thisidiom: elearning futures

Like many, I imagine, I had noticed the growth of Google Books out of the corner of my eye but not thought much about it - except for a vague question about the probable quality of their collection.

Recently, however, whilst involved in a project concerning the history of the Virginia Colony (1585 - 1620) I have found a number of primary sources on Google Books. For example, Strachey’s History of Travaile into Virginia Britannia. This experience has caused me to think again about the value of the service. Without it I would have been severely hampered in my research.

Is this further evidence for the death of the book? Not in my case. I’ve already gone straight from Google to Amazon and forked out money for a physical volume. You might then argue that the availability of virtual books promotes the sales of physical books. If there is a loser it could turn out to be libraries - or more specifically, the research sections of libraries.

I’ve been wary and critical of the aims for the Semantic Web from the first time I heard about it.

Read/Write Web have a couple of articles looking at the arguments for and against the Semantic Web. For anyone wishing to gain a deeper insight into the realities of the problems, these postings would be a good place to start.

I note that Second Brain has released a bunch of new features which I’ve yet to try out. Although I have a test pilot account it seems that Second Brain will be going to Public Beta within a couple of weeks.

Yesterday I tried out the new Google presentation tool. Even now (without having a peek) I’m unable to remember exactly what Google have decided to call their Powerpoint clone. This seems to me a case of slack product naming - one that is also reflected in yet another Google new service: Shared Stuff.

Shared Stuff is familiar territory - grabbing bookmarks on the fly and then sharing them via email. The advantage it might have over other bookmarking services could be in the speed at which it grabs and stores URLs.

The ars technica article Gmail driving Google Apps adoption at college, provides some further examples of colleges (in the US) taking advantage of Google educational services. The key does seem to be student preference for Gmail.

It seems that the KnowledgeWorks Foundation and the Institute for the Future have been working hard at trying to sort out possible futures for teaching. Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed carries a brief report of their recent workshop “The Future of Learning Agents”. The title of this workshop immediately alerts us to the presuppositions made by the organisers. “Learning Agents” are probably not teachers…

A nifty, but hard to interpret, interactive “map” of factors, issues, dilemmas and whatnot can be found on the KnowledgeWorks website. It’s a glossy production but has little in the way of a coherent vision. In my experience the future takes shape when someone decides to make it happen.

Following John Dvorak’s Bubble 2.0 article (commented on yesterday), I note some responses have already appeared: Marshal Kirkpatrick, Rex Dixon and Robert Scoble all have dismissive posts. The drift of their arguments, however, seems to be based on rates and levels of adoption. That is, with so many people using Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and so on, they will surely be with us for ever. Hmm, I recall a time in the late 70s when everyone in the world seemed to be wearing flared trousers; five years later, nobody was. Fashion.

John Dvorak has a nice post at PC Magazine on Bubble 2.0. He suggests that we are about to witness another internet bubble burst comparable to the dot-com collapse of 1999/2000.

“Bubble” is, itself, a “hype” metaphor and suggests an instant of complete and utter disintegration (along with the tempting idea that the bubble was empty of substance anyway and so worthless). The dot-com collapse didn’t see the removal of the internet as a phenomenon but instead a settling back of hype-driven lunacy. Some companies survived - because they were offering products or services of value - whilst many who imitated or misunderstood the dynamics of online business went to the wall. There is a natural feel to such cycles of growth and decay, rather like the processes of evolution. So it wouldn’t surprise me if evidence were to accumulate that we are currently on the downward slope.

In any event, John’s list of candidates for collapse echoed some of the thoughts I’ve had recently about elearning. Is social software sustainable? Does podcasting provide any valuable educational experiences? Is mobile computing and learning ever going to be worth the expense? Will the educational use of Second Life ever transcend the experimental prototype stage? And so on.

I believe that elearning will always have a place in the armory of distance education. It is certainly possible to learn effectively online and build purposeful online learning communities - often with very simple tools such as chat rooms and discussion boards - but none of this can replace a face-to-face learning experience and all that it brings in terms of flexibility, immediacy, commitment (from staff and student), social learning, peer-to-peer learning, convenience and so on. If elearning suffers a knock-back I think it will be in the area of blended learning. Perhaps we will see less effort going into the attempt to integrate elearning with face-to-face learning - except for very simple and basic provision such as online timetables, lecture notes, reading lists and the like.

John Kirriemuir has recently published his “snapshot” of UK higher and further educational developments in Second Life. It’s worth a read to see the kinds of things educators are doing there but it does raise questions about how such material is researched. John put out a request some time ago on the Second Life Education List (SLED) and it does look as if his account is more or less based on responses to that request. Because of this, it’s impossible to claim that his list of UK institutions using Second Life is in any sense definitive.

Of course, given that usage of Second Life is a changing landscape, it’s hardly surprising if there are information gaps.

The SimTeach wiki also has a good list of Second Life educational activity. This particular list is quite extensive but should be treated with caution. For example, some institutions are simply not represented here - perhaps because they don’t know about the wiki. Also, we need to distinguish between institutions that have officially sanctioned buying into SL and institutions where enthusiastic individuals or departments have bought in independently.

There is no simple way to do a search of SL and find all educational activity and determine degrees of official involvement. So, for the moment at least, we are relying on inexact methods for gathering data. Whilst at one level this is nothing to get too concerned about, at another level it tends to inflate the hype that has already accumulated around SL. Not to mention the fact that some are using this kind of data in an effort to sell SL to their institutions and get them to commit to purchasing an SL educational island.

Having now tried Second Brain I’m a little disappointed it doesn’t have all the features I would have wanted. Perhaps I’ll let them know - when I get round to it.

Then again, it could be that I haven’t yet discovered all the tools - not everything is that intuitive.

Here’s a couple of things that I would like:

1. Annotation tools that would allow drawing lines, boxes, arrows and labeling of these;
2. A simple way of importing saved clips of web pages.

Anyway, here’s a screen shot of a collection of sites related to Web 2.0 building:

The BBC reports that Trinity College Dublin has switched to using Googlemail (Google Apps for Education) to handle its student email accounts. Trinity isn’t the first university to do this - Arizona State (US) and Linköpings University in Sweden have also taken the plunge.

What is not clear yet is how the switch has impacted upon university IT services. It would be interesting to know the cost benefits of such a change and if the universities concerned have been able to re-structure their IT provision.

Outsourcing of university IT services looks to be a growing trend. Not only is Google likely to supply a more consistent and reliable service but it offers the possibility of email addresses with a greater longevity of use. The temporary nature of a university email address is one significant factor in student negative attitudes towards utilising their university email account.