I gave a presentation with Patrick McAndrew today to IET Committee on the implications of web 2.0 for higher education. Apart from all the fun technologies, one of the key principles to me is that of openness and a letting go of control. I think the instinct of many of us in higher education is to try and control the student experience. This may come from good intentions relating to ensuring quality, promoting a caring environment, getting students to understand the key concepts and gain the key skills, etc., but I think it becomes a habit, a default action. It doesn’t sit well in a web 2.0 world and I…

One of the common arguments I hear when discussing e-learning is that ‘pedagogy should come first’, and ‘we shouldn’t be enamoured by technology.’ This is difficult to disagree with and everyone nods sagely when its said. However one of three responses occur to me when it’s said: i) "If I hear that again, I’ll effing scream." ii)"It’s an excuse not to engage with technology, by claiming the higher ground of pedagogy." iii) "No, no, no – we need to be enamoured by technology more. I don’t sit around with a pile of pedagogies waiting for a technological breakthrough. Rather what happens is that I see a good technology and I…

I hosted a workshop yesterday at the OU on the broadcast strategy, looking at how it relates to courses and pedagogy. A couple of things that came out: i) I’ve been saying for a while that the boundary between content and technology has become blurred. I became more convinced of this today. Would you regard Google as a technology or a content company? This has implications for what we (the OU) think of as broadcast – it is as much about developing a tool as commissioning a piece of content. ii) The whole long tail phenomenon is relevant here. The traditional broadcast model relies on a lot of people consuming…

I was at a meeting of our research group, TLRG, today. I presented on future research directions for VLEs (rather like Elizabeth Taylor and marriage, I can’t resist doing these crytsal ball gazing exercises, even though I know something always comes along and makes them redundant). Talking to my colleague Adam Joinson, he mentioned he was doing research on social software looking at issues of privacy and trust. One point in particular interested me and that was a degree of ambiguity is preferable in such systems. For instance, when creating avatars, it helps if the avatar doesn’t resemble the individual too closely, as this frees up behaviour online, and also…