Update from Innovating e-Learning 2008

The closing days of JISC online conference saw some deep discussion. The session we were facilitating asked whether we should free the maniacs (or students!). Prof Mark Stiles was interested in the reasons education tended to be "controlling". He saw a downward spiral where embedding innovation led to regulation, which could act as a barrier to further innovation. Mark felt a philosophy of "minimum control" within institutions was the way forward.

Various examples of control (and concerns over relinquishing it) were cited, with the inference that we need to 'unpick' what is meant by control. Mark offered a spectrum of control to act as a guide:

• Control - to exercise restraint or direction over; to hold in check
• Manage - to take charge or care of; to govern, or control in action or use
• Facilitate - to make easier; help forward (an action, a process, etc.)
• Enable - to give power, means, competence, or ability to; to make possible or easy
• Recognise - to identify from knowledge of appearance or characteristics

He highlighted that "as [organisations] move up from merely 'recognising' something happens to having a fully 'controlled' institutional approach that we stop at the LOWEST level needed". Peter Bullen (Mark's co-presenter) reminded us that while controls are normally introduced for a good reason, they can become embedded and later, as organisations change, the original reason can be forgotten and the control can become unnecessary. A clear example of why process improvement or continual review is essential.

Both presenters had outlined the change processes introduced within their organisations. With particular emphasis at the University of Hertfordshire of involving students in this process. This process is called CABLE (Change Academy for Blended Learning Enhancement) and is described in detail in 'CABLE: an approach to embedding blended learning in the curricula and across the institution'.

Labels: #jiscel08, conference, control, elearning, online conference, transformational change

Day three of the JISC online conference sees the opening of the second theme - "Going boldly into the dark". The session we are facilitating ('Achieving Transformational Change - making it happen') features presenters Mark Stiles from Staffordshire University and Peter Bullen from the University of Hertfordshire.

Some really interesting and varied discussion has started on this first day about encouraging change at institutional, departmental and individual levels. Just as a taster these included discussion around 'Collaboration in transformational change'; whether embedding is a barrier to innovation and the question of how we measure transformation (and related to this - what is transformation!).

Other discussion covered issues such as ownership and control; motivations for staff to participate in transformational initiatives and what approach to staff support is taken (DIY or DIFM - do it for me!).

Lots more discussion to come from the second day of this theme!

Labels: #jiscel08, change, conference, JISC, onlineconference, transformation

This news item on PublicTecnhology.net reports that the European Commission has launched a public consultation to search for the best strategies to boost Europes ICT research and innovation until 2020.

The Commission believes that Europe is underperforming in both the level and intensity of its research and innovation investments, with only 33% of research and innovation in developed economies worldwide being in ICT.

The three main questions asked within the consultation are:

1. What are the main challenges ahead for ICT research and innovation? As the ICT revolution continues, what are Europe's key priorities for research and innovation?

2. How, and in what fields, should Europe aim to lead? Europe has world industrial and technological leaders in key fields such as telecommunications and embedded systems. How can advances in these areas be reinforced and what new areas should a leadership profile be sought?

3. What is the role of public policy in putting Europe at the forefront of ICT innovation? How can research policy be consolidated to create a European market for ICT innovation? How can complementary policy fields such as standardisation, licensing and intellectual property regimes be adapted to support the early commercialisation of research results?

If you would like to contribute, visit the consultation site - "Shaping the ICT research and innovation agenda for the next decade" and have your say!

Labels: consultation, EU, futures, ICT, IT, researchmethods, strategy

There's been lots of UK media coverage over the weekend of a Microsoft research study that used traffic on Microsoft's Instant Messenger (IM) to investigate global communication (See articles in the Guardian, Telegraph, and BBC.)

The study captured anonymised data from June 2006 - specifically properties of 30 billion IM conversations (not messages, conversations!) among 240 million people. Of interest to the media is the global investigation of 'six degrees of separation' - the idea that everyone is just six steps away from anyone else. In fact, the researchers found that the average separation among IM users was 6.6, or seven in terms of whole people!

The original study was published in June 2007 - which perhaps says something about the degrees of separation of journalists from up to date research.

Even though those with (reported) ages in the 15-35 age group are strongly overrepresented, there are other findings that are interesting in terms age and gender.
For example, a series of hot and cold graphs plotted against age, show that younger users have more conversations made of up more quickly generated messages, but they are shorter than older users who tend to send more messages per conversation. In terms of gender, the researchers note that "cross-gender conversations are both more frequent and of longer duration than conversations with the same gender".

Leskovec, J., & Horvitz, E. (2007). Planetary-Scale Views on an Instant-Messaging Network.

Labels: digitalnatives, networks, researchmethods, sms

Just trying out Cuil - a new search engine developed by former Google software engineers. It claims to index three times as many web pages as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft. Cuil uses this in ranking pages based on their content, concepts, inter-relationships and coherency, rather than how often pages are linked to or 'popularity metrics'.

The whole interface is very different, just entering a search not only uses autotext to predict what I might want, but also gives me potential websites as I enter my search terms. Looking for 'digital literacy' returns a page that looks very much more built using web 2.0 - there are panes with each found site's link, a description, and photos. I can explore or drill down by category. The following look interesting - Human Skills, Internet Governance, Educational Stages, Educational Technology. Hovering my mouse over the categories opens up options.


Here's the same search from Google. And if you look at the url, there are indicators of the differences in privacy. While Google has tracked my browser - and lots of other information in the background - the Cuil url is pretty clean - http://www.cuil.com/search?q=digital+literacy. In fact, Cuil emphasise that they do not store any personally identifiable information.

Cuil returns 101,721 results, while Google lists 591,000. So which search engine helps me find useful sites? The top page results are different, and they both list sites of potential interest to me. Given the very wide nature of my search term that isn't really surprising. Looks like this could be worth further exploration.

Labels: digital literacy, internet, researchtools, search, web2.0