Matthew Allen

Technologies and Social Media as Enablers of Collaborative Learning

Stephen Quinton and Matthew Allen

to be published in Collaborative Learning 2.0: Open Educational Resources (eds Alexandra Okada, Teresa Connolly and Peter Scott; IGI Publishing, 2012) see http://books.kmi.open.ac.uk/cl2oer/ for more details of this volume

Abstract

While many educational institutions throughout the world have introduced online learning as a delivery option, there is little evidence to indicate a predominance of solutions that advance pedagogical diversity and learning effectiveness. Aside from a few innovative exceptions, the design of most online learning environments is structured around the conventional instructional model, which inherently does not afford the flexibility required to take full advantage of the socialising and information sharing potential of web 2.0 technologies.

Online learners are not equipped with the tools required to organise their work, group learning is not always readily available, team-focussed problem-based learning activities are not easily supported and managed, and productive engagement with the wider community is not always feasible. Outside the campus intranet, countless people ‘collaborate’ with each other using ‘virtual’ online communities such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.

The Internet continually offers new tools to support such activities, but there is an obvious disparity between what people experience on the Internet and what university online delivery platforms provide. Bridging this gap is only part of the solution as there is also the unrealised potential of students’ web 2.0 expertise to consider. There is something incongruous in the notion of applying web 2.0 technologies to learning and teaching without enlisting the support of the very audience that by and large have been the drivers of web 2.0 innovations.

(Comments and ideas from session at Broadband Summit)

The MCEECDYA Program of reporting, National Assessment Program: Information and Communication Technology Literacy, provides evidence about the literacy of students. The 2008 report, not yet available publicly, shows that students in Years 6 and 10 of Australian schooling are not involved in a lot of “creating, analysing, and transforming” of information via online tools (what I would term cognitive uses of the web) and are primarily interested in using the net for chatting and searching for information. It will be interesting to compare this report (which is clearly in the social media period – 2008) with the previous report, from 2005.

Discussion of research infrastructure: main question – what is the interface with NBN given that the emerging Australian research network is already a lot faster and so on than the NBN? I am wondering if this is relevant to NBN – in the same way thet BHP Billiton builds its specialised network, so too would the Australian research community. It perhaps suggests that we need to be thinking about ‘networks’ not just the NBN.

An excellent presentation of problems in school:
Six key points

• Old models + new tech not solution

• No leveraging of open systems
• Risk management needed (not risk aversion)
• Personalised learning
• Costs are increasing
• importance of gatekeeping

See how the problem set is formed at the intersection of multiple domains of control and expertise – technologists, managers, teachers all work at different angles to the central problem and sometimes don’t have sufficient interaction. (Raju Varanasi – good presentation, from NSW Centre for Learning Innovation). And, the solution to this interaction matter is policy. Infrastructure is not the issue – it is policy.

A summary of the ‘reality check’ on digital education. The reality check is: don’t focus on the technology, think policy, professional development, cultures of use, legal matters AND students themselves. Technology gets in the way, if it is made the centrepiece; it should be invisible.

“the problem with students is that their life and learning will be going down a different [digital network] track” – they will choose this path because it is part of themselves and identity, so if schools don’t change students will not be engaged. (Watson, The Learning Federation)

Education is a very contested zone of debate since it involves the attempt to manage the future very directly by creating the people OF the future (our school students). Visions, hopes and fears get played out through the way people characterise the school system. Moreover, education is one of the remaining obvious places where the experts tend to be derided (teachers vs parents, bureaucrats). It is also a place where control strategies get explored and demanded, principally on the basis of the failure of children to be adult enough.

(This session doesn’t report on speakers directly but provides comments, summaries and ideas)

Realising Our Broadband Future
digital education stream

Very large bandwidth to big school, computers for everyone, digital resources are the focus (Moo, CIO, NT)

Watching a terrible Microsoft glossy promo video: does this company not realise how bad these things look? Sure, it’s a ‘vision’ not reality, but what it assumes is a class infrastructure – 100% middleclass. Plus the sort of ‘perfection’ they imagine for devices and software is, to be honest, just a wee bit farfetdched given M’Soft’s record on such things. Oh wait, maybe this is a glimpse into the 23rd century.

Part of the problem here is that technologists assume (as always) that the technology solves the problems. That the technology is what’s missing to make education better. Equally, there is a kind of rationalist determinism here, too, hidden in the technological determinism: computer science sees the problems as ones of knowledge and information and data, that there is always a rational answer to a human need which will appear, in the modern mode, if only it can be addressed.

Equally, some of the Microsoft hyperbole fails to account for the way teachers have already implemented the underlying pedagogic and other ideas which are apparently ‘allowed’ by technology, without that technology. Clearly, some technologies improve and extend and make easier some pedagogic approaches, but the experimentation comes from the teachers and students in action, from which a technology need emerges.

There continue to be significantly outdated ideas about education from many people, especially senior bureaucrats and technologists. These people imagine education is like it used to be. However education has moved on and some of the problems which the technology is meant to solve have already been solved or are simply not there any more. At the same time, some problems remain – systemic problems caused by time, space, age of children, the nature OF the system. These problems might be better seen as problems of the school system itself – they cause technology to ‘fail’ because technology is not designed for such uses. (NSW CIO of Ed talks about hotswappable computers if it breaks, just have another).

Schooling has to include, for many good social reasons, the collocation of people into places at specific times. This should not be forgotten. But the Internet, when fast enough and wide enough, enables those locations to connect to other locations in a manner that allows distributed activities to solve scale and reach problems (Hagen, CIO, Qld Education). “Build the damn thing and get out of the way”.

Certain issues, like health and education, are framed by political debate to demand attention to equity and equality of access and opportunity, especially where they relate to the spatial location of users etc. From some perspectives, innovation almost demands inequality – it has to be leading edge and thus mostly unaccessible, not usable or apparently not relevant to the majority. From the teachers’ perspective – the innovation comes from below and thus the system’s insistence on equity impedes.

I also reflect on the way education is seen as being in a problematic state – falling behind some presumed state of required competence in, learning through and exploitation of digital connectivity. Asking if broadband infrastructure can solve this, or similar, doesn’t really ask the right question. The problems is as much caused by the ‘transitional state’ we all live in – caught between pre-digital and digital worlds; our awareness of this transitional state is as much the cause of ‘the problem’ as problems themselves. This does not mean we need do nothing: but first we need to recognise what the real problems are.