Context

I’m currently sitting in the QANTAS club at Canberra airport waiting to return home after a week at ANU working on the PhD (being done through ANU). I decided to read a copy of CIO magazine while having brunch. In doing so I came across this article (Rodgers, 2009) title “Mind your own Business Intelligence.

This caught my eye because it mentions business intelligence. Business intelligence is very close to, for some it encompasses, the kind of work we’re starting in the Indicators project.

Business intelligence has dropped from the top 10

What interested me was this paragraph from the article

Perhaps even more surprising, however, was the fact that business intelligence dropped out of the top 10 items on CIOs’ agendas next year. Getting the right information to the right people at the right time for the right cost is what it takes to succeed in today’s business environment. Perhaps business intelligence sliding out of the top 10 is an indication of just how difficult BI is to achieve. BI is a moving target; it’s something that senior IT execs must constantly monitor and review to ensure that their organisation is getting the right information to key employees.

I find this interesting on two fronts:

1. CIOs are losing interest in business intelligence.
2. The slight touch of PEBKAC being implied as one of the problems.

PEBKAC

PEBKAC is an acronym devised by IT professionals as a code word for user error. i.e. the stupid user has made another mistake. PEBKAC expands out to Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair – i.e. the user. There is a tendency for IT folk to blame the user, instead of the technology.

The Wikipedia page on PEBKAC provides an important and interesting alternate perspective

Interface designers dismiss the blame on users for such trivial errors, arguing that a system that induces users to make mistakes is a badly designed one. By not taking human factors into consideration, its specification is incomplete and can make false or untested assumptions about the experience, knowledge and natural limits of their expected audience. Since the design lacks a major source of requirements, the resulting system will not be tailored to its purpose. The misunderstanding of the system that leads to the error is fault of the designer, not the user.

i.e. the problem is that system is designed for people to use correctly.

From this perspective, perhaps the problem with business intelligence isn’t that IT execs haven’t been constantly monitoring and reviewing the use of business intelligence to ensure that “their organisation is getting the right information to the key employees”.

Perhaps the technology the processes IT are using around business intelligence are broken. Perhaps they have not taken “human factors into consideration, its specification is incomplete and can make false or untested assumptions about the experience, knowledge and natural limits of their expected audience”.

I agree that business intelligence is really difficult, I believe most of its problems is that the tools and processes used to implement BI within organisations is broken.

The history of technology mediated learning

In an earlier post I argued that there is a highly visible hype cycle around e-learning/technology mediated learning. I think the same hype cycle exists in broader technology. This hype cycle is more closely aligned with Birnbaum than that of Gartner.

The four (grown from three) phases in the cycle I use are:

1. Technological spark – some new technology sparks interest, or enables new capabilities, solves an existing problem.
2. Growing revolution – a collection of folk find the spark important and a “club” grows around the technology building it up as the saviour of all.
3. Minimal impact – oops, it didn’t really make all that much difference, not many folk used it. Oh well.
4. Resolution of dissonance – the smart folk who pushed the revolution have to explain away why they were wrong. They can’t blame themselves. So they blame the users.

I think business intelligence may be getting into stage 3. Just like LMSes. But with LMSes, everyone is now going open source. The next fad.

References

Birnbaum, R. (2000). Management Fads in Higher Education: Where They Come From, What They Do, Why They Fail. San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.

Rodgers, M. (2009). Mind your own Business Intelligence. CIO. Summer 2009/2010: 4.

Next Monday I will be at the University of Melbourne participating in a “National Roundtable” title “Web 2.0 Authoring Tools in Higher Education Learning and Teaching: New Directions for Assessment and Academic Integrity”. This is being run as part of an ALTC project titled Web 2.0 authoring tools in higher education learning and teaching: New directions for assessment and academic integrity

The purpose of the roundtable is to “review experience and make joint recommendations for good practice guidelines”. The aim of this post is two fold:

1. Force me to actually think a bit about what I know/think about this topic.
2. Encourage others to share, disagree and improve what I think through their own contributions and experience.

I’m going to use social media, rather than Web 2.0.

I’m also traveling today, so I don’t think I’ll finish this entirely today.

A matter of cultures or mindsets

The way I’m currently thinking about this is the question of cultures or mindsets. There are (at least) two different cultures/mindsets involved here:

1. The social media culture.
2. Assessment/learning and teaching within higher education.

For me, good practice around using social media in assessment in higher education is about making sure that these cultures match. I also see this as potentially the biggest hurdle. I’m not sure that the culture of assessment/learning and teaching in higher education can easily match the culture of social media.

This blog post is titled “The impact of corporate culture on social media (An IBM Case Study)” and includes the slides from a presentation at a conference. The blog post includes the following

That culture is, in my view, the most overlooked, underestimated factor determining whether social media succeeds or fails in a company. And when corporate culture and social media are pitted against each other, social media will always fail. Always.

Disclaimer: I recognise that there are problems with using culture in this way. e.g. some claim there can be no culture within organisations, others disagree. I’m using it, I guess, in terms of the “way we do things around here”.

Mono, multi and the majority culture

I do recognise that learning and teaching/assessment in higher education is not a mono-culture. There are many and varied cultures that differ in many ways. However, I think there is a fairly large group of folk involved in learning and teaching within higher education that have much in common. For this I turn to Moore’s chasm and Geoghegan (1994). This is the idea shown in the figure below that shows a chasm between the innovative folk and the pragmatic folk.

The chasm idea is that the folk to the left of the chasm are very different to those to the right. Geoghegan’s (1994) idea is that most of what happens in higher education around instructional technology is designed for the folk to the left of the chasm. This is why most use of instructional technology has little adoption and what is adopted is of poor quality.

Geoghegan (1994) describes the difference between these two groups via the following table.

Rather than focus on the culture of the innovators. I’m going to focus on the “culture” of the pragmatists. I do this because they represent by far the majority of people within higher education. Also because the innovators, to a large extent, will take care of themselves. Lastly and perhaps most importantly, because I increasingly see that management and the Information Technology folk within many universities are, for various reasons, increasingly more like the pragmatists, than the innovators. As such, they can and do constrain what happens.

Culture/Principles of social media

I’m sure there’s a lot of this stuff out there. But I’m going to use these principles and in particular the remixing of them here. The 10 principles are (quoted from here):

1. Decentralization is freedom: Freedom enables us to pursue our thoughts and interests in a social space. Thus decentralization is of primary value.
2. Information wants to be free: The cost of obtaining information is rapidly declining, but still capable of providing and creating value. Freedom is necessary for free information.
3. Findability is power: Without findability, the information’s ability to provide and create value is greatly diminished.
4. Karma is real: The more you give, the more you get. You just don’t know what at the point at which you’re giving.
5. Rules beget rules: At some point, organization happens so that common understanding of interactions are possible.
6. Economies have currencies: Trade is possible with Karmic infrastructure and rules of engagement.
7. Communication is blood: Communication is the transport mechanism for information flow.
8. Immediacy in all things: Acting on new, validated information when appropriate moves things forward more quickly than before.
9. Context is fluid: Things change more often, as does your frame of reference. Think about the information you have at various points and look at developments along a continuum.
10. Associations are inherently good.

The mismatch with the culture of the pragmatists

I’m running out of time, so cutting this short. My current position is that the culture of the pragmatic, corporate university and the perceptions of the majority of staff are not a good match with the principles of social media.

For example, decentralisation, free information, karma, communication, immediacy and others don’t fit.

Flight being called.

Drawbacks of good practice and the need for theory

Dave Snowden is not a big fan of best practice and I like his reasoning. The folk sponsoring this roundtable use the “best practice lite” term that seems to be quite popular in higher education at the moment – “good practice”. It seems to remove the strong one and only nature of “best”, but it retains the main problem.

The main problem is the attempt to duplicate a practice from one context to another. If these contexts are 100% the same then this might be possible, depending on how much you can learn about the practice. But with most universities being complex systems, this is not possible. Snowden takes the approach of understanding the underpinning theory and using the theory as the basis to design an intervention that makes sense within the new context. Rather than repeating what worked in a different context.

This is what underpins my preference for understanding the culture of social media and universities, for understanding the theory.

Posted in elearning, icddu Tagged: web2.0 socialmedia

A couple of days ago we did an experiment around presentations that included the use of a twitter back channel (hashtag: #eair). The following is a reflection on what that allowed me to do and implications for conferences.

The question I end up at is “Should conferences have twitter hash tags for individual sessions?”

What I could do

After I finished the presentation I was able to review the tweet stream and see what people had said. This gave me a different and much greater understanding of what some of the audience were thinking and talking about. It was also frustrating because it revealed that I hadn’t effectively engaged some of the audience, they didn’t get “it”. I did end up replying to a number of tweets to expand on ideas or give alternate perspectives. The tweet stream enabled me to extend the conversation.

This ability has given me a better understanding of what worked and didn’t work for the presentation. I plan to try and use this for all my presentations.

The problem

It was easy to do this because I used a hash tag that was unique to my presentation – #eair. As I’m the only one use that tag for my local presentations, that should be ok. But conferences are difference. I’m just back from EDUCAUSE’09 which used the tag #educause09 for all discussion. There wasn’t a tag for individual sessions. So I couldn’t easily couldn’t easily find what people had said about a particular session, including the one I gave.

This absence/difficulty of tracking tweets for a particular session reduces the number of possible conversations.

Ignorance alert

I haven’t really gotten into the Twitter thing as much as others and was pre-occupied during much of EDUCAUSE’09. Is there a simple, well-known solution that I’m missing?

Solutions oriented

I keep being told I should be solutions oriented – apparently I’m cynical/pessimistic. So here’s my initial idea.

Each session at a conference get a unique number. That session number get added to the conference hash tag.

Example, ASCILITE’09 is using (I think) #ascilite09. If I’m tweeting in session 55, I’d be using a tag something like #ascilite09s55 or #ascilite09#55.

The drawback, based on very little testing, is that this would split off the conference tweets into the sessions. Perhaps the conference would need an aggregator? Perhaps, people just have two different searches? Perhaps the conference creates a Twitter list?

Don’t know enough to say. But the ability for each session tweet stream to be identifiable would be something I’d use.

I’ve just completed a presentation which included an experiment with some different technologies for lectures and a talk I gave at EDUCAUSE09. The slides, video and other related resources are available from the main presentation page.

The purpose of this post is an attempt at a debrief/reflection on the experience.

Lecture experiment

The wrapper around this presentation was an experiment in using some different technologies to deliver and support the presentation including:

• ustream to stream and record the presentation video.
• Votapedia as an audience response system that breaks the constraints on place of clickers.
• Twitter as a back channel.

The purpose of this experiment was to put an initial toe in the water. To do something with the technology to increase awareness of what it could/couldn’t do.

ustream

The video of the presentation (including powerpoint slides, views of the lecturer and audience) was broadcast via this ustream.tv channel. The recorded video is now hosted on ustream.tv.

Some statistics from the ustream dashboard:

• At it’s pead there were 11 people watching the broadcast.
• The broadcast went for 1 hour and 42 minutes (and 1 second).

Additional metrics will be available after processing.

I gave the presentation in one of the Interactive System-wide Lecture (ISL) theaters at the CQUni Rockhampton campus. There were audience members in the room with me and also at the CQUni theaters in Bundaberg and Mackay.

Folk from the CQUni IT division set up a flash encoder in the ISL theater so that the traditional ISL stream was sent to ustream. This was a major benefit as I am familiar with the ISL system and it provides some additional features including the ability to view the presenter, the member of the audience (at any of the campuses) asking a question, my slides, another computer and a document camera.

With little or no change on my part, my presentation broke the place constraint on a traditional ISL presentation. i.e. anyone from across the world with a web browser could watch the presentation. This is of significance for CQUni since it has a significant number of distance education students who never make it to a campus.

With ustream, these students could view lectures which they can currently only (in a small percentage of cases) access as podcasts or streaming video after the fact.

There are some organisational issues to be addressed such as how the university could automate/support the use of ustream and whether or not using ustream would be better than a university hosted service.

I don’t expect ustream to become an accepted option. The question of restricting access to just our students will be an issue. It will also likely be seen to be easier/less risk to support our own service than use an external service.

The ISL “console”

The presenter “console” in these ISL theaters offers some significant benefits over simply using ustream in my office with my computer. I can’t easily see members of the audience, it’s a bit more difficult to get a shot of me and to show other physical objects. The ability to use ustream with the console, especially because I’m familiar with using it for presentations, was a big plus.

However, it’s also a draw back. There are only so many of these consoles on campus. So there’s a limit to how many people can do this.

To get the best of both worlds there seems to be a need to create a system I can use on/with my laptop and get the same functionality as the console. Then the place restriction is entirely gone.

An important part of this would be the ability to see the participants when they ask questions. This is starting to get into elluminate territory and raises the question of what is the difference?

One perspective might be that elluminate is the “integrated system” approach to this where I’m potentially talking about a more best of breed approach – which is showing my prejudice.

Votapedia

Votapedia was used as an audience response system/clickers for a couple of simple questions. For example, the first question asked the audience how long they had owned a mobile phone. The question and results can be seen here (50% of the 17 responses had owned mobile phones for longer than 5 years).

The advantage of Votapedia over clickers is that Votapedia uses mobile phones or a web browser for answering the question. As such it also breaks the place constraint of clickers. Plus the combination of mobile phones or a web browser is something that most people already have, further reducing costs.

Setting up the votapedia surveys, from a technical perspective, was a little quirky. i.e. I had to get used to the way it works. Once familiar, it was fairly simple to manage and set them up. Even then, I did create a user error that prevented the final questions from being usable. A simple experience thing, the sort of insight that isn’t readily available in the Votapedia information and more importantly in the process. i.e. the system should be able to pick this sort of thing up and offer a warning. (though it is expecting a bit too much from a free service).

In terms of real, effective use in a course, the most difficult part of Votapedia – as with any audience response system – will be redesigning the lectures to make effective use of the technology and the interactions that it supports. In particular, the additional time such interactions would take which would appear to remove time from the presenting of information. A big challenge for many staff, including myself.

Twitter

Given there was only a small audience any use of social media was going to be somewhat limited. We had about 30/40 tweets from a half a dozen people or so. I had organised for one of my colleagues to act as “moderator” for the Twitter back channel. This was a good move. Col kept me aware of anything I needed to know and also encouraged some discussion with tweets.

ustream’s integration with Twitter was also a benefit. You can see the tweet stream on the ustream channel which hosted the stream. One drawback, this stream isn’t associated with the stored recording, would’ve been good to see some association, even some connection.

A twitter back channel appeared to be beneficial to some, but there could be some drawbacks. I did find myself replying to some of the tweets after the presentation. It gave me a chance to offer a perspective on some issues which may not have previously been possible.

There seemed to be value in twitter, however, the cost of having a moderator makes it difficult. You could get around that by perhaps tasking it to students in a rotating capacity, but there are drawbacks there. Is this a way to open up the private act of teaching by having other academic staff sit in on classes?

The future

It looks like we’ll probably do something similar to this in a couple of weeks when we do a trial run of an ASCILITE’09 presentation. Some ideas for things to think about:

• Use Keynotetweet to automatically inject questions and comments into the tweet stream as certain slides are presented.
  For example, references and links to resources used in the presentation. Questions for those on twitter.
• Publicise the twitter ID of the moderator.
• Use Votapedia for immediate evaluation of the session.

I’m in the midst of preparing some additional slides for a presentation/experiment tomorrow around alternatives for the LMS and the lecture. In part, this presentation connects with the future of universities – and perhaps learning in general – a topic that seems to have gotten increasing airplay in the last year or so. Especially in the form of pundits predicting problems with current practice. This post is in part about showing that this is not a new thing, but also about saving some nice quotes for future use.

As part of the work on the slides, I was doing a quick Google on “origins of the lecture”. One of the the bits I came across was a book titled In search of the virtual class: education in an information society in which I found the following quotes leading off chapter 4

Learning processes are lagging appallingly behind and are leaving both individuals and societies unprepared to meet the challenge posed by global issues. This failure of learning means that human preparedness remains underdeveloped on a global scale. Learning is in this sense far more than just another global problem: its failure represents, in a fundamental way, the issue of issues. (Botkin et al, 1979, p9)

I like the idea of “issues of issues”. Placing this problem of education as a fundamental problem for so much else. I also like that this comment was made 30 years ago. Something that illustrates one or more of

• The long-term importance of the idea.
• The on-going difficulty of doing anything meaningful about this problem.
• The on-going market that exists for people to profess fundamental flaws within the education system.

A similar quote in the same location

There is only one problem and that is education, all other problems are dependent on this one (President Domingo Faustino Sarmiento – founder of Argentina’s national education system)

This one adds the potential observation that if all you have is a hammer (i.e. you are in the education business) then everything you see is a nail (education is the solution).

The book

The book these quotes come from seems, from my current limited reading, to be on the predictive books from the mid-1990s arguing for how technology can/will radically improve/change learning and teaching. The following is from page 73

Why is education out of step with society’s needs? Does the problem lie in the way education is administered, the methods of instruction and the content of the curricula? These are the issues that advanced industrial societies focus on as they attempt to find a solution. Our concern si with the extent to which the problem lies with the classroom as a communication system for learning. Our argument is that the classroom is a technology that emulates the way people live and work in an industrial society. It does not relate to the way people will live and work in an information society. Some countires are sufficiently into a transition to an information society for the discrepancy to be obvious.

Part of the argument is that the classroom approach is wasteful of resource of space and time.

This Wednesday I’m involved with an experiment and presentation that is seeking to test out some alternatives for lectures/presentations. As it happens, the last week has brought a couple of events that are (so far) helping the case for the experiment. These are described below.

And now for a word from our sponsors…

The aim of the experiment it to break out of the geographic limitations of participation in lectures/presentations. Anyone with a web browser can participate (a Twitter account and mobile phone will increase your ability to participate, but aren’t necessary). The more people who use these medium, the better. So you are invited.

More detail on the experiment/presentation page.

We return now to your regularly scheduled program

Being bumped

I work at CQUniversity. The university has 4/5 regional campuses spread across a fairly broad geographic area. A significant number of courses are offered across all of those campuses. A common approach for some years has been for lectures for these courses to be given from one campus and broadcast across the other campuses via the Interactive System-wide Learning (ISL) system. Essentially a video-conference system with specially built rooms at each of the campuses.

This approach is becoming embedded into the operations of the institution. To such an extent that the ISL rooms are becoming a resourcing bottleneck. Apart from teaching, these rooms are also used for research presentations and meetings. It’s getting to the stage that trying to get these rooms during campus is simply impossible.

Originally, the experiment was scheduled to use one room on each of the campuses

Rockhampton – 33/G.14. Bundaberg – 1/1.12. Gladstone – MHB 1.09. Mackay – 1/1.01.

On Friday I was told that we’ve been bumped from the Mackay room. Apparently someone senior needs the Mackay room for an ISL session that is more important than my experiment.

Normally, this would have meant Mackay staff would miss out on the live presentation. They’d have to rely on the recorded presentation.

Not now. Theoretically, they should be able to participate the same as people off campus. I’m actually happy about this, it gives me a practical story to tell about why this approach might be useful. It will be interesting to see what problems arise.

PollEverywhere Polls and results

Over the weekend, while avoiding work on the presentation I came across this post from Wes Fryer. It describes how they used PollEverywhere in a conference presentation. PollEverywhere is essentially a commercial version of Votapedia which I plan to use on Wednesday.

Some things I found interesting:

• The graphs.
  The PollEverywhere graphs look much nicer than Votapedias (minor point).
• A comment that students like this approach because it is a legitimate use of their mobile phones in class.
• The idea that this type of experiment was an “a-ha” moment for some.