From Ideas to Implementation: Getting There in a Distributed Community
Posted on June 7, 2010 by Patrick.Masson
One of the fantastic benefits of my new position at UMassOnline, is the ability to attend the great variety of conferences, presentations, meetings and discussions going on throughout the University of Massachusetts, within the State, and among our peers throughout higher education. Looking forward into the upcoming academic year (and the summer), it’s exciting to see all sorts of interesting folks presenting on all sorts of interesting things. These events, not only allow me (the new guy) to learn about what is happening on campuses and in courses regarding new and innovative academic technologies, as well as online teaching and learning, but also introduce me to the creative and motivated folks that are making it happen.
As luck would have it my starting date hit just at the right time to catch just such an event, UMass Boston’s Ed Tech Conference, “Transforming Teaching and Learning with Technology.” The conference was a great introduction to not only the UMass Boston campus (it was a beautiful day, and the conference–held atop the Healey Library on the 11th floor–looked out across the Boston waterfront and harbor, cool!), but also the various areas of interest of faculty incorporating technology into the delivery of their online courses. In addition, along with the local Boston faculty, attendees included a variety of folks (faculty, instructional designers, etc.) from not only the UMass campuses (Amherst, Dartmouth, Lowell and Worcester) but other colleges and universities across the region.
The conference included everything you might expect at such an event: case studies describing how faculty used the Blackboard learning management system to enhance courses and improve outcomes and demonstrations of various Web2.0 tools, (blogs, Prezis, wiki’s, Twitter, YouTube, etc.). Interestingly, most of the technologies presented were not originally designed for education, nevertheless because they enhance (sometimes actually enable) the faculty’s teaching style or learning objective, while engaging students, Web2.0 has extended in to the online course, as well as, the classroom. And while sessions highlighting technologies are always interesting (especially to those of us developing technology), it is the techniques, that is, how these technologies are enabling new practices in education that I find so fascinating. Clearly the technology–which provides a relatively static set of features–is less important than the technique–how those features are incorporated into the course: this is truly where, as the conference title suggests, teaching and learning is transformed. As an example, consider the presentations by UMB faculty, Amy Todd, Lakshmi Srinivas and Gene Shwalb on YouTube. The video service, in one course described, creates a window into Indian cinema, where students study not just Indian dance choreography but also identify cultural norms and icons, which may be obvious and possibly taken for granted by native audiences, yet potentially unrecognized, and thus overlooked, by foreign viewers. In another course, on dying languages of South America, YouTube serves as a “resource for student research in cultural and linguistic anthropology,” where tone, inflexion and even expression and gesture add context to word meaning–information that would be missed through traditional text or even audio-based lessons. Most interestingly, both courses extended the classroom to include the YouTube user community. Students were asked to engage with other YouTube visitors about what they were seeing (and how they interpreted that) though comments and conversations. As Professor Lakshmi Srinivas said, “learning is in the hands of the students,” yet with distributed technologies (like YouTube), perhaps teaching might be in the student’s–and even the YouTube community’s–hands as well.
Considering the above, I would suggest the specific technology used to deliver the video is not really that important. Indeed the use of YouTube as a video archive and distribution channel could have been easily substituted with iTunesU, Google Video, Blip.tv, etc. Like online video services, many other technologies presented at the conference highlighted not only the diversity of services now in use within online courses, but the scope within each service domain. As mentioned previously, the video services domain includes multiple Web2.0 tools. In addition to the ones already mentioned, you can add to the list: BigContact, Crackle, Our Media, Revver, VideoEgg, and on and on. In addition to the video domain, presentations at Ed Tech showcased other technology domains as well, audience response systems, blogs, graphics annotation tools, personal devices, social media/networks and wikis with specific tools referenced such as, Camtasia, Director, I-clickers, iTouch, iTunesU, Kindle, Nook, PowerPoint, Presenter, Prezis, Reader, Twitter, Viddler and Wikipedia.
What is important to recognize, I believe, is first, the sheer number of technologies that are now available directly to faculty. Many of these tools occupy the same domain, essentially several tools offering the same services (i.e. online video sites like YouTube, Blip.tv and other media services), yet there are many many more outside any currently defined domain–the complete spectrum of apps, gadgets, mash-ups, extensions, add-ons and widgets (e.g. those offered through Apple’s WebApps, Blackboard’s Building Blocks, Mozilla’s Add-ons, Google’s Gadgets, Yahoo’s Aps or generally available on the web). Second, it is important to appreciate how quickly these technologies are discovered and incorporated into courses by faculty and instructional designers. Third, the pace of adoption for new technologies occurs faster than most IT service providers can extend their learning environment and support to keep up. Finally, the medium and devices delivering these technologies and content are, themselves, evolving and emerging. For example, the Learning Management System, traditionally the core of delivering online education, is transitioning to e-Learning Frameworks as well as Personal Learning Environments which are emerging as student-developed platforms, independent of faculty or institutional control. Adding to this complexity are the devices these systems ride on, such as smartphones (e.g. Blackberry/RIM, Nexus/Android, HTC/WindowsMobile, iPhone/Apple, Nokia/Symbian); and various mobile devices (e.g. the camcorder, iPod, Touch, iPad, game consoles, GPS, Kindel, laptops, netbooks, Nook).
In May of 2009, The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), published Higher Education in a Web2.0 World, “to conduct an independent inquiry into the strategic and policy implications for higher education of the experience and expectations of learners in the light of their increasing use of the newest technologies.” While focusing on the United Kingdom, JISC’s findings would appear to support what the faculty presenting at Ed Tech are experiencing and developing. According to the report, “there is an area within the boundaries of the so-called group space [both the communities of interest (students, faculty, institutions) and social networks themselves] that could be developed to support learning and teaching,” clearly UMass faculty have recognized this capacity. In addition to interest and relevance, the report outlines, what I believe are several important issues applicable to UMass and UMassOnline.
- “Web 2.0 technologies are being deployed across a broad spectrum of university activities…”
- “Deployment is in no way systematic and the drive is principally bottom up, coming from the professional interest and enthusiasm of individual members of staff.”
- “In learning and teaching, usage is patchy but a considerable working base exists…”
- “… there is no blueprint for implementation of Web 2.0 technologies, and each is currently deciding its own path.”
Considering the breadth of technologies now of interest throughout higher education; their independent and distributed development model; the pace of adoption; the growing number of platforms; and, IT’s limited resources, thus capacity, the ability to identify and implement relevant teaching and learning technologies to advance online education is more critical than ever. What differentiates a technology interesting to an instructor, and one integral for education? How does a request for a feature become a functional requirement? When does a pilot move to production and, who decides? Determining which new technologies are emerging as educational standards (e.g. Second Life?), which satisfy that small, but valuable niche that enables unique or under-served programs, what Chris Anderson called the “Long Tail” (e.g. Second Life for urban planning?), and which are destined to become the punch line of some bad technology joke (again, Second Life?) is arguably the primary value proposition for any organization supporting the use of technology in online education. How will the University, those advancing teaching and learning, and UMassOnline identify which services and systems to implement and how best to support them?
To this end, understanding the decision-making process that guides the adoption and administration of technologies (essentially, governance from idea to implementation) is something I am very interested in understanding within UMassOnline and the campuses we support. If we agree that the pace of technology is growing faster than what many organizations can accommodate, then it becomes vital to answer questions about:
- identifying needs, what are the services and systems students/faculty/courses/programs/campuses want, and how should support be provided as the tool moves from a single course, to a department, to the campus, to system-wide adoption;
- assessing resources, what resources are required for any new technology and where are they available (e.g. with the faculty, the program, the department, the college, the campus and/or the system);
- measuring interest, who, in addition to the sponsoring faculty or unit, will use a new or enhanced service or system;
- deployment, when and how should a new service or system be released, and;
- administration, what levels of support specific to a new technology are required–technical and end-user help, training, maintenance, communication, etc.?
I wonder if an organizational and operational approach for enabling the evolving ecosystem of online learning can be found within the same de-centralized, emergent and iterative development environment that sparked it, Web2.0? If Web2.0 is commonly identified with web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration (and we agree that these attributes are desirable), why wouldn’t we want to model UMassOnline’s approach to identifying and measuring interests, as well as service levels through adoption–our approach to governance–on the very same principles? In essence, like both Web1.0 technologies and the companies that offered a read-only environment for consumers, UMassOnline could choose to transform to mirror the Web2.0 communities of prosumers. In fact, when Tim O’Reilly answers the question, “What is Web2.0?” he offers a business case, not a technology definition: “design patterns and business models for the next generation of software.” I would highly recommend reading this entire article, but in case you’re busy embedding an important Web2.0 artifact into your online class, let me, like O’Reilly close, by summarizing what he and I believe to be the core competencies of Web 2.0 companies and a reference model for addressing the growing demand in online education for greater access to more independent technologies:
- Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
- Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
- Trusting users as co-developers
- Harnessing collective intelligence
- Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
- Software above the level of a single device
- Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models
I look forward to working with the University, its campuses, the faculty and you, in better understanding and supporting online education. I would be thrilled to discuss these ideas with anyone who might have a question or comment. This should be fun, and I thank you for the opportunity to contribute.
Patrick
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I like this post a lot. So I get the point, there are a lot of faculty members and students using a lot of tools. You clearly point out that there are more tools than any faculty member, student, or administrator can keep-up with and more variety of tools, platforms, applications, users, and uses, for educational (and administrative) technology than ever before. I am wondering if you have any insights on or examples of what some of those “Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models” Web 2.0 organizations might look like?