Oxford's Great eLearning Students

Just come across a posting from Curtis Bonk about his visit here back in January this year. What an extraordinary man he is! Never stands still, it seems - his blog is called TravelinEdMan, and I guess that does sort of convey his fairly driven approach to spreading the word about blended learning round the world (sort of like Bob Dylan's Neverending Tour, but without the croaking). Curt's talks are insane - cuddly toys, t-shirts, million dollar bills flying all over the place - and just more information than any normal human can absorb in one sitting. But some great stuff: his survey on corporate training in 5 countries--UK, USA, China, Taiwan, and Korea-- is sharp and revealing (you can find it in his Handbook on Blended Learning): especially about what turn out to be major national differences that raise important questions about the realities of globalism. And I love the way he persuades everyone he meets to contribute to his work. As research goes, it is kind of quick and dirty - but it's also really compelling, and he pulls stuff off that more bureaucratic approaches to research could probably never achieve.

What I liked best, though, when I read his posting about that visit just now, is what he wrote about our MSc eLearning students that he met here in Oxford. I couldn't have put it better myself, and it perfectly captures why it is so endlessly rewarding to work with them:

"It is always a delight to present at Oxford. The students have a contagious energy related to research on e-learning. We had students in the audience from Nepal, Taiwan, China, Korea, the UK, and other places. Very enthusiastic people and a lovely setting to speak in!"

Well, you can add Jordan, Pakistan, Denmark, Greece, Turkey, the USA, Azerbaijan and Armenia to that list too, Curt. And every single one of them that turns up here ends up teaching the rest of us something amazing and new about what learning means in their part of the world, and about how technology might or might not be able to help.

I Love Science Fiction

I always loved science fiction, since I was a kid. Started with Dan Dare and devoured all I could find. I would read John Wyndham over and over, specially "The Seeds of Time": robots, time travel, great ideas even if the writing was a bit naff. I never went for the intergalactic sagas: what I loved was the way some science fiction can turn the old world we know inside out, and make the old things new and exciting, and different. 50s sci-fi movies were great at doing that - the extraordinary Incredible Shrinking Man, The Man with X-Ray Eyes, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. I loved the long-lost American science fiction comics that worried adults so much, but which had some brilliant ideas. My favourite was a story about how our universe turns out to be just an exhibit in a science museum in someone else's universe. Someone is bending down to see the final implosion of galaxies, and saying: it's so good, it's almost real.

There was a great BBC play too, in the late sixties or early seventies, where someone kept waking up to find the same day happening all over again (hey! there's a great idea for a movie) and discovering that his whole life was just the fabrication of marketing executives, who had constructed a sort of toy new town (whose toy inhabitants had painfully real feelings) trying out new products on them. And of course there was all that other sixties stuff: StarTrek, Vonnegut and the crazy and entirely fictional Kilgore Trout, and 2001 of course, which made us all fall in love with the idea of artificial intelligence. I loved it all: science fiction was sort of like using science to create dreamworlds you could control, with all dreaming's ambiguities of the mundane and the crazy going on at once. I tried to dream it myself, and wrote a whole science fiction novel, which did achieve certain characteristics of being a cult classic. Such as being read by about four people, then incinerated.

As time went on, I did get a bit bored with the science fiction novels and the big overblown movies. But I didn't get bored with the idea of science helping us to fictionalise our lives - at least, helping us create amazing new narratives, which turn out to be real in ways I never imagined when I loved this stuff as a kid. As the very wonderful Paleo-Future shows us time and time again: people are always imagining different kinds of bright new future, but nobody ever gets it quite right.

It's great to be living in a time when the change starts to happen faster than you can imagine. And we don't need novelists or scientists to do it for us: the world is being changed by the audience.

A team from Apple came to Oxford last week to demonstrate the latest ideas about using podcasting to support university teaching and to demonstrate how it is generally a good idea to use Apple technology to do so.

It was an interesting event, as much for the way it was presented as for the content. The guys from Apple, neat and trim in their black outfits ( I did think the accompanying black Apple podium shroud was overdoing it though), presented twice: once to lecturers, once to technical people. They used very different discourses for the two groups, reflecting a perception of what each would understand, and each would approve. In fact, I don't think the distinction was necessary or appropriate: I suspect that anyone who went along would have been quite happy to learn some technological stuff, and also would not have been there if they weren't prepared to let the technology communicate its own potential.

Maybe we need to apply a bit of activity theory here, to understand how different interests within this particular workplace actually intersect, and to explore the possibility that we are working with some creaky old stereotypes about where the boundaries of one job end and the boundaries of another begins does not work in any setting probably, and certainly not in this one. The reality is, people use technology to enhance learning just as much because the technology might reveal something interesting about how to make that happen. But outsiders tend to scared of looking new and dumb when they come to Oxford, which might be true in some respects, but not when it comes to the way new technologies are dealt with here.

The people who did come along were there because they are willing to try new things out, I am sure. I thought podcasting might show me something new - might help me to perceive a different balance, a new configuration, between the things I arrange for and do with students, and the things they arrange and do for themselves. I still think it might, but that got lost yesterday, somewhere between the oversimplified stuff for lecturers and the grittier but unengaged (in terms of educational purposes) words for the techies. So we didn't quite get a key enticement of educational technology, which allows you to discover things about teaching and learning you hadn't thought of or considered possible before.

Anyway, I still look forward to being impressed by educational podcasting. The e-learning group are going to do a special project on this, as part of the course this year, and I'm quite excited about being enhanced.

Seeing it for real

We went to a lovely little rural school last week, as part of a series of visits to see what actually goes on in schools around here, in the way of e-learning. Tural, Jin Kyang, Yun Yu and me.

We watched a class of first years working with some e-learning technologies in the course of their busy active day. Su, their teacher is immensely skilful, good humoured (even with a terrible cold), and the kids all love her. When she wants to them to stop talking (5 year olds only speak when they have something important say, which is all the time), she says "speaking!" and throws them a look and they all shout "LISTENING!!!" and shut up.

The best thing we saw was when everyone in the class squashed down all together on the carpet in front of the interactive whiteboard. At that moment they turned into a kind of single organism, like a big happy jellyfish, focused intently on the board and on Su. They play maths games, design a monster, and love every minute of it.

Su says that her school is by no means the best around at using technology and there are definitely days when she thinks that the easiest thing to do with a computer is not to use it. There is a lot of guilt for schoolteachers, I think, tied in with using technology - some sense that they always ought to be doing more than they do, and a realisation that if only they had enough time and space, they could really get their heads round opening the box, taking out the technology, reading the instructions and trying it out for themselves. Meanwhile, Su concentrates on running a class of 37 kids aged between 5 and 7, constantly using little bits of technology to make a good day even better, and she makes it all looks so easy and natural.

Would you call what we saw going on there e-Learning ? I couldn't swear that I saw anyone actually e-learn anything in particular. But I do reckon we saw a wonderful technology-enhanced hour of school for these kids, who then went off went to the school hall for a few singing-enhanced minutes, while outside the final yellow and red leaves of this extraordinary autumn got ready to fall across the English countryside. We drove back to Oxford feeling enhanced, that's for sure.