Monday, September 17, 2007

Representing Campus-Wide Information Systems and Multicultural Education and Technology Journal at AARE

"That until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes ..." - Haile Selassie

I will be representing Campus-Wide Information Systems at the Australian Association for Research in Education conference in Fremantle in November and hunting for quality papers for the journal and its sister the Multicultural Education and Technology Journal.

I will present a paper called "Accomodating Culture within ICT-driven change programmes in Higher Education" I argue that Higher Education (HE) is key to creating and supporting the envisioned knowledge-based economies of the 21st century. Ironically, however, while the sector specialises in creating and imparting knowledge, it is often less agile than its industrial counterparts in applying knowledge media and ICT in response to threats and opportunities within its ecosystem. A complicating factor is that HE has a unique set of cultures. These include the chasm between academic and general staff. Moreover, collegiate traditions and ideals are now in competition with new financial realities and personal reward structures, which is generating a high level of resistance to change. Such cultural issues make it imperative to plan change carefully but hard to learn from change narratives set in other sectors. So, while there is a clear need within HE for ICT-driven change and change management, traditional approaches to embedding ICT must accommodate academic culture. The presentation will appeal to academic and general staff who are interested in embedding ICT within HE's unique culture.

The presentation incorporates ideas I have developed with Tom Browne of Exeter University and which we published in our special issues of the Journal of Organizational Transformation and Social Change.

Ten years ago today

You say your not nostalgic … then give me another word for it, you who are so good with words and keeping things hid” - Joan Baez.

It is a decade ago today that Lyn Pemberton and I hosted Writing and Computers 10. Out of nostalgia I’m going to include some of the original call for papers which appeared on a news group. Does anyone remember them?

Subject: Writing and computers 10 - call for papers
From: sjs16@itri.bton.ac.uk (Simon Shurville) [long gone!]
Date: Tue, 29 Apr 1997 15:52:30 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.ai.doc-analysis.misc
Sender: -Not-Authenticated-[3483]
Xdisclaimer: No attempt was made to authenticate the sender's name.
Xref: cfar.umd.edu comp.ai.doc-analysis.misc:361 Writing the Future:Writing and Computers 10 September 18th and 19th 1997, University of Brighton, UK http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/events/WandC97/ [long gone!] The Tenth Annual Writing and Computers conference will be hosted thisyear by the University of Brighton in the lively seaside town of Brighton, 60 miles from London. The conference regularly brings together an international community ofpeople concerned with all aspects of computers and the writing process, including psychologists, software designers, educational researchers, teachers, journalists, authors and technical writers. The theme for this year's conference will be Writing the Future-potential developments in writing with computers as we enter thenext millenium.

The conference led to a special issue of the journal Text Technology and the book Words on the Web, both edited by Lyn Pemberton and myself. Stand out academics included Illana Synder (author of Page to Screen, which is still a great book) and Pamela Gay. The man of the match was Steven Marcus, who sadly died not long after.

24 hours after all conferences one should be listening to Sleepy LaBeef delivering the Jim Beam Small Batch of rockabilly in a café with buffalo burgers and 300 kinds of hot sauce! So, on a whim, I fled the UK to Memphis to avoid Diana mania. In those days you could still vacation without a laptop. So I spent some great twilights on Beale Street soaking up the blues without e-mail or football scores. Later Erin Stanfill drove us slow and lost down to New Orleans with nay a Blackberry in our world. As an old New Orleans hand Erin showed me an Anne Rice of a time. As Lucinda Williams sang "my brother knows where the best bars are" and Erin is one hell of a brother. Then a lot happened in America that shouldn't and look what went down in New Orleans in the intervening years! I miss the deep fried oyster po' boys and the widest lake I ever saw. "You say your not nostalgic … then give me another word for it ...".

Migrated to Australia

"Thousands are sailing ..." - Shane McGowan

I migrated to Australia this month to settle with my wife, who has lived here for a couple of years. It is great to be in my new home and to start learning all about Australian culture. I have been here a few times before but it is a very different oppertunity to live here! The best part is finaly being with Marian full time. We married here a year ago in McLaren Vale and being apart has been very painful.

It is curious how many Brits are migrating these days. I suppose I have become sensitized and notice the news stories etc. The main reason people seem to give is the M25.

I am sad to have left Cranfield University and the UK higher educational scene in general. I really enjoyed teaching Information Systems and Knowledge Management at Cranfield. It will be really interesting to see how Australian academia compares. The good news on a work-related front is that Campus-Wide Information Systems are happy for me to carry on as assistant editor from here. I am planning to manage themed issues on Australian e-learning, Chinese e-learning, ELGG and Web 2.0 in the USA.

Postcript: my cat Skippy has now arrived from England and is mousing like a good un. Marian and I are loving Frematle and especially the Frematle Arts Centre. We have tickets for Dave Hole and the Indigo Girls.

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Special issues of Organizational Transformation and Social Change on ICT-Driven Change in Higher Education

".... and you can't see tomorrow with yesterday's eyes" - Ryan Adams

Dr Tom Browne and I have co-edited two special issues of the Journal Organizational Transformation and Social Change. Early in 2006, drawing greatly upon personal experience, we identified the need for the Higher Education (HE) community to identify and share much more transparently the growth pains of developing institutional e-learning cultures, with all the concomitant challenges of managing consequential organisational transformation. A proposal for a special issue was made to the editors of OTSC, which was enthusiastically accepted.

The special issues, which have now been published, contain twelve papers:

  • In ‘Technology Supported Learning – Tensions between Innovation, and Control’, Stiles and Yorke apply the longitudinal perspective gained through early adoption of e-learning at Staffordshire University to explore ways to overcome the barriers of introducing new technologies and maintaining innovation thereafter.
  • In ‘Implementing Web-Assisted Learning and Engaging Academic Staff in the Change Process’, Marek, Sibbald and Bagher present a change narrative based around the ‘fast and forced’ introduction of an MLE/VLE to facilitate blended learning at Napier University.
  • In ‘Effecting Institutional Change Through E-Learning: An Implementation Model for VLE Deployment at the University of York’, Beastall and Walker report a flexible approach to change management that varied in pace to suite the needs of individual staff, students and departments during the introduction of a VLE.
  • In ‘The Cultural Impact of an In-Depth Consultation on the University of Nottingham: A Bottom-Up Approach’ Wilson, and Grimshaw focus upon the details of designing an effective consultation exercise with stakeholders in research at the University of Nottingham as a precursor to establishing a virtual research environment.
  • ‘Initiating E-Learning by Stealth, Participation and Consultation in a Late Majority Institution’ by Luckin, Shurville and Browne recounts how a grass roots initiative was effectively transformed into a top down programme. The extent to which opportunities afforded by e-learning are embraced by an institution can depend in large measure on whether it is perceived as enabling and transformative or as a major and disruptive distraction. Most case studies focus on the former. This paper describes how e-learning was introduced into the latter environment. The sensitivity of competing pressures in a research intensive university substantially influenced the manner in which e-learning was promoted. This paper tells that story, from initial stealth to eventual university acknowledgement of the relevance of e-learning specifically to its own context.
  • In ‘Facilitating Organizational Change: Some Sociocybernetic Principles’, Scott reflects on the role of a senior learning technologist as change agent.
  • In ‘When Faculties Merge: Communicating Change’, Hughes brings his extensive subject knowledge of change management to bear in the context of his personal experience of a radical change to his faculty. He suggests that ‘the storytelling approach may be regarded as an antidote to the often prescriptive/normative nature of the change literature’ and provides us with a highly emotional worked example to back up the assertions in his recent text book.
  • In ‘Laptops For Students: Understanding And Evaluating The Drivers For Change’ Coen et al apply the MIT90s Model for Institutional Change to evaluate a project to provide students at the University of Strathclyde with personal laptops.
  • In ‘Implementations, Change Management and Evaluation: A Case Study of the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning in Reusable Learning Objects’ Cook et al evaluate a large scale project involving three institutions with very different organizational structures and cultures: the University of Cambridge (an ancient university), London Metropolitan University (a new university), and the University of Nottingham (a member of the Russell Group).
  • In ‘Technology at the planning table: Activity theory, Negotiation and Course Management Systems’, Benson and Whitworth apply a blend of Cervero and Wilson’s (1994) negotiation of power and interests model and activity theory to compare approaches to negotiation during innovation in HE in the UK and the US.
  • In ‘Whither E-Learning? Conceptions of Change and Innovation in Higher Education’ Rossiter widens her lens further to evaluate change management practices across the Australian HE system. Rossiter shows that substantial development of capabilities for change and innovation is still required across the sector.

In the first editorial Tom and I introduced these papers. In the second editorial, 'Educating Minds for the Knowledge Economy', we argued that while e-learning can support mass education, it can also replicate existing HE systems that are over reliant upon teaching which aims to transmit knowledge. This approach risks failing to equip graduates with the requisite skills to solve novel problems set by fast moving knowledge-based economies. Although approaches to redress this balance by incorporating research have long been available, for example action research and mode two, so far their impact in mainstream undergraduate teaching has been rather marginal. Recently, however, the family of ‘enquiry- and research-based’ approaches is starting to unify under the banner of enquiry-based learning (EBL), which is starting to gain traction in HE. We acknowledged that the e-learning community have already played a substantial role in the seeding of EBL. However, we suggested that, as part of a sector-wide transformation, e-learning now needs to generate radical innovations in process and technology and thereby develop capacities for affordable, high-quality mass EBL.

You can find the special issues online:

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Research Communities

Research Communities was a business unit of iDesk which was lead by Pernille Rudlin.

Research Communities applied intelligent tools to tame the web and help learners to optimize their research time. Specifically, it contained Research Assistant, an AI tool with the following functions:

A wizard to help the learner construct an appropriate research question in one or more natural languages.

An agent performing deep stochastic searches across the web to locate relevant documents.

A multilingual summarizer providing a personalised precis of each document thus enabling the learner to assess which documents to retrieve and read in full.

A highlighter facilitating rapid scanning of documents by generating hyperlinks to content that matches the learner’s interests.

A report generator that collated the research findings in a learner specified language and ranking.

The output of these tools seamlessly integrated with a learning portfolio and collaborative learning tools.

The Research Communities portfolio could be customized to meet the specific needs of learners, educationalinstitutions and professional bodies. The portfolio enabled the learner to:

List actions and due dates they have generated or agreed with a tutor, mentor or peers.

Integrate completed research and evidence of reflection into a formal report for a tutor, mentor or processional body.

Upload personal documents and relate these to particular action points or existing learning materials.

Entries in the learning portfolio could remain private or be shared with other learners.