Networked Learning 2006: Issues and Questions

Quick report on Day 2 of the Networked Learning 2006 conference, held up in Lancaster, in the north-west of England.

(Please note: the following commentary is based on rapid notes made as I attended sessions, and should be interpreted as a reflection of  my personal critical opinions and interests, rather than as a commentary on specific sessions or speakers.)

Hot Topics

• Standardisation: of user profiles / content / delivery mechanisms and technologies.
• Teaching quality and efficacy. 
• Rob Koper / Oleg Liber’s work in the area of modelling scenarios, activities, IMS Learning Design (as well as "small-l" learning design or, as the JISC crowd prefers it, "design for learning". LD is clearly gaining ground.
• Personal repositories. The language of "E-portfolios" seems to be starting to move towards that of "personal repositories". Very interesting development, and worth watching.
  

Unsurprisingly, given current institutional pressures in the leadup to the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), no-one suggested e-learning quality mechanisms as a way to “assess” teaching staff / or to deliver CPD points or QAA assurances. (A related aside: My impression is that many academic and support staff with an investment in technology-enhanced learning tend to focus on the RAE as a negative thing – “the thing that prevents focus on good teaching practice and specifically prevents teaching staff from devoting time to investing in eskills / developing elearning materials either for themselves or their students.” Is there any way, I wonder,  to view the RAE -- and/or research-informed teaching -- as a positive thing for elearning? This issue was not at all discussed at the conference sessions I attended, but it is clearly important, especially for academics who teach in emerging, fast-moving areas such as nanotechnology).

The language we use to describe e-Learning is still very conservative!! At this conference, at least, there was very little discussion of web 2.0 apps and services or of the specific role of a VLE / MLE in an integrated web services infrastructure. I can't help seeing this as a reflection of the composition of the audience. Networked Learning seemed to be more of a project workers and middle-managers type of conference with little technical / developer presence. (Likewise, I didn't see many representatives from the JISC / CETIS world, although there were presentations and reports from many JISC-funded projects.)

Does this lack of sophistication reflect the relatively high representation from Further Education (FE) institutions, as well as Higher Ed -- does the language used at the conference reflect that used in the FE environment, and does this in turn reveal a resource issue, ie. is FE less well-resourced and does it have less access to cutting edge practice? If so, this is a real problem and raises all sorts of questions about accessibility, resource management, and cross-sectoral capacity building.

Similarly... Why did OSS have such a low profile at this conference? Among the many discussions of VLEs and MLEs, I heard no mention of Sakai, little mention of Moodle, and little talk about interoperability – can it really be true that these are still perceived as technical issues?

Intellectual property, digital rights management, copyright. No-one has cracked it. But we’re all worried about it. There was much discussion of the need for educational institutions to formulate clear policies, but also of the need for institutions to communicate policy effectively to staff. There was some suspicion that many academic and support staff may engage in practices that are less than 100% "above board" in terms of IPR -- this was seen as evidence that the copyright field is a "grey area" in terms of social practice and understanding. There was very little discussion of the relative benefits / drawbacks of available copyright models -- but a lot of evidence of anxiety.

There is an urgent need for research methods training for those involved in user needs analysis and evaluation. Too many tool / project evaluations are too small scale to be meaningful. Valuable time and energy are wasted creating survey instruments that are not robust or scalable… From evidence of several presentations, data collection is patchy and unreliable. There is an overreliance on interviews. No discussion of log data. No discussion of quantitative methods or use of large scale survey data. What about EU figures?? International comparisons, eg Pew Internet Project? Without a variety of data sources and methods, wrongly generalised findings can distort planning and resource allocation – even pedagogical methods.
 
There still exists a lack of widespread access to pool of research literature on pedagogical advantages and benefits of elearning.

Sigh...  Time for a cup of coffee.