ISL Dublin 3rd September

Effects of technological change on learning, qualifications and assessment

Ray Land, University of Strathclyde

Qualifications for the Future SQA, 1 November 2007

ISL Dublin 3rd September

• print culture and the digital turn• shifts in the nature of knowledge• the challenge to academic authority• the academy and speed (Virilio)

• temporalities – slow and fast time (Eriksen)

• the five-minute university (Novello)

• liminality (Meyer & Land)

• troublesome knowledge (Perkins)

• prometheus bound? possible appropriation and repurposing of web 2.0

ISL Dublin 3rd September

• more than 70m blogs on the internet;

• 195,000 new blogs are created every day (two every second).

• dominant languages are Chinese, Japanese and English

• there are 1.8m blog posts a day.

• MySpace the busiest website in the world (120m registered users)

• YouTube grows in value more than $100m a month

• Source: Technorati 2007

ISL Dublin 3rd September

• 62% of content created by users under age 21 is generated by someone they know

• 57% of teenagers create content for the Internet

• 73% of students use the internet more than the library

• teenagers average four hours a day on television, the web and SMS

text

stability

individual

private

image

mutability

collective

public

ISL Dublin 3rd September

web as applicationarchitecture of participationuser-owned datarich, interactive interfacesno walled gardens

[Taken from Dempsey, L.The (Digital) Library Environment: Ten Years After http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/dempsey/]

Speed and collective action

eg Katrinalist.net Wikipedia

The Great Northern War - Wikipedia Between 1560 and 1660, Sweden created a

Baltic empire centered on the Gulf of Finland and comprising the provinces of Karelia, Ingria, Estonia, and Livonia. During the Thirty Years' War Sweden gained tracts in Germany as well, including Western Pomerania, Wismar, the Duchy of Bremen, and Verden. At the same period Sweden conquered Danish and some Norwegian provinces north of the Sound (1645; 1660). These victories may be ascribed to a good training of the army, which was far more professional than most continental armies, and could maintain much higher rates of fire due to constant training with their firearms. However, Sweden was unable to support and maintain her army when the war was prolonged and the costs of warfare could not be passed to occupied countries.

In 1617 Sweden's gains in the Treaty of Stolbovo had deprived Russia of direct access to the Baltic Sea, and internal strife during much of the first half of the 1600s meant that they were never in a position to challenge Sweden for these gains. Russian fortunes reversed during the later half of the 17th century, notably with the rise to power of Peter the Great, who looked to address the earlier losses and re-establish a Baltic presence. In the late 1690s, the adventurer Johann Patkul managed to ally Russia with Denmark and Saxony and in 1700 the three powers attacked.

ISL Dublin 3rd September

ISL Dublin 3rd September

Personal

‘me’ media Time Life magazine –’You’ YouTube MySpace FaceBook Flickr

‘If you're not on MySpace, you don't exist’

‘the collectivity fad’

Digital Maoism (Lanier)

‘the hive mind’ (Kelly)

“These sections of the web break away from the page metaphor. Rather than following the notion of the web as book, they are predicated on microcontent. Blogs are about posts, not pages. Wikis are streams of conversation, revision, amendment, and truncation.”Alexander, 2006

• open text – loss of closure and fixity of printed page– a shift in epistemology

• shift in medium implies shift in reading mode, from literacy to multiliteracy, technoliteracy, visual sophistication, multimodality (Kress)

the body of the book = the body of knowledge – makes it stable and ‘graspable’

volatility and instability of digital text – infinitely editable, instantly distributable,

methods for imposing fixity and authorial control (pdf, page scanning, restricted access) work against rather than with the mode of digitality

Shifts in epistemology: how Web 2.0 is transforming HE

• process over artefact• consensus & trust over authority• exploration over exposition• emergence & novelty over argument• open text / the rigour of no completion• convenience & speed overriding quality• knowledge network/ access over

possession• public/private continuum

authority

gatekeeping – mark poster’s exploration of how digitisation shifts history as a discipline – breaking down boundaries – if all historical resources are ‘googled’, if all history work is instantly publishable, how does that affect who counts as an historian? or a journalist? what is the role of the university, of the discipline?

institutional control

textual instability as a reflection of instability in the academy’s idea of itself (Barnett 2005)

media implicated in the academy’s inability to claim universality in its pursuit of Truth

supercomplexity

we now live in a world of radical contestation and challengeability, a world of uncertainty and unpredictability. In such a world, all such notions—as truth, fairness, accessibility and knowledge—come in for scrutiny. In such a process of continuing reflexivity, fundamental concepts do not dissolve but, on the contrary, become systematically elaborated…

In this process of infinite elaboration, concepts are broken open and subjected to multiple interpretations; and these interpretations may, and often do, conflict. As a result, we no longer have stable ways even of describing the world that we are in; the world becomes multiple worlds. (Barnett 2005 p.789)

The risks of Web 2.0:

The DEFRA wiki

The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage

Ezra Pound 1920

Speed (Virilio 1999)

rise of digital information technologies located firmly within the neo-liberal ideology of globalisation, and seen as caught inexorably within a logic of ‘fast time’, increasing acceleration and exponential growth of information.

the defining characteristic of early twenty-first century society, and an increasing source of its hazards, is its relentless acceleration and compression of time.

‘Our history is the history of acceleration’

Virilio, 2000:51

‘Speed is power itself’Virilio 1999:15

‘“Faster, smaller, cheaper” – this NASA slogan could shortly become the watchword of globalisation

itself’ (Virilio 2000:66).

the ‘tyranny of the moment’ - effects of speed (Eriksen 2001) speed is an addictive drug speed leads to simplification speed creates assembly line (Taylorist) effects speed leads to a loss of precision speed demands space (filling in all the available

gaps in the lives of others) speed is contagious – when experienced in one

domain the desire for speed tends to spread to new domains.

gains and losses equal each other out so that increased speed does not necessarily even lead to greater efficiency.

death of geography

loss of political space

advent of universal real time

loss of slow time

‘presentified’ history

single gaze of the cyclops

erosion of liberty

textualities and temporalities

fast and slow time (Eriksen)

Web 2.0 practices seem caught in an awkward tension, if not disjunction.

The pedagogical claims made for them seem to be located within, and to require the integrative and deliberative logic of, what Eriksen characterises as slow

time.

Slow and fast time (Eriksen 2001)

Slow and fast time (Eriksen)As digital phenomena, however, they increasingly serve to constitute fast time, can only accelerate in their future modus operandi, and reinforce the dromocratic principle that fast time drives out and occupies the place of slow time.

our experience of time in the media conditions of the internet (Lee & Liebenau 2000).

Duration (shortening attention spans)

Temporal location (internet always on)

Sequence (loss of continuity)

Deadlines (positioned differently in a task, temporal shifts)

Cycles (Constantly renegotiated, simultaneuously operating)

Rhythms (condensing and dispersal of working effort; new patterns of busy-ness)

Presence / absence, co-presence

Distanciation (Giddens)

The structuring of time–space distanciation relies on such social relations as “presence-availability ”—the organization of presence, absence proximity and availability, and the degree of co-present activities in relation to “tele-present” activities.

Notion that students in the digital age are ‘never away’ but permanently networked

the five minute university

Fr. Guido Sarducci, rock critic, l’Osservatore Romano, Vatican.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO8x8eoU3L4

impact on academic estate

public/private continuum

displacement of slow time to the domestic sphere

domestic privacy compromised by 24/7 digital

Liminality & troublesome knowledge (Meyer and Land 2006)

liminality, the transformative threshold space and process in which (necessarily) troublesome knowledge is negotiated and conceptual difficulty encountered and overcome (Perkins 2006, Meyer and

Land 2006) seems truncated by fast time and the linear, trouble-free ‘consumptive’ academy it ushers in.

asking for trouble

The liminal state permits an integration of new knowledge into a new way of seeing, a re-conceptualisation. It is the state of trouble, stuckness, letting go and changed subjectivity, without which the possibility of things being otherwise is unlikely to come into view. It is the space of meaning-making.

EARLI 2007 Budapest August 31st

Troublesome knowledge

• ritual knowledge• inert knowledge• conceptually difficult

knowledge• the defended learner• alien knowledge• tacit knowledge• troublesome language

EARLI 2007 Budapest August 31st

Liminality

• a transformative state that engages existing certainties and renders them problematic, and fluid

• a suspended state in which understanding can approximate to a kind of mimicry or lack of authenticity

• liminality as unsettling – sense of loss

EARLI 2007 Budapest August 31st

looking for trouble

• Knowledge is troublesome for a variety of reasons (Perkins 2006). It might be alien, inert, tacit, conceptually difficult, counter-intuitive, characterised by an inaccessible ‘underlying game’, or characterised by supercomplexity.

• such troublesomeness and disquietude is purposeful, as it is the provoker of change that cannot be assimilated, and hence is the instigator of new learning and new ontological possibility.

EARLI 2007 Budapest August 31st

East of Eden through the threshold

EARLI 2007 Budapest August 31st

Janus – divinity of the threshold

epistemological ontological

‘Strangeness’ as the new universal (Barnett 2005)

“The new universal is precisely the capacity to cope, to prosper and to delight in a world in which there are no universals.” Barnett, 2005

contestability and challengeabilityradical uncertainty and unpredictabilityteaching: from knowledge to being

prometheus bound?

Can the 21st academy appropriate and re-purpose social technologies to discover new contemplative, transformative and perhaps creative liminal spaces?

Or are such notions a nostalgic residue of print culture? Does digital culture usher in (fast) new modes of thinking, creativity and decision-making?

Digital gaming (James Paul Gee 2003)

• Active, critical• Design • Semiotic domains• Meta-level thinking• Pycho-social moratorium• Commitment• Changed subjectivity• Self-knowledge• Amplification of input• Practice /time on task• Adaptation to changed

conditions• Transfer of earlier learning• Distributed meaning/

knowledge

• Regime of competence• Probing• Multiple routes • Situated meaning• Textuality /intertextuality• Multimodality• Material intelligence• Intuitive, tacit knowledge• On-demand, just-in-time• Experimentation, discovery• Exposure to new cultural

models• Affinity groups• Decision making in complexity• Production

CybraryCity2

Second Life

Questions for learning

• How does the digital change the way academic knowledge is produced and distributed?

• What forms of ‘technoliteracy’ and multimodality are required to work in these spaces?

• How can assessment regimes and qualifications be re-crafted for these volatile spaces?

• What digital pedagogies will work best in these environments?

Evidence organisation

Step in evidence cycle

Web service

Evidence creation/discovery

Live search, Bloglines, Google groups, Wikipedia, Answers.com Google docs and spreadsheets

Evidence capture Furl, del.icio.us, Clipmarks, Google mail, Flickr

Evidence organisation

Box.net, Netvibes, Flickr, Blogger

Evidence sharing Furl, Clipmarks, Box.net

B. Elliott, SQA, Sept 2007

a student could use Live Search to search the world wide web for relevant information, subscribe to a number of RSS feeds using Bloglines to monitor appropriate websites, and check Wikipedia for appropriate articles. Relevant web pages could be saved using Furl or parts of web pages could be grabbed using Clipmarks. Google docs and spreadsheets could be used to pull together this information into an initial report, which can be stored online using Box.net. The whole project can be coordinated using a dedicated home page created using Netvibes, which would include RSS feeds, calendars, instant messaging, e-mail and a range of additional ‘gadgets’ relevant to the assessment task. Throughout this process, students can learn from one another by sharing their discoveries through such services as Furl and Clipmarks, which permit students to subscribe to one another’s archives..

B. Elliott, SQA, Sept 2007

ray.land@strath.ac.uk