacks and efficiency measures have made life difficult but have – I hope – improved the prognosis for the patient.

As I am sure many of you know now, the budget for 2010-2011 and beyond has been delivered in Western Australia. This year has been rather more productive financially for libraries in this state than previous years: the valuable information services libraries provide have been recognised and supported. The Minister of Culture and the Arts has been a successful advocate on our behalf – aided by excellent media coverage in the West Australian, no doubt. Funding for local library materials, administered by the State Library, has increased; there has been a modest increase for the State Library directly; and we have secured long-term and enhanced funding for the tremendous work of the Better Beginnings early literacy program.

Some of these budget improvements have not quite been as much as we might have liked but, on the whole, I think we can be well satisfied with them. They certainly address critical challenges that we face in public and state library services in Western Australia. If they are maintained and, more importantly, increased in coming years to meet the needs of WA’s growing population, then I think 2010 can be set down as a year to remember in the provision of public funds for libraries. For this, we need to recognise the efforts of everyone involved – the State Librarian Margaret Allen and her colleagues; the Department of Culture and the Arts, led by Allanah Lucas; the Minister John Day and his staff; and of course all those who, in one way or another, raised their voices of concern to ensure library funding was seen as a front-page issue.

However, we cannot now sit back and think the job is done; or simply congratulate ourselves on this financial support. Increased funding brings with it responsibilities and challenges, and there are two that I want to highlight this evening. The first responsibility for the public library system in Western Australia is to continue with the progress made so far on structural reform, a process commenced in 2008 with the release of the Implementation Plan for the Structural Reform of Public Library Services in Western Australia. It is important that we collectively and individually think about how we deliver library and information services, what those services might be, for whom, in what places and by what means; and we need to think about how the effectiveness of services assessed and action taken to improve based on assessment. In response to increased funds, and to ensure funding is maintained and increased, we must continue to demonstrate the value of libraries and what they do. But the library system is what generates this value – we are in charge or and make that value, our return to the community on the investment of its funds: we must do it as well as we can, and by making changes.

To be clear: the world of the contemporary library, especially at the local level, is not the same as it was in the 1950s when the legislation that governs our operations was first established. The financial questions have, to some extent, been resolved, but the changes in the way libraries are arranged, managed and best serve their communities will continue. Librarians’ professional duty involves finding the best way forward, based on the work already done, to create new opportunities: to embrace new ways of serving communities, providing access to information and accepting that while the ideals of the library, the goals it seeks to achieve, may not change, the methods of doing so may and probably should change. I congratulate everyone in local government, local libraries and the State Library who have been working on this matter for more than two years and wish them every success in future: the moment of change is now very much upon us.

The second responsibility is something that bears more closely on tonight’s occasion, the awarding the Sharr medal. This responsibility concerns education, professional development and building links between the profession of librarianship and the professional education of librarians and all information workers. Along with increased funding and the challenge of reform, there comes the responsibility to educate new members of the profession and provide opportunities for development within the profession. Libraries are undoubtedly changing. We see evidence for this in programs like Better Beginnings; we see evidence for it in the regular reports that tell us libraries are seen by their communities as innovative, educative spaces for community activity and not just repositories of knowledge (for example, in NSW, the report on Enriching Communities ).

If therefore we are entering a period of structural reform of the public library sector in Western Australia, I would commend to everyone in the profession the need for deeper, richer and more productive interactions between members of the profession working in them, and members of the profession educating for them. These interactions are an essential part of the development of the real repositories of knowledge in this field: the professionals who work in it. Money does not bring change; plans themselves to create new opportunities: people – professionally trained, and yet always active in their development as professionals – are the real basis of the value of the libraries in our changing world.

It is not just the case that educators turn out graduates – such as the winners of the Sharr Medal – who then work in the profession. The links must go in both directions. The education of information professionals needs to keep pace with the changing nature of librarianship: I think it must also anticipate further change, not just for the interior world of librarianship and information service provision, but so graduates are knowledgeable about the community and educational contexts in which they work. Equally, the profession must remain conscious of its duty to support and extend the relationship. Professional development of librarians, after they have graduated, will go hand in hand with greater involvement of professionals in education of the new generation of librarians. ALIA represents the very best, then, of a profession: a commitment to ideas, exploration, education and practice – a meeting point between being and becoming a skilled professional information worker.

And, on that point, may I announce that it is the firm intention of the State Librarian of Western Australia to resume the program of graduate recruitment that was initiated a few years ago and which was one of the casualties of global financial crisis. As the Library frames the budget for next year, for presentation to the Board, we hope to offer at least one and perhaps more places to recruit to the State Library graduates who will then continue to learn, even as they enter the profession.

In conclusion, may I say that we are only now appreciating just how much libraries have changed in the past 25 years. What this change has shown is how adaptable the profession has been on the whole. If we reflect on the changes in other areas of public life and service, I think we can say that libraries do at least as good a job now as they did mid-way through the last century, despite the rather negative attitudes now prevalent about the expenditure of public funds, and despite the very dramatic changes in social informatics brought about by new technologies. I am sure that, by responding to the greater certainty provided by the recent budget decisions with a renewed sense of purpose in managing and staying ahead of the challenges which continual change will bring, librarians in Western Australia will, on future occasions, remark on the professional excellence with which all information and library workers conducted themselves in the eventful early years of the 21st century in Western Australia.