I’m sitting here listening to Barbara Means giving the keynote on blended learning in K-12 in the US at E-Learn 2011. The audience is a little thin on the ground this morning as the conference is in Waikiki this year. The people on the beach missed a wonderful traditional chant and greeting – wonderful.

Barbara is telling us that, in meta-studies and in quasi-experimental studies, blended learning is equally or (often) more successful than face to face equivalents. And, the second point, as she observes, is that course completion rates are lower, of course (so the ones that survive are better). For the latter insight it is reasonable to consider the ‘e’ element of it – one absolutely distinctive feature of online learning is that it is much easier to ignore, so less motivated or well-organised students or those who have not learned online learning skills are at a disadvantage (something Barbera rightly observes). For the former, it is not at all.

The problem with these kinds of studies is a failure to understand and cater for the nature of the technologies they are examining. If we are looking at outcomes, it is almost nothing to do with whether people use online teaching or not, it’s about how the technologies (notably including pedagogies as well as organisational systems and the physical and virtual systems) fit together and how it all relates to things like motivation, time on task and the passion of the teacher, which together account for a good 80% of the reason for success or failure in most educational interventions. 

It ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it. A bad teacher is a bad teacher no matter what model is used (though good technologies such as sensible pedagogies, amongst others, can reduce the harm), while a good teacher, as long as the physical and organisational constraints are not too limiting, is good no matter what model is used. Technics matter, but caring, art, sensitivity and skill matter more. Good teachers can and often do use bad pedagogies and other bad technologies and yet they still succeed. Similarly, teaching things that people want to learn, when they want to learn them is more useful than almost any other factor. 

Some interesting insights into what happens when technologies are incompatible – like insane state legislation requiring students to sit in class when there is nothing for them to do there because they are working online, or when students learn to learn using one technology but no one notices that the same approach doesn’t work when you use another. Inevitably, she is talking about flipping the classroom (a trendy name for what good face-to-face teachers have done for millenia) with some encouraging stats to suggest that an approach of teaching rather than telling is becoming more fashionable as a result.

This is a bit scary, especially given that some systems put a limit on the size of passwords you may use.  Of course, they need to get hold of the encrypted (or hashed) password in the first place so that should provide a basic line of defence, but it is a remarkable feat, using incredibly cheap hardware. Time to make my passwords longer and stronger, I think. Recent reearch suggests that the strongest are not those that have weird and wonderful mixes of letters and symbols and numbers (easily forgotten), but that use sentences (but not obvious ones that can be found with a web search – poems and song lyrics are not a good choice!)

Address of the bookmark: http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2011/10/04/248075/GPU-cracks-six-character-password-in-four-seconds.htm

Stuff about learning, education and teaching

Stuff about technologies, mostly ICT but also other things

Links relating to social software and social media

I was introduced to Viber the other day – a neat and very elegant alternative to some parts of Skype, Google Talk etc, run on Amazon servers, that uses your real cellphone number to make and receive free calls and messages to and from other Viber users (Android and iPhone only, Blackberry client will follow). Incredibly easy to use: just install and go, that’s it, no registration, no noticable setup. It gives excellent sound quality (even over 3G), no ads, uses your existing address book, has a really clear and apparently very ethical privacy policy (except that it is in the US, so suffers the usual serious concerns about US government agencies being able to access data). If the person you are calling/texting is not on Viber, it just falls back on your normal cellular provider to dial the number. It even passes through most firewalls. Seems pretty faultless, as far as I can tell.

Apart from the issue of privacy in the US, I only have one puzzling concern: with no ads, no hidden connection charges, no premium services, no selling of personal data, strong controls preventing release of personal data to anyone at all, indeed no obvious means of revenue generation and some big infrastructure costs, how on earth will they make their money? 

Address of the bookmark: http://www.viber.com/

It’s to be expected. I have what is arguably the best Android iPad competitor on the planet right now and it is not a patch on my iPad 2. Actually, despite neat cameras, the latest Android O/S and theoretically wonderful battery life (reality is so disappointing when a Flash movie is running in the background or Skype it humming to itself, so you pick the thing up after less than a day to find the battery that should last 16 hours is already dead in less than 5), it’s not even close to my old iPad 1. It’s  getting there, but Apple win hands down without having to even breathe heavily. Which is why, in passing, I agree with most analysts that Amazon’s approach that does not seek to directly compete with the iPad is brilliant and might actually work.  

Actually, if this site reveals truth, there is a far more remarkable figure embedded in these already surprising statistics. That 60% of roaming wifi devices (major proviso: those that use Meraki networks) are made by Apple. I’m not sure why I should be surprised because that’s what I see every day when I walk past coffee shops, sit in airport lounges or hang out around open wifi networks. Despite the fact that Apple make well under 10% of the devices used on this planet to access the Internet, they are often the majority that I can see in public places and likely the majority portrayed on the old media like film and TV. Given that, within considerably under a decade, desktop and other tethered devices are likely to recede into a humdrum distant past and have little relevance to most people any more, this is a startling factoid. The only thing that makes me a little reluctant to predict the ascendance of the dark overlord  as a direct result (Apple as a company make Microsoft look like saints, albeit saints with bad taste and poor intellectual skills) is that wireless networks as we know them today have very little hope of survival. In itself and in the long term, this is a matter of minor interest as other more friendly and reliable wireless technologies will supplant the creaking wifi bandwidth hogs of yesterday. But legacy systems have a tendency to hang around for a while so wifi is not going to vanish immediately. And the chances that my 2005 vintage Mac will (without a lot sweet USB loving or some open countryside far beyond a city) still be able to access the airwaves at more than a few bits per second in 2015 are slim. Actually, my 2011 Macbook Air (not the latest model but not an elderly wreck) will have some similar problems. Scrub that, it already does, more than a few feet from an access point. So maybe Apple will choke on its own brilliance, and chance whimsy will determine what we use in a few years to get at stuff that is not on our machines, because Apple could not resist the low hanging wifi fruit when it should have been chasing something else. And the network, as we have always known, is the thing that matters most. Amazon know that. 

Address of the bookmark: http://meraki.com/press-releases/2011/06/22/meraki-reveals-ipads-use-400-more-wi-fi-data-than-the-average-mobile-device/

The emoticon is nearly 30 years old – hard to believe it is that old but also hard to remember a time when we didn’t have them.

Emoticon technology is very soft indeed but it has gained a few tweaks along the way, and not just the classic additions invented by Dave Barry. As I type this I can choose from a load of smarter-looking versions like this 

Address of the bookmark: http://mashable.com/2011/09/20/emoticon-history/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29

Critics suggest that the trend towards replacing academic peer reviewed papers with blogs and wikis that bypass that process is a dangerous trend, leading to shallow, unreliable and unsupportable beliefs supplanting rigorous research. Similarly, the relative reliability and accountability of traditional journalism is being replaced by unaccountable, inaccurate and biased reporting by amateurs. On the face of it, there may be some truth in these criticisms: at least, it is harder to distinguish the chaff than it used to be, though there are gains in diversity and timeliness. However, at least in many cases, this perspective is a result of a skeuomorphic failure to recognise that such posts only superficially resemble the publications that they replace. A blog post is not a paper, a wiki page is not a publication, despite their intentional resemblance to those archetypal forms.

Social media such as blog posts and wiki pages do not exist in isolation: that’s what ‘social’ means.  They are surrounded by a web of commentary, dialogue, ripostes and critiques that are as much a part of the ‘publication’ as the post itself. So, if we have cause to criticise an original post or page, so will plenty of others. In fact, we can add our critique as part of that process, and engage and learn more deeply as a result. The outcome is a co-created medium of which a single post is only a part, a dynamic system in which peer review is not the input to improve the original but a part of the content itself. When it works well, with sufficient input from sufficient people, it can be a far more enlightening, rigorous, multi-faceted medium than any traditional forms. Of course, the process can fail: too much input, too little input, too little filtering, too much filtering can make it far less wonderful. And it can fail if we treat it like the forms it replaces: you can easily miss 90% of the value of Wikipedia, for instance, if you don’t read the discussion page that leads to the entry itself. But, when it works, it works brilliantly.

My favourite example of what happens when you rethink the process and move beyond skeuomorphs is the now venerable Slashdot site. It is built for and by passionate geeks so it is not a form that is readily replicable: you have to delve into the complex mechanics of the ingenious use of collaborative filtering, the distributed bottom-up reputation management system, the ingenious checks and balances on bias and mob stupidity, and the management of explciit filters to get the full benefit of the system. Only a geek or a very determined non-geek is going to do that. The reward for those willing to put in the effort (and, despite the barriers, there are many tens or even hundreds of thousands that do) is an emergent literary form co-created by its inhabitants that evolves into an extremely high quality and reliable knowledge source with a richness, depth, creativity and diversity that no single author could hope to match. Or, if you prefer, a shallow humorous take on technology. Or a place to support rabid and improbable beliefs or biases. It’s up to you. Once you start to customise it, it is an  extremely dynamic, extremely personalised, extremely diverse system fuelled by the crowd that can be many different things to many different people. Slashdot is not the defining academic literature or journalism of the 21st century, but it points the way towards something that is potentially far more powerful than the result of the tree-based technological constraints of yesteryear.