I’ve finally uploaded the screencast of my keynote from Games:EDU, back in May. Actually, the majority of this relates to any undergraduate teaching in a typical university. Inappropriate strategic goals, growing mountains of paperwork, innovation prevention, the bare pass student and traditional lectures all pop up as challenges – encouraging students to form effective communities of practice and exploiting technology to extend the reach of the university pop up as part of the solution.
See it here, or on screencast.com:
Every so often something happens which makes me extra glad that I live in Scotland. Currently its the ConDem government rushing ahead with their plans to take schools out of local authority control (and into the control of anybody else who wants to run them, including for-profit companies).
First up, Becta was summarily dismissed. This has had a mixed reception amongst teachers – with reports of the agency wasting some of its money, or some of its services not being used by all schools. A good collation of responses here, courtesy of OLDaily. (The British Journal of Education Technology is owned by Becta currently – I presume and hope that arrangements will be made to transfer ownership before Becta closes for good)
Whereas in Scotland, LTS is not being closed. I doubt very much that every spending decision made by LTS is the best decision possible – but there is a lot of good work coming out of LTS, and some very dedicated people who work hard on making schools better, supporting teachers and supporting a forward looking curriculum.
Michael Gove outlined plans to encourage the best schools in England and Wales to leave local authority control (as a first step to taking all schools outside of local authority control), and to make it easier for parents and companies to start new schools. The BBC’s initial coverage of both didn’t delve too deep into the possible problems – with naysayers given relatively small soundbits on pieces about new academies and free schools. Schools (such as the new academies) which have been rated as ‘outstanding’ will also be free from future inspections. Even though there is now an example of an outstanding school turned academy failing a subsequent inspection.
Mike Baker finally provided some analysis on Saturday, which includes some worthwhile observations.
On local authority control over schools:
Perhaps the most misleading, and frequently repeated, claim is that becoming an academy allows schools to “escape local authority control”.
This is ridiculous because local councils no longer have “control” of schools.
… Town halls no longer determine how schools spend their money, what or how they teach, or how they are held accountable.
Schools are constrained in many ways. But these constraints come from national government or national bodies, be it the national curriculum, national tests, Ofsted, or government legislation on issues such as safeguarding or Every Child Matters.
What do local authorities do?
Their last remaining influence is in the provision of school places, organisation of the school admissions process, and as the stretcher-bearers when schools fail. …
They provide vital services such as educational psychologists and special educational need support and more humdrum, but essential, functions such as payroll management and legal advice.
And with local authorities having little actual control over schools, there is really one reason driving the academy agenda – money:
… academy status brings a cash uplift of 10% or more.
This is the money otherwise held back by town halls for central education services. For a large secondary school that could be £400,000 a year.
Many heads believe they can make better use of that money themselves, even though they may continue to purchase some services from the local authority.
This hints at one way in which academies will be able to save money. Limiting their use of central psychological services and special needs support. Cutting back on support for the most expensive pupils – i.e. those with the greatest need – will free up more money for prestige facilities (to attract better students) and better pay (to take the best teachers away from other schools). And even to allow companies running schools to profit from the public purse and parent contributions.
As Mike Baker’s analysis points out, there will be little in terms of academic freedom or control over allocated budget to distinguish a local authority school and a new academy or free school. All that is left is whether or not the school contributes to a local fund for specialist services to support the most needy (academies won’t), whether the people running the school can make a profit (yes for academies), and whether voters actually have any power to effect change in their local schools (academies “unlike local councils … cannot be turfed out by parents and local voters.”).
As I say, every so often something happens that makes me glad that I live in Scotland.
Related:
The Guardian asks head teachers if they will opt for academy status. Not all are in a hurry – those that are tempted are tempted by the extra money.
The Independent reviews the free schools policy:
“The Tories have misrepresented the case for free schools by only quoting the good part of some very mixed evidence from the US and Sweden,” says McNally. “There are serious issues here. It might raise standards but I’m concerned about social mobility. Will the pupil premium for disadvantaged children be big enough to attract people to run schools in poor areas? If not, non-free schools will have to pick up all the social problems and will struggle to get teachers because they won’t be able to pay as much as other schools.”
Next Thursday I’ll be giving the Academic Keynote at Games:EDU at Abertay University up in Dundee. There is a packed programme, and some great speakers lined up. I should be sharing my own talk with one or two of my former students now working in Dundee at Cohort Studios – they’ve been working on The Shoot for the forthcoming PS3 Move controller.
While the former students will be talking about the transition from student to working in the games industry, I was asked to talk about the current challenges in delivering games technology courses. Excuse me while I yawn… So I’ll be working hard till then on turning this into a more lively reflection on the state of (games technology) education in what is just the start of some troubled times for the education sector – with looming cuts and a general squeeze on funding. The title for the talk is “More for Less: The Hidden Challenges of Games Education” – where hidden mainly refers to the aspects of university that are hidden from students and outside bodies.
The working title was a bit more direct – but I had to agree with the conference organisers that it perhaps sounded a little too cynical. So I’ll not be delivering the talk “Bums on Seats: The Hidden Challenges of Games Education” after all.
EDIT: ps it turns out that there already is a University of Bums on Seats.
One of my current interests is the area of Open Education Resources (OER). I’ve got Opening Up Education sitting on bookshelf within easy reach of my desk for when I have time spare to read it. Though of course I can also read it online, as the whole book is also available in PDF format for free from the MIT Press website.
Via Ewan McIntosh I found Seth Godin’s Textbook Rant on why he thinks the textbook industry has to die. As a fan of OER, I think he has some valid points. Indeed, one of my hopes is that I’ll find some time to produce some of my own notes online and make them available under a creative commons licence. If I find the time, that is. Doing so is not part of my job description despite Seth’s assertion that:
Professors should be spending their time devising pages or chapterettes or even entire chapters on topics that matter to them, then publishing them for free online. (it’s part of their job, remember?)
No it isn’t Seth. Unless they are being paid to do so specifically as part of some OER project – of which there are at least an increasing amount. This UK project, for example, from JISC will “make the equivalent of 5,000 undergraduate modules of existing learning resources freely available online.”
Academic textbooks are generally overpriced – something I won’t argue with. This is related, I think, to how university study is funded through very large loans in the US. Textbooks in the UK used to be significantly cheaper in the UK than in the US. Once Amazon and other online retailers arrived this discrepancy became quickly apparent – with the unfortunate effect that many textbook prices in the UK rose rather significantly so publishers could protect their US margins. (One book I have on a list of recommended texts went from £15 to £25 from one year to the next – a rise of 66%). While most textbook authors only make fairly modest amounts of money (despite Seth’s comments), I would agree with Seth that most academic publishers have been exploiting their audience and overcharging.
As to the value of a textbook, I must disagree. Not all textbooks are made equal, and perhaps marketing textbooks are just less equal than others. There are some very good (and many mediocre) computing textbooks. I have no reservations in recommending Michael Dawson’s “Beginning C++ Game Programming” to prospective and current students – even while I don’t require it as a text in any of my classes. It has a good narrative, excellent selection of content, strong examples, well thought out exercises… well I like it. And so did most of the buyers who took time to review the book on Amazon. While I don’t care too much which C++ book students have, I do feel quite strongly that students trying to learn C++ should try and get a decent C++ textbook and really use it to support their learning. There is far more to be learned that we can teach in the hours we have with students.
As for OpenGL programming, for my 3D graphics class I’m in something of a bind. There are a lot of very good books out there – but none that really work for my course, taking my students from where they start the module to where I hope they’ll be at the end. As a result, I recommend a few texts and ask students to take time to look at the various texts and choose one – in the knowledge that A is expensive and is heavy on the theory, but light on practical, B is cheaper and all practical but quite limited, C has good coverage but very limited tutorial style support, and so on. But I do think that a student that spends time using one of the books to support their own learning will benefit greatly – and I don’t have the time to write a book on the subject myself. Naturally, I also point students to a good range of free web-based resources.
Seth ends his rant with an update from the email he received:
Update: got more mail about this post than any other post ever. … and so far, more than 94% of the letters aggressively agree with me. … I also heard from a handful of people who said that I was jealous, that the union won’t permit the system to change, that textbooks are really good, that professors are underpaid, that professors are too busy or (possibly and) that I’m delusional. I’ll note that not one of these letters came from a textbook user.
Seth’s blog doesn’t carry comments, but perhaps he should read the comments he got on Digg – which includes a number of comments from textbook users:
If I ever do manage to produce my own OER course on Real Time 3D graphics, I’ll be sure to post some updates here. Sadly, it’ll be a while. Meantime, I’ll continue to point students to a range of textbooks, and recommending that they get at least one of them (or borrow it from the university library).
Thanks to Stephen Downes at OLDaily for this. First up, the story links to the ‘Net Gen Skeptic‘ blog – how could I have not know about this blog?
In turn, Net Gen Skeptic summarises a new report from the University of Melbourne, on a project which has been investigating how
commencing first year students and their teachers use traditional and emerging technology-based tools in their everyday lives and to support student learning and drawn on the expertise of teachers and the results of this investigation to develop and implement pedagogically sound, technology-based tools to enhance student learning in local learning environments.
Skeptic summarises the findings mentioned in the report, starting with the key note that:
The rhetoric that university students are Digital Natives and university staff are Digital Immigrants is not supported.
Read more, with links to a handbook on good practice for ‘Educating the Net Generation’ and research papers, over at Net Gen Skeptic.
Related to the recent post on the death (or otherwise) of Universities, Bill Kerr pointed me to this post by Eugene Wallingford – “Revolution Out There — and Maybe In Here“. Eugene is similarly worried if Universities have had their day:
Were I graduating from high school today, would I need a university education to prepare for a career in the software industry? Sure, most self-educated students would have gaps in their learning, but don’t today’s university graduates? … What if I worked the same 12, 14, or 16 hours a day (or more) reading, studying, writing, contributing to an open-source project, interacting on-line? Would I be able to marshall the initiative or discipline necessary to do this?
In my time teaching, I have encountered a few students capable of doing this, if they had wanted or needed to. A couple have gone to school and mostly gotten by that way anyway, working on the side, developing careers or their own start-up companies. Their real focus was on their own education, not on the details of any course we set before them.
There are more points than just these – a worthy read. I also have seen a few students such as those Eugene describes. But not many. There are some concerns that in the UK schools are not doing a good enough job of helping children develop into this kind of self directed learner. See here for just one recent story.
In fact, I spend a part of many of my modules pointing out to students that there is more information freely available on the web than I can teach them in the hours given. I encourage them to go well beyond the material in class. I try to give them a useful set of links to get them started. And the best students either take the hint or are already ahead of me on this. The average student however… is much like the average student from my own days. The availability of material has not significantly affected human behaviour in this regard.
I ask them to view the material we cover in class as the start, as a beginning, and to use this only as a base for further exploration and learning. A proportion focus instead on the pass mark – on doing what is necessary to pass and try hard not to learn anything if they can help it. To a student whose goal is the pass mark, what use is the wealth of free material on the web? Something to crib from or cut-and-paste if it helps minimise the time spent on coursework?
In The End of Education, Neil Postman quotes an article by Diane Ravitch which looks forward to a time when todays wealth of knowledge and experience is instantly available anywhere. Quote of a quote of Ravitch:
In this new world of pedagogical plenty, children and adults will be able to dial up a program on their home television to learn whatever they want to know, at their own convenience. If Little Eva cannot sleep, she can learn algebra instead. At her home learning station, she will tune into a series of interesting problems that are presented in an interactive medium, much like video games”
Well, the content is definately out there on the web. Statistics don’t appear to be showing the significant improvements in numeracy that we might hope for. Why-ever not? Neal’s comment on this scenario?
“Little Eva can’t sleep, so she decides to learn a little algebra? Where did Little Eva come from, Mars? If not it is likely she will tune into a good movie.”
Until we replace students with martians, I suspect universities will have a role to play. There is no shortage of role-models that ably demonstrate that you can do well without a university education. John Harrison or Alan Sugar for example. But today, as in the past, many of these people are quite simply exceptional individuals. Meanwhile, students will continue to try to learn software development by enrolling on courses and doing what is required of them rather than immersing themselves creating software at home and online and by becoming software developers without the extrinsic motivation of a semester deadline.
A large part of me hopes to be proven wrong.
But Eugene’s closing comments are also worth noting:
People come to us eagerly, willing to spend out of their want or to take on massive debts to buy what we sell. Some come for jobs, but most still have at least a little of the idealism of education. When I think about their act in light of all that is going on in the world, I am humbled. We owe them something as valuable as what they surrender. We owe them an experience befitting the ideal. This humbles me, but it also Invigorates and scares me, too.
Its in this light that I also think that there is a real challenge for universities to meet, a challenge that may well be unmet by most.
Over at Edge, Don Tapscott appears to have a flawed and somewhat limited understanding of teaching and learning at universities as he predicts their imminent demise (though not without some truths in there). For all that he derides lectures, he might be surprised of the extent to which students sometime prefer to attend lectures. [Another similar story].
Actually, I’d happily drop most of my lectures for more discursive forms of interaction – though I can only do this if students adequately prepare and take steps to learn enough of the subject so we can actually have a discussion. Some of my trials with this have not been totally successful, others have worked a little better. Without any hard statistics to back this up I’d say the success of such an approach depends a lot on many contextual factors: the students, the institution, the delivery mode (online vs campus), the tutor (maybe I’m just not that good at this?) and perhaps most significant of all the course itself (to what extent does the core content of the course suit such a learning mode, and do students need to gain some degree of technical knowledge before discussion becomes possible?).
Anyway, there are two replies to Don’s piece on the Edge website, both making quite strong cases to illustrate that Don is somewhat out of touch. One of these is by Marc Hauser – whose weighty volume on the Evolution of Communication I referred to a lot back when I was doing my PhD. In his reply, Marc says:
Tapscott’s article thus underestimates the ingenuity of good teaching, that from my perspective, continues to thrive in many universities, and is not based on the premise of a blank slate student, waiting for professorial scribbling. Although I realize that many universities are turning to online classes, with virtually no personal engagement with the students, I find this trend sad. There is nothing more riveting than the dynamics of a class, when it is buzzing with discussion, to and from student to professor.
Indeed, in Don’s piece he seems strangely ignorant of the extent to which many universities world over are trying to adapt to new technologies to supplement and enhance teaching and learning. It’s not as if there is a shortage of material out there. If Don is serious about understanding how the internet may be changing education – and how some universities and leading academics are actively trying to extend the reach of their material out to users who, for whatever reason, are unable to attend university then I would recommend the MIT Press book Opening Up Education – and he doesn’t even need to pay for it, as the book itself has been published online for free:
[scribd id=5597799 key=key-123as4rz1xgbtxrag97g]
Last week I managed to remember to buy the Guardian on Tuesday for the education supplement. But didn’t find time to read it all. And so I managed to miss news of the release of JISC Committee of Inquiry into the Changing Learner Experience (CLEX) report “Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World” till the day after. Brian Kelly covered it here, and included the following quote from the Grauniad:
The “Google generation” of today’s students has grown up in a digital world. Most are completely au fait with the microblogging site Twitter; they organise their social lives through Facebook and MySpace; 75% of students have a profile on at least one social networking site. And they spend up to four hours a day online.
It looks like a good report, but it’s going to have to wait for reading time – I have marking to do. But I think the Grauniad got it wrong with the claim that Most [students] are completely au fait with the microblogging site Twitter – I think the reporter got students and edu-bloggers mixed up on that one. Some students, but not most. Not yet, at any rate. For the record, the report itself only has two instances of the word twitter – one in the index.
If you want the report highlights, you can grab the podcast here.
Then as if I wasn’t already feeling overloaded, BJET’s special issue on Virtual Worlds is now online. Lots of excellent papers – including a colloquia paper by yours truly and friends. Subscription required – if you work in HE, your institution might already subscribe.
And lastly, the ning group “The Future of Education” is hosting a series of webinars – some excellent speakers lined up. Tomorrow night (though too late for me, sadly) is Chris Dede. His talk is titledEmerging Interactive Media: What to Use, When, and How? If you attend, tell me how it was.
Judy Robertson at Heriot-Watt has been using Second Life for first and second year programming classes, as revealed on Virtual World Watch. She notes that Second Life was an effective and engaging environment for students learning programming due to the rapid feedback and the ability to see what other students were doing. She also notes:
We have questionnaire data which indicates that our students don’t like SL very much. It has had negative publicity recently which makes some of them think it is “sad”. However, the students do on the whole like our module. They seemed to enjoy making their pets and are proud of them. There is not a straightforward motivational effect for SL itself, and it would be a mistake to use it on the assumption that the students will like it because it is fashionable.
Meanwhile, my own most recent class on Collaborative Virtual Environments has a range of comments from students including:
Second Life, the website, the forums and the video conferencing were all useful…
even though i loathed them [forums and blogs] when i started this module (and to a degree i still do) i feel they have played a very important role to the CVE module, and the CGT course.
We should avoid using technology because it is ‘cool’, or we think it might be trendy. Decisions should be based on how they might help student learning… and I’m glad that this year at least my students (and Judy’s, from the sounds of things) were able to see beyond their personal likes and dislikes and benefit from the use of Web 2.0 and virtual worlds in the classroom.
This again takes me back to Sarah Robbins keynote at last year’s SLEDcc conference (slides here) where she emphasised the importance of making explicit bargains with students… explaining why the class is doing something, and bringing them onboard.