Leadership and Learning Technologies

This post may become a story for OhmyNews after the Learning Technologies show in Jan 2009. Comments will link to other posts.

When I first looked at the "Towards Maturity" model I got the impression that pressure from senior management was not a very significant driver for e-learning projects. Now that the Web is better accepted as part of most organisations there could be more evidence of formal policy and other support. I could not arrive at any definite conclusion from conversation at the event in 2008. So maybe other sources will give some clues.

BETT showtime for Silverlight

This is another draft for a future story. Nowadays fewer computer companies attend trade events. Apple was not at drupa for example. Schools seem significant enough that Apple may well be at BETT. Adobe and Microsoft are also probable, a rare chance to compare progress on Silverlight and Flash/ AIR. My impression was that Microsoft had less of a profile for Grava in 2008 than in 2007 but this is likely to change.

Comments welcome. More posts on this later.

Byron, is the panic over?

There was a lot more to the Byron Review than was reported in most UK media. It included material that could be argued to leave open the possibility that the Web offers benefits for education. At least some of the research could be followed up during the rest of 2008.

From the conclusion section, Usha Goswami (PDF)

Of course, humans can use language (“inner speech”) and cognitive
self-regulation to inhibit the impact of learning that is not useful, and to quarantine what is imaginary from what is real. As younger children tend to have poorer language skills and poorer quarantining abilities, learning from new media could be speculated to have stronger effects on younger children.
Alternatively, as older children are more responsive to the peer group and
have the skills required to seek out certain kinds of input from new media, it could be speculated that new media that is endorsed by the peer group will have stronger effects during the adolescent years. Hormonal and other brainrelated changes during adolescence make this a time when all children question their identities and their “autobiographical selves”. New media can offer learning experiences relevant to resolving some of these questions, just like any other form of experience. A priori, new media do not seem likely to be less influential as a source of information, however, there is no relevant research that I am aware of..

UK bandwidth, draft damage check for BETT

This post is the start of a draft story for Ohmynews around Jan 2009. There really is a policy within UK education to make the most of broadband. However it is not going to work in my honest opinion because there is not much of a policy from the bit that used to be the DTI and is now harder to make out than what used to be education.

Slightly off topic I think publishing as in text and fairly small graphics is still an option for the UK. Video etc, both production and distribution, depends on somewhere with lots of fibre.

Back on topic, this post will be followed by others, links in comments.

I have added a comment to the Critical Management site. I had almost given up on it but have been told there will be an update sometime soon that will reflect the content from the Web 2 meeting.

My comment

publishing technology
new
Submitted by willpollard on Sun, 08/17/2008 - 09:37.

oh dear, all the formatting seems to have vanished, should use full stops and capital letters. So far I have also found that downloading documents is a bit hit and miss. some don't work as i find it. What is XML, bibTEX, tabbed? Is this explained anywhere? Have you looked at Scribd? Simply put, they take care of all the hosting for you. How their business model works is a mystery. Lots of networking and comment possible as well. Not much on critique as yet but easy enough to load stuff up. Also, EPUB is worth a look as a format. Sony Reader will support this in the UK from next month. Not sure how to create EPUB but it looks possible. blog http://learn9log.blogspot.com

My take is that this is a quality issue. There is content on the site, a system to publish. It could work better, so how could it change?

Scribd still seems to be working well. distribution of documents with comments and networking etc. I have just joined two MBA groups where people have linked to my docs.

however I can't find much on Critical Management. Zaidlearn writes about how to teach critical thinking, or thinking creatively, and one remark is that some other way of describing it could be useful. "critical" can be a block.

Still, maybe more critical papers will turn up on Scribd and establish more of a base.

I don't think there is much on the web yet following the criticalmanagement.org worshop on Web 2 at the Academy of Management. Tried Technorati and Google blogsearch. Nothing yet I can find. Meanwhile the editors of OhmyNews have accepted most of my story about Sidmouth Folk Week and the term "blended networking", combining online and normal space. I guess there will be more content on the criticalmanagement site at some point as combining events and online is part of Web 2 as far as I understand it.

I have also done a blog about folk for wifiExeter that works ok as a YouTube set of links around an actual place. I have been trying to do this with central Exeter as retail and Lancaster campus as academic. The Sidmouth one works better as the content is just music. The others need statements of opinion or interviews.

Content I have found from the criticalmanagement site includes a thesis from Todd Bridgeman about UK Research Led Business Schools. I have not read all of it but there is some interesting material here. My impression is that the articulations of a business school can coexist as they are projected for different audiences. "Vocational / professional school" and "Commercial enterprise" for potential students and funding sources ; "Academic department" for other academics. Critique is intended mostly for other academics apparently, the public role still faces issues around access and finding language that can be widely understood. Hey, this is just a blog. Could be wrong here and comment is welcome.

Maybe something will turn up on YouTube. Searching on "Lancaster University" the first result from Lancaster Management is about employment and careers. Nothing wrong with that but I hope to find somewhere a statement of a critique point of view about quality so I could add a comment and disagree. Maybe such content would be regarded as a potential publication so too valuable to put on YouTube. My guess is this may change soon for all sorts of academic output.



Meanwhile I will probably do more with text. Video is more difficult than first appears.

Can't find anything about the Critical Management take on Web 2. Maybe something will turn up later but it seems to me that this is one topic that should not wait on a printed journal timescale.

Last week was about Sidmouth Folk but now I am starting to think about the autumn and getting sorted. Still time for summer mode if the rain stops.



New attempt at a "hello spiders" diagram. Not based on any stats at all. Just my take at the moment. My hope is that the Sony Reader will turn out to be an "event" and move on from a stuck situation. "Standardisation" and "co-operation" are both processes but the dynamics are yet to be expanded in later slides. Original was in Google Docs but there is nothing more there yet.

I have put a comment on the Critical Management site about their workshop on Web 2. I have found that they rarely look at quality ideas as having much to offer. Human Resource Management is also critiqued but is part of the scope. So as a website changes, what technique is used? Or if it just changes anyway, can theory be considered later?

I have been catching up on Critical Management Studies and found this about a workshop next month-

Web 2.0 is associated with technology such as blogs, wikis and podcasts and with environments such as You Tube, Myspace and Facebook. Our PDW would be an interactive workshop where we use these technologies to explore our experiences, insights and ideas of teaching in the age of Web 2.0. The implications of Web 2.0, which include a radical decentralization of knowledge and rich user experiences via interactive forms of participation, present opportunities and threats for the way we teach. In the workshop, delegates will bring their laptops to a room with wireless internet access. Using the interactive space of the critical management studies portal www.criticalmanagement.org, we will share ideas and debate and discuss the relevance and importance of Web 2.0 to management educators. After a brief introduction by presenters describing our experiences of Web 2.0, the bulk of the workshop will involve developing on-line content around the subject of teaching in the age of Web 2.0. This might include a contribution to an on-line discussion, creation of a blog entry etc.

This is for a conference organised by the Academy of Management at the Anaheim Hilton.

Previously I have found that Critical Management is more or less hostile to ideas about quality. See 'Making Quality Critical' for example. Hugh Wilmott is one of the people involved in this workshop so I will try to find out online if it could be related to a quality approach in any way. My opinion is that looking at a website as a process can be useful. I don't see why quality and learning should be distinct disciplines for academics. In practice there is an overlap, as I find it.

Maybe this workshop will reveal what could follow from Foucault studies by way of web design. I am still trying to think about "heterochronies" following web links from Networked Learning, see previous blog post.

It turns out that data security and the knowledge economy are linked. At least this seems clear from the IWR Blog. Some large companies think that looking after data is important and should be reported through some sort of metric on the balance sheet.

The Institute for Advanced Studies at Lancaster keeps changing the subject for research but there are enough connections to follow.

Reading the Guardian I found a report from the Work Foundation on UK cities, explained in relation to the knowledge economy. Thinking back to the meetings about leadership I am even more convinced that there is a case that the knowledge economy already exists and that leadership is adjusting to this. There can still be critique of the associated rhetoric but there also seems to be a reality around something that has happened. Same sort of thing with "safety", at least as far as the Web is concerned. Info security is an issue.

YouTube has other videos following the "I am an American" theme. So far the main point for me from the Safety conference is that the Web is accepted as part of what else happens for academics. One evening meal was at Info 21, the technobabble centre of the campus. Not that there cannot be a critique of this sort of thing but it is also true that something has already happened.

Now on holiday so updates next week. The official blog has more news.

Found this through Google blogsearch - Design with Intent by Dan Lockton. So there could well be more links as the conference continues.

He writes

I’m not sure what my position on the idea of ‘designing safe living’ is, really - whether that’s the right question to ask, or whether ‘we’ should be trying to protect ‘them’, whoever they are. But it strikes me that any behaviour, accidental or deliberate, however it’s classified, can be treated/defined as an ‘error’ by someone, and design can be used to respond accordingly, whether viewed through an explicit mistake-proofing lens or simply designing choice architecture to suggest the ‘right’ actions over the ‘wrong’ ones.

It also seems to that soemeone could describe any words as "discourse" so I hope to find out more about this aspect as well.

Mostly borrowed slides for context

Latest version of paper on Scribd

More slides

ISO 27000 and PDCA

direct link

On Scribd



Screenshots from Swickis, showing connections

direct link

embed

I am still using the words "hype" and "counter-hype" but hope to understand "discourse" better before too long. The publicity around the Byron Review in March this year seemed to me to be largely aimed at people who were already disturbed by the apparent dangers of the Web, in particular social networking. One aspect was the scale of the use by young people, almost everyone as it appears. Part of the threat is that parents do not understand the technology being used. Perhaps this was a final round of concern before the Web is accepted as normal. With VHS it took a BBC Shakespeare collection to finalise things. Maybe the next BETT will be a suitable occasion. The Byron Review includes a lot of balanced material on the educational potential of social networks. This was mostly ignored by newspapers at the time of publication.

Doing a Google News search I find there was an Action Plan published recently but I don't remember any publicity for this in June. The only newspaper link I can find is to a Guardian games blog. I guess this means the stream of panic is coming to an end.

Quality and learning again.

This could be way off topic for the Safety conference but I think it is still about assurance. I am still trying to make a connection to look at learning as an aspect of a quality system. Looking back at "The Learning Company" McGraw Hill 1991, I find

The history of management is littered with the remains of yesterday's right answers - scientific management......Quality Circles, the search for excellence and so on. So where are they now and what did we learn from these experiments?

My information is that Quality Circles have continued in Asia and there has not been a break. Recently I have had another look at PDCA as described by Ishikawa and the quality circles are a large part of the context. The litter is only in the UK and some other places. So the experience could have been seen as more positive as a contribution to the Learning Company. I wrote a story for OhmyNews in 2005.

Recently Steve Fleetwood has written "A Note on HRM and Performance" arguing against trying to make such a link. What if there was a scope that included quality? There has to be learning for quality to be assured and HRM contributes to this. Quality is about outputs so is easier to relate to performance.

Possibly the fundamental point being made is against any performance judgement at all. Universities should exist to critique society so this is their only relevance.

Yet for some reason it is the HR department that is well represented in learning studies. QA is not part of the scene. Why is this?