Some recent papers

"Now I believe this, and it's been proven by research ..." - Joe Strummer

Here are some recent publications and presentations:

• Shurville, S. and Owens, A. (in press). Always Coming Home: Applying Force Field Analysis as a Structured Approach to Eliciting Ongoing Organizational Contexts and Requirements for Flexible Learning. UCFV Research Review.
• Shurville, S., O’Grady, T., and Mayall, P. (2008). Educational and institutional Flexibility of Australian Educational Software. Campus-Wide Information Systems,Volume 25, Issue 2, pp 74-84.
• Scott, B., Shurville, S., Maclean, P. and Cong, C. (2007). Cybernetic Principles for Learning Design. Kybernetes, Volume 36, Issue 9/10, pp 1497 - 1514.
• Browne, T. and Shurville, S. (2007) Educating Minds for the Knowledge Economy. Journal of Organisational Transformation and Social Change, Volume 4, Issue 1, pp 3-12.
• Greener, S., Rospiglosi, A. and Shurville, S. (2007). Engaging from the Inside: Reflections on the Value of Social Cognitive Theory for Learning in Online Discussion. In the proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on e-Learning, Columbia University, New York, USA.
• Greener, S., Shurville, S. and Rospiglosi, A. (2007). The Value of Social Cognitive Theory in Online Discussion: Reflection via a Critical Incident repertory Grid. In the proceedings of the 7th International Conference of Information and Communications Technologies in Education, Crete, Greece.
• Shurville, S. and Browne, T. (eds.) (2007). A special double issue of the Journal of Organizational Transformation and Social Change on ICT-Driven Change in Higher Education (Part Two). Journal of Organisational Transformation and Social Change, Volume 4, Issue 1.
• Shurville, S. and Fernstrom, K. (eds.) (2007a). Special Issue of Campus Wide Information Systems on Global Educational Networks for the Common Good. Campus Wide Information Systems, Volume 24, Issue 3.
• Shurville, S. and Fernstrom, K. (2007b). From Rhodes to Global Educational Networks for the Common Good. Campus Wide Information Systems, Volume 24, Issue 3.
• Shurville, S. and Owens, A. (2007). Engaging Colleagues in Personal and Organizational Change via Force Field Analysis. In the proceedings of the 7th International Conference of Information and Communications Technologies in Education, Crete, Greece.
• Shurville, S. (2007) Successful ICT-Driven Change in Higher Education. Presented at International Hive User Group 3rd Annual Conference, Perth Western Australia.
• Browne, T. and Shurville, S. (2006). Initiating E-learning by Stealth at a Late Majority Institution. In Fernstrom, K. and Tsolakidis, K. (eds.) Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information Technologies in Education pp 101-106.
• Luckin, R., Shurville, S. and Browne, T. (2006). Initiating E-Learning by Stealth, Participation and Consultation in a Late Majority Institution. Journal of Organisational Transformation and Social Change, Volume 3, Issue 3, pp 317-332.
• Shurville, S. and Browne, T. (eds.) (2006a). A special double issue of the Journal of Organizational Transformation and Social Change on ICT-Driven Change in Higher Education (Part One). Journal of Organisational Transformation and Social Change, Volume 3, Issue 3.
• Shurville, S. and Browne, T. (2006b). Introduction: ICT-Driven Change in Higher Education: Learning from E-Learning. Journal of Organisational Transformation and Social Change, Volume 3, Issue 1, pp 245-250.
• Shurville, S., Simpson-Horn, G., Scott, B., Lee, M. P. and Harrison, A. (2006) Outcomes of the Periodic Review of an MSc in Knowledge Management Systems Taught via Flexible Learning. In Fernstrom, K. and Tsolakidis, K. (eds.) Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Information Technologies in Education, pp 348-352.
• Scott, B. and Shurville, S. (2005). Epistemological Unification of the Disciplines: The Contributions of Socio- Cybernetics. In the proceedings of the Sixth European Congress on Systems Science Paris, France, September 19-22, 2005 (CD-ROM only).
• Shurville, S., Rospigliosi, A. and Scott, B. (2005). Innovative courses in E-Business Information Systems for SMEs. In Méndez-Vilas, A. , González-Pereira, B., J. Mesa González, J., and Mesa González, J.A. (eds.) Recent Research Developments in Learning Technologies. Published by FORMATEX, Badajoz, Spain, pp 160-164.
• Shurville, S. Lee, M., Scott, B. and Harrison, A. (2005). Design, Development and Delivery of an Innovative Blended MSc in Knowledge Management. In Hawamdeh, S. (ed.) Knowledge Management: Nurturing Culture, Innovation and Technology, Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific, pp 537-550.
• Shurville, S. and Williams, J. (2005). Managing In-House Development of a Campus-Wide Information System. Campus-Wide Information Systems, 22, 1, pp 15-27.

Where the copyright is kosher, these can be requested from me.

Learner-Generated Contexts

"Mercy, mercy me ... the ecology" - Marvin Gaye

Should we conceptualize learners as tourists in zoologicalgardens curated by educators or as explorers in open environments fraught with danger and reward? In other words do we see ourseves as Johnny Morris or our learners as Steve Irwin?

Rose Luckin and her colleagues Jon Akass, John Cook, Peter Day, Nigel Ecclesfield, Fred Garnett, Matt Gould, Tom Hamilton, Andrew Whitworth have published some interesting and much needed theoretical work to frame discussions of education and web 2.0 grounded in ideas of self-organization and ecology. I think they would opt for Steve Irwin!

In 'Learner-Generated Contexts: Sustainable Learning Pathways Through Open Content' they write: "The proposal of a Learner Generated Context arose initially from the suggestion that an educational context can be described as a learner-centric ecology of resources and that a learner-generated context is one in which a user or group of users collaboratively marshal the available resources to create an ecology that meets their needs (see Luckin, R. 2006; Luckin, du Boulay, Smith, Underwood, Fitzpatrick, Holmberg, Kerawalla, Tunley, Brewster & Pearce, 2005; Luckin, Shurville & Browne, 2007 for more detail on the learnercentric ecology of resources framework and for more detailed examples). Through the discussions of the Learner Generated Context group fresh perspectives on thiscontention have developed. For example, both spatial and process issues emerge. These could be described as Changing the learning context and generating learning spaces, and Changing the learning process and the learning context.” (Luckin et al, 2007 p 90).

Elsewhere writing as the The Learner Generated Contexts Group, Luckin et al provide a nice pithy definition: "“A Learner Generated Context can be defined as a context created by people interacting together with a common, self-defined or negotiated learning goal. The key aspect of Learner Generated Contexts is that they are generated through the enterprise of those who would previously have been consumers in a context created for them." You can find out more and add to discussion at the wiki.

I think that the concept of a Learner-Generated Context helps us to start thinking about personal learning environments from a learning and teaching perspective rather than a purely technical one. Supporting approaches like mode two, participative action learning / research and enquiry-based learning with web 2.0 will require its own ecology of models and frameworks. For example, second order cybernetics becomes a useful tool to study and reflect upon Learner-Generated Contexts once we start to view learners as conscious modelers of their own learnings and learning environments. As educators we can teach reflective practice, perhaps using some form of scaffolding, to help learners to become second order cyberneticians in their own right.

Turning to materiality, I think that the ecological metaphor helps to make it clear that virtual learning environments, personal learning environments and other forms of technology mediated learning are part of a wider and more tangible world of books, museums and coffee bar conversations etc that learners inhabit and animate. Sometimes ‘hidden learning environments’ are only hiding in plain sight. Perhaps learning technologisits should get out more ...

Further reading: You can download a great powerpoint on learner-generated contexts. A smart addition to anyone's ecology.

References

• Luckin, R.; du Boulay, B.; Smith, H.; Underwood, J.; Fitzpatrick, G.; Holmberg, J.; Kerawalla, L.; Tunley, H.; Brewster, D. and Pearce, D. (2005). Using Mobile Technology to Create Flexible Learning Contexts, Journal of Interactive Media in Education, Special Issue on Portable Learning .
• Luckin, R. (2006). Understanding Learning Contexts as Ecologies of Resources: From the Zone of Proximal Development to Learner Generated Contexts. In T. Reeves & S. Yamashita (Eds.), Proceedings of World Conference on Elearning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education 2006 (pp. 2195–2202). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.
• Luckin, R., Shurville, S. and Browne, T. (2007) Initiating elearning by stealth, participation and consultation in a late majority institution, Organisational Transformation and Social Change Volume 3 Number 3 and Volume 4 Number 1 pp. 317–332.
  

Further reading

• Judy Robertson attended the recent London Knowledge Lab event on learner-generated contexts (I missed it as I was busy migrating) and her reflections on the event can be found on her previous blog. Judy has now moved her blog to typepad. It looks like an interesting platform. http://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~judy/blog/2007/09/learner-generated-contexts.html

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)