Presenting at ASCILITE 08

"But I tried to keep the overhead low" - Ryan Adams

I will be presenting 'Employing Educatonal Technologists: A Call for Evidenced Change' at at ASCILITE 08 in Melbourne: "Flexible technology-enhanced learning environments, both educationally and institutionally are key enablers for delivering efficient mass higher education. Educational technologists make significant contributions to the development and organizational embedding of such environments. Their emerging role is complex as it requires current knowledge and skills in learning and teaching, management and information technology. Given the strategic importance of the contributions that educational technologists now make to their institutions, we propose an international program of empirical research to analyze current issues and future trajectories relating to their aspirations, careers, management and organizational locations."

Keywords: educational technologists, flexible learning, management, organizational structure

The full citation is: Shurville, S., Browne, H. and Whitaker, M. (2008) Employing Educatonal Technologists: A Call for Evidenced Change. In Hello! Where are you in the landscape of educational technology? Proceedings ascilite Melbourne 2008. http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/melbourne08/procs/shurville.pdf

Always Coming Home: Applying Force Field Analysis

"OOOOHHHH, OOOOHHHH, OOOOHHHH, OOOOHHHH, Can you feel the force?" - The Real Thing

"Always Coming Home: Applying Force Field Analysis as a Structured Approach to Eliciting Ongoing Organizational Contexts and Requirements for Flexible Learning" is a paper I wrote for ICICTE 2007 with Mrs Aurélie Owens of Cranfield University. It is due to see publication in the UCFV Research Review. This paper is about helping academic and professional university staff to engage with flexible learning. We will argue that flexible learning is, in Ursula LeGuin’s phrase, “always coming home” because transformations to flexible learning can never be complete. This notion suggests that flexible learning actually requires a constant personal and institutional commitment to change management and staff development. The paper features a tutorial on applying Force Field Analysis to drive staff development workshops to engage academic and professional staff in the personal and institutional changes heralded by flexible learning. It also includes reflections on the use of Force Field Analysis from a facilitator and a participant observer. This is an example of practice-based research, which enables professionals to make informed decisions about if, where, and when to use a particular method. As The UCFV Research Review is not a specialized educational journal, we will introduce flexible learning, its critiques and some of the burning issues which herald widespread change to individual practice and institutional structure in higher education.

Keywords: change management, flexible learning, force field analysis, institutional change in higher education, personal change, practice-based research, staff development, staff development workshops

Always Coming Home - a paper accepted by the UCFV Research Review

"I left home too young" - Bob Dylan

The UCFV Research Review have accepted a paper I wrote with Ms Aurélie Owens* of Cranfield University, entitled 'Always Coming Home: Applying Force Field Analysis as a Structured Approach to Eliciting Ongoing Organizational Contexts and Requirements for Flexible Learning'.

The paper is about helping academic and professional university staff to engage with flexible learning. We will argue that flexible learning is, in Ursula LeGuin’s phrase, “always coming home” because transformations to flexible learning can never be complete. This notion suggests that flexible learning actually requires a constant personal and institutional commitment to change management and staff development. The paper features a tutorial on applying Force Field Analysis (Lewin, 1951) to drive staff development workshops to engage academic and professional staff in the personal and institutional changes heralded by flexible learning. It also includes reflections (Schön, 1983) on the use of Force Field Analysis from a facilitator and a participant observer. This is an example of practice-based research (Bourner and O’Hara, 2000), which enables professionals to make informed decisions about if, where, and when to use a particular method. As The UCFV Research Review is not a specialized educational journal, we will introduce flexible learning, its critiques and some of the burning issues which herald widespread change to individual practice and institutional structure in higher education.

References

• Bourner, T. & O’Hara, S. (2000). Practitioner-centered research, in: Bourner, T., Katz, T. & Watson, D. (Eds.) New directions in professional higher education (Buckingham, SRHE/Open University Press).


• Le Guin, U. K. (1985). Always Coming Home. New York: Gollancz.


• Lewin K. (1951). Field Theory in Social Science. New York: Harper and Row.


• Schön, D. (1983). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Cambridge, MA: Basic Books.

*Aurélie Owens has been active in the plagerism debate.

Call for papers for themed issue of CWIS on e-learning in China

"Let the day begin ..." - The Call

Dr. Qiyun Wang, Prof. Zhiting Zhu, Dr. Li Chen, and Dr. Hanbing Yan have offered to edit a themed issue of Campus-wide Information Systems on E-Learning in China. The issue will be managed on behalf of the journal by the associate editor Dr Simon Shurville (s.shurville@bcs.org). The call for papers is now available from the journal web site.

This themed issue will reflect upon progress in Chinese e-learning and will address topics including, but not limited to, the following:

• Case studies of Chinese teachers’ professional development in e-learning
• Discussion of issues, challenges and future trends of e-learning in China
• Evaluations of the effectiveness of e-learning courses in China
• Experiences of web-based course development and evaluation in China
• In-depth analysis of e-learning technology standards in the Chinese context
• Issue- or results-focused case studies of e-learning for Chinese primary, secondary schools and tertiary education
• Research articles illustrating and critiquing educational technologies and new uses of technology in Chinese education
• Perceptions and views on e-learning from various Chinese stakeholders
  

Academics with experience of e-learning in the Chinese context are invited to contribute case studies, conceptual papers, research papers, technical papers and viewpoint papers on the above topics for peer review.

The envisaged timeline is as follows:

• Authors should submit abstracts in English (about 300 words) and Chinese (about 150 words) to the editors by 15 Dec 2007
• Notification of acceptance will be sent by 31 Dec 2007
• Authors must submit the first drafts of their full papers in English by 31 March 2008. To speed up the process, authors with English as a second language are advised to have these proof-read by an English speaker prior to submission. These full papers must include structured abstracts as specified in the guidelines for authors. The full paper including its abstract should be 4000 words or less
• Authors will receive final reviewers’ comments by 31 May 2008
• The final manuscript must be submitted to the editors by 31 July 2008

Authors need to send a copy of their manuscripts in the form of an MS Word file attached to an email to the following:

Dr. Qiyun Wang
Learning Sciences and Technologies Academic Group
National Institute of Education
Nanyang Technological University
1 Nanyang Walk
Singapore 637616
Tel: 65-67903267
Fax: 65-68968038
E-mail: qiyun.wang@nie.edu.sg

And cc to:

Prof. Zhiting Zhu
Distance Education College
East China Normal University
3663 North Zhongshan Road,
Shanghai, China
Email: mailto:ztzhu@dec.ecnu.edu.cn

The Green World

"It's the end of the summer ... You can spin the light to gold" - Dar Williams

In this somewhat preachy post I want to make a case for considering the environmental impact of e-learning and other university systems and for including the environment as a stakeholder in our projects. In the past year or so I have watched the environment move from a left wing / green trope to become a mainstream topic of political debate in Australia. For example, The Green Building Council of Australia has released a new rating tool for schools and universities across Australia (see: http://www.gbcaus.org/). So I admit that I'm a latecomer and I hope that some readers will be able to offer more radical views and actions. If you read nothing else on this topic then please try and find a copy of McDonough and Braungart's Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, which really changed my way of thinking.

We are already reasonably certain that human environmental impact will be an economic imperative throughout the 21st centaury (Stern, 2006). McDonough and Braungart (2002) argue that our current economic paradigm is unsustainable as our systems of manufacture are relentlessly harming our collective health and that of our eco-system. They show that an ecologically effective paradigm, founded on systems that aim beyond zero waste, appears feasible. They also accept that significant research and cultural change will be required. In the longer term, the HE sector is well-situated to research, develop and transfer ecologically efficient processes and technologies. For now, despite current economic pressures, HE still enjoys a modest license to put critique into action and could therefore implement cultural change as a precursor to effecting modest ecological transformations.

Naively, we might expect a dash for e-learning to significantly reduce HE’s environmental footprint. Unfortunately, while paper-based distance learning seems to offer significant reductions, current e-learning practice offers scant improvements over commuting to campus. A recent report for the UK Open University by Roy et al highlighted that “on average, the production and provision of the distance learning courses consumed nearly 90% less energy and produced 85% fewer CO2 emissions (per student per 10 CAT points) than the conventional campus-based university courses.” … however … “e-learning courses appear to offer only a small reduction in energy consumption and CO2 emissions (20% and 12% respectively) when compared to mainly print-based distance learning courses. This is due to high student use of computing, consumption of paper for printing off Web-based material, and additional home heating.” (Roy et al 2005: 4). So an ethical HE sector might perform an ecological audit on its e-learning programs and incorporate environmentally effective learning materials printed on substances such as polypropylene, which can be easily recycled (McDonough, 2007). Such a cultural change could be seeded by adding environmental auditing to the curricula of staff development courses hosted by learning and teaching departments.

In the case of blended and traditional learning, a well intentioned institution might want to reduce the carbon footprint of its campus. Indeed, a recent survey, reported in the UK Guardian (Lipsett, 2007), showed that some HE institutions are making good progress with transforming their campuses into energy efficient systems. For example “Leeds Met gets 85% of its energy from renewable sources and recycles 36% of its waste” (op cite). Unfortunately the survey also revealed that the majority of UK campuses have yet to respond to the ecological imperative. We think that needs to change. The Higher Education Funding Council for England, think so too. They are funding the Higher Education Environmental Performance Initiative (HEEPI) (HEEPI, 2007) whose web site explains the relevance of the International Standards Organisation's standard, ISO 14001 scheme and the Eco-Management and Audit (EMAS) scheme of the European Union to HE institutions. The HEEPI web site represents a good entry point to learn about these standards and the roles they could play in HE transformations.

Problematically, the ubiquity of ICT on campus is contributing heavily to HE’s energy usage and emissions. In the United States, green campus initiatives are starting to raise consciousness on this issue. For example, Harvard University maintains a green campus web site which warns staff and students that “one desktop computer left on all day for one year can result in more than 1500 pounds of CO2 being released into the atmosphere. It would take 100 to 500 trees to offset that amount of extra CO2.” (Harvard, 2007). The web site also contains a purchasing guide which offers useful information such as “laptops use 1/4 the energy of desktops” (Harvard, 2007) phrased in straightforward language. Accessing such information could easily be included as an activity in staff and student inductions performed by information technology services and libraries.

ICT can be applied to support environmentally effective practices including as video conferencing and online billing (Pamlin and Szomolányi , 2006). Conference travel can be regarded as a pleasant aspect of academic life and it might be painful to give up. However, various organizations such as the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), have realised that academic conferences incur a high carbon footprint and have started to organize online events (JISC, 2007). Pamlin and Szomolányi (2006) estimate that replacing paper telephone bills for 100 million EU citizens would save 109,100 tonnes of CO2 per annum. I recently managed implementation of an online registration project for the University of Sussex as part of the Sussex Direct project. The sub-project was straightforward and cost effective. Moreover, the requirement for organizational change was minimal. However, although ecological concerns were an explicit driver, it is regrettable that an ecological audit was not performed at any point in the project. It would require a very minor organizational transformation for HE institutions to establish cross-functional teams to routinely address such issues. I advocate that an ecological audit should be included within the due diligence and evaluation for all transformational projects and especially those requiring significant new ICT platforms. If HE is to avoid inflicting ‘remote ecological tyranny’ upon future generations (c.f. McDonough and Braungart 2003), then HE needs to make the environment a driver and stake holder in its transformations.

References

• Lipsett, A. (2007), Leeds Met tops Green University League Table. The Guardian Friday June 15, 2007. http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/news/story/0,,2104028,00.html. Accessed 22 June 2007.



• Higher Education Environmental Performance Initiative (2007), Higher Education Environmental Performance Initiative. http://www.heepi.org.uk/. Accessed 22 June 2007.



• Joint Information Systems Committee (2007), Innovating E-Learning Online Conference 2007: FAQ. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning_pedagogy/elp_conference07/faq.aspx. Accessed 22 June 2007.



• McDonough and Braungart (2002), Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. New York, NY: North Point Press.



• McDonough, W. (2007), Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way we Make Things. http://www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cradle.htm. Accessed 22 June 2007.



• Pamlin, D. and Szomolányi, K. (2006), Saving the Climate @ the Speed of Light: First Roadmap for Reduced CO2 Emissions in the EU and Beyond. A joint initiative of ETNO and WWF. http://www.etno.be/Portals/34/ETNO%20Documents/Sustainability/Climate%20Change%20Road%20Map.pdf. Accessed 22 June 2007.



• Roy, R., Potter, S., Yarrow, K. and Smith, M. (2005), Towards Sustainable Higher Education: Environmental Impacts of Campus-Based and Distance Higher Education Systems. Milton Keynes: The Open University. http://www3.open.ac.uk/events/3/2005331_47403_o1.pdf. Accessed 22 June 2007.



• Stern, N. (2006), Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. HM Teasury. Available at: http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/stern_review_economics_climate_change/stern_review_report.cfm. Accessed 22 June 2007.

Excellent change management text book by Mark Hughes

"... please tell me you all - why does good change take so long?" - Greg Brown

Projects are synonymous with change. Hence the project management community has learnt that managing a significant project entails managing concomitant change on behalf of the project team and the stakeholders. Problematically, however, the rational and teleological approaches that dominate project management (Pollack, 2007) are more suited to directing technical processes and logistics than to the subtleties of wrangling complex emotions and politics. Worse, the change dimension of significant projects is inherently ‘wicked’ (Rittel and Webber, 1973). This means that identifying and characterising the potential change issues, selecting approaches to ameliorate them and identifying metrics to evaluate progress are irreducible parts of each particular project. Consequently project managers must accept the lack of steadfast algorithms for planning, implementing or evaluating change. Hence, when managing change hard nosed, logical positivist project managers need to learn how to interweave softer, less deterministic mindsets into their professional practice. Realising this, as a working project manager, I decided to update my skills and sought a course that would address the non-algorithmic people side of projects and change.

So I recently completed a two year part time M.A. in Change Management at the University of Brighton taught by Mark Hughes and Steve Reeve. The course was great as it used action learning/research to share experiances between experianced managers. A perfect learning design for the target group. Mark has now published the excellent text book 'Change Management: a Critical Perspective'. Mark's text is a blessing to educators because it presents rigorous arguments against reifying positivist approaches to change, together with sober alternatives, and contextualizes these arguments within a first rate evidence-base. This approach sets a radical agenda squarely within the workplace while opening the floodgates for critical and reflective debate in the classroom. I am currently reviewing the book and hope to publish the review in the journal Project Management in Business.

Mark also recently published ‘When Faculties Merge: Communicating Change’ in the recent special issue of Organizational Transformation and Social Change that Tom Browne and I edited. In the paper he brought his extensive subject knowledge of change management to bear in the context of his personal experience of a radical change to his faculty. Mark suggested that ‘the storytelling approach may be regarded as an antidote to the often prescriptive/normative nature of the change literature’. This provided a worked example to back up the assertions in this book. Anyone interested in change management in higher education would be advised to read the paper and the book.

Mark is also interested in 'Encouraging and Supporting Postgraduates Who Wish to Publish Work from Their Studies'. I think his approach works well with enquiry based learning, mode 2 and could be adapted to web 2.0.

References

• Pollack, J. (2007). The Changing Paradigms of Project Management. International Journal of Project Management. Volume 25, Issue 3 pp 266-274.
• Rittel, H.W.J. and Webber, M.M. (1973). Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning, Policy Sciences, Vol. 4, pp. 155-69.

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.

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:

• Volume 3, Issue 3 (2006)


• Volume 4, Issue 4 (2007)