Fortnightly Mailing

A leaving speech

I stopped being chair of governors of The Sheffield College at the end of March 2021, after a 45 year connection. Here's the short speech I gave to an online staff meeting.

==

The invitation to speak caught me by surprise. It really is an honour. Today is my first day since 2008 without a Sheffield College role. To explain: 

In 1976 I did teaching practice here. In 1979 I got a permanent job here. In 2002 the College dismissed me as redundant. In 2008 the College appointed me a governor, on my second attempt. Until yesterday I was chair of governors. 

I’m going to talk about how I feel about the College, and then to offer three reflections.

What is a 45 year association with one institution like?

I’ll start with three snapshots: 

It is 1979

After teacher-training I’d worked for two years as a part-timer, cadging cars from friends to get between Chesterfield, Cleethorpes, Manchester, Scunthorpe, and Sheffield.  I’m being interviewed for my dream job as a Lecturer Grade 1 in Trade Union Studies at Granville College. As a part-timer I had often worn a so-called Chinese rickshaw driver’s jacket. And Doc Martens. Once I’d henna dyed my hair. Anxiously waiting after my interview I was called back by the panel: “We’d like to offer you the job: but only if you agree to smarten yourself up, put on a collar and tie, and wear a decent pair of shoes.”  Of course I swallowed my pride and said yes.  

Still 1979, it is my first team meeting

I’m wearing my new smart clothes. We are planning the coming term. Unknown to me, something is on the way up the inside of my trouser-leg. I shift my position. My knee sears with pain. I yell. I  reflexively start to hit my knee to kill whatever thing has done this to me. Next I tear off my trousers, to make sure that the thing - formerly an Autumn wasp - is dead. Rather anxious laughter ensues. I feel sheepish. My new colleagues look worried. Who exactly have they been landed with?

The 1980s now 

It’s the lunch break. A three-course student made and served meal in the subsidised staff restaurant. Over a  three-term cycle you could experience most of the culinary curriculum - including lambs’ brains au gratin. Afterwards there’d be coffee in the staff lounge, sort of “at the feet” of the Principal, the aptly-named Arthur Colledge, who was also the Regional Secretary of the lecturer’s union NATFHE. (Think about that for a minute….) Arthur, smoking his pipe, or knocking out the dottle, would converse intimidatingly with whoever was sitting nearby. The trick was to avoid catching his eye, to nod occasionally, but never to get drawn in, else you’d risk being made to feel a fool. 

As an aside, don’t do any of it Angela - not the pipe, not the dottle, not the intimidation.

Through these three snapshots I wanted to focus on what FE felt like at the time of my start in it.

But of course there’s a continuous “jostle” of other memories, of widely varying significance. Here are a few of them: 

• the annual staff/student summer cricket match on Granville College’s sports ground out towards Fox House - land and pavilion bought by a speculator and even now slowly going to ruin; 
• outright and unchallenged homophobia; 
• the City Council’s correct 1980s plan to set up a fully tertiary system, fatally weakened from the start by the Secretary of State’s decision to retain school sixth forms in the south west of the City; 
• guerrilla action by women staff taking down sexist calendars from male staff rooms; 
• the huge changes in Sheffield caused by deindustrialisation; 
• the giant, muddled institution that resulted in 1992 from the merger of Sheffield’s six FE colleges to form a Sheffield College nearly twice our current size, with over 100 locations; 
• leading a bitter and protracted industrial dispute about our lecturers’ contracts; 
• the creeping damage done by austerity over the last decade; 
• a full-to-bursting City Hall Ballroom for the union-run (but everyone attended) annual staff Christmas social; 
• the pain, anxiety and eventual liberation of being “restructured out” aged 50; 
• the long period when “things were just not quite right in the College”, when pride in what the  College does had somehow ebbed away; 
• my last three years here as chair during which we’ve all been engaged in turning the college around.

And I’ve ignored completely: 

• the tough collective experience we are going through with Covid;
  
• the long term harm the pandemic has done and will do to the fabric of the City; 
• and the completely admirable way in which you have responded to the pandemic.

Before I finish, I have three reflections:

Firstly, what makes FE so special? Researcher Beryl Tipton became particularly interested in what she terms “the multi-purpose educational function of FE”. She wrote, in 1973: 

“For in the heterogeneity of their educational and occupational backgrounds, its members of staff are probably unlike those of any other type of educational institution in the country”. 

She continued

“a college’s staff structure is almost a microcosm of the country’s social divisions featuring, as it does, all of the following: graduates and non-graduates; industrially experienced and non-experienced; craftsmen, white-collar workers, managers, social scientists and artists; men and women; and the relatively young through to the relatively old.” 

It was, above all, the heterogeneity, the incredible range in its workforce, that Tipton pinpoints, which made me excitedly feel at home as soon as I stepped into an FE college. It still does.

Secondly, what can make a college great? 

Above all it is its climate or culture. The vibe has to be right. The way that all roles are vulnerably interdependent on each other must be always in the background. Nobel prize winner and arms control expert Thomas Schelling put it this way

“Most of what we call civilisation depends on reciprocal vulnerability.” 

I believe that what is true for nations is true for organisations and is true for individuals. As chair I have tried to put this value into practice; I think governors have tried to do likewise; and I know that Angela shares this approach too. 

Finally, why is change for the better sometimes so hard? 

Because we don’t get or give enough time for things to run their course. If you make bread it takes the time it takes. If you lay concrete, you know it takes time to cure. If you grow veg you know that plants take the time they take to fruit. There are things you can do to improve the yield; sometimes you have to act fast - when frost threatens, say; but nature has to take its course. So, to get The Sheffield College back from its 2017 brink onto its current upward trajectory has taken you, has taken us, has taken our students, the time it has taken. Should you be impatient for improvement? Of course. But you must be patient too. 

To conclude: I wish The Sheffield College and you its staff, the very best for the future. From the side-lines, I know that I will see the College dealing with whatever challenges come its way; that I will see the College continue to go from strength to strength; that I will see the College, guided by a new strategy adopted yesterday by governors, being the anchor institution that the City of Sheffield needs and deserves.  

Thank you.

==

How algorithms manipulate the market

In September 2015 I took part in a symposium about "digital capitalism" organised by CRASSH (the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities). This culminated in an evening talk by Dan Schiller - Digital Capitalism: Stagnation and Contention? - with a main argument that:

in contrast to the unabashed triumphalism that greeted the rise of the Internet as a pole of growth during the 1990s, today we are living amid both persistent economic stagnation and escalating political contention over the structure and control of the world’s information infrastructure.

Last Friday I went to a related one-day conference - The Power Switch: How Power is Changing in a Networked World - also run by CRASSH.

One speaker – competition lawyer Ariel Ezrachi – gave a particularly eye-opening talk. (You can get a flavour of what some of the other speakers said in this 35 minute Talking Politics podcast, led by David Runciman. At some point videos of some or all of the event will (?) be available.)

Here’s the gist of Ezrachi's talk.

1. A popular premise is that the Internet is a blessing when it comes to competition. Except that "The invisible hand of competition is being displaced by a digitalized hand".
2. Monitoring of the market by the platform providers means you see what they want you to see, as in The Truman Show.
3. We think we are savvy because we ignore targeted adverts.
4. But it is much harder (impossible?) to escape the effects of dynamic and personalised pricing.
5. Systems know your location, how long you’ve been pondering a purchase, the path you took. You get offered lower prices if you first searched, than if you came direct. If you did not conclude a transaction you may find the prices falls.
6. You may be offered higher prices if you searched using a Macbook than a cheap Android tablet; or from a wealthy location. If you are a first time buyer you may get a lower-than-normal price: even lower if you seem to be a rich first time buyer (because getting a rich person’s sign-up is worth more than a poor person’s).
7. The net effect of this is a hidden and unrecognised anti-competitive interference in the operation of the market, in which the house always wins, and where there is a real problem of asymmetric information between buyer and seller. (Ranking of search results to put cheaper options lower down is another example of asymmetry. As is the way Uber operates; as will be the way that your “digital assistant” operates, using data about you to shape the prices it finds for you.)
8. In a shop you pay the list price or less; if you buy on the Internet the price will be the base price or more.
9. Users of mobile phones are stuck with only two platforms: Android and Apple, sitting underneath all mobile apps; and although Facebook is itself a super-platform, it is beholden to Google and Apple because the latter control the platforms through which mobile users access Facebook.
10. So, there is now an enormous concentration of power over the market – a new kind of power – in very few hands, with big scope to undermine new entrants, and reduced opportunities for disruptive innovation. (Thus Peter Thiel’s "competition is for losers".)

Summary. A fundamental change is taking place in the nature of market competition, with markets invisibly and continuously manipulated by bots and algorithms, making competitive pricing an illusion; and with power over the market infrastructure shifting (already shifted?) into very few hands, there are big and poorly understood risks to economic and overall well-being.

Clayton Wright's Educational Technology and Education Conferences, January to June 2016

Clayton Wright - source

The 34th Educational Technology & Education Conferences listing [93 pages, 1.3 MB DOC] has been published by Clayton Wright.

Here is Clayton's covering note to the list.

The 34th edition of the conference list covers selected events that primarily focus on the use of technology in educational settings and on teaching, learning, and educational administration. Only listings until June 2016 are complete as dates, locations, or Internet addresses (URLs) were not available for a number of events held from July 2016 onward. In order to protect the privacy of individuals, only URLs are used in the listing as this enables readers of the list to obtain event information without submitting their e-mail addresses to anyone. A significant challenge during the assembly of this list is incomplete or conflicting information on websites and the lack of a link between conference websites from one year to the next.

An explanation for the content and format of the list can be found at http://newsletter.alt.ac.uk/2011/08/why-distribute-documents-in-ms-word-or-openoffice-for-an-international-audience/. A Word or an OpenOffice format is used to enable people with limited or high-cost Internet access to find a conference that is congruent with their interests or obtain conference abstracts or proceedings.

Alphabet

This makes me smile every time I pass it.

Paul Mason's Postcapitalism - talk and discussion

"Ask yourself. How can eight men undercut that machine [washing cars]? And what is it doing to the society we live in that eight men, often with zero legality of migration status, can undercut that machine. That's the society you live in. And that's why I have no qualms or squeamishness about promoting automation. But we have to do it socially."

Here's Paul Mason talking at length about the ideas in his book, Postcapitalism - a guide to our future, at a CRASSH seminar in Cambridge. 45 minute talk, with great clear audio, introduced by John Naughton, followed by 25 minutes of discussion. [Review of the book, by David Runciman.]

FE Area Based Reviews should start by making an assessment of need

[Also on LinkedIn. Header image added 3/10/2015. Small edits made 4/10/2015. Addendum from evidence by Martin Donnelly and Peter Lauener to the 19/10/2015 Public Accounts Committee added 20/10/2015]

Until 2002 I was employed in The Sheffield College. For the last seven years I have been a governor there. The college is a big urban FE college spread across four main sites, with a turnover of over £50m.

In 2000 I was a bit involved in The Sheffield Review, after The Sheffield College was put into Special Measures by the FEFC and the then Education Secretary, David Blunkett.  Two Governors were "imposed" (Bob Fryer and FEFC's Dr Terry Melia) and George (now Sir George) Sweeney was parachuted in as Principal.

Here is a link to the executive summary of The Sheffield Review: http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/9912/. (I have a hard copy of the full review, but there seem not to be any publicly available digital versions.)

One very striking aspect of the Sheffield Review's method, which seems to differ from what is currently envisaged for ABRs, was that the FEFC's Terry Melia was very hot indeed on working out what the need in Sheffield was, and only then moving on to what provision was required to meet the need.

Of course the funding situation then was not as it is now, and is expected to be even worse after November's Comprehensive Spending Review. So funding will be insufficient to meet needs. And working out need in a LEP area such as Greater Manchester, or Sheffield City Region is a bigger job than "only" in one big local authority area. Nevertheless, ABRs ought, for moral as well as practical reasons, have that baseline assessment of numbers/need at an early stage.

From what I can make out, having attended the introductory meeting for college governors about Area Based Reviews, and having kept my eyes and ears open, it seems that ABRs will look at what there is on the ground by way of supply, and then move on to considering how that supply might be better and/or more cheaply provided. [Note that this approach is not the one that Government Officials described to the Public Accounts Committee on 19/10/2015. See Addendum below.]

The gap between supply and need would thus never be analysed.

This flaw in the ABR process (it is not the only one...) should be fixed.

Addendum - 20/10/2015

Extract from the oral evidence taken on 19/10/2015 by the Public Accounts Committee Inquiry into the financial sustainability in the further education sector. Emphasis added. For the full transcript go to http://goo.gl/w2It35.

Q50 - Chair [Meg Hillier, MP]: It sounds like it could be a bit haphazard. In terms of the future shape of the sector, FE colleges particularly have a capital asset and a physical presence, which constrains who they deliver to, to a degree, but also is an important local provision for people who may not be able to travel in the same way that people might do to university. Does the Department have no strategic oversight of what the general geographical spread should be of these institutions, and do you not have any alarms or worries about how area-based reviews may work or throw up mergers that might not deliver for all residents in a particular area?

Martin Donnelly [Permanent Secretary at BIS]: We are very concerned to ensure that there are available learning opportunities for people throughout England—in this case. Perhaps I could ask Peter to comment in a bit more detail about how we take that into account as we go through the process of supporting colleges and the area review.

Peter Lauener [Chief Executive of the Skills Funding Agency and the Education Funding Agency]: First of all, a bit of context. As Martin said, there has been a long-term process of rationalisation and merger in the further education sector since incorporation in 1993. When a merger happens it does not mean that buildings are necessarily closed, although there is sometimes a separate process of reducing the number of buildings in a particular area, if there are too many; but very often you get distributed leadership and management over a wider area, which produces savings and efficiency, and improvements in effectiveness.

As we go to the area reviews, the big challenge with those is precisely, I think, what you said—to start with what is needed for learners, for communities, for business, and then work back from that to structure. So it is not a sort of “move the deckchairs around”. It is what is needed in this area to provide the best possible service to the three groups—learners, the community and employers—and improve progression through to higher skill levels. It is a quite a challenging agenda.

Citizen Maths - powerful ideas in action

[Cross posted, with some very minor changes, from LinkedIn.]

Since late 2012 I have been closely involved (as "project director") in the creation of Citizen Maths, a free open online maths course at Level 2. I last wrote about it here just over a year ago. 

Citizen Maths is a free open online maths resource for:

• self-motivated individuals who want to develop their grasp of maths at Level 2;
• employers/unions who want to provide staff (or, in the case of trade unions, their members) with a practical and flexible learning and development opportunity in maths;
• colleges and other learning providers who want to give enrolled learners an additional or alternative route to improving their maths.

To make use of Citizen Maths, learners need access to (and knowledge of how to use) a desktop or laptop computer with a broadband internet connection.

Here's a four-minute screen-cast about Citizen Maths from a learner's point of view:

 

Who is behind Citizen Maths?

Citizen Maths is funded by the Ufi Charitable Trust. It is developed by Calderdale College, with the UCL Institute of Education, OCR, and with advice from the Google Course Builder team.

What does Citizen Maths consist of?

We’ve designed Citizen Maths to involve between five and 10 hours of study for each powerful idea. It it built up from:

1. short “to camera” videos and explanatory screencasts, by experienced maths tutors Paula Philpott and Noel-Ann Bradshaw; 
2. activities, tasks and other practical challenges, using

• applets that provide an onscreen manifestation of a powerful idea
• the Scratch programming environment
• standard tools like pencil and paper, and spreadsheets.

There are also frequent “low stakes” quizzes to help users check their understanding.

Why “powerful ideas in action”?

Citizen Maths engages people in familiar activity to reveal the ‘maths inside’, focusing on the way that maths has an immediate relevance to the problems we all of us have to solve every day. These problems could range from comparing deals and prices on groceries and creating a household budget, to understanding a payslip, creating sales forecasts, keeping track of savings and pensions, controlling a production process, or making political judgements. By putting problems in meaningful contexts, learners who do Citizen Maths will begin to grasp the power of mathematical ideas in action.

Which powerful ideas does Citizen Maths cover?

There will be five. During autumn 2014 we ran a proof of concept trial of Citizen Maths based on the powerful idea proportion. From mid October 2015 Citizen Maths will embrace, in addition, representation and uncertainty. From spring 2016 here will be two further powerful ideas: pattern and measurement. Here's a summary of the scope and importance of each.

1. Proportion is about mixing, sharing, comparing, scaling and trading off. It sits behind many aspects of everyday maths, for example when you are sharing out costs, or altering a mixture, comparing amounts, or scaling something up or down.
2. Uncertainty includes making decisions, playing, and simulating. It offers a way of thinking about uncertainty in personal and work-related situations, for example when making sense of risks to health, deciding whether to take out an extended warranty, or playing card games.
3. Representation is about interpreting data and charts, comparing groups. It recognises how much we are influenced by data and the presentation of data, for example in media reports of opinion polls, interpreting stories about health risks, or comparing our own household income to that in the rest of the country.
4. Pattern is about appreciating structure as in tiling, or knowing how to construct such structure. Pattern focuses on how mathematics can find and describe the regularities in both the natural and the man-made world, for example in the symmetries of animals and plants or in the design of buildings.
5. Measurement includes reading a scale, converting, estimating, and quantifying. It picks up on the importance of measures and measurement in everyday and working life, for example when dispensing medication, converting currencies or estimating the size of a crowd.

To find out more, go to https://citizenmaths.com/. There is also this Slideshare presentation:

Robotics - someone who ran DARPA's Robotics Challenge looks ahead

This article [10 page PDF - web-based version here] is by Gill Pratt, until recently responsible for the DARPA Robotics Challenge. Pratt starts by explaining why a "cambrian explosion" in the pace of development is on the way, highlighting eight technical drivers that are at work:

1. Exponential growth in computing performance
2. Improvements in electromechanical design tools and numerically controlled manufacturing tools
3. Improvements in electrical energy storage
4. Improvements in electronics power efficiency
5. Exponential expansion of the availability and performance of local wireless digital communications
6. Exponential growth in the scale and performance of the Internet
7. Exponential growth of worldwide data storage
8. Exponential growth in global computation power

He goes on to summarise four "big ideas" that between then represent "Cloud Robotics":

• Memory-based Autonomy
• High-Speed Sharing of Experiences
• Learning from Imagination
• Learning from People

The article concludes with a speculation - with echoes of ideas advanced by Paul Mason in Post Capitalism: A Guide to Our Future - about the implications (of the explosion) for the economy and the workforce.

Pretty it ain't.

On the long-term future of artificial intelligence

Minor edits made 19/8/2015

Stuart Russell is co-author (with Peter Norvig) of the very highly regarded text book "Artificial Intelligence - A Modern Approach".

This 30 minute talk provides a striking, accessible and ethically focused explanation of what AI is, where it is headed, and why its practitioners need to find ways of making AI "provably beneficial", if it is not to have, long term unforeseen and harmful consequences. (Cory Doctorow has more on the talk here.)

A ten year old interview

Reda Sadki reminded me about an interview I did by email for Epic (now Leo) in July 2005 in which I'd banged on about wanting to ban the term blended learning.

The interview was long gone from the Epic/Leo site. But the Internet Archive's trusty Wayback Machine had it, and all but two of the links still worked, at least after a fashion.

I re-read it, initially with trepidation, then with quite a bit of relief. Here it is. (I've fixed the dud links and added one to a review I subsequently did of The user illusion, cutting consciousness down to size by Tor Nørretranders.)

Q What's your INTEREST in learning/online learning?

I spent 25 years working in Further Education, teaching and developing TUC courses for trade union representatives. Through the TUC I got involved in pre-internet online distance learning courses, using a Swedish conferencing system called PortaCOM. I applied what I’d learned in the creation of LeTTOL, a web-based online course for teachers wanting to learn how to teach on-line – http://www.lettol.ac.uk/, which, several thousand learners later, won a National Training Award in 2003. My interests now center, through ALT, on establishing learning technology as a discipline, and learning technologist as a profession, and in the other half of the week mainly on helping organisations implement sustainable e-learning.

Q What interactive technology do you use and have at HOME?

Several radios and a telly. All four people in my household have networked computers, one of which is a Mac, and one of which is used for making music. My sons use iPODs. No Digital TV. No games machines. No self-filling fridge. I have and use a lot of books, which you could class as an interactive technology.

Q What stands out as your MOST EFFECTIVE learning experience?

A week training to be a trade union studies tutor. Extremely challenging. Plenty of feedback. Combining learning about a curriculum with learning how to tutor it. Reading “Inside the Black Box – Raising Standards through Classroom Assessment” by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam. An in-a-nutshell summary of why giving learners timely and motivating formative feedback is the most important determinant of how fast and well they learn. http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/education/publications/blackbox.html [Now available here: http://www.webcitation.org/6VELZxcop - SS 28/6/2015.]

Q What stands out as your LEAST EFFECTIVE learning experience?

A year training to be a further education teacher. Diffuse. Lacking in practicality. Thin on (useful) theory.

Q Any really NEW AND INNOVATIVE IDEAS out there?

When I see the word “innovative” my heart sinks, even more so when I see the words “really new and innovative”. This is because I believe in honing and improving ideas and methods which work, rather than moving to the next fad, and in e-learning there are a lot of fads. Of course the danger with this approach is that you can be blind to necessary or beneficial innovations. So, if pushed I would say that applications like http://www.jot.com/ which enable users to build Wikis without any special syntax are worth keeping an eye on, as are tools like http://search.yahoo.com/cc which finds content across the Web that has a Creative Commons license.

Q What do you want that DOESN'T YET EXIST in learning/online learning?

Machine translation! But this interesting piece about “The Google Translator” - http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2005-05-22-n83.html - perhaps shows that something sitting in the background which enables people to converse with each other online when using different languages is not that far off.

Q Any views on the phrase and concept 'BLENDED LEARNING'?

The term provided a bolt hole for traditionalists wanting to defend face-to-face teaching against the encroachment of online learning.

Q Any views on GAMES in learning/online learning?

I trust my sons’ judgement that the value of games in learning is exaggerated. But I think I am probably missing something.

Q Any views on INTERACTIVE TV in learning/online learning?

In a previous role I helped develop “Keep IT In The Family”. This was a simple quiz – a game, even – to test a user’s IT knowledge, at three levels of difficulty, and to recommend suitable IT courses depending on the user’s knowledge. It was served from The Sheffield College and was freely available over the Internet, or to Telewest DiTV subscribers. At one point, judged by the number of users, Keep IT In The Family was one of Telewest’s most popular interactive services. That said, I feel that learning is a category of activity which normally requires learners to be able to concentrate, free from interruption, with a means of making complex inputs (currently using a keyboard). TVs typically neither have the necessary input devices, nor is a living room a conducive environment for learning.

Q Any views on MOBILE DEVICES in learning/online learning?

I’ve not yet read “JISC Landscape Study on the use of Mobile and Wireless Technologies for Learning and Teaching in the Post-16 Sector”. Certainly the pressure is now on content developers to make sure that content will run adequately on a wider range of access devices than just a PC or a Mac. And users of mobile devices are paying for data by volume rather than at a flat rate. So they may not thank you for media-rich content, even if it is educationally effective.

Q Any views on OPEN SOURCE in learning/online learning?

Open Source. I use Firefox and Thunderbird as my main browser and email client. Moodle, for example, is certainly presenting an interesting challenge to LMS vendors. But in 5 years time I think there will continue to be a “mixed economy” of software products in the provision of e-learning.

Open Content. Initiatives like MIT’s Open CourseWare - http://ocw.mit.edu/ - and the stunning W3 Schools web site - http://www.w3schools.com/ - show the power and significance of freely available e-learning content.

Q What's your favourite PHRASE/QUOTE/EPIGRAM in learning/online learning?

Because Jacob Bronowski’s “The Ascent of Man” was so influential, and because so many of his quotes make you think, I was disappointed to find that I’d been wrongly attributing “A word is worth a thousand pictures” to him, including the accent. It is still my favourite phrase in learning/online learning, mind.

Q Could you recommend a PIECE OF RESEARCH in learning/online learning?

Learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning: a systematic and critical review. This report, by Frank Coffield, David Moseley, Elaine Hall, and Kathryn Ecclestone, is freely available for download from the Learning and Skills Development Agency. It critically reviews the literature on learning styles, and it calls into question the way in which learning styles inventories are in widespread use, often with next to no evidence as to their validity. http://www.lsda.org.uk/pubs/dbaseout/download.asp?code=1543 [Now available here: http://www.webcitation.org/66qgBO959 - SS 28/6/2015.]

Q Could you recommend a BOOK in learning/online learning?

The user illusion, cutting consciousness down to size by Tor Nørretranders (ISBN: 0140230122). [Review here http://fm.schmoller.net/2007/03/16_bits_per_sec.html - SS 28/5/2015.] More about the nature of consciousness than about learning, but provides convincing evidence that the conscious mind is only able to deal with a tiny proportion of the data it receives - perhaps as little as 30 bits per second. The mind then creates a “media-rich” consciousness from this thin data-stream. We’ve evolved to interpret the sensually complex real world in an effective way; but that does not mean that our brains are good at effectively interpreting media-rich learning materials, which should hence be used (if used) with great care.

Q Could you recommend a WEBSITE in learning/online learning?

W3 Schools - http://www.w3schools.com/.

Q If you were to pick one CONFERENCE to attend in learning/online learning, what would it be?

ALT-C. Why? I work for the organisation which runs it. ALT-C has enough depth and breadth for an astute delegate to be able to plot a varied, interesting, and rewarding course through it. The booking deadline is 12/8/2005.

Q Any words/phrases/ideas you'd like to BAN from learning/online learning?

Word. Blended.
Phrase. Compelling content.
Idea. Digital natives and immigrants (which is not to say that Mark Prensky’s Digital Game-based Learning (ISBN: 0071363440) has nothing useful to say – both it and he have!).

Q Anything in learning/online learning that you strongly believed in, on which you have now CHANGED YOUR MIND?

I used strongly to believe that learning without some face-to-face contact between learners is unavoidably and badly second best. Thus online distance courses just had to start and preferably finish with a face-to-face session, and if possible have face-to-face activity in the middle. I now know that if the course design is right, and if the learners are suitably experienced – both big ifs - this is not the case.

Q Anything else you'd like to add?

The impact of “always on” wireless connectivity on learning/online learning will be bigger than many people realise. Partly because of how access devices will change (getting smaller, more multipurpose, and in some respects less usable), and partly because of how different kinds of data will be available to be integrated into the content (for example positional, location-specific, or “friends-close-by” data).

Hope you found the questions stimulating. Thanks for your answers.

Video and Online Learning: Critical Reflections and Findings From the Field

A terrific article by Anna Hansch, Lisa Hillers, Katherine McConachie, Christopher Newman, Thomas Schildhauer, and Philipp Schmidt.

Well, I think it is terrific, because if chimes with so much of my experience working on the design and development of Citizen Maths and FutureLearn's Assessment for Learning in STEM Teaching, and as a committed MOOC learner.

Here's the abstract:

Video is an essential component of most Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and other forms of online learning. This exploratory study examines video as an instructional medium and investigates the following research questions:

• How is video designed, produced, and used in online learning contexts, specifically with regard to pedagogy and cost?
• What are the benefits and limitations of standardizing the video production process?

This report presents an overview of current video practice: the widespread use of video and its costs, the relevance of production value for learning, the pedagogical considerations of teaching online, and the challenges of standardizing production. Findings are based on a literature review, our observation of online courses, and the results of 12 semi-structured interviews with practitioners in the field of educational video production. Based on these findings, we have developed a set of recommendations designed to raise awareness and stimulate critical reflection on video’s role in online learning. Additionally, we discuss some need for further research on the effectiveness of video as a pedagogical tool and highlight under-explored uses of the medium, such as live video.

You can access the full paper from http://goo.gl/MvXXCs. There is also this shorter version by Katherine McConachie and Philipp Schmidt on Medium.

The productivity puzzle: bad news for the "education, education, education" crowd

Here is an eye-catching section from Ricardo Hausmann's "The Education Myth":

And there is more bad news for the “education, education, education” crowd: Most of the skills that a labor force possesses were acquired on the job. What a society knows how to do is known mainly in its firms, not in its schools. At most modern firms, fewer than 15% of the positions are open for entry-level workers, meaning that employers demand something that the education system cannot – and is not expected – to provide.

When presented with these facts, education enthusiasts often argue that education is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for growth. But in that case, investment in education is unlikely to deliver much if the other conditions are missing. After all, though the typical country with ten years of schooling had a per capita income of $30,000 in 2010, per capita income in Albania, Armenia, and Sri Lanka, which have achieved that level of schooling, was less than $5,000. Whatever is preventing these countries from becoming richer, it is not lack of education.

A country’s income is the sum of the output produced by each worker. To increase income, we need to increase worker productivity. Evidently, “something in the water,” other than education, makes people much more productive in some places than in others. A successful growth strategy needs to figure out what this is.

Make no mistake: education presumably does raise productivity. But to say that education is your growth strategy means that you are giving up on everyone that has already gone through the school system – most people over 18, and almost all over 25. It is a strategy that ignores the potential that is in 100% of today’s labor force, 98% of next year’s, and a huge number of people who will be around for the next half-century. An education-only strategy is bound to make all of them regret having been born too soon.

Hausmann is former Chief Economist of the Inter-American Development Bank, and Professor of the Practice of Economic Development at Harvard University.

 

Prevent death on the roads by better treatment of obstructive sleep apnoea

Edited image of crash site from BBC News

In August 2006 my nephew Toby was killed by a truck whose driver, Colin Wrighton, an obstructive sleep apnoea sufferer, had "blacked out" (Wrighton's phrase) at the wheel. The crash-scene is above.

I wrote in Fortnightly Mailing about the issue in the years following the CPS decision not to prosecute Wrighton. Examples:

• March 2008 - Joined up government needed to prevent road deaths (after we submitted written evidence about sleep apnoea to Parliament's Transport Committee);
• August 2008 - Coroner calls for Government action on sleep apnoea (after representing my family at Toby's inquest);
• May 2009 - Finding and treating lorry drivers with sleep apnoea (after my MP Meg Munn gave an outstanding speech about sleep apnoea in an adjournment debate in the House of Commons).

Last week we launched the Four-week wait campaign for the treatment of obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome [22p PDF], an attempt to get renewed attention in the UK on the dangers of untreated obstructive sleep apnoea, and, in particular, to guarantee that vocational drivers can be treated for the condition within four weeks, thereby limiting or entirely eliminating the need for them to surrender their license and their livelihood following a diagnosis.

Today, Radio 4's iPM programme broadcast a 15 minute piece about OSA, featuring interviews from 2008 with my sister and brother in law (Toby's parents), and with Colin Wrighton; and a new, long and informative interview with Professor John Stradling, a sleep specialist who is closely involved in the four week wait campaign. Here is a recording of the interview [20MB MP3 file - you may need to "right click" and save the file locally in order to play it]. Or you should be able to stream it from the BBC's web site. I've also uploaded a five-page text transcript of the programme [23kB PDF].

If you want to help us achieve our objectives, write to your MP urging him or her to press the Department of Health, NICE, DVLA, and HSE to work together to ensure that vocational drivers diagnosed with obstructive sleep apnoea are given a cast iron guarantee to be treated within less than 4 weeks. Take particular note of the BBC's interview with John Stradling, when he talks about:

• the proportion of heavy goods vehicle drivers with OSA (~15%);
• the proportion of road accidents due to excessive daytime sleepiness (~20%);
• the extent to which, when an articulated lorry jackknifes, this is normally the consequence of the driver nodding off.

Thank you. 

Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive matters more and more

Here are some links to a couple of past posts about the Internet Archive, which is playing a crucial role in archiving the Web and digital artefacts such as films, games and software:

• 13/3/2009 - Brewster Kahle - the man behind the Wayback Machine;
• 8/10/2012 - Brewster Kahle and the love of books - physical and digital.

Two recent pieces give added emphasis to the importance of Kahle's work, from different angles:

• 26/1/2015 - The Cobweb: Can the Internet be archived? by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker;
• 28/1/2015 - As Google abandons its past, Internet archivists step in to save our collective memory, by Andy Baio.

Clayton Wright's Educational Technology 32nd Conference Listing, January to June 2015

Clayton Wright - source

The 32nd Educational Technology & Education Conferences Listing [90 pages, 1.15 MB DOC] has been published by Clayton Wright.

Here are the first two paragraphs of Clayton's covering note to the list.

The 32^nd edition of the conference list covers selected events that primarily focus on the use of technology in educational settings and on teaching, learning, and educational administration. Only listings until June 2015 are complete as dates, locations, or Internet addresses (URLs) were not available for a number of events held from July 2015 onward. In order to protect the privacy of individuals, only URLs are used in the listing as this enables readers of the list to obtain event information without submitting their e-mail addresses to anyone. A significant challenge during the assembly of this list is incomplete or conflicting information on websites and the lack of a link between conference websites from one year to the next.  

An explanation for the content and format of the list can be found at http://newsletter.alt.ac.uk/2011/08/why-distribute-documents-in-ms-word-or-openoffice-for-an-international-audience/. A Word or an OpenOffice format is used to enable people with limited or high-cost Internet access to find a conference that is congruent with their interests or obtain conference abstracts or proceedings. Consider using the “Find” tool under Microsoft Word’s “Edit” tab or similar tab in OpenOffice to locate the name of a particular conference, association, city, or country. If you enter the country “Singapore” in the “Find” tool, all conferences that occur in Singapore will be highlighted. Or, enter the word “research” or “assessment”. (Note that key words such as “research”, “assessment” or “MOOCs” may not be present in the conference title, yet these topics could be discussed during a particular conference.) Then, “cut and paste” a list of suitable events for your colleagues.