Blogs

Ross Priory, Scotland.
As we approach the end of the second day at ICE 3, Karim Remtulla is the next speaker (full paper here). He is particularly interested in how e-learning connects with the realities of the workplace (both in terms of the experiences of recent graduates in transitioning to the workplace, and those of employees coming back to university for further education). Karim notes that the projections for e-learning are promising - it is now a US$300 billion market globally, while the World Bank's education portfolio stands at US$8.5 billion, and covers 86 countries. The dominant point of view on e-learning is that it is simply a process of learning from information which is delivered electronically, leaving us as learners to identify relevant information and convert it into meaningful and applicable knowledge - but this may be a highly questionable definition.

Ross Priory, Scotland.
The next presenters at ICE 3 are Michael Begg, Rachel Ellaway, David Dewhurst, and Hamish MacLeod. They describe themselves as educational informaticians, and note that the idea of learning design has been somewhat diluted by the ubiquity of online teaching spaces. Instead, this group focus on proximal development - experimentation with spaces which are in a constant state of development and often sit at something of a distance from the institutions around them.

The problem here is Web2.0: the variety of definitions which exist; and the lack of clarity about its standards. Why do institutions say they like it, yet do so little about it? Who is implementing it in an educational context, and who owns it? What is the origin of the claims that it is going to make things better? What makes us "us" and the institution "them" - and is Web2.0 for us or for them (or for the students)?

Ross Priory, Scotland.
Up next here at ICE 3 are Debbie Holley and Martin Oliver. They begin by highlighting the notion of the digital divide, which appears to be based on a notion that media access is inherently a good thing: if the digital divide problem is solved by providing access for all, then society will be better off. This question of access is positioned as the basic issue, but is ultimately only a superficial one - behond this, there are also divides in relation to people's skills and literacies, to their levels of motivation to exercise their skills (they may have skills, but choose not to use tem), and further, there is a divide between what are seen as 'normal' high technology uses on the one hand, and disruptive effects of complex technologies on the other.

Ross Priory, Scotland.
The last ICE 3 speaker before lunch is Andrew Ravenscroft. He begins by discussing some of the traditional conceptualisations of cyberspace, such as the descriptions in William Gibson's Neuromancer, which saw cyberspace as a distinct space which one would enter; The Matrix is perhaps the most prominent visualisation of this idea (and Andrew shows a very funny Muppet version of the Matrix trailer which can be found on YouTube).

Ross Priory, Scotland.
Cate Thomas is the next presenter here at ICE 3. She begins by describing the online world as an uncanny space where there is a ghost in the machine; the academy as it moves further online then also becomes a haunted university where radical uncertainty persists. How are academic staff constituted in this digital university, then?

Cate suggests that academics are already in crisis today; their traditional authority has been undermined, much as the crisis of the author in the postmodern environment has also undermined authorship. Additionally, there is a tendency towards disembodiment of the academic subject, which means that their electronic self increasingly begins to constitute the day-to-day presence of the contemporary academic. Their real-life presence, in turn, comes to be reconstituted by the electronic persona; the online world rewrites real life in that sense.

Ross Priory, Scotland.
The second day here at ICE 3 starts with a keynote by Gunther Kress. He begins by noting the brackets in his talk title, which for him symbolise the distinctions between some of the core and continuing aspects of learning, and the particular affordances of the learning environments in use at any one point. What stays the same, what changes, and why, then? Of course, we are embedded in cultures, and these do shift and change.

Ross Priory, Scotland (apparently this is also where Rob Roy was written).
The last ICE 3 speaker for today is John Cook. He describes the cultural emergence of 'Generation CX' (rather than Gens C or X, presumably), but notes that even Generation X hasn't been particularly well (or uniformly) defined as yet. The term emerged first in 1964, and was famously revived by Douglas Coupland in the 1990s, now referring to those born between 1960 and 1965 and feeling no connection to the cultural icons of the baby boom generation. A yet later, grunge Generation X was defined by songs such as Nirvana's "Smells like Teen Spirit".

Ross Priory, Scotland (no sign of ghosts as yet).
Hamish McLeod and Jen Ross are the next presenters (full paper here). They explore metaphors for being an online tutor, and begin with a brief quote from Wikipedia on online tutoring, which presents a very matter-of-fact take on the issue that may not quite plumb the full depths of the question. The potential move of teachers from 'sage on the stage' to 'guide on the side' has been much highlighted, of course, but also doesn't quite cover this issue; traditional positions of the teacher are now much criticised, but exactly what role might come to replace them (if such replacement does take place) isn't very clear at this point.

Ross Priory, Scotland (and we're just being told that the place is cursed, apparently...).
The next presentation here at ICE 3 is by Colleen McKenna and Claire McAvinia, who present thoughts on work they've done in getting students to create hypertext assignments. To what extent does some work challenge traditional essay writing, and does it make more visible the features of conventional linear argumentation? Does this work liberate the thinking of these student writers?

There's already a good deal of interest in exploring hypertext writing for non-academic text (fiction, poetry, reflective writing, etc.); however, less has been written about presenting academic non-fiction writing in a hypertext format and assessing student writing of this form. Hypertext might offer a different type of meaning-making which privileges exploration over conclusion, as David Kolb suggests. Such writing claims a factual territory rather than pointing to any one source of truth. Gunther Kress similarly distinguishes between the temporal logic of traditional academic argument and the spatial logic of the image, which predominates in screen-based hypertextual media.

Ross Priory, Scotland.
I'm spending the rest of this week at the ICE 3 conference (Ideas, Cyberspace, Education) in Scotland, having spent much of Tuesday driving up here from my temporary base at Leeds. Really looking forward to this - a small but well-credentialled conference in a very beautiful (if cold) place. We're now about to make a start to the conference proper, having already been welcomed at the lunch session.

The first paper is by Peter Goodyear and Siân Bayne. Siân begins by noting that universities are still deriving much of their status from a base in the printed book (and university crests are a simple indication of this); however, today, it is possible to see the Internet both as culture and as cultural artefact (and Siân focusses here especially on Internet as a separate culture in itself) - the Net changes existing practices and opens up new possibilities for practice which universities may explore. (This doesn't necessarily happen, though - witness the underlying structures of WebCT, for example, which remain based in traditional learning activities, and separate activities into very distinct categories that may no longer be useful. Such learning tools blind us to the other available possibilities in online spaces.)