edtech – D’Arcy Norman dot net

the most important edtech advancements

Jim wrote about his thoughts on the most important advancements in educational technology. I think he’s onto something – the exact tech isn’t important. Nor are the logos on the shiny things we build and/or buy. My personal stance is that we’ve seen 2 major changes on our campus – neither of which are directly related to specific technologies.

Human-scale technologies
Distributed, coordinated, domain-specific community support

The first shift is nothing new – it’s also not constant or consistent. It’s about individualized ownership/control/access to technologies. Some new tools are cheap enough that people grab their own copies – even gasp without asking permission, or even notifying anyone. Some tools are good enough that The University grabs a few copies and hands them out more freely for people to do stuff. I’ve seen people do things with creating online resources for their courses that was simply not possible even a few years ago – and even if technically possible, involved the need to spin up projects, find funding, management, designers, etc…. Now, an instructor can sit at her computer and create really good resources for her courses, on her own, without needing to ask permission. And students can do the same. That’s a fantastic shift.

We’ve been doing things in my group to help with that – we’re setting up a Faculty Design Studio, to give people a place to come work with higher-end tools. We’re ramping up a “tech lending library”, so people can sign stuff out, without needing to go through Project Management or funding requests. Want to play with a GoPro camera to record something for your course? Go for it. Need a tripod, microphone, camcorder, lights? Sure thing. Keeping technology available at human scale is important. It’s more than Enterprise Platforms and [Learning|Research|Administration] Management Systems.

We’re also changing how institutional programs are being run. Our Instructional Skills Workshops involve participants recording themselves presenting or facilitating. In the Olden Days™, that involved a big video cart, with microphones, cameras, mixing boards, DVD recorders, CRT monitors, etc… and was a Big Deal to set up. Now, we have a set of Swivl robot camera mounts, some iPod Touch handheld video recorders, and a tripod. Done. Videos get uploaded to Vimeo1, and it’s all faster, easier, and better than what we did before. And instructors are signing the Swivls out to do similar things for their own courses. Great stuff.

The second shift is probably the more important one, though. Distributed, coordinated communities of practice to support instructors who are designing their courses and integrating learning technologies. We’ve moved from a centralized model – where everyone had to come to The Big Department In The Middle™ to get “help” to fix their courses. That wasn’t great for a few reasons – it can’t scale, without dozens of staff members in TBDitM™ – but also, it positions the support for technology integration as some Other. Something bolted on by other people outside of an instructor’s faculty or department. Something foreign, extra, separate. Superficial.

communities of practice across campus

The community of practice shifts the support model into being native in each faculty and department. With domain-specific understanding of the pedagogies used in each context, and of the activities that make up the learning experience. And of the technologies that enable, enhance and extend these activities. We had this, informally, before – but isolated pockets of in-context support were not able to benefit from what people had learned or tried in other contexts. So, intentionally designing the central portion of the support community as a coordination hub to enable people across campus – NOT as a “come to us in The Middle and we’ll fix your stuff”, but as “hey – let’s come together to learn about what we’re all doing, and how we can share that to make it all sustainable and meaningful for everyone.”

That’s where the magic is. Coincidentally, I’m currently looking to hire the person who will act as our coordinator/collaborator/cruise-director for this distributed community of practice.

until we eventually get a campus video platform set up – 4 years and counting on that… [↩]

Reclaiming Educational Technology: the business and politics of edtech

During the Reclaim Hackathon at UMW last week, several of us were talking over food and beverages and realized that we had the opportunity to document the current thinking in the “edtech scene”. It’s something that we hadn’t tried to do explicitly before, but we realized that if we don’t do it ourselves we’ll be left with the narratives pushed by the Big Business of Edtech Venture Capital™. So, David Kernohan and I took it on as a project. We recruited Andy Rush to record a series of impromptu interviews with some of the people who were present at the event1, and off we went.

I took on editing the footage into something that tells the stories, starting with this:

Reclaiming Educational Technology: the business and politics of edtech from UCalgary Taylor Institute on Vimeo.

Thanks so much to Audrey Watters, Kin Lane, and Martha Burtis for agreeing to participate (and to the many other folks who took part – they’ll be making appearances in future episodes – OOH! THE SUSPENSE!).

I’m planning on several additional segments/episodes, exploring the nature of innovation, shifts in culture and technology, and more. I’ll make time to put those together ASAP. When all of the smaller segments are done, I’ll try to work them together into a longer documentary that ties everything together.

I’d have loved to interview everyone, but even these brief interviews produced an hour and 48 minutes of raw footage – we’ll have to plan follow-up sessions later… [↩]

Audrey Watters on the nature of educational technology

Audrey Watters, presenting to Pepperdine University:

Ed-tech works like this: you sign up for a service and you’re flagged as either “teacher” or “student” or “admin.” Depending on that role, you have different “privileges” — that’s an important word, because it doesn’t simply imply what you can and cannot do with the software. It’s a nod to political power, social power as well.

Many pieces of software, despite their invocation of “personalization,” present you with a very restricted, restrictive set of choices of who you “can be.”

This is gold. It gets to the very heart of the problem. And it’s not restricted to online learning (and online learning technologies) – see my last post on a prof who bans “technology” in the classroom, effectively enforcing the restrictive set of choices of who her students can be. This isn’t about the evils of restrictive Learning Management Systems – it’s about the evils of restricting learning.

And this, on the nature of education itself:

To transform education and education technology to make it “future-facing” means we do have to address what exactly we think education should look like now and in the future. Do we want programmed instruction? Do we want teaching machines? Do we want videotaped lectures? Do we want content delivery systems? Or do we want education that is more student-centered, more networked-focused. Are we ready to move beyond “content” and even beyond “competencies”? Can we address the ed-tech practices that look more and more like carceral education — surveillance, predictive policing, control?

We have choices to make – and we (collectively) are making choices – about what we think education is, and what it should be. If we don’t put some real thought into the reasoning behind, and the implications of these choices, we’ll wind up in some uncanny valley of education where all of the checkboxes are properly checked, but it’s not education as it could have been. As Gardner Campbell says, “That is not what I meant at all; That is not it, at all.”

Edtech and campus expansion

From our latest Comprehensive Institutional Plan:

There are two initiatives that have the potential to address our access issue and increase enrolment with strategic allocation of new resources. The first is the development of a learning technologies strategy that will include a focus on enabling and enhancing learning experiences through the integration of learning technologies, with the potential to create alternative instructional approaches that allow for a larger on- line presence and admissions (strategy will be developed by June 2014).

(Emphasis mine)

Our campus is already oversubscribed by something like 3,000 FTE, and we are needing to prepare for much higher enrolment as the city continues to grow1. There will be a much larger role for blended- and online learning as core parts of our academic programming.

So. My team is the “Technology Integration Group” of the Taylor Institute, which will be responsible for figuring much of this stuff out. Looks like we are going to have our hands full 🙂

the Plan mentions several times that Calgary is the fastest growing city in Canada, third largest municipality in the country, projected to hit 1.5M people by 2019 – we just crossed 1M a few years ago. [↩]

why I care about edtech

I’ve been in the edtech game for a long time. I started as a programmer in 1994, then moved into instructional design, and now am working with an amazing group of folks to integrate learning technologies into the practices of instructors and students.

But. Why?

I just came from a workshop that made it clear that many in the edtech field see innovation as something like “working out creative licensing deals with vendors and/or publishers.”

No. It isn’t.

Edtech is important because it can be transformative.

Transformative.

It can literally change the nature of the learning experience. It can shift people from consume mode, into collaborate and publish mode. It can knock down walls. Evaporate silos. Connect people across campus, across campuses, and across the globe.

None of that has anything to do with the lame excuses for “innovation” being described in the field of educational technology. Where brokering a 50% reduction in the cost of textbooks is an acceptable goal. If the textbook publishing model is broken – and it is demonstrably broken by any conceivable metric – the only acceptable goal is to either opt out of that model, or to toss a grenade into it.

This is akin to negotiating with a buggy salesman to get the best deal, when what we really need is a bicycle. Or a pair of shoes. Or a hovercraft. Or a factory.

Edtech is important not because of the tech, but because of the educational activities enabled by it. Which means that the licensing agreements seen as “innovative” are often necessary, but not sufficient.

This stuff is important because it can change the nature of the educational activities. It can make resources and people accessible to those who would not have had access otherwise. It can amplify the voices of people who would not have been heard otherwise. It can make what you do matter outside of your own isolated context.

And higher education is uniquely positioned in such a way as to lead the development and adoption of educational technology. It is in our mandate to create new knowledge, to disseminate this knowledge, and to share what we learn with as many people as possible. That is a truly awesome responsibility, and one that some would outsource to commercial entities.

To allow that to happen, to outsource educational innovation to commercial interests (or, really, to outsource it at all), is to shirk the responsibility that we have as members of institutions of higher education. It is our job to work in the interest of the public – the people that pay our bills – to build ways to share the research that we conduct, to enhance the learning of our students, and to make learning accessible to as many people as possible.

It is not our job to reorganize our institutions around managing and enforcing DRM that is designed to prop up companies who have built entire industries around bilking our students for every penny they can siphon out of them.

Our job is to provide the best possible learning experience to our students. Full stop. That’s it.

Now, if that happens to be best done through a commercial solution, then let’s do that. Let’s sign the best damned contracts we can sign.

But, there will be times. Many times. When that means going against the interests of commercial entities. To share what we have and do so freely and willingly, despite potentially reducing the direct profits of others. And so we shall. Our mandate is not to serve companies that profit from our students (or our taxpaying supporters). Our job is to provide the best damned experience to our students. That’s the guiding principal that should shape every decision, every project, every action. Is this the best thing for our students’ experience? If so, do it. If not? Don’t. It’s that simple.

Edtech is important because it is transformative. Because it has the potential to amplify (or mitigate) innovations across the field of higher education (and beyond). It is our responsibility to take this seriously, and to do what is best for our students above all else.

on disabling adblock in my browsers

Clint mentioned that he’d disabled adblock, and gave his reasoning. Stephen somewhat disagrees. Here’s my take:

I have been running adblockers as browser extensions, CSS overrides, and .htaccess filters for years now. It’s not bulletproof, but it sure takes care of most of the ads. The web is a much less tacky place with these tools in place.

But, in my role as a lowly edtech geek 1, I’ve been bitten by this before. Case in point: we’d gotten reports from instructors who were seeing ads in our Desire2Learn environment. WTF? I’ve never seen any ads. That’s not possible. They must be mistaken, or have a popup from somewhere else. Then, I checked on my phone, without Flash and without any adblockers, and saw this:

d2l-ads-flash

Not only were there ads in our D2L environment, they were incredibly stale. I checked with our D2L contacts, and the ads were not inserted by D2L. They were put there by Adobe, through their “hey! you need flash!” download “helper”. Working with D2L, they tried to get Adobe to avoid inserting ads on their clients’ D2L learning environments. Not sure if they succeeded, yet, though.2

So, my use of adblockers and flashblockers and privacy enforcement utilities was actually changing my experience (for the better) in such a way as to make it inconsistent with what the people I work with and for were seeing. Now, I could just advocate that everyone must install flashblockers and adblockers etc… but that’s just not realistic. We still have people who insist on using Internet Explorer 6 or 7. They’re not going to install a modern browser, and they’re definitely not going to install any of these other utilities that help make the web suck less.

If I’m going to be deploying, managing, configuring, supporting, integrating and using online tools to support teaching and learning, I need to see what the instructors and students will be seeing, warts and all. if for no other reason than to work with service providers to get ads and their ilk out of our educational environments.

Now, for almost everyone else – please install adblockers. And flashblockers. And privacy enforcement tools. According to the latest neuroscientific research, the web is on average 86% less painful to use with these tools in place [citation needed].

integrator? consultant? advocate? evangelist? what do they call people like me now? [↩]
and before you get all smug that your open source LMS would never (NEVER) have such an issue – if anyone ever (EVER) embeds Flash in any of their course content, this same ad will be helpfully inserted by Adobe. [↩]

mapping campus edtech

my edtech predictions for 2013

So, Dr. Bates calls out Audrey Watters for not making predictions for 2013. I’d love to see her predictions. Fair’s fair, though, so here are mine:1

Lots of people will do small-scale innovative projects with no funding or resources, because they love trying new things and doing awesome stuff.
Some companies or institutions will “invent” or “discover” something that one or more of these people have been doing, and it will be branded as their own.
This branded “innovation” will become co-opted and corrupted, so that it doesn’t really do anything innovative, or anything other than building the reputation of the “innovators”.
People will hype the crap out of the “innovation” as The Future of Education, and The Saviour (or Disruption) of Universities, and present it at conferences and write papers and travel the presentation circuit explaining it to the masses.
The people from 1. will largely ignore the hype, shrug their shoulders, and continue doing awesome stuff because they enjoy doing awesome stuff.

I feel pretty safe standing behind these recommendations for 2013, because that’s the pattern of innovation that’s happened pretty much every year I’ve been playing with edtech.2

some of the details have been left out, but can easily be filled in as an exercise left to the reader [↩]
which, holy crap, has been for almost 2 decades. which, holy crap, is a lifetime or two in edtech [↩]

three pressing challenges

a discussion board post for my “conceptualizing edtech” course, archived for posterity. It was written for an audience (fellow students in the course) that may not have much background in living online, so I settled for using terminology they may have seen before. It’s also supposed to be a brief post, so I didn’t go into anywhere near the depth I could/should have…

Three pressing challenges for learners in creating and using technology in an educational context.

1. control and ownership

If we learn what we do, then we can extend this philosophy to educational technology. Students are now able to “do” their own technical infrastructure, meaning they can be in control of _what_ they use, _how_ they use it, _why_, _where_, and _for whom_. This shift toward being able to manage a personal cyberinfrastructure sets up students to be able to function far more effectively on their own, without needing the constraints necessary for institutionally provided and supported infrastructure.

Campbell (2009) writes1 :

Templates and training wheels may be necessary for a while, but by the time students get to college, those aids all too regularly turn into hindrances. For students who have relied on these aids, the freedom to explore and create is the last thing on their minds, so deeply has it been discouraged. Many students simply want to know what their professors want and how to give that to them. But if what the professor truly wants is for students to discover and craft their own desires and dreams, a personal cyberinfrastructure provides the opportunity.

Jim Groom, from the University of Mary Washington, is teaching a course at the moment on digital storytelling. Much of the course involves working with students to set up _their own_ publishing spaces, and in working together to build their personal infrastructure. They manage their own web publishing platforms. They write and publish. They integrate and contextualize. These are skills that they will use after they graduate.

Students (and teachers) being able to manage their own technical infrastructure and publishing platforms means they will be able to control what they publish, how they publish it, and to retain it as a living archive of their professional scholarship. These things are difficult, if not impossible, strictly using institution-provided infrastructure such as Blackboard. This personal infrastructure becomes, as much as I cringe at the term and the acronym, a Personal Learning Environment. (see some example PLE diagrams, as collected by Scott Leslie)

2. overwhelming options

If we are using non-instutitionally-provided tools, the list of available options becomes potentially unmanageable. Which tool(s) should I use? For what purpose(s)? How do I use them? What do I do with them? What are the risks? The benefits? It is easy to become overwhelmed, which is why institutionally-provided solutions are so appealing.

But, by becoming an active member of the larger community, and engaging with people who are working on similar things (students in a class, faculty members in the same department, etc…) it is possible to take advantage of what the other people in your personal learning network are doing – to use similar tools and therefore to be able to support each other. To find resources of interest and share them with each other. The PLN is best described as part of the Connectivist theory (Siemens, 2005)2 .

3. literacy

And, finally, if we are managing our own infrastructure and engaged with a network of people working together, it is crucial that we understand the implications of what we are doing. Literacy is essential, due to the implications of privacy, copyright, and the nature of online discourse. Digital literacy is not a new concept. See, for example, Jones-Kavalier & Flannigan’s (2006)3 description of the nature and importance of digital literacy. It is critical that we understand the nature of the media we are using, that we are aware of how they shape what we do, and that we are able to take advantage of the affordances they offer – as well as manage and mitigate the limitations.

4. Solution?

The only solution I can think of is to just dive in. To live with a whole bunch of technologies. To not see them as separate, distinct, or extra, but rather as just the way things work. Write a blog. Publish a newsletter. Manage a wiki. Shoot some video. Post photos. Just spend time doing it. Manage your own personal cyberinfrastructure. Build your personal learning environment. Engage your personal learning network(s). They are there already, you just need to tap into them.

Campbell, G. 2009. Personal cyberinfrastructure. EDUCAUSE Review. 44(5). 58-59. Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Review/EDUCAUSEReviewMagazineVolume44/APersonalCyberinfrastructure/178431 [↩]
Siemens, G. 2005. Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, International Journal of Instructional Technology and Distance Learning, Vol. 2 No. 1, Jan 2005. Retrieved from http://www.itdl.org/Journal/Jan_05/article01.htm [↩]
Jones-Kavalier, B.R. & Flannigan, S.L. 2006. Connecting the Digital Dots: Literacy of the 21st Century. EDUCAUSE Quarterly. 29(2). Retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/EDUCAUSE+Quarterly/EDUCAUSEQuarterlyMagazineVolum/ConnectingtheDigitalDotsLitera/157395 [↩]

on edupunk

Jim’s been talking about edupunk a fair bit lately (starting with the killer post The Glass Bees, then Permapunk and finally tying in the awesome Murder, Madness, Mayhem wikipedia project), and Jen wrote up a piece that dovetails nicely into the concept. There’s something about the edupunk concept that is resonating deeply in me.

It’s a movement away from what has become of the mainstream edtech community – a collection of commercial products produced by large companies. Edupunk is the opposite of that. It’s DIY. It’s hardcore. It’s not monetized. It’s not trademarked. It’s not press-released. It’s not on an upgrade cycle. It’s not enterprise. It’s not shrinkwrapped.

It’s about individuals being able to craft their own tools, to plan their own agendas, and to determine their own destinies. It’s about individuals being able to participate, to collaborate, to contribute, without boundaries or barriers.

And it’s not new. The early days of the “edublogosphere” had a definite edupunk vibe to it. Long before that, we had seen edupunk, and it was awesome. I remember when Hypercard was commonplace. When teachers and students would regularly build and adapt their own interactive applications, games, and databases to support classroom activities. Without fanfare or infrastructure or strategic planning or budgets. When Hypercard was killed, it was an end of a renaissance era of DIY edtech.

But, the key to edupunk is that it is not about technology.

It’s about a culture, a way of thinking, a philosophy. It’s about DIY. Lego is edupunk. Chalk is edupunk. A bunch of kids exploring a junkyard is edupunk. A kid dismantling a CD player to see what makes it tick is edupunk.

I’m not about to suggest that technology isn’t important or relevant to edupunk – of course it is. But only as an enabling piece of infrastructure. Technology can empower individuals, amplify actions, and connect communities. But without the edupunk philosophy underlying it all, it’s just a bunch of technology. Uninteresting and irrelevant.

One of the coolest classrooms I’ve ever been in is the Engineering Design Lab at the University of Calgary. It’s a classroom from the outside, but is really nothing but rows of workbenches, armed with any tools and materials imaginable. Drawers full of Lego for building prototypes. Cabinets full of Mechano for piecing together simple machines. A full machine shop for building more complex ones. It’s a place where the students are not only allowed, but encouraged to explore and create. Working in groups to create and solve problems. Critical thinking. Inquiry. Experiential. And it is the most hardcore edupunk class I’ve seen.