Category: Education

Digital Education

Joss Winn / / Education, Learning Landscapes, Projects, Student as Producer

Late last year, I worked with colleagues to propose a way forward for implementing the university’s ‘Digital Education Plan‘. Here’s the document that went through university committees and is currently being put into action. A significant investment is being made at Lincoln to support and develop teaching and learning, teacher education and student engagement, under which the recommendations below will be resourced. I continue to have input into all four areas of work recommended. I am leading on the proposed Masters research degree, based on the idea of ‘the university as a hackerspace’, which I have written about previously.

Implementation of the Digital Education Plan

Introduction

This paper sets out four areas of work to enhance and support digital education at Lincoln. These activities are derived from the university’s Digital Education Plan (May 2013),  a report following an HEA/Leadership Foundation consultancy (July 2013) and ongoing discussions by the Digital Education Strategy Core group. The implementation of a digital education plan at Lincoln is grounded in two institution-wide projects undertaken over the last five years: Student as Producer and Learning Landscapes. Both of these major projects, as well as other related initiatives, inform the approach and objectives for implementing the Digital Education Plan. In summary, the four areas of work are:

  1. A cross-university digital education group
  2. Incentives and recognition
  3. A multidisciplinary Masters research programme
  4. A framework for re-engineering space and time

A cross-university digital education group

Digital education at Lincoln requires on-going co-ordination and support. A cross university group focusing on innovation and support for technology for education should be established within CERD, with formal membership from across the Colleges and key service departments. This group will build on knowledge gained and lessons learned from the LNCD group.[1]

As well as some existing staff from CERD, the group should have three newly established ‘Digital Education Developer’ posts who are attached to each college. Staff from ICT, Estates and the Library should also be formally attached to the group. These core staff would engage with colleagues and students from across the university. They would encourage and support wider efforts across Colleges to undertake applied research and development into digital education. This ‘hub and spoke’ model of co-ordinating support, innovation, research and development across institutions is widespread in the sector.[2]

A core principle of the group will be that students and staff have much to learn from each other and that students as producers can be agents of change in the use of technology for education.

Incentives and Recognition

Next, we propose to focus on developing ‘digital literacy’ and ‘digital scholarship’ across the staff and student population of the university. These are broad, inclusive terms that encompasses a range of skills, experiences and critical approaches required for teaching, learning and research, effectively providing the groundwork for any successful implementation of the digital education plan. Digital education at Lincoln should engender an environment whereby students and staff are encouraged and supported in being not just consumers of technology but rather productive, critical, digitally literate social individuals. In this view, technology is inclusive and understated, advocated by the institution primarily to develop the individual’s critical, social understanding and abilities which they apply to their learning and in this way technology does not become an end in itself. In the development of critical, digital literacy, we can raise awareness of the nature and effects of inequitable digital practices and in doing so, encourage socially responsible individuals who are then able to challenge exclusive practices and ensure inclusive ways of living in society.

To help achieve this, we will develop optional, accredited modules for both staff and students:

  1. Continuation of the existing 30 credit module, Teaching and Learning in the Digital Age (TELEDA). This has been developed for staff by Sue Watling (CERD) and was successfully piloted in 2012-13. Its primary focus is how online communication and collaborative group work can enable critical thinking and reflection.
  2. An accredited module for staff and students will be developed which is formally aligned with the new ‘Mozilla Web Literacy Standard’[3] and other appropriate models.[4] This will be made available to any student from September 2014 as part of the Lincoln Award and available to staff as part of CPD.
  3. A 30 credit module in digital scholarship will be developed for staff and post-graduate students. Taken in addition to the TELEDA module, this would lead to a Post-Graduate Certificate for staff. It will also be available as an optional module for the MA in Education (in development).

In addition to accredited taught modules, the proposed digital education group will offer support and incentives to staff and students who wish to engage with digital education at the university, through annual Internships, research grants/bursaries and internal and external applications for funding. Through our experience of the Fund for Educational Development (FED) and Undergraduate Research Opportunity Scheme (UROS) funds, we know this is an effective method of engaging staff and students in research and development that produces tangible research outcomes and will help further the critical development of digital education at Lincoln.

A multi-disciplinary Masters research programme

In addition to the digital education group, we propose a new academic programme which will act as a focal point for teaching, research and development of new technologies that maintain Lincoln at the cutting edge of digital education and technology culture. Influenced by the rapidly emerging ‘hackerspaces’[5], the programme will seek to learn from what we see happening in hacker culture: new reputational models, ‘fablabs’ and ‘hacklabs’, commons-based peer-production, and new methods of innovation funding. This research-based, postgraduate programme should be cross-disciplinary and always experimental in its form and content; a sandpit for innovation, engaging academics and students in the sciences, arts, media and humanities to think deeply about the way technology is used for research, teaching and learning and the social good.

This cross-disciplinary research programme will allow students with different disciplinary backgrounds and interests to spend their degree in a physical university space, working together on ideas of their own under the guidance of experienced staff. To bootstrap the Programme, the first intake of 10 students should be recruited with a wide range of artistic, technical and scientific experience and they would pay no tuition fees. In following years, tuition fees would be payable but waivable depending on the accomplishments and impact of the student’s work. Impact could be measured in a variety of ways: technical, commercial, societal and educational. Over time, successful alumni would help attract more students to the programme, developing a culture of hackers and successful startups attached to the research programme. To further attract and incentivise students, ‘angel funding’ should be available on a competitive basis for student projects which show further potential.[6]

The programme combines cross-disciplinary research and development, teaching, learning and enterprise, but it recognises that those processes are changing and that hackers and entrepreneurs are developing a model that is replacing these functions of the university: the opportunities for learning, collaboration, reputation building/accreditation and access to cheap hardware and software for prototyping ideas, can and are taking place outside universities, and so they should. However, university culture is still a place where the hacker ethic (respect for good ideas, meritocracy, autonomy, curiosity, fixing things, anti-technological determinism, peer review, perpetual learning, etc.) remains relevant and respected.

A framework for re-engineering space and time

Finally, we propose to develop a framework for staff and students to analyse and re-engineer the use of space and time at the University of Lincoln. To create this, we will undertake a comprehensive investigation into the form and content of a large, lecture-based module and its objectives and constraints. In doing so, we will provide staff and students with a toolkit for evaluating and re-designing the space-time of their own programmes through better use of teaching and learning time and the blended use of the physical and virtual space of the university. This guided evaluation would also be built into one or more of the above mentioned teacher education modules so that staff reflect on the way technology may change the way their modules are designed and delivered.

The virtual space – cyberspace – allows us to think critically and imaginatively about the idea and form of university we desire. This approach was central to the Learning Landscapes project, highlighting how critical pedagogy can be used as a design principle, a resource in the design and construction of a counter-space, providing critical tools with which we ‘reverse imagineer’ the university. The ‘edgelessness’[7] of cyberspace allows for ‘Utopian thinking’ through which the constraints of traditional hierarchies of research, teaching and learning become “manifest as entirely different spatial forms and temporal rhythms.”[8] Arguably, we’re already seeing this Utopian thinking in the forms of the Open Data, Open Access and Open Education movements.

Based on the recommendations of the original Learning Landscape project, we propose the following overarching objectives for digital education at Lincoln:

  • Drive research into the effective design and development of digital education
  • Provide support to teachers and students for Utopian thinking and experimentation on the web
  • Include students as clients and collaborators in the design of university digital services
  • Be academically credible. Digital education should not simply be a technical exercise removed from the academic rigour of the university
  • Understand the relationship between space and time: it’s not just ‘cyberspace‘, but space-time
  • Articulate the institution’s vision and mission as a connected, networked whole
  • Create incentives. Recognise and reward innovation across all staff and students
  • Create formal and informal management structures that support strategic experimentation and imagineering (e.g. ‘think tanks’, ‘sand pits’, ‘skunk works’)
  • Avoid stereotyping. Bring people together from across subject areas and professions so as to avoid an ‘us and them’ attitude
  • Intellectualise the issues. Generate debate on the nature of academic values and the role and purpose of higher education: the idea of digital education is synonymous with the idea of the university.

In essence, digital education points to a learning landscape that is designed to engender capable, confident and critical individuals engaged in research, teaching and learning, so that they are active producers of their own social world.

Recommendations

We ask that the Education Committee recommends the following:

  1. Urgent recruitment of three Digital Education Developer posts
  2. The development of two further modules of study relating to digital literacy and digital scholarship
  3. The development of a cross-disciplinary Masters level research programme
  4. Research and development into the re-engineering of lecture space-time
  5. On-going investment to support these initiatives.

[2] Walker, Voce and Ahmed (2012) Survey of Technology Enhanced Learning for higher education in the UK, UCISA. p.91

[4] e.g. SCONUL Seven Pillars of Information Literacy (2012)

[6] The Y Combinator (http://ycombinator.com) model of angel funding is a good example of this already happening, where students and recent graduates receive a small amount of funding and lots of support, in return for just a very small share of their enterprise. JISC are also experimenting with this style of ‘angel’ funding in their Summer of Student Innovation programme. http://elevator.jisc.ac.uk

[8] Harvey, David (2000) Space of Hope, University of California Press, 237-8

Research groups operate as firm-like entities

Joss Winn / / Education

One of the sources I have drawn from in my research on the pre-history of hacking in the university is Henry Etzkowitz. His research into the history of MIT and ‘entrepreneurial science’ was especially useful and interesting. As something I want to come back to at a later date, I’ll leave you with this quote from his paper, Research groups as ‘quasi-firms’: the invention of the entrepreneurial university, Research Policy 32 (2003) 109–121 (PDF). I was reminded of this by an article in Tuesday’s Guardian newspaper.

Research groups operate as firm-like entities, lacking only a direct profit motive to make them a company. In the sciences, especially, professors are expected to be team leaders and team members, with the exception of technicians, are scientists in training. As group size increases to about seven or eight members, professors who formerly were doing research are typically compelled to remove themselves from the bench to devote virtually full time to organizational tasks. Often persons in this situation describe themselves as “running a small business”. To continue at a competitive level with their peers, they must maintain an organizational momentum. Once having attained this goal, it is extremely difficult to function again as an individual researcher, so every effort is made to sustain leadership of a group.

Research groups within universities operate as small businesses lacking only a direct profit motive. Discuss!

The university as a hackerspace

Joss Winn / / Education, Hacking, PhD, Student as Producer
Developers at Dev8D
Developers at Dev8D

I spend most of my time working with students and recent graduates. At first Alex, then Nick and Jamie, and in a week or two, Dale and Harry will join us. Dale and Alex are finishing up their final year in Computer Science and work as part-time Developers in ICT Services. Nick, Jamie and Harry graduated last year from studying Computer Science and work with me on JISC-funded projects. They’re all in their early to mid twenties. I learn a lot from them. Sometimes they make me feel old. I’m only 38.

In a year or so, they’ll probably move on to other things. Alex and Nick already have their own company and a business plan. Jamie wants to do a PhD. If I can secure us interesting and useful work, maybe Dale and Harry will stay on for a while longer, I don’t know. I hope they will stay but it needs to be for a good reason otherwise I would encourage them to look for new challenges.

These days I wonder how we (‘the university’) can support young hackers like the bunch I work with. Career progression for  developers working in universities is not great. Paul Walk recognised this as does the JISC-funded DevCSI project, run by Mahendra Mahey. Without their work, which highlights the importance of local developers, I think the HE sector would be a pretty barren place for hackers to commune. No Dev8D, no DevXS, fewer hack days and developer workshops. Along with several other people, I was invited to be on the Steering Group for DevCSI today, which I am very pleased about, and I look forward to working with the project more closely in the future.

There are a few things I’d like to focus on with DevCSI, based on my experience working with young hackers: the first is about how hackers learn. As I see it, this requires research into the history of hacking in universities, the role of undergraduate and graduate students in funded research, from ARPANET to Total ReCal, hacking as a cognitive craft that has its own learning communities and learning environments, that creates tools which help improve the effectiveness of learning and how those tools eventually shape the tools the rest of us use to learn.

The second thing I’d like to focus on, is how universities can learn from what we see happening in hacker culture: new reputational models, fablabs and hackerspaces, peer-production, and new methods of funding. On this last point, I’d like to develop an academic programme that attracted hackers and graduated start-ups. I think the Y Combinator model is a good example of this already happening, where students and recent graduates are receiving a little funding and lots of support, while asking for just a very small cut of the company.

Finally, I’d like to think about how we can break down the distinction between developers working in professional services and developers working on research projects and remind ourselves that we all work in universities: autonomous institutions for research, teaching and learning, and that when companies want to instill a culture of innovation, they often emulate the research culture of universities. I’d like to work towards developers in HE knowing there was the opportunity to be paid the same as professors when they clearly add similar value to the institution, which I think is easily possible. I see no reason why  great hackers  – experienced software craftsmen and women – working in universities shouldn’t be paid £100K or more, just as professors and other senior staff can be. Of course, working in a university, they would teach other hackers, run software development projects, contribute to the strategic direction of the university and produce superb software for the institution, too. Would they be on an academic or a non-academic contract? I don’t know. At that level, I don’t think it matters, but at the junior and middle periods of their careers it remains a divisive distinction that affects people’s aspirations.

Being great hackers, they would attract students that aspire to be great hackers, too. Just as I decided which graduate school to study at based on the reputation of a single professor working there, so young hackers would want to work with and learn from great hackers in universities, even more so if their programme of study included a Y Combinator style opportunity for angel investment.

I’d like to see an academic programme led by experienced software craftsmen with reputations to match, where students from different disciplines spend their degree in a university space that resembles a hackerspace or dojo, working together on ideas of their own under the guidance of more experienced staff, leading to potential angel investment at any point in their degree. Those that don’t get funded, leave with a degree, a valuable experience and a network of alumni contacts. Those that do get funded are given the support they need to develop their work into a real product or service. Sometimes, it might be one that the university would use itself, but not always. Over time, successful alumni would help attract more students to the programme, developing a culture of hackers and successful startups attached to the degree programme.

What excites me about this is that it’s a mixture of what universities always say they are about: research, teaching, learning and enterprise, but it recognises that those processes are changing and that hackers are already developing a model that is replacing these functions of the university: the opportunities for learning, collaboration, reputation building/accreditation and access to cheap hardware and software for prototyping ideas, can and are taking place outside universities, and so they should. However, I think that university culture is still a place where the hacker ethic (respect for good ideas, meritocracy, autonomy, curiosity, fixing things, against technological determinism, peer review, perpetual learning, etc.) remains relevant and respected. A university is a place where people come to learn from each other and we should be creating these new spaces and programmes that recognise the value of developers in universities.

Like any programme of study, work and investment, it needs careful thinking about how to set it up right, but from where I stand, it feels like a gaping hole in higher education that needs to be filled. Do you know of any examples that are already running? A ‘MIT Media Lab lite’ could be close to what I have in mind, but I have no experience of how it’s run and whether it breaks down the distinction between academic and non-academic staff to the extent I have in mind.

Learning a craft

Joss Winn / / Education, Hacking, Hardware, Open Source, PhD, Projects, Software, Student as Producer

During my attendance at Dev8D last week, I used the time to start pulling together some ideas I’ve been knocking around for a few months now. Most of the projects I’ve helped set up or led over the last three years have involved working closely with developers working in higher education and ever since JISCPress, we’ve been growing a culture where student developers, either on bursaries, employed part-time or full-time recent graduates (i.e. their first ‘proper job’) are core contributors to the project. My point here is that through these projects I have been able to observe how young hackers learn their craft and make the transition from a formal education in Computer Science to learning on the job (i.e. apprenticeship).

DSC03598
DevXS http://devxs.org

I use the word ‘craft’ deliberately. I think our work is much more closely aligned with craftsmanship than with engineering but I was unsure how to articulate this until I read Pete McBreen’s Software Craftsmanship. McBreen argues that a focus on craftsmanship is to return to the roots of software development:

Good software developers have always understood that programming is a craft skill. Regardless of the amount of arcane and detailed technical knowledge that a person has, in the end, application development comes down to feel and experience.

McBreen distinguished software craftsmanship from software engineering and computer science, not as their opposites but as a different tradition “that happily coexists with and benefits from science and engineering.” He compares the software craftsman to the blacksmith, both of whom transcend science and engineering and benefit from improvements in their tools, materials and understanding. For McBreen, GNU/Linux is an example of software craftsmanship that thrives due to the dedication, skill and craft of the people who contribute to the development of the operating system.

‘Software engineering’ was born out of a so-called ‘software crisis’, identified at a NATO conference in 1968. It was determined that the way out of that crisis was to apply an engineering approach to large scale state of the art defence projects. Since that time, argues McBreen, “the needs of the US Department of Defence have dominated the conversation about software engineering.”

software engineering is not all that relevant to many projects. Software engineering was created to solve the problems of really large groups working on multiyear projects. Most modern software development, however, is done in relatively small teams.

Not surprisingly, the practise of software craftsmanship is often allied with agile development, which emphasises the human aspects of software development, the creative and variable processes involved in creating software that meets human needs. Both share a concern with quality and both encourage continual reflective critique of one’s work in order to improve the software and oneself. In his book on Crystal Clear, for example, Alistair Cockburn identifies ‘reflective improvement’ and ‘osmotic communication’ as two of the three minimum requirements for a Crystal Clear project. In practice, reflective improvement refers to workshops and end-of-iteration discussion about how the work is going and how it might be improved. Osmotic communication refers to how flows of information between developers should be unobstructed by locked doors, walls and corridors. It’s about sitting developers in the same or adjacent rooms so that they absorb information about the project with as few barriers as possible. Access to information, a safe environment where people can respectfully speak their minds and close collegial working are highly valued. At times, developers will program side-by-side or in pairs at one workstation, so as to review each others’ work. He refers to this as ‘peer code peering’.

Pair programming

Both reflective improvement and osmotic communication can be enhanced by the choice of tools developers use and the feedback they provide to her. Craftsmen in all trades rely on their tools to provide feedback – a joiner’s plane, a responsive power drill, etc. Many craftsmen will make their own tools to improve their responsiveness. Cockburn notes that one of the most important tools developers can use is an automated regression test suite, which allows the team to continuously test their work and provides feedback to each developer about the quality of their code. Feedback from a Continuous Integration (CI) suite of tools can be usefully presented by ‘information radiators’, dashboards which typically provide status information of servers, the number of use cases delivered and the number of tests passed. Although, Cockburn doesn’t use the term, I think that reflective improvement and osmotic communication refer to the ‘learning environment’ that the software craftsman creates so as to improve their understanding of their work and further develop their craft.

References to the importance of learning from others and from one’s work are made throughout McBreen’s book, as well as an entire chapter at the end of the book called ‘Perpetual Learning’. There, he outlines how to create a ‘learning environment’ by building a library of books for developers to read, as well as ensuring that they take time out each week to practice or learn something new. Like Cockburn, he emphasises the importance of workshops and a series of seminars where developers discuss their work. In addition, McBreen suggests that developers are encouraged to attend and present at conferences and write papers about their work as well as take on the role of instructor where they are able to do so. Craftsmen continually undertake self-directed learning, preferring non-proprietary, open source tools that are sustained by a community and made freely available to learn from, but more importantly, software craftsmen learn from each other, with master craftsmen mentoring journeymen and apprentices.

In a more recent book on software craftsmanship, Apprenticeship Patterns, Hoover and Oshineye also devote a chapter to ‘Perpetual Learning‘,  offering further practical advice to aspiring software craftsmen. They list the following:

  • Expand your bandwidth: Read books and articles, engage with your peers via conferences, social media and mailing lists, join user groups, study from open educational materials on the web
  • Practice, practice, practice: Take the time to practice your craft without interruptions, in an environment where you can feel comfortable making mistakes. i.e. ‘deliberate practice’ They borrow the term ‘code katas’, whereby programming exercises are repeated again and again until they become ingrained in the individual.
  • Breakable toys: Budget for failure by designing and building toy systems that are similar in toolset, but not in scope to the systems you build at work. i.e. build something personal to you, that you will learn from. Develop your own CMS or game that you can afford to break while learning.
  • Use the source:  Seek out other people’s code and read it.  Start with the applications and tools you use every day.
  • Reflect as you work: Become a reflective practitioner of software development. This involves regular introspection into how you are working.
  • Record what you learn: Keep a record of your journey in a journal, personal wiki, or blog. A chronological record of the lessons you have learned can provide inspiration to those you mentor, since it makes your journey explicit, but it can also give you a vital resource to draw upon.
  • Share what you learn: Early in your apprenticeship, develop the habit of regularly sharing the lessons you have learned. i.e. keep a blog, run workshop sessions, be part of a community of learners.
  • Create feedback loops: Create mechanisms for regularly gathering more or less objective external data about your performance. i.e. automated regression tests, information radiators, exams and certifications, pair programming, and asking your peers what they think.
  • Learn how you fail: Seek to identify the ways in which you tend to fail and try to resolve those that are worth fixing.

In his book, The Craftsman, Richard Sennett chooses to focus on open source software development as a modern form of craftsmanship (“the skill of making things well”). The value of Sennett’s book is its breadth of scope. While making no reference to McBreen’s earlier book, Sennett situates open source hacking and the development of GNU/Linux within the social and economic history of craftsmanship and our relationship with technology. For Sennett, Linux is a “public craft” and open source hackers are a “community of craftsmen.” In terms of learning this public craft, he compares ancient pottery making with open source hacking and finds that only the speed between problem finding and problem solving differentiates the two.  In programming, and especially open source programming, the velocity at which we can learn can be much greater than in traditional, material crafts. Our tools and the open, distributed nature of developer communities enhance our opportunities for learning. ((Sennett’s observations also help us consider software craftsmanship together with learning theories such as cognitive apprenticeship, situated learning, and constructivism.))

In The Nature and Art of Workmanship, David Pye does not make reference to software development but does develop a very useful framework for identifying and understanding craftsmanship, which complements much of what Sennett and McBreen describe. For Pye, craftsmanship is the workmanship of risk; that is, work that is constantly at risk of error in the process of creation. A simple example of this is writing with a pen. In contrast to the workmanship of risk (craftsmanship) is the workmanship of certainty; that is, workmanship where the quality is always pre-determined and is usually found in quantity production, and always in fully automated work. An example of this would be modern printing. The workmanship of certainty is most common in modern, industrial society, but has existed in some form for hundreds, if not thousands of years. All types of workmanship exist somewhere on the axis between risk and certainty and furthermore are subject to varying degrees of regulation or freedom.

Workmanship
Workmanship

What distinguishes the degree of risk or certainty for Pye is the extent to which the workman’s tools regulate his work. Pye argues that a pure form of workmanship of risk is hardly ever seen in any trade; for centuries people have developed tools to help regulate their work in some way (e.g. jigs) and guarantee some degree of certainty in the quality of their work. Regulation of work does not necessarily lead to certainty as some tools such as a lathe can be used in combination with a free hand, producing unique objects that are nevertheless regulated in some respects such as their size but not their form.

A simple way of asking whether it is workmanship of risk or certainty is to ask, “is the result predetermined and unalterable once production begins?”

In the drawing above, I have speculated that software craftsmanship as McBreen describes it, would be called workmanship of risk by Pye, with regulation introduced by tools such as Integrated Development Environments (IDE), Continuous Integration (CI) suites and the general operating system environment the developer is working with. Although regulated, like almost all workmanship of risk, the software craftsman often produces something bespoke to the users’ requirements, iteratively working towards the desired result through the writing and refactoring of code. Agile software development recognises that the result of most software development cannot be predetermined and that projects run best when they remain responsive to the users’ feedback. Software Engineering, on the other hand, aims to eliminate as much of the risk as possible and pre-determine the outcome of the design and programming effort, which both McBreen and Pyritz both identify as a form of Taylorism.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers defines software engineering as “the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to development, operation, and maintenance of software”. Pyritz questions whether the Taylorist model of scientific management is even viable in software development, quoting Humphrey, who asked ‘Why don’t they practice what they preach?’

The general practices of industrial software engineers are poor by almost any measure”. Why? “The educational system does not provide graduates with the practical skills they will later need. . . . Few software organizations are willing or able to provide the remedial training their new engineers need. Today’s software organizations have few if any role models who consistently demonstrate effective work habits and disciplines.

In learning to become software craftsmen we need role models, too. Both McBreen and Sennett emphasise the importance of apprenticeship and slowly learning by doing with others. This is what JISC’s DevCSI offers to the sector, running regular hack days, DevXS and the annual Dev8D conference. This year over 250 developers attended Dev8D to learn from each other.

Learning from each other at Dev8D
Learning from each other at Dev8D

While I was at Dev8D, I issued an informal survey asking developers a number of questions about their working environment, how they learn their craft, the tools they use and an assessment of their skills. I shall provide a summary of the responses in another post [UPDATE: here it is], but I am encouraged to do further research in determining how developers (working in tertiary education) learn their craft and how opportunities for learning might be improved.

Another related project I started while at Dev8D was Hacking the University, a simple website intended to collect short interviews with developers working in universities. It is inspired by The Setup and I hope that over time, it will provide a record of the people working in this community and add to the recognition of the work they do, how they learn and how their working environment impacts upon their work and learning.

If you are a developer working in a university, please consider contributing to Hacking the University and telling others about your approach to your craft.

Open Data at Lincoln: What have we got?

Joss Winn / / Data, Education, Fun, Projects

Tony Hirst recently blogged about the Open Data scene in UK HE, mentioning Lincoln as one of the few universities that are currently contributing HEI-related #opendata to the web. Sooner or later, I’ll write a more reflective post, but here I just wanted to document the current situation (that I’m aware of) at Lincoln. There are two groups that take an interest in furthering open data at Lincoln: LiSC, led by Prof. Shaun Lawson, and LNCD, the new cross-university group I co-ordinate which consolidates a lot of the previous and current work listed below. (For a broader overview of recent work, see this post).

Derek Foster in LiSC recently released energy data from our main campus buildings, updated every 2hrs on Pachube. I was just speaking to Nick and Alex and I think they plan to pull this data into our nucleus datastore, combine it with the campus location-based work we’ve done and generate dynamic heat maps (assuming Derek isn’t already working on something similar??)

LiSC are also mashing open data from the UK Police Crime Statistics database to create a social application called FearSquare and last week put together MashMyGov, a site that randomly suggests mashups using data sourced from Data.Gov.UK.

In the past couple of years, LNCD have worked on:

JISCPress, a 2009/10 project we worked on that didn’t release any data but developed a prototype WordPress platform that atomises documents for publication and comment on the web and spits out lots of data in open formats. It also uses OpenCalais, Triplify and can push RDF Linked Data to the Talis Platform. JISC now use it to publish documents for comment.

Total Recal, a JISC-funded project we completed recently and will roll out across the university this September. As well as providing a fairly comprehensive and flexible calendaring service at the university, it allowed us to work on our space-time data and develop a number of APIs on top of…

Nucleus, the epicentre of our open data efforts. This is a data store, using MongoDB, which aggregates data from a number of disparate university databases and makes that data available over secure APIs. Through a lot of hard work over the last year, Alex and Nick have compiled the single largest data store that we have at the university. Currently, it offers APIs to university events, calendars, locations and people. We’ll also be adding APIs to over 250,000 CC0 licensed bibliographic records held in Nucleus, too (see Jerome below). It also uses the OAuth-based authentication that Alex has developed.

Linking You, is a JISC-funded project we delivered last week to JISC, which looked at our use of URIs, undertook a comparative study of 40 HEI websites (more to come), proposed a high-level data model for use by the HEI sector and made some recommendations for further work. What we’ve learned on this project will have a lasting effect on the way we present our data and on our wider advocacy of open data to the university sector. I really hope that our recommendations will lead us to more discussion and collaboration with people interested in opening university data.

lncn.eu, a URL shortener that Alex and Nick developed in their spare time for a while and has since been formally adopted by the university. Naturally, lncn.eu has an API and can be used (e.g. Jerome) as a proxy for other services, collecting real-time analytics.

Jerome, is a current JISC-funded project that will release over 250,000 bibliographic records under a CC0 license. The data is stored in Nucleus and documented APIs will be available by the end of July. This is a very cool project managed by Paul Stainthorp in the Library (who’s also a member of LNCD).

We’re currently using data.online.lincoln.ac.uk to document the data that is accessible over our APIs. At some point, I can see us moving to data.lincoln.ac.uk – we just need to find time to discuss this with the right people. So far, we haven’t really gone down the RDF/Linked Data route, preferring to offer data that is linked (e.g. locations and events data are linked) and publicly accessible over APIs that are authenticated where necessary and open whenever possible. We are keen to engage in the RDF/Linked Data discussion – it’s just a matter of finding time. Please invite us to your discussions, if you think we might have something to contribute!

Triple Crunch

Joss Winn / / Climate Change, Economics, Education, Energy, PhD

For much of last year, one of the questions I researched in detail was What will Higher Education look like in a 2050 -80% +2c 450ppm world? My research began with a personal interest in Peak Oil and from there led me to look at climate change and the social and economic impacts of these related subjects. The focus of my research was initially an application for a research grant. You can read the application and the judges comments, which were very favourable but ultimately didn’t secure the grant because it was outside the remit of the programme of funding. Oh well. For months after that, I tried to understand the implications of a future where energy production doesn’t meet demand and the impacts of climate change become more apparent and wrote about it regularly under the tag ‘resilient education‘. Ultimately, my research led me to be quite pessimistic about our ability and willingness to deal with the projected problems. If you read my blog posts, you’ll see that there are really deep structural issues that need to be faced, in particular around the relatively recent obsession with economic growth. I say recent, but the underlying logic of capitalism has always been concerned with the accumulation of surplus value in the form of money, something Marx identified in the 19th century, but it’s only in the last 50 years or so that the idea of ‘economic growth’ has been an explicit political priority.

Anyway, the news over the last week or so has reminded me that the government and mainstream media are literally years behind acting on the research available to them. I was encouraged to read that the UK government seems to be acknowledging Peak Oil and is working with an industry group to model the impact on the UK economy if the price of oil rises to $250/barrel in 2014 (it’s currently around $115). This new relationship might have been forged due to the excellent report that the group produced last year, showing the likelihood of an ‘oil crunch’ in the middle of this decade, or it might have been because the International Energy Agency finally admitted that Peak Oil had actually occurred (in terms of crude oil – not total liquid fuels) in 2006. Energy analysts already knew this – you only had to look at the trend in crude oil production to get an idea – but with the IEA now using the term ‘peak oil’, the issue is bound to get more coverage.

Other news in the last week confirms the problems we face with climate change, too. Again, it takes the IEA to speak out before it gets any real coverage, but thankfully they’ve highlighted the the very tight correlation between economic growth (GDP) and rising emissions, saying that “it is becoming extremely challenging to remain below 2 degrees. The prospect is getting bleaker. That is what the numbers say.”

Finally, Larry Elliot, the Economics Editor for the Guardian wrote a column yesterday, which ties everything up together reasonably well. Energy, the economy and emissions are all inextricably linked and point to a ‘triple crunch’ that is yet to fully impact on the UK. I’m pleased to see this kind of reporting in the mainstream media but what’s really frustrating is that it only took me a few months of research to figure this out. The message has been clear for a number of years now and the public discussion is a decade overdue. There is a substantial body of research which I identify in my blog posts, that points to an oil crisis this decade (not what we’re seeing at the moment, but a real crisis where liquid fuel production falls over a number of years), which shows that the -80% emissions target is all but impossible and that when global net energy production falls, so does GDP.

As I’ve said before, this all has significant immediate and long-term social and political implications, including the effects it could have on the provision of higher education. It’s time that a co-ordinated effort was made by the sector to examine these issues in detail, involving academics from across disciplines as well as business continuity managers and VCs. We really do need to start ‘thinking the unthinkable‘…

Technology for education: A new group

Joss Winn / / Education, Fun, Mashups, Open Education, PhD, Projects, Software, Student as Producer, Support, Web

I offer this as one response to my previous post. Much more needs to be done to ‘reverse imagineer’ EdTech, but this will be my practical focus for the foreseeable future and the nexus of where theory is put into practice, where pedagogy meets technología: “The processes and practices of doing things, understanding things and developing knowledge”? (Selwyn 2011, p7)

A new group

In January, I wrote about how I had written a paper for the university about the role of technology in the context of Student as Producer. The paper included a recommendation that a new team be convened to “further the research, development and support of technology” at the university. January feels like a long time ago now, and I wanted to write about what’s been happening since then, because it’s all good 🙂

Following my presentation of the original paper to the Teaching and Learning Committee, I was asked to provide more detail on what the proposed team would do and a justification for the budget I had outlined. Both papers were written on behalf of and with the co-operation of, the Dean of Teaching and Learning, the University Librarian, the Prof. of Education, the Head of ICT and the Vice President of Academic Affairs in the Student Union. The second paper went back to the T&L Committee and, following their approval, then went to the university’s Executive Board in early April.

I began the paper by outlining what the team is for:

The team will consolidate and extend the existing collaborative work taking place between Centre for Educational Research and Development, The Library and ICT Services ((Since writing this, I’ve listed examples of our existing work in a recent blog post. You can add JISCPress and ChemistryFM, this WordPress platform and our e-portfolio system to that list, too.)) and invite staff and students from across the university to join the team. The team will offer incentives to staff and students who wish to contribute to the rapid innovation of appropriate technology for education at the university, through work-experience, research bursaries and internal and external applications for funding. Through our experience of the Fund for Educational Development (FED) and Undergraduate Research Opportunity Scheme (UROS) funds, we know this is an effective method of engaging staff and students in research and development. A core principle of the team will be that students and staff have much to learn from each other and that students as producers can be agents of change in the use of technology for education.

I then went on to argue:

The Student as Producer project is anticipated to take between 3-5 years to fully embed across the university. During this time, significant changes will occur in the technologies we use. In just the last five years, we have seen the rise of web applications such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Web 2.0 in general. Aside from such applications, networked infrastructure has developed considerably, with access to broadband now widespread and the use of smart phones and netbooks rapidly increasing. For a student at the University of Lincoln in 2011, high-speed networks are now ubiquitous across the city campuses and such networks themselves are now the ‘learning landscape’, in which the university is but one part.

There is a strong argument for shifting away from the idea of ‘educational technology’ to address technology straight on, recognising that any technology can support and enhance the research, teaching and learning process, and that the use of these technologies increasingly lies outside the institution’s control. We would argue that it is not the university’s role to compete with or determine the use of any technology but rather support access to technology in the broadest terms. This can be achieved through incremental improvements to infrastructure (e.g. network capacity and ease of use), supporting staff and students (e.g. training, workshops, courses) and personalising and integrating the services we do provide so that staff and students have a useful and enjoyable experience of technology at the university and understand how it fits within their wider networks. In particular, we should consider whether Blackboard can be better enhanced through mobile applications and the integration of other popular services such as Facebook. It is a key technology for the support of teaching and learning and if extended through the work of the proposed team, could be a platform for innovation. All of this work should be informed by a broad understanding of the social roles of technology and the objective of producing critical, digitally literate staff and students.

I presented a list of risks that I thought would present themselves if we didn’t take this approach:

  1. Poor co-ordination: Poorly co-ordinated investment in technology to support strategic objectives, resulting in competing interests in limited resources.
  2. Disjuncture: Growing disjuncture between student expectations and institutional provision of technology and support.
  3. Inertia: No locus for technological experimentation and innovation.
  4. Unattractive to potential post-graduates and staff: Technological provision compares poorly to other institutions, putting off new staff and post-graduates.
  5. Loss of income stream: Under-investment in ‘seeding’ projects that may attract external income.
  6. Business As Usual: During a period of significant change in Higher Education, our progressive T&L Strategy is hindered by poorly co-ordinated technological development.
  7. Student as Consumer: Technology remains something ‘provided’ by the university, rather than produced and informed by its staff and students.

Finally, I provided more detail about the costs. After taking into account existing budgets available to us and anticipated external research income, the total I asked for was £22K/yr to pay for an additional 12-month Intern position and a contribution to the staff and student bursaries we want to make available.  This was approved.

I was pleased with the outcome as it means that our current work is being recognised as well as the strategic direction we wish to go in. In terms of resourcing, we will have at least one more full-time (Intern) post and hold a £20K annual budget which will be used to provide grants and bursaries to staff and students, pay for hardware and software as needed and pay for participants to go to conferences to discuss their work and learn from the EdTech community at large. This doesn’t include any external income that we hope to generate. The nature of our applications for research grants is unlikely to change other than we hope to have more capacity in the future including both students and academic staff as active contributors to the development, implementation and support of technology for education at the university.

Team? Group? Network? Place?

The core members of the group (i.e. CERD/ICT/Library) met for an afternoon last week to discuss the roadmap for getting everything in place for the new academic year. We began by discussing the remit of the group (as detailed in the two committee papers), which is principally to serve the objectives of Student as Producer, the de facto teaching and learning strategy of the university. We spent a while discussing the nature of the group; that is, whether it was a team, a network, a group or even a place. In the first committee paper I wrote, I described it as “a flexible, cross-departmental team of staff and student peers”, but have since come to refer to it as a ‘group’, as ‘team’ does not reflect the nature of how we intend to work, nor the relationships we hope to build among participants, nor is a ‘team’ inclusive enough. I’d like to think that we’ll develop a network of interested staff and students and even attract interest and collaboration from outside the university, but I think it’s too early to call what we’re doing a network, although we are networked and working on the Net.  We’ve given ourselves a couple of weeks to come up with name but whatever we call it, we agreed that in principle we’d govern the group by consensus among us. Ideally, though not always in practice, the Net can help us create flatter structures of governance, so we’ll try to shape the way we work around this ideal.  My role will be to co-ordinate the work of the group by consensus.

UPDATE: We decided upon LNCD as the name for our group. It’s a recursive acronym: LNCD’s Not a Central Development group.

All participants will be encouraged to write about their work in the context of Student as Producer, building on the progressive pedagogical framework that is being implemented at the university, theorising their work critically and reflexively. We’ll support this approach, too, building a reading list for people wanting to think critically about EdTech and an occasional seminar series where we’ll discuss our ideas critically, reflexively and collegially.

Road map and tools

We will be up and running by the start of the next academic year. Over the summer, we’ve got a timetable of work that we plan to do to ensure we’ve got a clearly defined identity and the tools in place to support the nature of our work. By the end of September, we’ll have a website that offers clear information on what we do, what we’re working on, how to get involved and the ways we can support staff and students at the university. The site will allow you to review all aspects of our projects as well as propose new projects which can be voted up and down according to staff and students’ priority. There will be an application form for you to apply for funding from us and a number of ways for you discuss your ideas on and offline. We’ll be continuing our current provision of staff training, but will be looking to re-develop the sessions into short courses that are useful to both staff and students. The 2009 Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World report recommended that

The time would seem to be right seriously and systematically to begin the process of renegotiating the relationship between tutor and student to bring about a situation where each recognises and values the other’s expertise and capability and works together to capitalise on it. This implies drawing students into the development of approaches to teaching and learning. [Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World, p.9]

This is very much what Student as Producer is aiming to do through embedding research-engaged teaching and learning across the curricula and the approach we plan to take around support and training for the use of technology in teaching and learning. We’ll be working with the Student Union and the Principle Teacher Fellows across the university to identify ways that students and their tutors can be encouraged to support each other and we welcome the input and collaboration of anyone who wishes to adopt and advocate this approach. We’ll be designing some posters, flyers and business cards over the summer so that people around the university know who we are and how to get in touch in time for Fresher’s Week.

For the Geeks, you might be interested to know that we’ve decided upon a set of tools for managing our work online in a distributed environment where most of us work in different parts of the university campuses. We’ll have a dedicated virtual Linux box (as well as our usual development servers) and the main website will be run on WordPress using our own custom CWD theme. We’ll be migrating all of our code to Git Hub very soon and we’ll be using Pivotal Tracker to manage our development tasks in an agile and open way. We’ll be using our existing combination of Get Satisfaction and Zen Desk to manage peer-to-peer user support and bug reports and we’ll also be looking at alternatives such as User Voice and the Open Source Q&A tool to provide a way for you to suggest and vote for project ideas. Notably, through the use of their APIs, most of these tools integrate well, so that we can create tasks in Pivotal Tracker from bug reports made with Zen Desk and associate those tasks with commits on Git Hub. We’ll be using Twitter just as we always do, and we’ll be using Google Groups for longer discussions around each project (as well as regularly meeting face-to-face, of course). For projects that don’t involve writing code (which we certainly welcome), we’ll be looking at tools that assist with resource development and document control, such as digress.it, MediaWiki, Git Hub, Google Docs, EPrints and Jorum, depending on the nature of the project. We won’t be prescriptive with the tools we adopt, using whatever is appropriate, but with an emphasis on those that offer decent APIs, data portability and good usability. Proprietary software lacking APIs and with poor usability (we can all think of a few) won’t get much of a look in. Finally, through RSS and widgets, we’ll be presenting a coherent picture of each project on the main website.

There’s quite a bit to do but we know how to do it.  If you’ve got any suggestions (a name would be useful!), ideas or even want to join us, for the time-being, leave a comment here and we’ll get back to you. Thanks.

Reverse imagineering ‘educational technology’

Joss Winn / / Education, PhD, Student as Producer, Theory

The question that has been occupying some of my thinking the last couple of months is “how is Student as Producer expressed in terms of ‘technology’ (technología)? That is, “the processes and practices of doing things, understanding things and developing knowledge”? (Selwyn 2011, p7)  Over the next couple of years, the Student as Producer project aims to

…establish research-engaged teaching and learning as an institutional priority at the University of Lincoln, making it the dominant paradigm for all aspects of curriculum design and delivery, and the central pedagogical principle that informs other aspects of the University’s strategic planning.

There are a number of documents that lay the theoretical and practical groundwork for Student as Producer.

Re-reading these papers, some broad themes are common:

  • History
  • Society
  • Pedagogy
  • Curricula

Within these themes, we can find the following keywords and ideas

  • Speculative thinking
  • Critique
  • Close contact between student and teacher
  • Dialectical method
  • Student as subject, student as producer
  • Make history not just knowledge
  • Relationship between intellectual and manual labour
  • ‘Common Affairs’ / ‘Everyday life’
  • Radically democratic
  • Direct communication/direct action
  • Informed by social history
  • Student designed curricula
  • University as producer and consumer of technological innovation
  • Student as personification of knowledge
  • Politics of production
  • Internet as mass intellectuality
  • Polycentric, collective intelligence
  • Social constructivism
  • Openness
  • Collaboration: Student as teacher/teacher as student
  • Connect theory with action
  • Interrupt consensus
  • Ecological sustainability = institutional sustainability
  • Social learning that transforms social context
  • Paradigm shift

In the context of a university, the technologist is interested in the ‘study of’ (logia) the art, skill or craft (techne) of teaching and learning and in the context of Student as Producer, we are obliged to  extend this interest to thinking critically about the use of ‘tools for improvement’ and recognising that their development and use is, and always has been, political and socially determined, just as ‘the idea of the university‘ has always been politically and socially determined.

How then, might we undertake a ‘reverse imagineering‘ of educational technology? What is it with technology that we are seeking to improve in education? ((It’s worth noting that the word ‘improve‘ has always been closely aligned with the use of technologies to add value i.e. profit. The Middle English improwen, meant to enclose land for cultivation, from Anglo-Norman emprouwer, to turn to profit. The OED entry lists a long and interesting list of similar uses.)) Following the objectives and techniques of ‘reverse engineering’ in hacking, reverse imagineering might be a method by which we deconstruct the complex machine of ‘educational technology’ and reconstruct a technology for education.

The deconstruction of complex machines and their ‘decolonized’ reconstruction can be carried out on all kinds of objects, not just computational ones. In the same way as you deconstruct a program, you can also deconstruct the internal functioning of a government or an administration, a firm or an industrial or financial group. On the basis of such a deconstruction, involving a precise identification of the operating principles of a given administration, or the links or networks between administrations, lobbies, businesses etc., you can define modes of action or intervention. ((Bureau d’Etudes, Autonomous Knowledge and Power in a Society without Affects.))

How do we deconstruct educational technology in order to reconstruct a technology for education? I suggest we develop a critical praxis of technology for education and that Student as Producer offers us both a theoretical and practical framework by which to undertake it.