John Millner :: Blog

It’s well known that new communications technologies diffuse in different ways and have different impacts on society compared with non-network innovations (because each new adoption makes them still more useful to existing adopters - see Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations for more on this). An article by Bobbie Johnson in today’s Technology Guardian got me thinking about another unique characteristic of network technologies: they are not labour-saving in the straightforward way that earlier technical innovations were.

“Take email, instant messaging and SMS,” writes Johnson.

It's faster and easier than ever before, but it doesn't reduce the workload because we simply spend more time doing it (Britons sent more than 50bn texts in 2007, for example - as many each week as they did in the whole of 1999). This reverses previous technological trends: just because the laundry process was now 10 times faster, we didn't suddenly begin washing 10 times as many clothes. (The internet is the ultimate labour-creating device, Guardian Unlimited, 13/03/08)

Every time we need to find something out or exchange a thought, not only can we do so straightaway, but our attention will be caught by a dozen other things which we hadn’t until then been aware of needing to know or share. By giving us almost unlimited access to information and enabling us to communicate so easily, the net plugs into two of our most basic instincts as a species - to learn and to talk to each other - with the result that we spend more and more of our time doing these things.

This is why knowledge workers find themselves working harder and harder the more they embrace information technologies which orginally promised to make their lives easier. As Johnson says,

It’s not for nothing that the net is characterised as a time sink, because wherever it carves out efficiencies, it usually manages to create extra work too.

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Certainly it's perceived to be a serious and growing one. One recent survey, by Northumbria Learning, found that half UK HE students believed their tutors would fail to spot work that had been plagiarised from the internet; while another, by the Times Higher Educational Supplement, found that 1 in 10 students had attempted to find model essays online. JISC, the UK HE technology advice and research body, has set up an Internet Plagiarism Advice Service and will be holding its third International Plagiarism Conference later this year.  A JISC report suggested that student plagiarism was “common and probably becoming more so”; Oxford University has suggested that internet plagiarism was becoming so rife that the reputation of its degrees was in danger of being undermined; and Google has responded to these fears by banning adverts from the so-called ‘online essay mills’.

On the back of these concerns, plagiarism prevention has become highly profitable, with 90% of UK universities - more in north America - paying to use plagiarism-detection software, mostly using a package called Turnitin from US company Plagiarism.org, which uses a smart search of possible online sources combined with textual analysis of assignments using a rapidly growing database of past students’ work.

However there is little solid data supporting this perceived explosion of copying-and-pasting from the internet. Closer reading of the THES survey for example suggests that the overwhelming majority of student copying is done not online but offline from friends, and that only a tiny percentage of students - 3% - are copying wholesale chunks of text.

It’s not easy for academics to stand out against the plagiarism panic, but a few do. Barry Dahl, VP of Technology and Distance Learning at Lake Superior College, Minnesota, maintains there is no evidence supporting the assertion that online plagiarism is more prevalent (it’s merely that online students get caught more than traditional students) and that plagiarism detection software is both a gross infringement of student intellectual property and less effective than intelligent use of Google (see Turnitin Sucks).

And Steven Heppell, Professor of New Media Practice at Bournemouth University and UK government advisor on education and technology, thinks at least some of academia’s plagiarism concerns are the result of industrial-age thinking about learning as information transfer, students “learning stuff’ and then being tested to see how much of it has been absorbed. He points out in his weblog that

One huge impact of ubiquitous [internet] technology is to move information towards being a free good. So much information, so many providers. All the heated debates about IPR [intellectual property rights] and plagiarism fall away with the realisation that, like Technology, Information is everywhere…

In a learning environment where Google, Wikipedia and the social web have made virtually all information public, free, and collective in nature, the idea of information ownership begins to lose its meaning. Perhaps plagiarism too...

I’m not at all sure that it can. Unless you approach the speed of light or get too near a black hole, time doesnt speed up or slow down, and strictly speaking its direction is always and ineluctably towards ever greater entropy, or randomness - the diametric opposite of what time-management tools promise. Time management is a trope of course, a kind of flood defence we erect against the tidal wave of data to which knowledge workers in the connected economy are exposed. But like flood defences, the digital shortcuts listed in this H806 Activity can only be temporary, because the tide of data continues to grow and sooner or later will cancel out the temporal gains we thought we’d made by managing our time a bit better.

I think we need a more radical rethink of our approach to work in the knowledge economy.
Instead of inventing tools to keep the ocean of data at bay, we need to learn to live with it - in fact to swim in it like fish.  To do this we need a new skill:  the ability to effortlessly sift through vast quantities of information, evaluate it, and extract the bits that are relevant to the job in hand. And I think the people who are best at this new skill are those who (at the risk of sounding a bit eastern/mystic) can empty their minds of all kinds of management clutter and let the sea of data flow through them.

In his book Getting Things Done David Allen puts it like this:

In order to keep nothing on their mind  knowledge workers need reliable, accessible external systems in which to store all their to-do lists, project plans, schedules and calendars - all the management clutter that would otherwise be filling up their head and stressing them out.  And this is where network technologies come in, enabling workers to store their commitments, lists, plans and documents online, access them at any time, wherever they are, using mobile devices if they’re on the move, and share them with colleagues whenever they need to.

 

Allen D, 2003. Getting Things Done: How to achieve stress-free productivity. Piatkus, London

Coppicers' shelter, Horseshoe Thicket, Walthamstow

 

As both How do People Learn and Delivering Learning on the Net make clear, online learning can take a number of different forms - from a just-in-time network-based training session which uses online as a medium for delivering instruction, to an open-ended, work-oriented, informal community of practice. Reynolds, Caley and Mason identify three main genres of eLearning - web-based training, supported online learning, and informal eLearning (Reynolds J et al, 2002) while Weller suggests a fourfold classification into  high-tech / low-tech didactic, and high-tech / low-tech constructivist (Weller M, 2002). Unsurprisingly, each different form of eLearning utilises somewhat different internet functionalities and instantiates a different theoretical approach to learning.

Web-based training or WBT is (at least currently) the type of online learning most often seen in the work setting. Such courses deliver locally-bespoke computer-based training material direct to the individual learner’s browser, may be highly interactive, and usually incorporate automated tests to check understanding and reward progress. WBT uses the internet or company network as a one-to-many distribution system with integrated return channel for interactivity, tracking and test feedback. Courses are linear in format and there is little if any interaction with tutors or peers.

This type of online learning has its foundation in behavioural theories of learning with their emphases on one-way instruction, the primacy of the expert, step-by-step progression, stimulus and reward, and summary assessment.

On the other hand, eLearning experiences belonging to what Soren Nipper calls the 'third generation of distance learning' have very different characteristics, centering round student interaction with course materials and dialogue with the tutor and with other learners. This type of online learning utilises a much wider range of internet communications affordances: one-to-one, few-to-few and few-to-many as well as one-to-many. The format will usually be less linear and more hypertextual, there will be less prescription and more learner control over content, and interaction will take the form of synchronous or non-synchronous conferencing (text, audio or video) plus individual and collaborative production of wikis, websites, podcasts etc - the whole gamut of internet communication and publication technologies.

This kind of online learning casts the teacher in a facilitative rather than an expert role, and emphasises dialogue, the personal construction of meaning, learning by doing, and the social context of learning. It is clearly founded in constructivist, social-constructivist or community-of-practice approaches to the nature of learning.

The important point to bring out at this point is that while WBT makes only very partial use of the functionalities afforded by the internet, third generation online learning makes full use of them. So while it’s not the case that online learning is necessarily constructivist in nature, it is the case that the constructivist approach is much more closely aligned with what Neil Postman calls the ‘ideological bias’ inherent in the internet as a technology.  For technologies are not neutral; on the contrary,

Embedded in every tool is …  a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another. (Postman N, 1993)

It follows from this that online learning which makes full use of the internet’s affordances in this way will result in a different kind of learning than that resulting from using it simply to deliver instruction. While WBT may be an efficient way of delivering finite packets of factual knowledge, or new procedures, or technical skills, it is not suitable for delivering the higher order learning skills - communication, planning, analysis, evaluation and reflection skills - that enable students to become independent, self-directed, lifelong learners: for these you need interactivity, dialogue, participation. And it is these lifelong learning skills that are increasingly at a premium in the networked organisation and the networked economy.

 

Nipper S, 1989. Third generation distance learning and computer conferencing. In Robin Mason and Anthony Kaye, editors, Mindweave: communication, computers and distance education, chapter 5, pages 63-73. Pergamon Press.

Postman N, 1992. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Vintage.

Reynolds J, Caley L, Mason R, 2002. How do People Learn? Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

Weller M, 2002. Delivering Learning on the Net. Routledge Farmer

The read/write web is an example of what Castells calls a new socio-technical pattern formed by the  interaction between internet technologies and the uses to which we humans collectively put them.

Until the early 1990s the internet was necessarily read/write in nature because its content consisted largely of bulletin boards, newsgroups and text files, and to a large extent the readers of this content were also its authors. But with the explosion of the world wide web the character of the net changed in three important ways:

• It became a vast library of public information presented via millions of more-or-less media rich websites which required some technical knowledge to build and host;

• It became a mass medium - a medium which although interactive was one in which most users were readers (in the widest sense) rather than authors; and

• The web opened the way to e-commerce, with many websites functioning as digital shopfronts and much content devoted to advertising. The marketeers who drove this commercialisation process inevitably saw users more as consumers than active  participants.

Although this was certainly not what Tim Berners-Lee intended when he developed the language, protocols and software of the web in the early 90s, all three of these changes tended to make the internet more of a read-only and less of a read/write domain.

But in the following decade the net entered another phase of its evolution.  Growing from roots in the internet's virtual communitarian and hacker cultures, and responding to users' desire to communicate and express themselves online, new 'social web' functionalities developed to enable users to upload and share, to converse with each other, to self-publish and to comment.  The first commercial weblog application, designed to make it easy for anyone with a computer and internet connection to write web pages, and invite others to comment, was written in 1999; and in the 9 years since then there has been a self-publishing revolution, with the number of blogs worldwide now thought to be at least 200 million (see Blog Herald 2008/02/11).  At the same time the medium has bifurcated into dozens of separate genres - from the book draft blog (Chris Anderson's The Long Tail started life as a blog), thru newspaper blogs and the professional or political commentary blog, to blog as journal or journal-expose (remember Belle du Jour?) to blog as semi-private reflection, to photoblog (Flickr is essentially a collective photoblog), to moblogs and microblogs like Facebook and Twitter which focus on the capture of ephemera with very frequent updates via WAP or SMS.

Despite their very different flavours, each of these blog genres is essentially about the same thing: the creation of a fluid, interactive private/public space where the joy of authorship and self-publication meets the thrill of online conversation and critique.

As Dan Gilmore says in his excellent book We the Media :

Many to many, few to few. The blog is the medium of both, and all. Weblogs ... are expanding into the space between email and the Web, and could well be the missing link in the communications chain. To date they're the closest we've come to realising the original read/write promise of the Web .. the first tool to make it easy to publish online. (Gilmore, 2006).

 

Gillmore, D, 2006, We the Media: Grassroots journalism by the people, for the people, p28 (paperback), O'Reilly, Sebastopol CA. Also available as an e-book at http://www.authorama.com/we-the-media-1.html

Does Castell's description of the four main strands of internet culture - techno-meritocratic, hacker, communitarian and entrepreneurial - tell the whole story? In 2000 when Castells was writing it probably did. From the vantage point of 2008 I think I'd want to add a fifth cultural strand: that of digital youth culture.

The children and teens who have come online in the last 10 years constitute the first generation of users for whom the internet is normal and unremarkable because it has always been there, and their sheer weight of numbers and the specificity of their digital needs have had a dramatic impact on the character of the Net. Napster, Limewire and the other peer-to-peer music sharing networks, MSN, MySpace, Bebo, Last.fm, Facebook and YouTube are "social web" phenomena which young users have effectively called into being - in some cases wrenching them from their original form (YouTube started as a dating service!) to fit in with their need for p2p sharing and socialisation. In the process they have changed the way young people communicate and entertain themselves, and quickly transformed a clutch of young Net entrepreneurs into young Net millionaires.

What you see here is the same wave of young 'digital natives' who have helped kickstart two new and massively profitable industries based on digital networks - mobile telephony and internet-based music retail - moulding the internet itself to their own generational culture and digital needs.

 

Castells argues in The Internet Galaxy that the last quarter of the 20th century saw the emergence of what he calls "a new social form" based on the new technologies of the internet. For the first time in history these technologies allow "communication from many to many in chosen time" (Castells, M, 2001 a), and this free-flowing network capability has given rise to new ways of thinking, working and interacting, new business structures, and a new type of economy based not on the production of physical goods but on the processing of symbolic ones. This new, post-industrial, social form is the network society.

Many other social theorists have described this cluster of technological, economic and social transformations in similar terms, if sometimes under slightly different labels. The terms information society (Fritz Machlup), programmed society (Alain Touraine), knowledge society (Nico Stehr), third wave society (Alvin Toffler) and network capitalism (Christian Fuchs) all refer to a post-industrial phase in which production, wealth and power are increasingly expressed in the form of information rather than material goods, and increasingly mediated through digital networks.

Criticisms of the network society concept point mainly to the danger, in focusing on the radical novelty of post industrial society, of overlooking important continuities between it and previous socio-economic formations. The main economic engine in network societies is still the drive to accumulate private capital, the market imperatives of competition and commodification still dominate, and the social and economic inequalities (both societal and global) characteristic of   market economies tend to widen rather than close. Labels such as informational capitalism or digital capitalism – used for example by sociologists Frank Webster and Dan Schiller – attempt to re-emphasise this fact.

While I would agree that what Castells calls the "new economy" brought into being by the internet is still driven by the same underlying dynamics of capitalist economics - I think this is a point that Castells himself would readily concede. In The Internet Galaxy chapter 3, e-Business and the New Economy, he makes it quite clear that the expansion of the new economy – “powered by information technology, dependent on self-programmable labour, and organised around computer networks” (Castells, M, 2001 b) - was driven by the primal capitalist urge to maximise returns through driving up productivity and competitiveness:

The financing of the new economy is the cornerstone of its existence... High valuation of potential innovation on the stock market, and its anticipation by venture capital, were the mechanisms that mobilised capital from all sources.. and channeled it into innovation. (Castells, M, 2001 c)

Castells, M, 2001 a, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society p275 p/back edition, OUP, Oxford
Castells, M, 2001 b, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society p99 p/back edition, OUP, Oxford
Castells, M, 2001 c, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society p104 p/back edition, OUP, Oxford

First things first: the letter string e-tivity is not a word. It is morphologically impossible and semantically meaningless. Tivity is not a unit of meaning in English, so e-tivity makes no more sense than, say, e-arning or e-vernment. In fact it is truly shocking that such a gross linguistic gaffe should have gained any currency among serious academics. So can we please agree to call them e-activities?

Second, while much of Salmon’s 5-stage e-activity model makes perfect sense, there is a problem (as Jones and Peachey discovered) with stage two – ‘online socialisation’. Socialisation is of course critical for the success of the other stages: information exchange, knowledge construction and development of new understanding. But socialisation cannot take place in a content vacuum, ‘sending and receiving messages’ that have nothing to do with the learning process. Socialisation in fact takes place in parallel with, and is part-and-parcel of, information exchange, knowledge construction etc, and continues as long as the e-activity itself continues.

So the 5 stage model should look more like this:

Zinny pondering knowledge theory

I’ve been thinking (while on my morning dogwalk) about two knowledge-theory dualisms mentioned in passing by Mayes and de Freitas in their review of learning models, which seem potentially useful conceptual tools in aligning course design with learning outcomes. The binary opposites in question are declarative and procedural knowledge on the one hand, and generic and domain-specific knowledge on the other.

As far as I can work out, declarative knowledge is explicit, conceptual and externalised knowledge of the kind that normally results from academic learning; as opposed to procedural knowledge which is implicit, instrumental, internalised knowledge of the kind we associate with skillful practice of any kind.

Domain-specific knowledge is knowledge of the data, concepts, and language particular to a distinct realm of knowledge such as physics or plumbing; while generic knowledge refers to the general learning abilities which enable people to become successful independent learners – skills like self-confidence, self-discipline, organisation, communication and collaboration skills, critical thinking and reflexivity.

Using a concept grid like this one you can position any learning outcome in relation to the two binary axes. So learning to ride a bicycle would be in the procedural / domain-specific quarter, while taking a course in project management would be located in the declarative / generic quadrant.

We can use this knowledge-type taxonomy to illuminate the knowledge theory clusters and learning models reviewed by Mayes and de Freitas. For example, models derived from behaviourist/associative learning theories begin with procedural learning of simple components and build up to declarative knowledge as components are integrated into conceptual systems. Models derived from cognitive/constructivist theories, on the other hand, usually begin with declarative learning of a domain’s broad unifying concepts, and proceed to more procedural forms as learners master domain-specific skills. Both associative and cognitive approaches tend to foreground domain-specific knowledge.

Models based on the learning networks/social practice perspective would seem to work in both directions, sometimes proceeding from the procedural to the declarative (when learning is practice-driven) and sometimes from the declarative to the procedural (when learning is primarily social and reflective in nature). The community of practice approach may also be best suited to providing the kind of learning environment which fosters generic skills such as communication, collaboration and critical thinking.

I tried my concept grid out on Zinny. "Rough!" she said: I think she thinks it needs a bit more work...

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References:

Mayes, T & de Freitas, S, 2004, Review of e-learning theories,frameworks and models: JISC eLearning Models Desk Study, Stage 2, available online in pdf format from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning_pedagogy/ (accessed 26/05/2007)

Dawn on the River Lea, Hackney

I am much taken with Diana Laurillard's model of learning as a conversation between learner and teacher. Formerly Professor of EdTech here at the OU and head of the government's eLearning Strategy Unit, Laurillard is now Chair of Learning with Digital Technologies at the Institute of Education. Her model of learning in HE is set out in her influential 2002 book Rethinking University Teaching, where she describes the teaching-learning process as a two-phase interaction between learner and teacher:

1) a discursive phase in which the teacher presents a new concept and students enter into a dialogue with the teacher, trying out the idea and its corresponding language, questioning and clarifying.

2) an interactive phase in which students engage with teacher-constructed tasks, attempting to put the new concept into practice, adapting their practice in response to feedback, and reflecting on their learning.

Building on the social constructivist learning theory of Vygotsky and Piaget, Laurillard describes this conversational framework as a “a continuing iterative dialogue between teacher and student, which reveals the participants’ conceptions and the variations between them… There is no escape from the need for dialogue, no room for mere telling, nor for practice without description, nor for experimentation without reflection, nor for student action without feedback.” (Laurillard, 2002)

The idea of learning as dialogue is not in itself new of course: it goes back to Protagoras and Socrates in the fifth century BCE. What is both new and highly relevant to eLearning course design is Laurillard's articulation of the dialogic learning process into five stages, each one associated with a distinctive type of learning technology.

The initial stage of learning, for example, she describes as apprehending; this is when new material is presented to the student, and corresponds to narrative forms of media such as print or video. The next stage - exploring - necessitates more interactive technologies such as a library or the web; and so on... The full typology is shown below.

Learning experience  Technology types
Apprehending             Narrative (eg print, video)
Exploring                   Interactive (eg library, web)
Discussing                 Communicative (eg seminar, online conference, blog)
Practising                  Adaptive (eg modelling/simulating/enacting a learning object or event)
Articulating                Productive (eg outputting a learning object or evidence of learning)

It has been suggested (see Mayes and de Freitas, p34) that Laurillard’s model of a continuing, iterative dialogue between teacher and student may be hard to sustain in the context of online/distant learning. I would argue that such a dialogue is at least as important in eLearning as it is in location-based higher education. And I know it is possible, because I have experienced it while a student on H808, The eLearning Professional.

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References:

Laurillard, D, 2002, Rethinking University Teaching: A Conversational Framework for the Effective Use of Learning Technologies, 2nd edition, London: RoutledgeFalmer

Mayes, T & de Freitas, S, 2004, Review of e-learning theories,frameworks and models: JISC eLearning Models Desk Study, Stage 2, available online in pdf format from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning_pedagogy/ (accessed 26/05/2007)