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NMC Horizon Studies

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Photo: Courtesy my.opera.com

On reading the 2015 NMC Horizon study it seemed to me to be a sound assessment of the way technologies are heading in education but some areas seemed to lack ambition. This could obviously be down to the fact that education is well known to be slow on the uptake of new technologies, and the writers did not have the luxury of hindsight. One area which struck me was adaptive learning technologies which in the 2015 report it was pitched at 4 to 5 years and by the 2017 report is a year or less, these technologies in some way are already being used in education, in this way I think the report was being conservative, much like education itself. The internet of things was part of the 2015 report and again in 2017, on the same timeline moving from 4-5 years to 2-3 years. This one is very hard to gauge in my opinion as the term encompasses such a broad area who is to say when the uptake of these technologies really happen, some institutions would argue now Virginia Tech and The University of New South Wales for example, as mentioned in the report. I would imagine we will see a slow proliferation of these technologies making their way into institutions.

A couple of technologies that really interested me from the 2017 report was Artificial intelligence and next generation VLE's, these are both areas that have the capacity to have a profound effect on education and these are areas that could well work together. There are already applications coming to market that use AI capability one such application is seeing AI by Microsoft, this application uses the camera on a phone and describes the world around it. It is described as being designed for the low vision community. The adoption timeline for the next generation VLE's is 2-3 years and Artificial intelligence 4-5 years, if the desire is there I'm sure these timelines could be on the pessimistic side as the technologies are in place already, the need is definitely there in both areas especially as there is a general acceptance that students need a more personalised learning experience.

A technology that is missing from the reports in my opinion, and a technology that I have spoken about at some length is blockchain technology. This could have a profound effect on education and specifically the measurement of achievement and dissemination of research (a discussion of the form in which this may take place this can be found at http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/10187). A site called steemit came on the scene in 2016 that also utilises blockchain technology and encourages users to post content and in return are given tokens, depending on the popularity of the piece, each post can be upvoted, so more votes, more rewards. With regards to measuring achievement a platform is being developed at appii.io that is utilising blockchain technology to securely keep records of achievement but also connect students and employers to maximise student's strengths and preferences with employer needs. I am surprised that blockchain technology has never made it into the report, the authors may have their reasons for this but in my opinion this technology will change the educational landscape and beyond in profound ways and I would place this at the mid term of 2-3 years.

Am I too optimistic? 





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Three Little Monkeys

Already on the PLE Highway?

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Edited by Andrew Brooks, Saturday, 15 Jul 2017, 14:41

Personal Learning Environment

I don’t think it would be too controversial to say that the use of some kind of PLE in education is becoming more commonplace as people start to make use of technologies in various areas of their life. Where is this all heading? If we can accept that students learn in different ways and what is good for one student may not be good for another then we have to accept that a one size fits all system is not optimum either. As Weller points out in the Sclater/Weller (2016) podcast that students do not want to use an inferior system in their studies than they are using in their leisure time, they’re are some great free tools out there that work very well, but as Sclater counters that students need to be able to interact so they must be using systems that allow this, although it is a red herring to suggest that a good reason for not partaking in the use of different technologies in the form of a PLE is in case of technical failure, of course any platform can fail but if your environment is distributed then it is much less likely your whole environment is down at the same time. It is true that there needs to be some consistency for ease of communication, but at the same time students needs and preferences need to be taken into account for optimum learning potential, after all there are a vast range of technologies waiting to be exploited, along with a vast range of preferences. How would this work? Some kind of hybrid system? Maybe it is fair comment from sclater to suggest that far from the VLE being put out to pasture it could become more of a back end system. This is the direction I see for the PLE. We do need to give students ownership over the tools they use if they are to get the most out of their learning as they possibly can, but their needs to be a route for the students to maintain fluid communication. This currently does not happen with the VLE either, forums are not instant or fluid enough and the whole system is a little restrictive when compared to the tools that can be utilised in everyday life. What would be better and a potential direction is for students to choose the tools that they wish to use and have a system that interacts with these platforms giving students the flexibility of using their PLE whilst keeping the ability to communicate, of course there may be situations that need to be kept in a closed forum or at least desirable, but a more flexible system is surely more beneficial for all. Is this fanciful? Is education heading down the PLE highway? Its already on it, where to next?

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Is technology itself a cause of reform in education or an instrument used to encourage reform?

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The big boot of schools that are adapting to change squashing the small man who is the majority of schools that aren't adapting

As we have seen, technology has been making massive waves in recent years in education and the impact can be seen in the ways in which courses are delivered and also in the way students are interacting with their courses, this can be seen both in the class and on distance learning courses. Education itself is notoriously slow on the uptake of new technologies but of course these technologies are no longer new and the people that are innovating have grown up with these technologies. Chris Jones asks the above question in the context of an activity as part of an MA module. In my view, technology can not cause reform in itself as people need to be willing to use the technology and see the value in its use. In my opinion though it is being used as an instrument of reform, just look at the explosion of MOOCs the sheer number of courses available online now is incredible and the surge in uptake of these courses is equally phenomenal. According to class-central.com the number of students has more than doubled in the last year up from 16-18 million to over 35 million   ( https://www.class-central.com/report/moocs-2015-stats/) These are obviously headline figures and the real story is a lot more nuanced than this, for example are these students that are registered to a platform, or registered to a course, have started a course, partially finished or finished a course, the permutations are endless, but it is plain to see that the interest in massive online courses is growing at a rapid rate. This is a massive subject in itself and is in danger of spinning out of control just like the MOOC figures, so to come back to the original question, I think it is reasonable to say that, yes, technology has been an instrument used to encourage reform, after all the big players in this field aren’t creating all this content out of a sense of social justice or just because they can. This is becoming a very big market as people are changing their learning habits, and see the MOOC model as one that is very flexible and one that they can jump in and out of as they see fit. People obviously have different reasons for wanting to learn but the point is that with the MOOC model, the previous barriers of large time and financial commitments have been lowered a great deal and in many cases the financial commitment has been completely removed. Society at large is changing continuously and education is and must change also. 

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Blockchain, Blockchain, Blockchain!!

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Blockchain Image

I spend a lot of time thinking about this technology, hence the title, and how it can, and is influencing so many areas, Weller (2014) speaks about the problems in open access publishing and there really has been no dramatic shifts since that was written. The current system really is a hinderance especially when you think about how long it can take from writing to publication, with lengthy peer review times in between, not to mention the costs involved. 

There are of course solutions to this, as far as I can see, and I have written about this in a few places already, one of which can be found at https://steemit.com/blockchain/@chavboy/how-can-a-social-network-be-used-to-increase-the-dissemination-of-research#@steemitboard/steemitboard-notify-chavboy-20170610t134624000z, these are just a few extra thoughts on the topic. The gold route to open access publishing is really not a viable long term option as far as I can tell, one could argue that we still need a system such as this to secure the knowledge base and give academics a secure place where they can release their material without fear of their work being misused by others. I do speak about this very problem in my extended abstract which is linked to in the post above, so I won't trawl back over that topic here. So even with this argument there really is no place for the practice of double dipping whereby publishers get to charge twice for the journal, Weller speaks about this in the brilliant "The Battle for Open: How openness won and why it doesn't feel like a victory." This is, in my view, a cynical attempt to extract every last penny out of this industry before their outdated model breaks down and fails to produce anymore income.

The route that interests me is the green route type of scenario (again for a clear discussion on this route please see Weller (2014) titled as above), we have the technology where this is a viable option, publications can be held in a repository, with minimal cost incurred, and tagged so they are fully searchable. Where blockchain comes in, of course, is for the security aspect and also to cover the peer review process. If the repository has blockchain technology built into it, it would mean that academics can upload their papers to the repository knowing there is a secure record of the upload. There could be further discussion on how peer review could take place but a good starting point would be a reputation based system, similar to the demo over at blockchain.open.ac.uk. This would very much be community led and could lead to a much more frictionless process. Steemit uses tokens to encourage participation, and this community has grown quite rapidly in a short space of time. Clearly there needs to be a movement away from the current system as it does not lend itself well to fast paced sectors where the pace of change is quicker than the process itself. If we are looking for technology that can provide us with solutions to the current problems in this area then I would shout it from the rooftops Blockchain, Blockchain, Blockchain!!

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Sporadic Blogging

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Sporadic Islands

I decided to title this blog Sporadic Blogging as this has been my experience thus far. I decided that I was going to use my Tumblr account to blog through the course of my MAODE firstly to fulfil activity obligations, but also as a bit of a journal and to organise my thoughts, to see where I was at within my thought processes at various times chronologically. 

I must say number one, big tick, I have used it to fulfil obligations, but with regards to the rest, not really. Now I did post a couple of times to try to promote (unsuccessfully) my conference presentation for H818, but apart from that it was all activity based. By the way it should be noted I am fully aware that in order for a blog to be successful and therefore a good promotion tool then a following needs to be cultivated, and for a following to be cultivated then time needs to be spent and consistent postings need to be made. The unsuccessful nature of my promotion did not come as a shock, but it was more an ‘excuse’ to post. I use the word ‘excuse’ as this is how it feels to me when posting a blog, I mostly feel I need to be using my time wisely as it is something I don’t have much of at the moment. On reflection this is completely inaccurate as if I think about it there are many activities that I partake in that if I was prioritising differently I would rearrange. This is not to say they are more or less important, but just a reminder that not having time for something should be very rare as most of us can find the time to do things we would like to do if we are prepared to adjust our priorities.

This blog definitely falls into the category of fulfilling activity obligation, but it also has helped organise my thoughts as well. With regards to the activity itself I did not find any of the findings particularly surprising, however, personally the students who could see no value in studying in this way were, in my view, missing out on some important experiences. I think that the more interactions you have and the wider audience you reach, the more opportunity there is to see a point of view, or achieve some outcome or interact in a way that will help you see a particular point in a way that otherwise you would not. I have thought a lot about how I can use blogging in the future, one way that will be helpful to me, and it will mean moving my Blog at some point in the future, is for teaching purposes. I am retraining to be a secondary school teacher starting in September and I hope to incorporate blogging into my regular practice. I’m not 100% sure how this will manifest itself yet, but I’m sure the reading of my blog will be a weekly requirement, and will be a way to communicate information and start conversations to aid upcoming lessons etc. I’m aware this will be time consuming but I will be prioritising this because as Stephen Downes asserts, you must lead by example and write a blog first if you are going to require your students to do so at some point (paraphrase), and I will. You can find this paper by Stephen Downes at https://www.academia.edu/2869149/Blogs_in_Learning and for anybody that happens to be reading this, not connected to H800 the paper in this activity is Characterising the different blogging behaviours of students on  online distance learning course by Kerawalla et al.

On reflection maybe I should have called this blog priorities or the illusion of time or something like that, but it wasn’t planned in any way and I just started writing and so I’m not prepared to contrive it in this way, so Sporadic Blogging is the name by which it is known.


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