One of my current interests is the area of Open Education Resources (OER). I’ve got Opening Up Education sitting on bookshelf within easy reach of my desk for when I have time spare to read it. Though of course I can also read it online, as the whole book is also available in PDF format for free from the MIT Press website.

Via Ewan McIntosh I found Seth Godin’s Textbook Rant on why he thinks the textbook industry has to die. As a fan of OER, I think he has some valid points. Indeed, one of my hopes is that I’ll find some time to produce some of my own notes online and make them available under a creative commons licence. If I find the time, that is. Doing so is not part of my job description despite Seth’s assertion that:

Professors should be spending their time devising pages or chapterettes or even entire chapters on topics that matter to them, then publishing them for free online. (it’s part of their job, remember?)

No it isn’t Seth. Unless they are being paid to do so specifically as part of some OER project – of which there are at least an increasing amount. This UK project, for example, from JISC will “make the equivalent of 5,000 undergraduate modules of existing learning resources freely available online.“

Academic textbooks are generally overpriced – something I won’t argue with. This is related, I think, to how university study is funded through very large loans in the US. Textbooks in the UK used to be significantly cheaper in the UK than in the US. Once Amazon and other online retailers arrived this discrepancy became quickly apparent – with the unfortunate effect that many textbook prices in the UK rose rather significantly so publishers could protect their US margins. (One book I have on a list of recommended texts went from £15 to £25 from one year to the next – a rise of 66%). While most textbook authors only make fairly modest amounts of money (despite Seth’s comments), I would agree with Seth that most academic publishers have been exploiting their audience and overcharging.

As to the value of a textbook, I must disagree. Not all textbooks are made equal, and perhaps marketing textbooks are just less equal than others. There are some very good (and many mediocre) computing textbooks. I have no reservations in recommending Michael Dawson’s “Beginning C++ Game Programming” to prospective and current students – even while I don’t require it as a text in any of my classes. It has a good narrative, excellent selection of content, strong examples, well thought out exercises… well I like it. And so did most of the buyers who took time to review the book on Amazon. While I don’t care too much which C++ book students have, I do feel quite strongly that students trying to learn C++ should try and get a decent C++ textbook and really use it to support their learning. There is far more to be learned that we can teach in the hours we have with students.

As for OpenGL programming, for my 3D graphics class I’m in something of a bind. There are a lot of very good books out there – but none that really work for my course, taking my students from where they start the module to where I hope they’ll be at the end. As a result, I recommend a few texts and ask students to take time to look at the various texts and choose one – in the knowledge that A is expensive and is heavy on the theory, but light on practical, B is cheaper and all practical but quite limited, C has good coverage but very limited tutorial style support, and so on. But I do think that a student that spends time using one of the books to support their own learning will benefit greatly – and I don’t have the time to write a book on the subject myself. Naturally, I also point students to a good range of free web-based resources.

Seth ends his rant with an update from the email he received:

Update: got more mail about this post than any other post ever. … and so far, more than 94% of the letters aggressively agree with me. …  I also heard from a handful of people who said that I was jealous, that the union won’t permit the system to change, that textbooks are really good, that professors are underpaid, that professors are too busy or (possibly and) that I’m delusional. I’ll note that not one of these letters came from a textbook user.

Seth’s blog doesn’t carry comments, but perhaps he should read the comments he got on Digg – which includes a number of comments from textbook users:

• One user notes that some books are better than others: “The discussion that came out of Lencioni’s book was incredibly more significant than a text book. Plus it was cheap to buy and it was practical.“
• One user points to a list of text books with very positive Amazon reviews. “In nearly every discipline, there is a market-leading textbook that is trusted, learned from, and even treasured by the people who know and use it—i.e., students and teachers.“
• Another points out some of the positive features of textbooks and suggests that “Maybe rather than get rid of textbooks, we just advocate that they become a little more affordable.“
• And a couple of marketing profs ask whether Seth is willing for his own books to be given away free in class (to put up or shut up, basically): “We’re using Seth Godins book Permission Marketing as our textbook in my summer school class. Are you saying we can reprint this book for free or is it just chapters? Can you please post authorization for students to do this. Thanks this is great news to be able to now get your books for free.“

If I ever do manage to produce my own OER course on Real Time 3D graphics, I’ll be sure to post some updates here. Sadly, it’ll be a while. Meantime, I’ll continue to point students to a range of textbooks, and recommending that they get at least one of them (or borrow it from the university library).

Metaplace has been making good progress in the last few months – particularly in some of the ’softer’ issues. When first logging into MetaPlace Central there is a simple tutorial. The wiki support is much improved. There are regular inworld classes hosted by some of the more experienced and expert residents. I think I detect the hand of Robin Harper (ex-Linden Lab, currently a consultant to Metaplace) in these developments.

Another major change is that now MP is in Open Beta (anyone can sign up), you can now embed MP worlds in other webpages. First thing I did was embed the world I built for UWS onto my Moodle site:

UWS Metaplace campus in a Moodle Frontpage

If you previously visited MP and considered it too limited or lightweight, do take time to return and see some of the recent creations – users like Dalian (whose name I also recognise from Second Life) are now starting to push the level of what can be done in MP.

New report from JISC – Effective Practice in a Digital Age:

The skill of the practitioner remains key to the effectiveness of learning – an unchangeable factor in a context of rapid change. However, practitioners now need to understand how to draw advantage from an increasingly diverse range of tools and media and select the most suited to their purpose; the appropriate integration or blending of technology-mediated activities with face-to-face learning and teaching is an important dimension of 21st century practice. When designing learning, practitioners must also be aware of the impact of technology on the way learners learn and make explicit for them the most effective learning strategies.

To further understanding of how technology may be best used in support of learning and teaching, Effective Practice in a Digital Age combines the work of individual innovators in institutional contexts with knowledge gained from JISC-funded programmes of research into the pedagogic potential of technology and into the factors involved in technology-mediated practice.

The report has sections on the use of VLE’s, blended learning, podcasting, and virtual worlds (talking to Anna Peachey of the Open University, with examples from her classes). This is extended with a range of videos and podcasts on the resource exchange page. The report is available as a free download, and you can order hard copies from the JISC site.

Reported by Rebecca Atwood in the Times Higher Education Supplement (who was also one of the interviewees and round-table participants)

Demos – a left-leaning think-tank based in London – has released a report titled The Edgeless University. From Rebecca’s summary:

Universities are becoming defined by their function, not their form, and knowledge is no longer restricted by campus buildings, it explains, but this does not make institutions redundant.

“The noise of information and knowledge needs filtering; students need guidance and expertise. They also need the ‘brand value’ of institutions and the validation they provide. Universities have to capitalise on the connections and relationships made possible by the new information technologies,” the report says.

It suggests that the value of universities lies in their “institutional capital” – “the spaces they create for learning, the validation they provide for learning and research, and the returns people get from it”.

The report covers a lot of ground in its 95 pages – and goodness knows when (if ever) I’ll be able to read the report properly. But the subsection “Why we still need universities” seems quite topical, given recent blogosphere posts on just that topic. There is also material on Open Education throughout the report, and discussion on the use of a range of Web 2.0 technologies (Second Life even merits a small mention).

As well as wealth of opportunities, the report also identifies some challenges:

Many academics find it hard to envisage the possibilities that technology affords, not least because often they lack the basic skills to use the new tools. The UCISA survey noted that staff skills were ‘overwhelmingly seen as the greatest challenge for these new demands’. The answer is not to barrage teachers with imperatives to change how they behave, but to help them find space and the capacity to develop new ways of working for themselves. This needs more resources, incentives and support. (pages 58-59)

The latest report from Virtual World Watch is now out. This is the first one that I didn’t manage a response to… though I don’t think there have been major updates or changes here at UWS since the last report.

Summer 2009 Virtual World Watch report

Trends, especially subject areas of use, are becoming clearer. The academic health and medical science sector in particular has a disproportionate number of virtual world activities. This could be because the subject matter lends itself more easily to such development, and also due to the (relative) ease of funding for such applications. For example, hands-on maternity and birthing simulations have been developed in several UK universities (Coventry, Nottingham, Teesside and Worcester). The full experience is especially difficult to convey in mere textual words, and the author of this report recommends trying one out as a good introduction to the experience of learning in virtual worlds.

For the McLuhan fans.

Its around 50 years since McLuhan wrote about media as ‘extensions of man’. A recent article in Current Biology adds evidence from neuro-science that the brain adapts to the use physical tools – so that to the brain the tools indeed become extensions of the user. I’m sure this all ties up neatly somehow…  I’m wondering if this kind of work will impact research on presence in virtual realities. Perhaps.

BBC article and the Current Biology article.

Thanks to Stephen Downes at OLDaily for this. First up, the story links to the ‘Net Gen Skeptic‘ blog – how could I have not know about this blog?

In turn, Net Gen Skeptic summarises a new report from the University of Melbourne, on a project which has been investigating how

commencing first year students and their teachers use traditional and emerging technology-based tools in their everyday lives and to support student learning and drawn on the expertise of teachers and the results of this investigation to develop and implement pedagogically sound, technology-based tools to enhance student learning in local learning environments.

Skeptic summarises the findings mentioned in the report, starting with the key note that:

The rhetoric that university students are Digital Natives and university staff are Digital Immigrants is not supported.

Read more, with links to a handbook on good practice for ‘Educating the Net Generation’ and research papers, over at Net Gen Skeptic.

Related to the recent post on the death (or otherwise) of Universities, Bill Kerr pointed me to this post by Eugene Wallingford – “Revolution Out There — and Maybe In Here“. Eugene is similarly worried if Universities have had their day:

Were I graduating from high school today, would I need a university education to prepare for a career in the software industry? Sure, most self-educated students would have gaps in their learning, but don’t today’s university graduates? … What if I worked the same 12, 14, or 16 hours a day (or more) reading, studying, writing, contributing to an open-source project, interacting on-line? Would I be able to marshall the initiative or discipline necessary to do this?

In my time teaching, I have encountered a few students capable of doing this, if they had wanted or needed to. A couple have gone to school and mostly gotten by that way anyway, working on the side, developing careers or their own start-up companies. Their real focus was on their own education, not on the details of any course we set before them.

There are more points than just these – a worthy read. I also have seen a few students such as those Eugene describes. But not many. There are some concerns that in the UK schools are not doing a good enough job of helping children develop into this kind of self directed learner. See here for just one recent story.

In fact, I spend a part of many of my modules pointing out to students that there is more information freely available on the web than I can teach them in the hours given. I encourage them to go well beyond the material in class. I try to give them a useful set of links to get them started. And the best students either take the hint or are already ahead of me on this. The average student however… is much like the average student from my own days. The availability of material has not significantly affected human behaviour in this regard.

I ask them to view the material we cover in class as the start, as a beginning, and to use this only as a base for further exploration and learning. A proportion focus instead on the pass mark – on doing what is necessary to pass and try hard not to learn anything if they can help it. To a student whose goal is the pass mark, what use is the wealth of free material on the web? Something to crib from or cut-and-paste if it helps minimise the time spent on coursework?

In The End of Education, Neil Postman quotes an article by Diane Ravitch which looks forward to a time when todays wealth of knowledge and experience is instantly available anywhere. Quote of a quote of Ravitch:

In this new world of pedagogical plenty, children and adults will be able to dial up a program on their home television to learn whatever they want to know, at their own convenience. If Little Eva cannot sleep, she can learn algebra instead. At her home learning station, she will tune into a series of interesting problems that are presented in an interactive medium, much like video games”

Well, the content is definately out there on the web. Statistics don’t appear to be showing the significant improvements in numeracy that we might hope for. Why-ever not? Neal’s comment on this scenario?

“Little Eva can’t sleep, so she decides to learn a little algebra? Where did Little Eva come from, Mars? If not it is likely she will tune into a good movie.”

Until we replace students with martians, I suspect universities will have a role to play. There is no shortage of role-models that ably demonstrate that you can do well without a university education. John Harrison or Alan Sugar for example. But today, as in the past, many of these people are quite simply exceptional individuals. Meanwhile, students will continue to try to learn software development by enrolling on courses and doing what is required of them rather than immersing themselves creating software at home and online and by becoming software developers without the extrinsic motivation of a semester deadline.

A large part of me hopes to be proven wrong.

But Eugene’s closing comments are also worth noting:

People come to us eagerly, willing to spend out of their want or to take on massive debts to buy what we sell. Some come for jobs, but most still have at least a little of the idealism of education. When I think about their act in light of all that is going on in the world, I am humbled. We owe them something as valuable as what they surrender. We owe them an experience befitting the ideal. This humbles me, but it also Invigorates and scares me, too.

Its in this light that I also think that there is a real challenge for universities to meet, a challenge that may well be unmet by most.

Think I missed this one at the time – too busy to blog or something.

Ben Goldacre considers the arguments about the effect of Social Networking on the brain and detects some scaremongering. (In the Daily Mail? How unlikely!)

Chilling warning to parents from top neuroscientist.

The Digital Britain report was published yesterday – I was away on external examination duties, so didn’t have a chance to look at it till today. Found relatively little reference to the games industry – there is a note in the executive summary about reviewing tax breaks for the industry – as the games industry in the UK has dropped into fourth place on world rankings this is probably due. Looking at the Education/Research sections (chapter 6) the following paragraphs jumped out:

55. Student demand for computing courses has fluctuated in recent years. There was a steep rise in demand and provision through the 1990s, followed by an equally steep fall in the first half of the present decade. The decline might be a reflection of perceived employment opportunities after the collapse of the dotcom boom and the waning of concerns about the ‘Millennium Bug’. Since 2006-07 numbers have levelled off and accepted applicants have started to rise again for the current year, but we should not be complacent and should continue to promote the sector as an area with good opportunities for those with the right aptitudes.
56. There are around 13,000 media programmes at FE and HE levels serving an estimated 50,000 students. This is oversupply in terms of the digital media sector but provides valuable skills into the wider economy. However, too many courses produce graduates with general digital media skills but with insufficient specialisms to meet employer needs.

Coupled with notes that many IT specialist companies have challenges recruiting suitably qualified staff (20% of such companies), this is clearly a problem of some national significance. Its not as simple as ensuring digital literacy, but encouraging students to consider more technical and specialist careers.