E-Learning Environments team blog

Each year the ‘Horizon Report’ from the New Media Consortium tells us what’s up and coming in terms of technology in education.  The preview has been released (you’ll need to register but it’s painless) – the full report is out next month but this is a useful summary. Here’s a potted version:

What’s coming:

• This year: mobile apps and tablet computing
• 2-3 years: game-based learning and learning analytics
• 4-5 years: gesture-based computing & the ‘internet of things’ (small network aware smart physical objects)

Trends:

• Moving education from providing information to helping students evaluate & make sense of it
• Shift from F2F to online learning, providing sometimes better learning environments than in physical campuses
• Need for faster and easier access to academic and social networks, and focus on just-in-time and ‘found’ learning
• Expectations of cloud-based and device-independent applications and services
• Move to challenge-based and active learning often using smart devices to connect curriculum with real life problems
• Move to more collaborative ways of working – collective intelligence wins out over silos.  Use of GoogleDocs, wikis, Skype etc for teamwork and communication with the tool having a role in ‘immortalising’ the process and participants’ perspectives

Challenges:

• Finding appropriate evaluation metrics, beyond citations etc – things like re-tweeting, tagging, mentions in blogs, reader ratings
• Developing digital literacy skills – for student and staff who may not realise that their students need their help
• Competition and economic pressures driving creative approaches such as streaming of introductory courses – but there is a need to engage students on a deeper level too
• Institutional barriers to engaging with technologies – innovation with technology seen as outside scope of academics’ roles
• New modes of scholarship are challenging institutional libraries and research managers as students and researchers use alternative sources of information and tools

All in all a good read – looking forward to the full version.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/steveharris/3917314476/

Through surveys and focus groups it has become clear that students increasingly regard the UCL online environment as part of their learning experience. Indeed much of the drive towards ‘total Moodle’ at UCL comes from perceptions of student demand; “it’s what learners expect nowadays“. Nevertheless it is sometimes difficult to determine exactly what those expectations are.  It is sometimes – and quite understandably – challenging for students to describe their ‘model’ learning environment.

This may be set to change with the publication of the National Union of Students’ charter on Technology in Higher Education (2011), which has been developed after consultation with the sector and students. The charter, announced at the Future of Technology in Education (FOTE) conference last Friday by Emily-Ann Nash of the NUS  Higher Education Committee aims to set out “best practice for the use of technology in higher education, for teaching & learning and how technology can improve the student experience“.

The idea is that students and their respective student unions will be pushing to make sure technology is high on the institutional agenda so that “graduates are equipped and ready for the 21st century environment“.

The 10 points of the charter cover; clear ICT strategy, staff development, training and support for staff and students, accessibility, online administration, linking technology-enhanced learning and employability, investment in using technology to enhance learning and teaching, research into student demand and finally that technologies should enhance teaching and learning but not be used as a replacement to existing effective practice.

In a sense this is much what learning technologists across the sector have been lobbying for for years, but what is really significant is that the NUS here claims to articulate student expectations in quite a specific (and measurable) way. It will be interesting to see what effect it has on student demands.

The charter builds on the HEFCE commissioned NUS report Student Perspectives on Technology – demand, perceptions and training needs (2010).

The annual Horizon Report, published by the ‘New Media Consortium’ tries to predict which technologies are going to be important for higher education over the next 5 years. It’s actually a very good read.  The 2011 edition is just out now at: http://www.nmc.org/pdf/2011-Horizon-Report.pdf. Here’s a potted version:

Key trends, as in 2010, are:

• Abundance of resources and relationships made accessible via the internet is challenging the roles of educators and institutions.
• People expect to work wherever and whenever they want.
• Increasingly collaborative world of work is prompting reflection on the nature of students’ projects.
• Increasing use of cloud-based technologies and decentralised IT support.

Critical challenges:

• Digital media literacy is a key skill for all, but not well-defined nor universally taught. Pace of change of technology exacerbates problem.
• Difficulty of finding metrics for evaluating new forms of scholarly publishing.
• Economic pressures and new educational models are challenging traditional models of the university.
• Staff and students are struggling to keep up with pace of technological change , and with information overload.

The report describes the top six ‘technologies to watch’. Open content and visual data analysis have disappeared, and  new in this year are game-based learning and ‘Learning Analytics’ (which looks intriguing).  They have three ‘horizons’ and the report describes the technologies in detail – and points to case studies.

Technologies to watch in the near term (12 months)

• E-books, e-readers with note-taking facilities, some augmentation of functions to allow immersive experiences and social interaction.
• Mobiles – increasingly users’ first choice for internet access.

Technologies to watch in 2-3 years

• Augmented reality – layering info on top of representation of the real world: access to place-based information.
• Game-based learning, from simple individual/small group games to massively multiplayer online games – ability to foster collaboration, problem solving, procedural thinking.

Technologies to watch in 4-5 years

• Gesture-based computing
• Learning analytics, along with data gathering and analysis tools to study student engagement, performance and practice in order to inform curriculum & teaching design and enhance the student experience.

The new JISC guide Effective Assessment in a Digital Age has just been published. Assessment lies at the heart of the learning experience and this guide draws together recent JISC reports and case studies to explore the relationship between technology-enhanced assessment and feedback practices and meaningful, well-supported learning experiences. Effective Assessment in a Digital Age complements the excellent  Effective Practice in a Digital Age, the 2009 JISC guide to learning and teaching with technology, and Effective practice with e-Assessment (JISC 2007) by focusing on the potential enhancement to assessment and feedback practices offered by both purpose-designed and more familiar technologies.

Many of you will have come across Wordle a web site that generates “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. Worldle describes itself as a ‘toy’ but may have a more serious application. Derek Morrison, one of the authors of Transforming Higher Education Through Technology Enhanced Learning a new book from the The Higher Education Academy has used  Wordle to generate a visual representation of the text for each chapter. As he says “As well as providing an aesthetic and navigation artifact for web sites they may also provide useful meta information about the relative emphases in the content”, and in his blog entry provides links to some other educational suggestions for Wordle.

I recently started a Masters course at the Open University in Technology-enhanced learning and was pleased to see one of the first references for discussion came from Dr Ian Rowlands who is at the Centre for Publishing here at UCL. The focus was a fascinating 2008 report Information behaviour of the researcher of the future commissioned by the British Library and the JISC about the ‘Google Generation‘ born after 1993 and described by Dr Rowlands as ‘brought up in an immersive, rich and media-interactive culture’.

The report was highlighted again following UCL’s involvement with the recent BBC2 series The Virtual Revolution.

The aim of the report was to find out if there was something ‘qualitatively different’ about this new generation and if so, as they migrate through school, university and become academics and researchers, what should the British Library be doing to cope with those changes. The team analysed a number of websites young people used and identified a distinctive pattern of search behaviour.

In a UCL interview Prof David Nicholas, Head of UCL Information Studies, suggests young users “skitter over the surface of the web rather than going deep into particular areas.. they don’t understand how to evaluate information – they have developed a ‘pick and mix’ mentality”. Of course without longitudinal studies it is hard to say this is really ‘different’. Furthermore the ‘generation’ terminology may be misleading. As Prof Nicholas remarks “adults behave similarly – we’ve all become the ‘Google generation’…it’s the way we all work these days”.

Dr Rowlands presents the research in an Open University webcast The Google Generation A Crisis of Information Literacy?.