Computer skills ‘undervalued’:Computer skills are still undervalued in the UK board room, software giant Microsoft claims.

(Via BBC News | Business | UK Edition).

“A solid working knowledge of productivity software and other IT tools has become a basic foundation for success in virtually any career.”

Arguably Bill is only part way there… The idibl project based in the Institute for Educational Cybernetics would argue that the application of online technology to knowledge creation, sharing and organisation of activities is a given in present and future society. Citizens and professionals need an explicit conceptual knowledge of online technologies, rather than a tacit operational knowledge, in order to be most effective as technology change continues.

Institute for Educational Cybernetics - top floor only:^)

Reflecting on the Jisc Cetis conference and trying to distill my key learning I remembered the Gordon Brown Arctic Monkeys gaff.

When in response to a question from a journalist from New Woman magazine, he said of the Arctic Monkeys on his iPod it “really wakes you up in the morning”. Subsequently put on the spot by a mens magazine he failed to name a single track and was forced to admit he was more of Coldplay man really aka middle of the road soft indi-rock.

This takes me onto Universities and Web2.0 and the whole raft of cool social software applications. Do I really want my university to try and be cool by appropriating these technologies or would I rather that they remain somewhat dour but trustworthy and effective in what they do?

The argument is made that teaching staff need to ‘go where the students are’ (YouTube, facebook, etc.) if they want to be relevant and effective educators. However, this somewhat ‘false’ adoption may have just the opposite effect as we in fact appear shallow, fickle, untrustworthy, etc. Back to Mr Brown…

What we really need to do is identify the ‘added value’ that the institution offers to students in this fast changing technological world. This may well require staff to use new and different technologies, but it shouldn’t be characterised by a ‘headless’ rush into the fashionable technologies of the day.

An initial analysis of a recent survey of 10 online facilitators, who are technologically capable and experienced, indicates that the adoption of new technologies at a reasonably steady pace resulted in tremendous pressure for them in integrating it with their teaching practices and reported corresponding difficulties for their students.

Some university staff will feel comfortable using the new technologies and will be readily able to integrate it into their teaching practices, others will not or will take a long time to do so. Very diverse practices will and have emerged.

This doesn’t really matter so long as everyone, students and university staff alike, have a clear understanding about what the added value that the institution brings is and expectations of staff and student responsibilities are aligned.

PLEs and the institution: “Given a lot of recent comments we really have to elaborate the set of connections between what an institution offers and what individuals manage. I’ve tried to put some of how I think this should work in a diagram (as usual).” (Via Scott Wilson’s Workblog).

What I like about the model provided by Scott (see below) is that it offers a practical way forward for risk averse institutions (all of them!) who wish to move towards a model of the learner taking increasing responsibility and control of their learning. The important aspect in this respect is the identification of a “Course coordination space” that is used to ‘glue’ the learner experience together in different units of organisation.

This is, I believe, important for three reasons. The first is that it offers the opportunity for a ’safe’ place for those who are less confident with learning and the use of technology to support this. Important in the recruitment and retention stakes.

Second, it offers the opportunity for core interactions around which a larger ‘community of learners’ can develop and grow. This is, I believe, an important aspect of a university education. In the foreseeable future, if we place all our faith in the development of the PLE I think we will be disappointed.

Third, it is a space that we can expect course staff can comfortably inhabit (I have high expectations) and offer some level of agreed service to students however this is defined.

Lastly, although it would add another level of complexity, some thinking about how a students workplace fits into the mix is also required.

Scott Wilson, Nov 2007

Estelle Morris: Education should not be based on untested theories: Estelle Morris, the chairwoman of the strategy board of the Institute for Effective Education at the University of York, explains the ethos behind it. (Via Education Guardian).

I remember attending an event at which Marilyn Leask (then head of Effective Practice and Research and Dissemination of the TDA) made the observation that “the big challenge for education is what evidence is there to base changes in practice - a key concern is that changes are based on evidence not anecdote!” She went on to make the case for a “systematic review of the huge body of research evidence out there by the practitioners and researchers working collaboratively to work on projects that are well grounded and substantial. Small scale research does not provide the evidence required on its own, but if co-ordinated and combined with rigorous methodology it can contribute significantly to the knowledge base.”

On the face of it, this announcement about the Institute for Effective Education at the University of York is good news as its focus is on evidence based approaches to learning and teaching.

However, I am not so sure why it takes an American professor to head up the university bearing in mind the gulf in educational philosophy and practice between the two countries. Should we be concerned at the ’scientific’ approach being adopted?

“The Institute, which will be both international and independent, will create a hub of evidence for education innovation by using innovative approaches and scientific evaluations similar to those in medicine.

Led by Professor Robert Slavin, a distinguished researcher from Johns Hopkins University in the USA. He has an established reputation for conducting rigorous experiments on co-operative learning (where children work in structured teams to help one another to learn), comprehensive school reform, literacy, mathematics, and English as a second language.”

I have been playing around with Yahoo pipes for a while - a web service that lets you aggregate, filter, sort and broadcast RSS feeds. I think this is a great tool that ’should’ be more popular than it is. Like many good ideas, the difficulty is trying to see how it can be used. To this end, I have created a pipe for people that I know who blog who used to work for the now defunct Ultralab. There may be more than those on my list, so if you do blog and want adding please do ask.

I suppose I am working on some notion that weak links may be worth preserving. I realise everyone is already on Facebooked and Linkdin, etc…, but it is worth a play:^)

Web aggregation

Sam Deane
Tom Smith
Stephen Powell
Lydia Arnold
Derek Wenmoth
Pete Bradshaw
Joanthan Furness
Matthew Eaves
Shirley Pickford
Malcolm Moss
Richard Millwood
Ian Terrell
Stephen Heppell

David Eastwood on widening university access: If the students will not come to us, we must find ways of going to them, says David Eastwood. (Via Education Guardian, Tuesday October 23, 2007).

The Four Cities report provides useful background to my work on the idibl project at the University of Bolton.

The research aimed to “give voice to those who are left behind.” and the Guardian article identifies the key message for higher education institutions as:
“they have to get under the skin of communities like those in the Four Cities report if they are to fulfill their potential to transform life chances there. Universities and colleges have a vital role to play in changing the cultures and perceptions that reproduce cycles of disillusionment and disengagement, working with career services, local authorities and voluntary organisations.”

The report claims that young people in communities like the ones researched express a belief that they feel “written off by potential employers and even some education professionals because of where they live” and the report goes on to draw the conclusion that because of this “They give up on education at an early age, believing they will never succeed and finding no relevance in what they are taught.”

My belief about the best way to help individuals achieve is to motivate them in the following ways at whatever stage in life you can:
1. Positive role models - without those it is difficult to imagine what or who they might become
2. Community - the support network of family, friends, colleagues…
3. Opportunity - however well motivated an individual is, they still need a context in which they can succeed

As the report points out, for some this may be a vocational route where purpose and study are closely linked. The courses we develop for the idibl project will provide the opportunity for authentic learning. However, if they are to attract the disaffected group identified by this report, it might be that we will need to offer a route in at a younger age?

‘Inherently frail’ - the verdict on marking:

“Call for debate as lack of consistency in assessment attracts warning of student litigation. Rebecca Attwood reports. Lecturers’ marking of student work is “inherently frail” and assessment procedures would struggle to stand up to legal challenge, academics warned this week.” (Via The THES news).

The interesting part of this article is down the bottom of the page:

“According to Professor Price, what is needed is a focus on sharing understanding of assessment standards among staff and students. The most effective way of shoring up standards is through cultivating a much closer learning community, she said.

Professor Bloxham agreed and said the involvement of students could guard against potential litigation. “It would be better for us to engage students from the beginning in assessment of their own work against standards, helping them understand that part of being a professional in any field is being able to recognise good quality,” she said. “We need to express our marks as a reflection of our professional judgment, not an absolute.”

The only point I would add would be that if we place an increasing importance on the quality of marking we will need to give it an increasing amount of resource in terms of academic staff time. I believe that the ideas outlined above will require this, but I also believe that better understood, timely feedback is worth the effort - that is more emphasis on the summative rather than the terminal.

For academics, marking needs to be not seen as a near unbearable chore but something that is rewarding and and even fun. Chance for some creative thinking here!

A Times Higher article about developments Gloucestershire University, 19 October 2007.

I have posted the encouraging news from Gloucester further down this post, but I wanted to challenge the reported position taken by Adrian Furnham, a professor of psychology at University College London who found:
“that the least intelligent students favour coursework because it allows them to “freeload” from others and hide their limitations. He blamed the rising use of coursework for grade inflation.”

Adrian appears to be making a confused point about how individuals perform in different forms of assessment with a concept of intelligence - however you define that…

At the root of this is a very self-referential argument that runs like this. By definition university lecturers performed well in traditional forms of assessment and this must, therefore, be the right way to measure the ‘intelligence’ of students at a university and confer membership of this particular club with all its different levels.

Using different forms of assessment that allows other groups of students to evidence their ability allows a wider membership of the academic community and challenging the identity that the current membership have constructed for themselves.

However, the bulk of the article is really encouraging:

Assessment for learning?:
“Gloucestershire plan would emphasise coursework and cut module choice. Patricia Broadfoot, the vice-chancellor, confirmed that she is also pushing for a “substantial reduction” in the number of exams for students at all levels across her university amid mounting questions over the value of the traditional form of assessment. She told The Times Higher that she believes that exams are not the best way to promote students’ learning. “Students have an instrumentalist attitude to study, and we want to move away from that. We want to see them excited by study, and exams contradict that,” she said….Middlesex University abolished first-year exams in 2004, moving to “100 per cent coursework”, arguing that it was the best way to “facilitate learning”

…Professor Broadfoot, a professor of education, said she wanted “to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions” about exams…Much time is spent on marking and feedback,” Professor Broadfoot said, “but this suggests that the latter is not perceived as valuable by a significant minority”. Noting that this year’s National Student Survey highlighted concerns about a lack of formative feedback, she said that “this is a challenging and urgent agenda for all universities.”

Technology arrives?
“New types of feedback to students have developed in line with technological developments - for example, podcasting, electronic criterion-referenced sheets and Questionmark Perception (interactive quizzes). All these provide personalised and formative feedback matched to learning objectives, she said.”

Inquiry based?
“Gloucestershire’s new teaching and learning strategy also includes the promotion of “active learning” throughout the university, or learning through practical activities. “We want students to learn through their own research and to get more involved with teaching each other,” Professor Broadfoot said.”

Community of learners?
“We want to build a strong cohort of students who identify with and support each other.”

Lots here for the IDIBL project at the, Institute for Educational Cybernetics University of Bolton to take encouragement from…

From the BBC “Degrees ’should give more detail Tuesday, 16 October 2007, 12:13 GMT 13:13 UK

“…an inquiry conducted by university leaders says it has not found any better degree classification system.

So grades such as first class, 2:1 and 2:2 will continue alongside a pilot scheme giving more detailed exam marks.

This will give employers more “fine grain” information about graduates’ abilities, says their report.

…it proposes piloting a parallel system - to be called a Higher Education Achievement Report (Hear) - which would provide a detailed breakdown of marks in exam papers and course modules.

Such a transcript would give employers more precise information about strengths and weaknesses than a single classification, says Prof Burgess.”

Capturing and making available for presentation in a meaningful way information about the abilities a student has developed whilst studying at university is a good thing. However, also identifying “weaknesses” as Prof Burgess indicates is a deficit model and is a bad thing. Are student ‘weaknesses’ a deficiency on their part or are they, arguably, the fault of the institution in term of the education they have just experienced.

Unless we can imagine a better name soon, the work that Richard Millwood, Mark Johnson and I are undertaking for the Institute for Educational Cybernetics (IEC) at the University of Bolton will be branded as the IDIBL project. The website we are building is using the much loved Plone (version 3.0) which has come on leaps and bound since I last used it on the Ultraversity project. For those who don’t know, it is a powerful open source content management system (CMS) that ‘gets’ collaboration and community, although it probably isn’t aware of the latter:^)

This post is a inspired by a service called pipes from YAHOO. Initially we were playing around with Drupal to handle our aggregation, but couldn’t find a module (plugin) that did what we wanted - that is filter an RSS feed by a particular tab. Anyhow, after a few minutes looking at pipes I was sold on a combination of its powerful functionality for mixing and re-purposing feeds coupled with a funky and fun user interface. If you want aggregation without the hassle of running an application, this may be just the ticket for you!