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In 2002 Edinburgh International Festival introduced £5 tickets for their late night concert series. This represented a large discount and the aim was to attract new audiences. An audit of the initiative after the event showed no discernible shift in audience demographics. Rather what mostly happened was middle-class audience members who would ordinarily pay £20 to see a concert instead grabbed themselves a bargain.
“this paper will question whether free admittance to information is enough to realise the goals of universal education and economic prosperity often promised by the open education movement” (p.22).
This point is also made in Bayne, S., Knox, J., Ross, J. (2015). Open Education: the need for a critical approach. Learning, Media and Technology Special Issue: Critical Approaches to Open Education. 40(3). pp. 247-250.
“Many approaches to open education have been guided by the assumption that students fall into a universal category of rational, self-directing, and highly motivated individuals (p.248).”
With this in mind, it was interesting to read Brown, J. S., & Adler, R. P. (2008). Minds On Fire: Open Education, the long tail, and Learning 2.0. EDUCAUSE Review, 43(1), 16–32. In contrast to the previous three papers here was an optimistic, but uncritical eye directed at the possibilities of ‘open’ education.
Can this be attributed to the fact that the Bayne, Knox and Ross paper was written in 2015 (the two other critiques written in 2013)? Brown & Adler’s paper was written in 2008. Five – seven years may not sound like a long time but those intervening years coincide with the crucial formative years of the MOOC. With this in mind, I thought it would be interesting to compare some of Brown & Adler’s assumptions with some statistics gathered in 2015 on MOOCs: who’s benefitting from them and why.
“Approximately 80% [of enrollers] already had at least a bachelor’s degree, nearly 60% were employed full-time, and 60% came from developed countries”.
Obviously, MOOCs are only one example of ‘open’ education. However, the statistics we see in the HBR article serve to support the arguments put forward by Bayne, Knox and Ross. We need to do better than make educational resources available at no monetary cost if we are to achieve more than the equivalent of subsidising middle class classical music concert goers.
This week (week 5) I have been re-reading the core and recommended texts for week 2. Interestingly, revisiting the texts has allowed me to gain a clearer understanding of each author and their key points – to recognise their distinctive voice. I shall attempt to summarise my thoughts below as a useful aide memoir, and to help facilitate ideas for future blog posts.
Key themes covered are:
philosophers, thinkers, futurologists have been predicting how technology will change the classroom for nearly a century. This is not new.
what place for faculty in the future?
what are the drivers for increasing technology in the classroom? can we find any which differ from neoliberal interests (corporate strategists, top university administrators) seeking to make greater efficiencies in the ‘business’ of education?
Sian Bayne’s paper is an argument to keep vigilant of these interests, but to not ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’.
technology (or more generally mechanisation) will always have a role to play in gaining efficiencies in the workplace. However, what we are really talking about here is AI. What role will AI play in the future of teaching? Can we really call it teaching in the absence of a human teacher?
Despite widespread discussion around technology usurping the teacher, is there any evidence for this?
Watters challenges the oft quoted Arthur C. Clarke maxim “any teacher that can be replaced by machine should be”. I think she’s right to challenge this, although I think she wilfully ignores what Clarke means here. I have always understood this quote to be a challenge to teachers to provide something more than that which a machine is capable of. It is a challenge to lazy teaching, not teaching per se.
Watters also makes the important point that the essentialist view of technology (“what technology wants”) gives agency to the machine, ignoring the “machinations of investors or entrepreneurs or engineers, an ignorance of ideology”.
We are limited by what we know. And we are limited by what we think is desirable, what we think is smart. I was really interested to read that one of the earliest chat-bots was named ELIZA, after Eliza Doolittle. Watters raises a really interesting point here – Eliza Doolittle is taught so she can pass as a member of the upper classes. The concept of passing should trouble us. It suggests there is only one desirable way to be and for as long as we think that we are limiting our own progress.
Selwyn’s metaphor for teacher as symphony conductor (p.117) is a nice one. And it reminded me of this Guardian Audio Long Read I was listening to the other week. In it, Ian Leslie describes watching a video of a teacher at an elementary School in New Jersey, Ashley Hinton, orchestrating her class. The video was played to a group of teachers in London, England by Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like a Champion.
Selwyn is a refreshing read. I particularly liked the fact that he reminds us to consider not just the potential affect technology can have on teaching, but the reality of how faculty mostly employ technology in their teaching (p.117).
Main takeaways:
digital technologies can help staff in the procedural elements of their job
digital technologies can help teachers enhance their own learning – not least by giving them access (via the internet) to teaching resources and support on a global scale
digital technologies can provide pedagogical support inside the classroom
however, digital technologies can also pose a threat to the role of the teacher
will the future of the teacher be teacher-as-facilitator? Does this mean reducing teaching to ‘scientific’ concerns? Does it mean the end to the ‘art’ of teaching?
how do academics use (or not use) technology right now? Many are “said to be reluctant to alter arrangements that may destabilize or subvert their authority, status and control in the classroom” (p126). I have certainly seen evidence of this in my role as learning technologist at ECA. There is a real concern amongst many academics regarding the routine recording of lectures for this very reason.
interesting point regarding how some technologies (such as the interactive whiteboard and powerpoint) have actually contributed to teaching being more presentational in nature (rather than facilitative) (p.129). Teacher as TED talker?
technology, whilst promising greater efficiencies, doesn’t of course mean teachers have more time to teach. In fact, with greater accountability requirements mean technology can intensify, rather than reduce, the pressures of time.
“once a course has been delivered online a teacher has little or no intellectual property rights over the future use of that material”. Presumably, one of the main reasons behind resistance to lecture capture?
Herbert Dreyfus (2001) “reasoned that many forms of learning and expertise are dependent on being in the physical presence of a more knowledgeable other” (p.133). Does he specify which forms?
teachers can (and need to) play a role in supporting students to develop digital literacies, including the ability to think critically about digital technology itself (p.135)
Selwyn references Seymour Papert (Papert, S (1993) The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer, New York, Basic Books, pp.57-81) to cover “the popular notion of learning as a process of the co-construction of knowledge [which] sees the individual learner encountering and engaging with many different resources”. Again, this made me think of how technology could aid and assist this ‘connecting the dots’ approach. Perhaps Synote is already covering this?
Selwyn closes his paper with the following questions to consider (perhaps a useful starting point for a future post):
What can digital technology do that a teacher cannot? Conversely, what can teachers do that digital technology cannot? How easy is it to use technology to replicate the qualities of face-to-face, personal interaction with a teacher? What is lost and what is gained through the ‘mediation’ of technology-based teaching?
to what extent does digital technology contribute to the ‘deskilling’ of teaching as a profession? Is the comparison of the deskilling of classroom-based teachers and machine-using factory workers a valid one to make? What subtle strategies of resistance do teachers display to technology-based teaching?
How useful is the notion of ‘blended’ teaching in understanding the relationship between teachers and technology? What aspects of education need to be blended – this is, different technologies, different pedagogical approaches, or different types of task? Is the notion of ‘blended’ technology more applicable to particular stages or types of education?
Yes – how many of these texts consider the different requirements, and approaches taken for teaching kindergarten, to high school, to University? How many consider the different demographics within University education itself? And how to compare of teaching philosophy to, say, surgery?
I am reminded, again, of this scene from the 1969 film version of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie when Bayne references Usher and Edwards (Usher and Edwards 1994) regarding the humanistic foundations of Education:
“The very rationale of the educational process and the role of the educator is founded on the humanist idea of a certain kind of subject who has the inherent potential to become self-motivated and self-directing, a rational subject capable of exercising individual agency. The task of education has therefore been understood as one of ‘bringing out’, of helping to realise this potential, so that subjects become fully autonomous and capable of exercising their individual and intentional agency. (24)”
I particularly enjoyed Bayne’s neat summary of this particular piece of backwards logic: “one might ask how we have come to a point where large and expensive programmes of research in AIED, intelligent tutoring systems and educational data mining are seen as a better option for investment than – say – more or better teachers”.
I devoured it. How refreshing to read an article in support of teaching, and education, which doesn’t fit within a regressive framework. In this blog post I have simply summarised the key points as I understand them. I hope to return to these in future posts.
education differs from learning in that it requires that students “learn something, that they learn this for particular purposes, and that they learn this from someone”
he goes on to chart the history of the learnification of education, in particular drawing on the influence of constructivist thinkers, and how this has “repositioned the teacher from someone who is at the heart of the educational process to one who literally stands at the sideline in order to facilitate the learning of his or her ‘learners'”(p.38)
crucially, “in education there is nothing that is desirable in itself”(p.38). All considerations around education, (method of delivery etc) have to be considered in relation to the “aims and ends of education” (p.39)
so what is education for?
qualification
socialisation
subjectification
He summarises as follows: “Teleology implies pragmatism, and pragmatism requires judgement, and in precisely this way we can see how once we go beyond the language of learning and (re)turn to a language of education the teacher begins to reappear” (p.40).
The section which I found particularly interesting was The Gift of Teaching. Here, Biesta refers back to ancient Greek philosophy summarising the ‘learning paradox’ and Socrates’s answer to this: that all learning is a matter of recollection, and that the purpose of education is a leading out what is already there. Socrates “is not just there to facilitate any kind of learning but that, through an extremely skilful process, he is trying to bring his students to very specific insights and understandings”. The teacher is therefore not just ‘bringing out’ what is already there but crucially is actually bringing something new . This is what leads Biesta to refer to teaching as a gift. And where is this gift-giving available? Well, most notably in a school. Schools should therefore not be thought of as places of learning, but rather places of teaching.
What is the difference between ‘learning from’ and ‘being taught by’ a teacher? Principally, it relates to a sense of control, of agency. Learners are agents of their own learning. However, when we are being taught by someone, “something enters our field of experience in a way that is fundamentally beyond out control” (p.42). These ‘lessons’ are not automatically received, and therefore the success of the gift-giving relies on “fragile interplay between the teacher and the student” (p.42). Because what is being brought by the teacher is being brought from the outside, and is therefore fundamentally other, it can be described as an intrusion (Nancy, 2000). And this intrusion offers resistance. Education is therefore not simply an exchange, an act of giving and receiving, but rather an “ongoing dialogue between ‘self and ‘other'” (p.43). And it is at this point of resistance that education begins.
The article reminded me of a recent headline I saw: 65% of today’s schoolchildren will eventually be employed in jobs that have yet to be created (according to this U.S. Department of Labor report.) This, in turn, reminded me of John F Kennedy’s famous speech at Rice University in Houston, Texas on September 12, 1962. “We shall send to the moon… a giant rocket… made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented”.
There is an optimism associated with this period (early 1960s) which I intentionally tried to tap into when I chose the following image for my learning technology intranet site:
It captures a sense of wonder and excitement associated with technology. I anticipated there would be some colleagues resistant to the kinds of technologies and services I was employed to support, and I wanted to ‘brand’ my service as light touch and optimistic.
Is it possible to still share that optimism in 2016? How do digital technologies (in particular social media) contribute to a dystopian vision of the future? I hope to explore this further in future blog posts.
In anticipation of week 10, I wanted to log an idea. I’m currently sitting on the 5th floor of the University of Edinburgh Main Library. Here is my view:
And here is what I am hearing:
I have deliberately positioned myself so I’m facing the window. I am aware of others around me, probably doing things very similar to myself. Reading core and secondary texts for their courses. Interspersing this with checking Twitter and the football on the Guardian MBM. Most are sitting solo. But I am aware of some very quiet chatter. All students seem to be observing the library policy of only bottled water. The guy next to me has some Haribo sweets. The rustle of the bag is very satisfying. I decided to record these noises as they seem the perfect background noise for studying. I recall reading a project around this very subject (in fact a quick look at the VLE for this course tells me it is this: Bayne, S., Gallagher, M. S., & Lamb, J. (2014). Being ‘at’ university: the social topologies of distance students. Higher Education, 67, 569-583.) However, I don’t recall anyone favouring a recording of ‘typical’ library noises. I shall have to wait until week 10 to find out.
The article argues that it is an under-represented area of research how online education, and its implementation, can be seen through the lense of Foucault’s conceptualisation of power.
The article uses interviews carried out with tenured faculty in a mix of US Universities to explore this investigation. The authors also reference another piece of research (Garza Mitchell, R. L. (2009)) to support one of their points.
In the literature review, the authors state that the majority of research in this area has been “technical or managerial in approach.” It goes on to cite several papers, nearly all dating from 1992 – 2004. Bearing in mind this paper was published in 2015, I was surprised that there was only one paper referenced which had been published in the preceding 10 years (Garza Mitchell 2009).
In addition, this more recent reference (Garza Mitchell 2009) relates to interviews with staff at community colleges, not Universities, and is therefore not a direct comparison. The point they raise is an interesting one: online education can lead to a cultural change within the institution as well as “changes in faculty status and roles”. However, I wasn’t convinced by the resulting assertion that “Such shifts in professional identity can result in a newly scripted self, one more in line with others’ desires, or a self that is easier to control” (my emphasis). How is it easier to control a faculty member who now identifies more as a teacher, than a researcher? This isn’t made clear but does suggest, on the part of the authors, that there is a hierarchy of status in the role of faculty, with researcher being placed higher than teacher.
The authors suggest one of the ways institutions outflank faculty trying to wrestle back control of their working lives is by “not giving credit for extra time spent developing or teaching online courses …. an action taken to discourage teaching online”. This part of the argument I found less convincing as it fails to acknowledge the fact that institutions want more faculty to deliver ODL courses / programmes, so why disincentivise?
As the authors state in the introduction “administrators, professors, and students are all institutional stakeholders who exercise power in their relations with one another.” It states that these interviews were triangulated with interviews conducted with 13 administrators. I would like to know more about this. I would also like to see if it could be possible to triangulate with interviews with students. For example, participant “Don”:
“When I teach face-to-face, I might be working on something and then I have class coming up. I have to cut what I’m working [on], at that point, and go to the class. When I come back I may have lost track of what I’m trying to do. The more classes I have online, the more I can simply work with them throughout, and finish what I’m doing. If I want to respond to an entire class’s _____ [assignment] within one sitting, I can do that.”
While this clearly allows Don to gain more control of his time, is this optimal for his students? For example, is Don’s feedback going to be compromised if he is responding to all his students late into the evening because he wanted to clear his day for research?
Similarly,
“For Robert, most, if not all, interaction with students enrolled in online classes is other than face-to-face. He typically communicates with them through email or instant messaging at a time and place of his choosing.”
I thought it worth noting that these online communications take place at a time of Robert’s choosing (ie not the students).
Viewing online education through this lense is an interesting and useful starting point. Especially as more and more institutions are looking to expand their Online Distance Learning offerings, it makes sense to consider how institutions are going to manage the competing demands of administrators, faculty and students. However, it is limited in scope. By its own admission, those interviewed represent a narrow demographic within teaching staff (all were tenured at the point of interview) and I agree with the authors that “future studies of power and online education should investigate the experiences of contingent faculty. The experiences of faculty in other institution types may also be different and thus worthy of further study.”
A list of the papers I read this week, a few notes on what I thought of them, and some on why I chose *not* to include them in the structured blog task for this week.
At the start of this week, I logged into Moodle and checked the tasks and activities for the week ahead. I printed out the core and further readings and signed up for the Skype session. Well done me, I thought. This week is going to be different. This is the week I’m going to catch up.
I have recently moved to compressed hours so I can spend a little more time with my daughter. This is proving to be wonderful, but it does of course mean that after a long day at work, and time with my family, and putting my daughter to bed, I have about two hours every evening to study. Still, I thought, read 1-2 texts a night and this should be fine.
And I have thoroughly enjoyed having some weighty journal articles to read and reflect on. BUT, note to self, don’t start with the Marxist. Hall’s principal argument (that TEL has been co-opted by capitalism) felt like an angry shout into the void. For example:
“A key driver in this process is the reality of competition between universities as competing businesses, or capitals. Driving efficiencies through technology is critical, and TEL forms part of this process”.
Is he criticising TELs ability to drive efficiency? Is he anti-efficiency per se? UK students attending University as a percentage of population has increased hugely in the last two decades. Efficiency matters if we are to continue to be able to teach increasing numbers of students. Rallying against this felt like an argument from a place of privilege.
Similarly, when Hall argues
“the statements made by Gartner and Willetts reveal the tensions that exist between the quantitative, data-driven risk-management that pervades the higher education choice agenda, and the qualitative realities of the humane relationships that academics seek to develop with their students”.
my first thought was ‘really?’ How are these mutually exclusive? Hall doesn’t specify.
Perhaps I should have chosen Hall’s article because it was the one which frustrated me the most. But I didn’t want to have to re-read it several times as the basis for the critical analysis task.
I then moved on to Sian Bayne’s What’s the matter with ‘technology-enhanced learning’? “What is wrong with technology? What is wrong with enhanced? And finally, what is wrong with learning?” I got used to having to search terms such as “transhumanism” but overall I enjoyed the paper. We should all check our language. ‘I’ll keep that in the ‘maybe pile’ I thought to myself.
“It should be noted that essentialism and instrumentalism are not “theories” of technology if by theory we mean a fully articulated, reflexively employed framework that enables us to interpret and understand some phenomenon. Indeed, it is our argument that a “theory” of technology in this sense is precisely what is missing from the bulk of research into online education”
Isn’t this because “technology” moves at such a pace rendering it impossible to understand and build a framework which would still be relevant 20 years later? Or perhaps I misunderstood his point?
I made lots of notes when reading this paper and I intend to write a blog post dedicated entirely to my thoughts on it. Before I forget the association however, I want to log that some of the points raised reminded me of the Stanford 2025 project, where we are encouraged to ‘choose a future to explore’.
I noticed that when I moved on to the further readings I was no longer having to check terminology or re-read certain sentences to aid with understanding. Perhaps this had something to do with the nature of the readings? Or perhaps by now, I was becoming more immersed in the language of the subject?
I was initially attracted to Selwyn’sMinding our language: why education and technology is full of bullshit … and what might be done about itbecause, like a child, I enjoy the juxtaposition of swearing with a serious endeavor. Much of the paper feels, to my mind, instinctively true. So many of us whose livelihoods depend on EdTech can be guilty of ‘EdTech speak’. It’s not, of course, always intentional. There are valid reasons why, once a shared language takes hold, people are loathe to let it go. Because we understand what is being spoken about when we all speak the same language. It also reminded me of this.
I would have considered using this article as the basis for my critical analysis but it isn’t an academic journal article so doesn’t comply with the requirements of the task.
Finally, I watched the interview at Economist.com with Evgeny Morozov on Technology: the folly of solutionism. I particularly enjoyed his assertion that “it is the very imperfection of our environment that makes us human”. This reminded me of my favourite Leonard Cohen track, Anthem, when he sings “Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in”.
He also better articulated one of Hall’s arguments when he talk s about how technology is being used to offload problems from governments to citizens (eg why tackle obesity with greater regulation, when you can build a consumer app.)
Reading Sian Bayne’s paper Teacherbot: interventions in automated teaching, I was initially drawn to the following Usher and Edwards (Usher and Edwards 1994) reference:
“the task of education has therefore been understood as one of ‘bringing out’, of helping to realise this potential, so that subjects become fully autonomous and capable of exercising their individual and intentional agency”.
This reminded me of the hilarious exchange of ideas between Jean Brodie and Miss Mackay discussing the purpose of education in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
I wonder what Jean Brodie would have thought of automated teaching? Or indeed of the ‘learner centredness’ of so much discussion around digital education? Not much, I suspect. I think she too would have appreciated Sian highlighting the irony of spending so much time and money investing in AIED, when perhaps a better use of that time and money could be spent training and hiring more, and better, teachers.
The following passage also struck a note with me:
“Clegg et al. (2003) construct a critique of digital technology in education from a perspective which aligns well with Feenberg’s, arguing that essentialist and instrumentalist (Hamilton an Friesen 2013) constructions of both technology and globalisation in government and institutional policy seem to constrain teachers to the choice between positively embracing digital education, or ‘standing aside and watching its inevitable unfolding’ (my emphasis).
I see this a lot during the course of my work as a learning technologist and I was pleased to see Sian’s paper as an attempt to move beyond this. To see double.
“While I was trying to figure out what the hell “post-humanism” means, the teacher bot led me on a merry chase looking up quotes and obscure academic references, which had the interesting side effect of “ambush teaching” me. I will happily admit, that I do not feel like I have been to a class. I do not feel like I have been taught, either. I do, however, think I have learned something. I’ve certainly been prompted to think. Isn’t this what every good teacher/trainer strives for?”
Which is a neat summary of how I’m feeling just now.
