Jon

Very much liked this, has the Milton Freidman feel of "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon".  Nothing like stating the obvious with great simplicity, so that we can actually see it. Another quote speaks to this, if I can continue this increasingly pretentious comment

<!--[if gte mso 9]> Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]> <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} <![endif]-->We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate

Litte Gidding - T.S. Elliot

A little off your topic about difference in face to face situations but I am currently working with a student on a lit review of all research with mobile technology and health and we have not found anything that actually indicates that the technology improved health or health education although everyone speculates that it does. I believe this is mainly because the research is mostly  retrospective survey or perception of user stuff.

What I would really like to study right now is why texting is easier for communication than either talking on the phone or face to face. We are in the middle of our first texting study between faculty and students in the clinical area and both sides believe that texting is liberating them obvioulsy from the pressures of syncrynosity (is that a word?) but also independent study students are texting other students whom they would never phone or Facebook ( problem here with title of The Landing is that it is hard to use as a verb).

Interesting! I suspect that it is missing the elephant in the room to focus on the little thing with shiny buttons and lights in health as much as in education. It ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it.

I'd love to hear more on that texting study: I've had mixed success with that myself. Apart from things like cost, one big issue for me is the great freedom from their faculty's office hours that students tend to enjoy with the technology: would be good to know how that is dealt with. Email is more controllable that way, with less expectation of a rapid response, and phones have voicemail for such issues. But the expectation for quick text responses tend to be higher (it is after all only going to be a few characters and most people carry their phones with them) and having to respond to texts at odd hours of the day and night can be quite unappealing once the novelty wears off. 

I think the sensation of someone at the other end responding quickly and showing caring about your learning is worth a ton of learning theory, detailed responses or textbooks. But managing expectations is tricky, especially to deal with the feelings of uncertainty when that response is not so very rapid. Are there limits on how much texting is acceptable and at what hours?

Hi Jon,

Originally I had thought that 'learning analytics' the much smaller definitions you've noted above, bu it is clear to me that it is going to be used to describe all of the above related, but very different aspect.

I also agree that learner analytics will also be the most appealing among public ed admin and corporate heads alike.  When I heard the promise of "being able to identify the students most at risk of dropping out in the next five days" touted by Phil Ice from American Public University, I knew it exactly what my company would want to explore... but I also have questions, How do you know you've identified the right students and do interventions make a difference? (I guess if you don't intervene and the students you predicted would drop really do, it would prove you were right...)

This line of thinking has already led me to ask some questions: If you know which students (or employees) are likely to be unsuccessful isn't the shortest path in improved stats, to refine the recruitment process?  If we identify the people likely to drop does it become a self-fulfilling prophecy?  Or do we dump so many resources into them, only to allow other students to fall through the cracks?  I don't have any answers t this point, but I do get the feeling that it is the type of analytics that could definately be used for either good or evil, depending on the underlying theories, assumptions and motivators.

I fear the hard machine. Respect it too. Maybe love it a little. Those are really good points. We need to be so so careful about where the hard machine leads us. I am much keener on machines that give us flexibility of use and transparency of operation as a rule, despite the fact that they also involve harder work to make them do what we want. My big fear here is that such learner analytics will be used unreflectively or (worse, because harder to fix) automatically. I'm also a little worried about what those in charge might do with teaching analytics, especially if they get aggregated and lead to university analytics. Even if the machine is soft and results are treated with caution, each higher level of aggregation and abstraction has a tendency to lead to dangerous and unwarranted generalisations - at least, that seems to be a general rule that I have aggregated from lower levels of abstraction. What started as a useful tool for guidance can so easily become an instrument of control.

I see a fundamental incompatability between the complete democratization of higher education, which seems to be implicit in your expressed hopes, and the old idea of a community of scholars. I wouldn't want to return to a day when women and others are arbitrarily excluded from that community, but I can't see it ever being something that most people would voluntarily join. I can imagine guild-like groups maintaining professional standards much as they do now, but I think most people are extrinsically movtivated and do not see the pursuit of knowledge as an end in itself. A self-selecting community of scholars would be relatively tiny. Back to the future--it might not be so bad.

I don't think the first phase of my ideas involves major disruption to what we already have - it just introduces a bit of evolutionary churn that is currently throttled by the tight coupling of teaching and summative assessment. We could carry on much as we do now in many ways, teaching, researching, assessing. But, as we move to the next phase, the separation of assessment has the big advantage of creating an evolutionary power struggle in which I think quality would improve: reliable assessment would be valued highly, as would good teaching, as separate and distinct processes. And they would not have to come from universities, but they probably would, at least to start with. In the future, my hope would be that universities of some form might remain but, to do so, they would have to be good. Maybe guild-like entities would evolve, but they wouldn't have to emerge for this process to work - the traditional peer-review and other quality control processes would still have a valuable role.

Right now, we can teach really badly and assess moderately well thus, as long as our students are good enough to succeed despite our poor efforts, we come out smelling of roses. This gives very little incentive for teaching to evolve - as long as we are all caught in the same system, our ties to the surrounding ecology are too strong to allow significant change to occur. Maybe evolution would lead to bad things, especially if it were hijacked by poorly informed cost-cutters who might remove value as well as cost. But I think the roles of accreditation and teaching are too important for that to happen - people wouldn't like it.

I should emphasise that formative assessment is a necessary part of good teaching - it's just the summative part I'd like to separate out.

Just a quick question Jon:

When you say "...the result is a tendency to limited creativity and inspiration" do you mean for our course authors or the students? Or both?

I would offer that the LMS doesn't really limit choice as much as some of us think it does (not you - others).

Since our undergrad, self-paced courses are not teacher-centric but centered more on the information and activities that are supported/encouraged, students creativity and inspiration is limited more in the design approach than by the LMS interface options itself. 

My vehicle always looks the same (closed design), and I know where everything is if I need to use it,  but it can take me to wonderful places if I want it to. 

I think the LMS borders/boundaries have always been permeable to supporting creativity & inspiration for both our internal staff and our students (e.g., adding on the Landing as an activity, a link to a prof's external blog, a Moodle forum where students can share their aesthetic creations etc.).

However, if a course author maintains a personal root teaching metaphor of linear progression marching through predefined, closed content, means-ends ("hard")  instead of supporting emergence/contingency/complexity etc. then the LMS will be a vehicle that can only move in one direction in a closed box and never go anywhere "interesting" (or "soft") for anyone

Basically, I think it's actually the people who create the courses that can be the root cause of the "border control" on creativity & imagination - not the technology.  Does that make sense?

The dangers are definitely for course authors and teachers: students may be victims of their decisions, but it depends entirely on the way it is used and the learning activities are designed, and it fits into a much broader ecology of systems and processes. And yes, people are the ones that can make or break it and who can rise above any systemic constraints if they are creative, skilled and sufficiently time-rich.  

The problem is not that great things cannot be done with an LMS - within limits they can, especially if they know a lot about how to use it - but that it comes with a set of expectations and assumptions that are determined first by the developers, then the policies and admins and only then the creators of courses. People, who are short of time and/or don't have enough skills to usurp predetermined structures, will tend to take the easier paths - it's not that they are lazy or unimaginative, it's just a feature of a world without infinite time to give. The LMS (including the surrounding hierarchies of control, not just the software) achieves its magic and improves efficiency by reducing the need to make choices, and that means the overall tendency is towards uniformity and away from innovative solutions. Personally, I like a few constraints (not *too* many) because they encourage problem-solving and creative solutions if you are willing to put in the effort and have the necessary skills to overcome limitations. But I am a geek and unusual because I have a strong interest in doing and researching such things, and I enjoy (and usually win) the fight with the machine. Observing a lot of LMS-based courses in many institutions, it is clear that this is not the overall tendency. In fact, people who have hitherto achieved innovative and flexible designs in face to face courses often fall into line when it comes to the LMS, parcelling amorphous topics up into separate units, separating discussion from content, formalising previously informal formative assessment practice, adopting a culture of announcement and control when formerly it was a dialogue, and so on. The details vary enormously according to LMS and organisational culture/structure, but the effects are similarly constraining whenever they occur.

By assembling an LMS with other technologies (including pedagogies and other processes as well as other software and hardware) it can become a useful part of a richer technological assembly and I do not object to its use as a deliberately chosen toolset, any more than I object to lectures or exams (both of which are things to be avoided on the whole) as long as they are reflectively and intelligently chosen to fit identified learning needs and pedagogies, and not used as a matter of course. That's one of the big reasons I think the Landing is part of a more useful long-term strategy: part of the philosophy of the Landing is to create a space that is as constraining or unconstraining as you need it to be - it is about giving control to non-geeks and non-admins to create any process, soft or hard, rather than embedding structure in the software. It's very far from perfect yet, but that's the direction we are heading.

Excellent!

Reminds me of the National Park phenomenon that assumes that you can preserve nature and wildlife within arbitrarily demarcated boundaries.  A strange assumption that those created boundaries are impermeable

Perhaps the Landing can be thought of as AU's National Park on the Web, with more freedom to roam and have some fun in the wilds of a more naturally structured environment than the "classrooms" in our LMS.   The group campsites seem to be popular so far....