The digital divide and Web 2

The internet, though global in reach, has its own specific geography, simultaneously linking and dividing people and places in new ways. As Manuel Castells demonstrates in The Internet Galaxy, plotting any aspect of the internet economy – origins of diffusion, locations of technical infrastructure, location of investors, service providers and content producers, location of users – will give you a map of the digital landscape which is both familiar and rapidly changing (Castells, 2002). Like Mercator’s Projection, which exaggerates the imperial North while shrinking the underdeveloped South, our Internet map would massively inflate the size of the most technically advanced countries of North America, Europe and the Pacific rim and further belittle the developing countries of the South.

Within the magic circle of northern hemisphere wired societies, the internet has turbo-charged the economies of a handful of major metropolitan areas which now constitute the main hubs of network development and investment, account for the majority of internet domains, and form the main nodes in the global network. As Castells points out, the internet is in fact the technological driving force of global urbanisation:

The entire planet is being reorganised around gigantic metropolitan nodes that absorb an increasing proportion of the urban population, itself the majority of the population of the planet… The internet is the medium that allows metropolitan concentration and global networking to proceed simultaneously. The networked economy, tooled by the internet, is an economy made up of very large, interconnected metropolitan regions. (Castells 2002)

Because the internet has made connection to the network a precondition of full social and economic participation, it has also – at least initially – increased the divide within the wired societies between richly connected urban and poorly connected rural areas and between the well-connected majority and economically deprived ethnic minority communities who cannot afford connection. However as internet diffusion nears saturation these internal digital divides are beginning to narrow.

But the digital divide between the developed/wired world and the undeveloped/unwired one is arguably still growing. For less economically developed countries, lack of connection to the global network equates to marginalisation in the new global economic system: “development without the internet would be the equivalent of industrialisation without electricity in the industrial era.” (Castells, 2002)

The global network may actually be accentuating inequality. The 1990s was a decade which saw not only the rise of the internet and the growth of the networked economy, but also a substantial increase in inequality between rich and poor countries – a widening of the gap in productivity, income and social benefits between the developed and developing world. This growing development gap is another aspect of globalisation, the distinctive economic and social transformation of our time, whose technological driving force is the internet. Castells concludes that

Under the current social and institutional conditions prevailing in our world, the new techno-economic system seems to induce uneven development, simultaneously increasing wealth and poverty, productivity, and social exclusion, with its effects being differentially distributed in various areas of the world…This global process of uneven development is perhaps the most dramatic expression of the digital divide. (Castells 2002)

Such uneven development is characterist of technological innovations in general. Way back in the 1960s, E M Rogers wrote

the consequences of the diffusion of innovations usually widen the socioeconomic gap between the earlier and later adopting categories in a system.. Further, the consequences of the diffusion of innovations usually widen the socioeconomic gap between the segments previously high and low in socioeconomic status. (Rogers, 2003)

However as internet-powered globalisation proceeds, some of its imbalances may be evening out. Just as some of the network access inequalities in technically advanced societies – between men and women, urban and rural, rich and poor – have diminished as the net diffused more and more widely, so there are signs of the digital divide between developed and developing countries beginning to narrow.

One factor is the waning of global economic domination by the countries of the North and West. A new tier of southern and eastern economic superpowers has arisen – the so-called BRIC grouping of Brazil, Russia, India and China – whose economies are growing so fast that they will soon match in size or overtake those of North America and Europe. The stature of the BRIC economies is reflected in the countries’ internet presence, as measured by the number of internet domains based in the BRIC countries: in 2007 a list of the 20 countries with the largest number of domains showed China in third place with 157 million domains, Brazil in 12th place with 25 million, Russia 17th with 20 million, and India 19th with 15 million (see domaintools.com).

Although north America, Europe and the Pacific rim countries (including Australia) still have the highest penetration of internet users, they no longer have the largest number of users – Asia does. More importantly the rates of internet usage growth in the countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America now dwarf those in the developed North and West, as the table below shows. The South is catching up.

Data from June 2008. Table from Internet World Statistics @ www.internetworldstats.com/stats

Other less economically developed countries are also taking strides. Indonesia is currently the least wired of East Asian nations, but has just announced an ambitious programme of broadband rollout, backed by NGOs, local businesses, international corporations and the UN, that aims to provide 20% of the population with a cheap, fast connection via either wireless or mobile by 2012.

Several aspects of ‘Web 2.0′ have the potential to help make participation in the global network more feasible for people in developing countries. For example

• Open source makes free software available to people who could not afford to pay
• Cloud computing makes powerful applications available to all and means computers need be less powerful
• OER makes educational resources available free to anyone with a connection
• Mobile & social computing makes helps people to get organised and make their voice heard

Another positive is the huge number of organisations now working of the problem of bridging the digital divide: UN bodies like UNESCO and the Global Alliance for ICT, academic/business initiatives like OLPC, international NGOs like Digital Alliance Foundation, bridges.org and Eduvision, and networks like Digital Divide.org, Digital Divide Network, Scidev.net and Web2forDev. A growing number of people understand that helping to bridge the divide is the responsibility of all of us, and is about investment in hardware and in infrastructure, and above all about investment in education.

As Digital Divide.org say on their website, “closing the digital divide is fundamentally about empowerment – that is, about using new technologies to empower the poor just as they now empower the rich.. It is the only way to make globalisation work for the poor”.

It is also arguably a precondition for survival, for we humans face global climate catastrophe unless we can find ways of equalising development – of ending the pursuit of endless economic growth, contracting and converging in order to reach a more just and sustainable way of co-existing with each other and the planet. The hope must be that the global network can play its part in this process of slowing down and evening out.
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Castells M, 2002. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Interent, Business and Society. Oxford

Rogers EM, 2003. Diffusion of Innovations, 5th edition, p471. Free Press, New York

Copyright and the Commons

When it comes to intellectual property the internet has a split personality. Like chromosomes lining up in preparation for cell division, every piece of web content is caught in opposing forcefields emanating from the Net’s twin poles: the need to Keep, and the urge to Share.

In the Keep corner, here’s the copyright notice on the website of University for industry, which runs the UK government’s learndirect programme:

Save as expressly set out in this Copyright Notice, you may not modify, copy, reproduce, re-publish, upload, post, transmit or distribute in any way any of the learndirect Materials. Any use of the learndirect Materials not expressly permitted in this Copyright Notice is strictly prohibited and will constititute an infringement of the copyright and other intellectual property rights of Ufi..

While over in the Share corner, here’s the copyleft statement on Wikia.com, a wiki-hosting offshoot of Wikipedia.

Except where otherwise specified, the text of all wikis on Wikia.com is freely licensed under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). Reusers of the content must retain it under the same licence, ensuring it remains free… Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GFDL..

This core polarity between Keep and Share, so intrinsic to the internet, can be understood in several different ways.

It can be traced back to some of the divergent cultural streams identified by Manuel Castells as flowing fortuitously together in the 1970s to form the internet’s distinctive zeitgeist (see Internet Galaxy 2: Net culture). The entrepreneurial tradition, for example, sets a supremely high value on ownership, for entrepreneurs require markets, and markets are about the exchange of property. Entrepreneurs must keep what is theirs until they can sell it for a profit, and it is largely this capitalist drive to marketise the new technology that has fueled the internet’s explosive growth in the last two decades.

The hacker subculture on the other hand has an ethic of knowledge sharing and collaboration, derived partly from the practice of the open source software movement and partly from communitarian philosophical strands in 1960s and 1970s youth culture. The hacker instinct is to donate what they make to the hacker community so it can be used and improved by others. Copyleft and the GNU Free Documentation Licence were bequeathed to the world wide web by the share-alike ideology of this hacker tradition.

Another way of understanding the Keep/Share dualism is as the latest manifestation of the historical struggle between commoners and enclosers, which in the 17th – 19th centuries in England forcibly took most farmland out of common and into private ownership. The Creative Commons open publication licences set out to recreate this ancient communal form of ownership in the context of what Charles Leadbeater calls the “new global information commons”. Leadbeater points out that unlike the real world version, the digital commons does not fall prey to overuse and lack of care – the so-called Tragedy of the Commons – but on the contrary is augmented by sharing: “The sheep grazing the commons shit out more grass. The more the commons is used, the larger it gets.” (Leadbeater, 2008 )

Leadbeater describes the digital-age version of the struggle between commoners and enclosers like this:

In England the village commons were enclosed to encourage more private investment to raise agricultural productivity and provide more food for the expanding urban population.. Now the same argument is being used to justify enclosures of the digital commons.. The argument of large corporations such as Microsoft and News Corporation is that the digital world will work better if everything can be turned into private property, to be protected and controlled. Were these emergent commons to be parcelled up and fenced off .. we could buy, have, make and acquire, but we would find it much more difficult to enjoy collaborating, participating, contributing and playing. (Leadbeater, 2008 )

A still more ancient source of the IP polarity, suggested by Geoff Mulgan in his book Connexity, is the age-old contradiction between the human need for stability and security and the human desire to explore and exchange. This tension dates back to the beginning of civilisation, expressed in the counterbalancing pull of the periphery against the centre, the outpost against the walled city, the frontier against the capital.

The edge places can be found throughout history: they are the hubs, entrepots, port cities. They see themselves as a web of connections, not as a territory. They were often not only creative and absorptive, but also often unstable….
By contrast in the landmasses you find the cultures of the centre. These are built around great empires, huge bureaucracies, absolute religions and ideologies.. They aspire to stasis and immobility. This immobility has been reflected in .. grand buildings that symbolise hierarchy.. (Mulgan, 1997)

Is this tension between centre and edge still at work in the Keep / Share duality? Arguably here again, as with the Tragedy of the Commons, the internet has changed the rules of an old game. For the nature of the global network is that it has no centre, but consists entirely of nodes and connections. The Net is all edge.

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Castells M, 2001. The Internet Galaxy: reflections on the internet, business and society. OUP, Oxford
Leadbeater C, 2008. We Think. Profile Books, London. Available in part online from http://www.wethinkthebook.net/home.aspx
Mulgan G, 1998. Connexity: responsibility, freedom, business and power in the new century. Vintage, London

The point of Blended Learning

Blended Learning’s contribution to the eLearning discussion is a simple one. It forcefully makes the point that delivering learning online is a pragmatic not a dogmatic solution, that eLearning works fine in a mixed economy of learning, and that it doesn’t replace but supplements traditional modes of delivery. This point may seem obvious from the standpoint of 2008, but six or seven years ago it needed to be got across to educators, and BL performed that function.

(It’s for this reason that Blended Learning is best understood as simply a mix of on- and offline learning delivery. This definition clarifies BL’s place in the eLearning landscape, whereas other definitions that have been suggested – such as the blending of distinct web-based modes, or the blending of pedagogical approaches – actually obfuscate BL’s role.)

A blended approach makes sense in many scenarios because some types of learning simply ARE best delivered face-to-face: children will always need some physical schooling; learning ceramics, taekwondo or CPR will always demand hands-on teaching. eLearning in turn can help wherever learners are geographically dispersed, or on the move, or having to fit their learning around their work or domestic obligations – as well as putting enormously powerful exploration, research, communication and community-support tools into the hands of learners themselves.

There are cost factors to be balanced here too. eLearning can have high fixed costs, especially if sophisticated learning objects or simulations are involved, and so may only be cost-effective where there are large numbers of learners or where courses have a long shelf-life. Face-to-face sessions on the other hand may appear inexpensive to run but do not scale up well and will always carry high variable costs in the form of transport and accommodation overheads. A blended learning approach which combined high eLearning fixed costs with high face-to-face variable costs would be difficult to justify from a cost-effectiveness point of view.

On metadata

We’ve been asked to think this week about the importance of metadata in eLearning. In his introduction to the metadata study theme, Martin Weller focuses on its role in making learning resources transparent and findable:

It is [its] potential to make resources more accessible to effective searching and the subsequent promotion of content reuse that makes metadata significant for learning.
(H806-08/Connected learning in practice/Metadata)

Vital as this identifying and labeling role is, however, I think Martin’s formulation understates the significance of metadata for educators and learners.

Properly understood, the term metadata encompasses more than just the web-standard header tags (title, description, keywords, script, creation date) that virtually every web page carries, or even the more comprehensive or specialised metadata sets such as Dublin Core or the UK Learning Object Metadata set. Every hyperlink on the web is a statement of relationship between data at the anchor location and data at the target location. Every online database or directory which helps to organise and categorise the web depends upon a pre-defined taxonomy which, again, describes relationships between different bits of data. Every user-generated tag describes someone’s individual take on the significance of a particular set of data. And Google’s regularly-updated back-up of the entire world wide web, stored for indexing purposes on half-a-million servers at Mountain View, California, is arguably the mother of all metadata sets.

Metadata is woven in to the fabric of the web. If eLearning is learning that takes place online and interactively, then metadata is what makes it possible.

Metadata and learning meet in a theoretical convergence zone. The act of writing metadata is one of stepping back from the immediate experience, considering and interrogating it. It involves asking questions like:

• What sort of data is this?
• What are the key points, and how could it be summarised?
• What is its internal structure?
• What other data does it relate to, and how?
• What conceptual patterns, categories or hierarchies does it fit into?

The act of metadata-making, in other words, is an act of metacognition. It is an act of reflection, which is agreed by virtually all learning theorists – from Dewey and Habermas, through Kolb and Schon to Boud and Moon – to be central to all but the most surface kind of learning.

Metadata is not just about indexing and locating learning objects. It is at the heart of learning itself.

Learning as conversation

Diana Laurillard’s conversational framework feels like a very powerful model for understanding how formal learning works and how best to design effective learning objects. It is the best kind of theory: one that informs practice. It starts by identifying the main characteristics of a learning encounter, develops from these a typology of learning experiences, and finally maps this to a taxonomy of media forms appropriate to each type of experience.

Building on the Socratic tradition of dialectic, the social constructivist learning theories of Vygotsky and Piaget and the conversation theory of Pask, Laurillard maintains that all complex learning involves

a continuing iterative dialogue between teacher and student, which reveals the participants’ conceptions and the variations between them… There is no escape from the need for dialogue, no room for mere telling, nor for practice without description, nor for experimentation without reflection, nor for student action without feedback. (Laurillard, 2002)

She divides her learning conversation into four phases – “the basic characteristics of every learning encounter” – as follows:

1. a discursive phase in which the teacher presents a new concept and learners enter into a dialogue with the teacher, trying out the idea and its corresponding language, questioning and clarifying.
2. an interactive phase in which learners interact with teacher-constructed tasks, attempting to put the new concept into practice, and getting feedback on their performance
3. an adaptive phase in which learners attempt to put their ideas into practice, modify their ideas and adapt their actions in the light of what they have learned, and make their own links between ideas and events; and
4. a reflective phase in which learners consider their experience of 2) and 3), reflecting on their learning, relating the theory back to the practice, adjusting their thinking in the light of reflection and framing future actions to be more successful.

Next, she adduces from these characteristics a fivefold typology of learning experiences, like this:

Finally, Laurillard turns to the characteristics of the different teaching media – which she groups into narrative, interactive, adaptive, communicative and productive media – and maps these media forms to the types of learning they support, and the technologies needed to deliver them. The resulting taxonomy looks like this:

Laurillard’s framework is intended to define any formal learning encounter, and the appropriate media technologies she lists include traditional as well as digital ones. But for eLearning practitioners the framework poses the question – which online technologies are best suited to supporting the range of experiences needed for signficant online learning to take place?

Here’s my attempt at an answer..

Narrative media such as digital text, video or audio files are readily attended to and aid apprehension by providing structure and coherence to the learning content. However they are linear media. They can present only the teacher’s ideas, terminology or instruction – not the learner’s reaction or reformulation of them. They support only the first, non-dialogic, part of the discursive phase of learning.

Interactive media such as hypertext, simple learning objects and the world wide web itself are non-linear media and therefore support exploration and discovery. They allow students to make their own links and follow their own lines of enquiry. They also allow some limited intrinsic feedback (ie feedback that comes from the activity itself) and, when combined with narrative media setting goals and giving guidance, interactive media can support the discursive as well as the interactive phases of the learning encounter.

Adaptive media such as more elaborate learning objects, simulations and virtual environments give the learner significantly more control over their interaction with the learning experience. Learners can experiment with changing the parameters, can model systems or environments, and can see what happens when they try to put their new learning into practice. They can also get more detailed intrinsic feedback, and may be able to log the interactive process and thus begin to reflect upon it. Adaptive media therefore support both the interactive and adaptive phases of a learning encounter, and may also support the final reflective phase as well.

Communicative media such as CMC, chat and online social/collaborative environments obviously support the discursive dimension of learning. The discussion and debate that these media allow with both teachers and other learners support the second, dialogic, part of the discursive phase of learning; but they also provide an additional source of learning content in the form of information and ideas, and enable extrinsic feedback during the interactive and adaptive phases – thus supporting reflection during the final two stages. Communicative media (eg in the form of wikis and blogs) can even provide the output of productive learning. On their own however they cannot easily support the interactive and adaptive phases of the learning encounter.

Finally, productive media such as a webpage or blog post or digital object or model of some kind – these enable an output from the learning in which the learner articulates what they have learned, considers the learning experience, adjusts their original conception in the light of the interaction, and reflects upon the significance of the experience. Productive media support the final, reflective phase of the learning encounter, and will often overlap with communicative media.

What emerges is that while each media form supports a different dimension or dimensions of the learning encounter, none of them can support every dimension. Narrative media support the apprehensive dimension and may be all you need for a purely instructional approach; interactive and adaptive media support immersive, exploratory learning and on their own result in a game-like experience; communicative media support the discursive and productive dimensions, and for pure peer-to-peer learning may be all you need. But to support the kind of deep or complex learning which engages all the phases of the learning encounter, you need a combination of media forms.

Reference:
Laurillard, D, 2002. Rethinking University Teaching: A Conversational Framework for the Effective Use of Learning Technologies, 2nd edition. London: RoutledgeFalmer

The wisdom of clouds

Two heads are obviously better than one – but how much better? Certainly a lot more than x2. All the evidence suggests that in general groups of people are much, much better at solving problems than individuals, and that really big, diverse groups are the best problem solvers of all. As James Surowiecki put it, “groups are often smarter than the smartest people in them.” (Surowiecki, 2004).

The problem of how to organise and classify all the world’s knowledge, for example, is one that many very clever individuals – from Liebnitz and Wilkins to Otlet and Bush – have tried and failed to solve. The problem is arguably in the process of being cracked today by a combination of Google plus the collaborative efforts of hundreds of thousands of ordinary web users and the user-generated taxonomy, or folksonomy, of social bookmarking.

Online bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us and Connotea are much more than just convenient places to store and organise every link you might need again – though they are that. Because they’re social, they help eLearners to be cleverer in three separate ways.

1. Plugging in to the global brain
You can use the clouds of tags created by other users to sample what thousands of people all over the world wide web are reading or saying about any topic that interests you. It’s like plugging into a vast collective intelligence and is a great way of running into things that you on your own would never have run into.

2. Harnessing the power of We Think
By thoughtfully applying tags of your own to your bookmarked items, you begin to share bookmarks with all the other users who’ve applied the same tags and are therefore thinking about similar stuff to you. This enables you to tap into a rich communal reservoir of knowledge and ideas, and harness what Charles Leadbeater calls We Think or “the power of shared intelligence to sort wheat from chaff”(Leadbeater, 2008 ).

3. Joining a community of practice
By hooking up with other learners who share your area of study to form a kind bookmarking circle (networks in Del.icio.us, groups in Connotea) you can enter into a highly efficient community of learning practitioners, reading what they’re reading, sharing comments as well as bookmarks, sparking ideas – and all simply as a by-product of saving and tagging your links.

Social bookmarking is such a great eLearning tool, because eLearning is a social practice.

For the record, my H806 bookmarks – shared with my fellow students via the H806 tag – are at http://delicious.com/johnmill.
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Surowiecki, James, 2004. The Wisdom of Crowds: why the many are smarter than the few. Little, Brown. London

Leadbeater, Charles, 2008. We Think. Profile Books. London.

Personal or communal?

Personalising learning – allowing the learner to learn whatever, however and whenever they want to learn – has got to be a good thing, right? Well, maybe not. In his 2002 article MyUniversity.com? Cass Sunstein argues that too much personalisation could have consequences that are bad not only for learning, but also for a diverse, democratic society.

Sunstein’s argument is twofold. First, if students are set free to filter out the content they find unfamiliar or unsettling, focusing only on what they think in advance they want to learn, they will actually miss out on the richest learning opportunities. Those

unanticipated encounters involving topics and points of view that people have not sought out and perhaps find quite irritating, are central to education, democracy, and even to freedom itself.

Second, if every learner is free to construct their own personalised learning experience, a vital social dimension to the learning is lost. Knowledge risks becoming individualised and fragmented, with no common set of reference points for learners and educators to coalesce around. Sunstein believes that

Citizens, including members of educational institutions, should have a range of common experiences. Without shared experiences … people will find it increasingly hard to understand one another. (Sunstein, 2002)

I think Sunstein is about 75% right. It’s true that without a shared set of reference points, without those unexpected encounters, learning can barely happen at all. And he’s right to suggest that the current preoccupation with personalisation – the desire for everything to revolve around ‘me’ – is related to a more generalised consumer-individualism: the idea that we have the right to purchase whatever we want, from anywhere in the world, whatever the cost, in order to construct a unique persona for ourselves.

And yet, and yet…

There’s a more positive way of looking at personalisation in learning which Sunstein perhaps overlooks. Not as filtering out the unfamiliar, not as the fragmenting of collective experience, but simply as an increase in the individual learner’s control over the learning experience. Any cognitive or constructivist approach to education requires the learner to be an active partner in the process, and that in turn implies scope for decision-making and the expression of personal preference by the learner. If educators hope to produce independent learners, they must first give learners some independence.

And there’s a crucial aspect of online learning that Sunstein has not taken into account: community. Properly understood, eLearning is a networked activity, with dialogue between a community of learners (and teachers) at its heart: such a dialogue presupposes, and could not take place without, a common core of learning content and a shared set of learning experiences.

My current OU course exemplifies this. H806 consists of a core of texts, themes, modules and assignments which all students must engage with in order to complete the course; but at the same time gives students a great deal of choice about which learning objects to focus on, and enormous latitude in how they relate the new ideas to their personal experience, in what to read, and in how to express and record their learning. H806 also, and crucially, consists of a community of learners who continuously share their experience, their knowledge and their insights in various online communities – communities where students’ diverse professional and cultural backgrounds are a regular source of different views, new knowledge, challenged assumptions, and unanticipated encounters.

At its powerful best, eLearning can be both personal and communal.
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Sunstein C, 2002. MyUniversity.com? Personalized Education and Personalized News. EDUCAUSE Review Volume 37, Number 5, September/October 2002. Available online @ http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/MyUniversitycomPersonaliz/40359?time=1209199791

Just-in-time learning and types of knowledge: 2

Another useful knowledge typology is one I compiled from some interesting references in Review of e-learning theories, frameworks and models, a 2004 JISC report by Terry Mayes and Sara de Freitas. This model focuses on individual rather than collective knowledge, but like Alice Lam’s framework sees knowledge as extending in two binary dimensions, domain specific – generic, and declarative – procedural, as in the diagram below.

In this schema, domain-specific refers to knowledge of the data, concepts, and language particular to a distinct realm of knowledge such as physics or plumbing; while generic knowledge covers the general learning abilities which enable people to become successful independent learners – skills like self-confidence, self-discipline, organisation, communication and collaboration skills, critical thinking and reflexivity.

Declarative knowledge is explicit, conceptual, conscious and externalised knowledge of the kind that normally results from academic learning; as opposed to procedural knowledge which is implicit, instrumental, largely unconscious and internalised knowledge of the kind we associate with skillful practice of any kind.

While the declarative – procedural dimension is very similar to Lam’s explicit – tacit one, the domain-specific – generic axis draws attention to a different but equally important aspect of learning. In particular, many of the types of learning that are most important to a networked organisation in a fast-moving knowledge economy – generic learning skills which can only be developed through practice in a particular context – take place in the generic / procedural quadrant of the framework. This type of learning is cumulative and sustained, and yet more habitual than theoretical. And it is precisely this type of learning that the Just-in-time approach would seem least suited to delivering.

Mayes and de Freitas comment:

There is a growing agenda … giving greater emphasis to what are becoming called employability assets. These outcomes are all generic – not dependent on declarative knowledge – and include analytical and flexible learning capabilities, but also emphasise qualities that are much harder to specify as part of a curriculum: confidence, self-discipline, communication, ability to collaborate, reflexivity, questioning attitudes. These outcomes start to suggest a crucial role for the community of practice approach, and turn our attention to learning environments that provide maximum opportunity for communication and collaboration…
(Mayes & de Freitas, 2004)

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Mayes, T & de Freitas, S, 2004, Review of e-learning theories,frameworks and models: JISC eLearning Models Desk Study, Stage 2, available online in pdf format from http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearning_pedagogy/

Just-in-time learning and types of knowledge: 1

The Just-in-time approach to learning clearly has huge advantages in delivering short bursts of bespoke, context-specific knowledge or skills to learners (especially workplace learners) wherever or whenever they are needed. But there are some learning settings – ones where learning needs to be more sustained, cumulative, theoretical or collaborative in nature – where Just-in-time seems less appropriate. So exactly what types of knowledge or cognition does Just-in-time work well for? To answer that question we need some tools for thinking about categories of knowledge.

Perhaps the best known knowledge typology is that of Alice Lam, which sees knowledge as extending in two dimensions: explicit-tacit (the epistemological dimension) and individual-collective (the ontological dimension). The interplay between these dimensions gives rise to four categories of knowledge, as follows:

(Lam, 2000)

Embrained knowledge, then, is formal, abstract and conceptual knowledge. It is general, conscious and explicit and is the result of individual acts of cognition. Embodied knowledge also resides primarily within individuals, but is applied, practical, bodily, context-specific and largely unconscious. Embodied knowledge is about doing rather than knowing.

Encoded knowledge is the collective, conscious knowledge of an organisation or society which has been codified into language or information – rules, standards and systems – which then regulate behaviour. Embedded knowledge is also collective, but instead of residing in an explicit code is tacitly embedded in social practice and a community’s shared beliefs and norms. Embedded knowledge is relation-specific, contextual and dispersed.

Lam’s typology makes it clear that much of an organisation’s most valuable knowledge exists at the tacit rather than the explicit level. But tacit knowledge, being neither fully conscious nor encoded, is something which is learnt through practice and over time and is not very readily engaged with via short bursts of targeted information. Just-in-time learning, then, would appear to be most useful for learning at the level of explicit knowledge, either embrained or encoded.

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Lam A, 2000. Tacit Knowledge, Organizational Learning and Societal Institutions: An Integrated Framework. Organization Studies, Vol. 21 Issue 3, p487

Cargo cults and CD-ROMs

In Diffusion of Innovations (core reading for H807 and a social science classic) Everett Rogers identifies compatibility as a key factor in the rate of spread of new technologies. Rogers means that to be successful, an innovation must not seem so alien to existing practice that people can’t imagine themselves using it. There needs to be a hint of continuity in among the newness.

Sometimes though, this need for compatibility has strange, backward-looking consequences which very nearly seem to cancel out the benefits of the innovation. Consider the fax machine, which became ubiquitous in offices in the 1980s and 90s. You start off with a digital document on a computer, but – instead of sending it directly down a telephone line – you make an analogue copy by printing it, then convert it back to digital by scanning it into the fax, send that down a telephone line, then at the other end convert it back again to an analogue form which is less useful than the digital document it started out as! The sole point of this wasteful round-about seems to have been to generate the familiar pieces of paper that office workers were used to.

From an ethnographic point of view, such behaviour looks almost like the cargo cults of Pacific islanders who fetishized the technologies of the first Europeans they encountered and made radios out of coconut shells and straw. Such misunderstood objects are described by sociologists as boundary objects: objects which mark the boundary between cultures, between conceptual worlds, only dimly understood because of their place at the periphery of what is known.

I’d argue that the CD-ROM, which as Martin Weller points out was once hyped as “the new papyrus” (Weller M, 2002), is another example of a boundary object, a digital instance of non-digital thinking. Think about it: you invest a lot of time and money making multimedia, interactive content which (if placed online) could be easily updated and distributed virtually free to anyone online; then you seal it into a piece of plastic so it can never be updated and becomes difficult and costly to distribute! Such crackpottery can surely only be explained in terms of an inability to escape from the model of the printed book which has been our main means of distributing knowledge these last 600 years.

That, plus a weird obsession with plastic.

Weller M, 2002. Delivering Learning on the Net. RoutledgeFalmer