A decade on, and it’s still Groundhog Day: questioning research on technology in higher education

Martin Oliver, London Knowledge Lab
m.oliver@ioe.ac.uk

The author

Martin Oliver is a reader in the Faculty of Culture and Pedagogy at the Institute of Education. His research interests include the impact of new technology on roles and practices within higher education (including how this changes what students learn and do), evaluating ICT use and the development of theory and methodologies in the field of e-learning.

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Abstract

It has been suggested that there is an ongoing failure to learn from previous research and policy about technology use in Higher Education. This paper explores this claim, critiquing policy and practice around curriculum design and delivery, using ideas about tacit practice and the lived (or performed) curriculum. This reveals a consistent focus on tangible elements such as materials, at the expense of ephemeral but vital aspects of curriculum practice, supporting claims about a lack of progress. However, a more optimistic interpretation may be possible, viewing this instead as a consistent way of understanding new technologies as they arise.

Keywords

Technology, Higher Education, curriculum design, curriculum delivery, tacit practice

Audio Slideshow (click arrows bottom left to move slides)

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Transcript

Slide 1 (Title Slide)
This paper is the development of a talk that I gave as a key note at the C-SAP conference in London on January 16th 2009. The conference was called The Virtual University: The Social Science critiques of learning and teaching in the age of digital reproduction. This version of the paper is just over 40 minutes long, and is structured in a series of sections. Firstly I’m going to review existing literature to identify issues and concepts that will be useful in the critique that follows. In particular I want to pay attention to the question of whether any progress has been made in our understanding of the relationship between technology and the curriculum. Next, these ideas will be applied to series of policy related documents developed in the UK context concerning technology and Higher Education. Then I’ll apply the same concepts to develop a critique of traditions of research internationally in this area, and I’ll end by drawing conclusions for the possibilities for progress in this area.

Slide 2
My starting point is two quotes taken from a paper by Cornford:

‘The university’ is a highly heterogeneous institutional ensemble, which exists primarily in the heads of people who constituted it, and in a myriad of locally negotiated practices and interactions. This university, as an institution, often only appears to exist ‘virtually’.

The second excerpt is this:‘The very notion of information, which sits at the root of the notion of a virtual university and its ability to abstract from the place – the specific, the parochial – contains within it a powerful incentive to formalise, to standardise, to make explicit, to make concrete’ [Cornford, 2000]

So one idea I want to draw out from this which is going to be quite important for the rest of the paper is the idea of tacit practice, the idea that there are things which happen in people’s day to day work which aren’t talked about, maybe even can’t be talked about but which might be quite important for them to do their job. Taken together, I think these two quotes offer an interesting dynamic. On the one hand we have a picture of conventional Universities, which are understood as actually something more virtual than we usually assume to be. Less about the bricks and mortar and more about the practices which are often going to be tacit and more about what the people who make the University have about their practice. The view of the Virtual University on the other hand, takes for granted information, and shows how in order to make a Virtual University you have to turn that into something which can be represented, it can be specified, it can be standardised in some way. So in a lot of ways, the idea of the Virtual University is about making things more concrete than they used to be. It’s this complexity I want to draw out throughout this paper. While it might be useful to have this idea of a Virtual University on one hand, an idea of a very concrete University on the other, these are in effect ideal types rather than real cases. Now that framed my positioning of this talk within the conference. To frame this paper specifically though, I wanted to drawn on a quote from another source.

Slide 3
This is from a paper by Terry Mayes and the quote I wanted to use is as follows:

'In the film 'Groundhog Day', the protagonist is forced to experience the events of a single day over and over again. He is free to act in any way he chooses, but whatever he does the day always finishes in the same way.'

And then later in the same paper:

‘Part of the fascination of this predicament is the awful familiarity of this experience: so often one feels caught in a flow of events which will unfold in an entirely predictable way.'
[Mayes, 1995]

Slide 4
He goes on to say:

'People who have been involved over any length of time with educational technology will recognise this experience, which seems characterised by a cyclical failure to learn from the past. We are frequently excited by the promise of a revolution in education, through the implementation of technology. We have the technology today, and tomorrow we confidently expect to see the widespread effects of its implementation. Yet, curiously, tomorrow never comes. We can point to several previous cycles of high expectation about an emerging technology, followed by proportionate disappointment, with radio, film, television, teaching machines and artificial intelligence.'

It’s worth pointing out that Terry Mayes made these observations in 1995 at the time he’s very optimistic about a new technology that was emerging and which might give the opportunity to break out of these cycles, and that was multimedia. Clearly, we are no further on now that we were then; we’re still experiencing cycles even if they are about new technologies every time.

Slide 5
So what’s going on? Why are we still experiencing these cycles? In part the answer seems to be about how we start to make use of the technologies. We tend to be very aware of it when something goes wrong. For this reason, problems with our practice things that aren’t familiar to us, things we don’t quite know what to do with become very visible, they become foregrounded; they’re the focus for attention. By contrast, anything with which we’re quite comfortable, anything that’s working well we don’t tend to keep in focus and it tends to drift into the background. In relation to technology what this means is; we’re very aware of all the technologies we haven’t quite worked out what to do with yet. But the ones with which we are comfortable, such as email, photocopying, pens, all these things are taken for granted as part of our daily routine. We’re no longer aware that we’re using them in quite the same way that we are with say, Web2 technologies which are far more familiar to us. Now this is actually a problem for research because all the things which are well embedded, all the things which we might want to learn from it’s actually very hard to get people to talk about because they’re actually no longer aware of the role they play in their practices. However, in many ways this is a good thing. If people were to focus on the technology rather than what they are trying to achieve with it, they wouldn’t be able to get on with their jobs. This notion of tacit practice is one of the two sets of ideas I want to work with in the paper. In the second one, we have to look at the idea of curriculum.

Slide 6
I’m going to draw on some work that I did with course leaders and other teachers, interviewing them about their idea of what the curriculum meant. In their conversations they talked about the curriculum in several different ways. I mean for some it was completely absent, they didn’t talk about the curriculum. For others when they talked about the curriculum what they talked about was the syllabus, the listed topics. Others moved to a more holistic view of what the curriculum was and started talking about that list of topics in context as a course, a plan. Others went a step beyond that and also talked about pedagogy. So, the ways in which that particular course plan could be instantiated in classroom practices. Others went further still and talked about the context around that; ideas of the hidden curriculum, about values, meanings, purposes and so on. Now those ideas form quite a neat, nested model with a simplistic notion of the syllabus in the middle, building to a more and more holistic picture. Interestingly though, these people described a disjunction between their plans, all those formal specifications and informal contexts, what the curriculum ought to be like, and what happened when they actually started to teach it? They spoke about something that they called a lived or a performed curriculum, so this was less about plans and more about performances. They would talk about creating spaces; they would talk about responding to their students. They would talk about opportunities for interaction, and all of these things they stress were not things that could be planned out in detail in advance because they had to emerge from the interactions that they had with other people.

Slide 7
Next I want to take these ideas about the curriculum and use them as an analytic tool to examine some of the policies that have been put in place around e-learning. There have been at least four decades worth of policies around the use of computers and Higher Education. An analysis by Conole et al [2007] suggest that these have come in four phases. The first of these saw computers primarily as tools, mainly within the science curriculum. The next phase started to look at these in relation to curriculum more generally, and specifically looking at home grown resources. The early TLTP projects are a good example of this. The later TLTP projects and subsequent policy initiatives have positioned technology use much more as an emerging part of the mainstream curriculum. Mainstream learning and teaching rather than something separate from it. The fourth phase that they identified positions technology use as something which should be directed by strategies, whether national or institutional. It’s in marked contrast to earlier phases which looked at technology use much more as an emergent phenomenon driven by people’s practices. Here the emphasis is on specification, control and in many cases standardization.

Slide 8
I’m going to look now in a bit more detail about what exactly it is that is said about technology within policy. For the first example of this I want to look at the Dearing report. The discourse analysis [Smith and Oliver, 2002] of the way that technology was talked about in the Dearing report showed several interesting things. Firstly, students were portrayed almost exclusively as passive. The only exceptions to this was when they were choosing a course, and courses were described exclusively in that context in terms of their costs and outcomes. But apart from that, students were described as being 'developed'. Lecturers were not talked about as teachers. Instead they were talked about as materials developers. This was positioned in a very positive way for example there was phrasing such as ‘enshrining the core of their teaching’ in the materials that they were working on. And technology itself was talked about mainly in terms of its ability to provide access to information.

Slide 9
Now turning back to the ideas of tacit practice and of curricula described earlier, what you see is quite an impoverished picture of the curriculum in terms of this particular piece of policy. The curriculum is seen primarily as a syllabus. The outcomes are specified, its costs are specified but it’s just bought and consumed, and many of the discussions of pedagogy in relation to technology are relegated to an appendix on resource based learning. And that appendix is primarily economic in focus. There is very little sense in this of the experience of learning, and very little sense as well of the practices of teaching.

The next document I want to examine is taken from the E-University. Now the E-University UK was a government backed initiative which tried to set up a new institution working in an entirely virtual way which it was hoped, would reach entirely new educational markets.

Slide 10
A business case for this was put together by Price Waterhouse Coopers [2002], and within appendix three they talked about what they described as learning products and services for the E-University. I want to read an excerpt from this:

'As the learner progresses through the courseware, there is the opportunity to ask questions by selecting the associated ‘chat’ channel in the toolbar. In response, a chat window opens and the learner is greeted and invited to describe the assistance sought, in text form. The person who answers the questions is part of a call centre and is specifically trained to answer questions about the courseware. […] If the mentor is unable to answer a question, it is referred to a tutor with superior subject expertise, who returns a full answer to the learner by e-mail within a set period.'

Slide 11
If anything, the sense of the curriculum you see in this document is even more impoverished. Extensibly, there is a way to interact with tutors but this is paired down to a minimum; it’s the point of last resort for learners. They are actively discouraged from turning to expert tutors because expert tutors are costly and this is a business case. Again the emphasis seems to be squarely on accessing and perhaps internalising information. There’s very little sense of the politics around this, the processes that students have to engage with in order to produce that kind of understanding for themselves, and teachers' expertise is framed primarily in terms of the understanding of the subject not in terms of the practices of teaching, but it’s minimized because it’s just too expensive to provide in a cost effective way. The consequence of this is that any sense of tacit practice, any sense of professional wisdom has been stripped away, in order to ensure that the process is as efficient as possible.

Slide 12
The next document I want to look at is produced by the DFES [2003], towards the unified e-learning strategy. Now some of the writing in this is full of hyperbole. Here’s an excerpt:

E-learning exploits interactive technologies and communication systems to improve the learning experience. It has the potential to transform the way we teach and learn across the board. It can raise standards, and widen participation. It cannot replace teachers and lecturers, but it can enhance the quality and reach of their teaching, and reduce the time spent on administration. It can enable every learner to achieve his or her potential, and help to build an educational workforce empowered to change. It makes possible a truly ambitious education system for a future learning society.

The claims being made in this section are wildly excessive; the causal power attributed to technology seems to know no bounds. On the face of it, people are being marginalised; technology is the thing that’s doing all this change. It’s also causing problems in that it’s setting itself up to fail. It’s impossible really that technology can have this causal influence on the system. That’s the point of the Groundhog Day metaphor earlier; technology has been expected to deliver these things time and time again and it’s consistently failed to do that. However, even though there are aspects of this which are quite excessive, there is something quite important in the way that technology is described. It’s positioned as something which people are using. The idea that teachers are something which can’t be replaced for example says something quite important about the expertise that those people have.

And indeed it’s quite important that it really had a vision.

Slide 13
There are various things within there which could be seen as part of this: individualised learning; personalised learning support; collaborative learning; tools for teachers and learners to innovate; virtual learning worlds; flexible study; online communities of practice; and quality of scale.

The document talks about teachers and professional teachers, as people who have expertise, who develop their practice who are able to innovate, and also positions them as members of communities, and there is a sense there of social knowledge which is conspicuously absent in many of the other policy documents.

Slide 14
It’s interesting to contrast this which was a consultative document, to the actual policy which followed on from it [DfES, 2005]. A lot of educational value ascribed to technology within the policy concerns motivation rather than learning per se. Education in fact is described as something of a problem, something which people don’t really want to engage with. And yet they do seem to want to play games. So the reasoning seems to be that if we put games into the curriculum we’ll solve the problem. Needless to say this is woefully simplistic. The rest of the discussion of technology focuses on fairly familiar themes by this point; things like efficiency. There’s also discussion of access to information, preparing people for face to face meetings but not really allowing them to communicate with each other through technology, and some passing mention to things like authentic experiences such as fieldwork enabled through web cams. Quite how using a web cam enables an authentic fieldwork experience isn’t explained.

Slide 15
Even though the consultative document had a strong sense of people and communities, the sense of curriculum that’s provided from the policy that follows is strongly oriented to progression through structured materials. There is some sense of a lived curriculum but it’s restricted entirely to face-to-face interactions; it doesn’t happen outside the classroom context, and there is only a marginal sense of there being anything tacit about professional practice.

Slide 16
The last document I want to look at is the submission about e-learning that was sent to the Denham committee [Cooke, 2008]. The focus of this submission was on virtual education, and it was talking about the development of a corpus of open learning content, material that would be quality controlled, coherently organised and supported by national centres of excellence. There’s a strong sense of the importance of investment, and e-infrastructures. The way teachers were talked about was very similar to the Dearing report. They were not talked about primarily in terms of their teaching practice or their professional wisdom, but in terms of the need for them to be adequately skilled and making an effective, imaginative widespread and critical use of the materials that were being produced. Their expertise was seen in many ways as a problem rather than a resource. There’s a strong focus on educational information strategies, and in terms of learning there was some mention of digital literacy.

Slide 17
The messages around the use of technology were interestingly mixed. Some aspects of it were seen as fairly positive, others particularly negative. So for example, interactive online tutorials were seen as an asset, whereas things like Google and Facebook were seen as bad or at least superficial practices. Again this positions knowledge as access to information, and particularly controlled and mandated information. The other problem with this is there is no strong disciplinary critique, of the way in which Web 2 technologies might be used just a preoccupation with things like copying and pasting from Wikipedia.

However some aspects of Web2 were seen in a more positive light. Aspects of Web2 which were seen as particularly positive included its interactivity, the open and participatory model on which it was built, its association with communities such as communities of scholars, and the fact that students expected it to be there. Other interesting points that were made included the idea that technology was primarily a way of enabling blended learning and the way that it would achieve this was by freeing time for real contact, suggesting that real contact didn’t happen through technology. And also some interesting analogies between some of the materials that were produced through this initiative and text books, suggesting that teachers could come at this in a critical way, and make selective and informed choice of the material they wanted to incorporate into their teaching.

However the message that was fore grounded, even in the title of the submission, was about the sense of international competitiveness. The argument in the document was that we need to develop open educational content as a country, because other countries are doing it. The strange thing about this is, if educational content is open, and other countries have provided it, surely there’s no need for us to invest time and money doing exactly the same kind of thing? It’s also interesting to consider this alongside the wider development in Web 2. There you have a view of knowledge production as distributed, always anarchic, certainly social. Here the emphasis is much more on the production and quality assurance, in other words the control of materials in a centrally mandated collection.

Slide 18
Once again there’s a sense of the primacy of materials over processes. This seemed to be a problem in education and the way to solve this is producing more materials. There is talk about teachers needing to be imaginative, but the implication of that is that currently they’re not being imaginative. Again this risks positioning teachers in a very negative way according to a deficit model. However, it should be noted that it is possible to interpret this in a more charitable way. If the assumption behind this is 'there’s a concrete problem, a lack of materials around which tacit practice can be constructed', and if it’s assumed that the concrete materials being provided will enable a lived experience to follow on from that, this could be seen in quite a positive way. However, the focus within the document remains on the materials. Again it’s a sense of curriculum as resources, as syllabus, rather than as something richer and experienced by people.

Slide 19
I want to make a few points to sum up this first section.

Some things remain constant across these policy related documents. There is an ongoing pre-occupation with the material and with the formal. There’s a strong orientation to an information based model of learning or at best, resource-based and this persists throughout these policy based documents. There are some broader accounts but they seem to have been harder to sustain. And certainly in the move to formal stipulation through policy rather than consultation, they tend to be downplayed. Why is this? There are some problems. Tacit practice as we noted at the start is hard to represent. And again, not everything that is representable is computable. The result of this is a considerable gap between people’s practices and the kind of technologies that can be created and brought in to support them.

Slide 20
So I argue that there are these consistent problems within policy in the area. What if anything is different in the context of research?

Slide 21
It’s certainly fair to say there are similarities. There is a long tradition of work around the use of technology in relation to the curriculum. There’s a similar pre-occupation with explicitness and with computability and certainly a failure to learn from the past.

Slide 22
One obvious point of reference is instructional design. Now this is a tradition of research that’s largely arisen within America. It has its roots in designing training programs for the military during WW2. For a long time it had a strong preoccupation with behavioural outcomes, and it took a structural and quite reductive view of knowledge. The field has broadened out beyond this since the introduction of constructivism as a point of reference but nonetheless there is a strong orientation to standardisation, structuring and formalisation [Oliver, 2004].

Slide 23
The consequence of this is that the curriculum is treated primarily as a form of syllabus. Pedagogic design is often important, but students are positioned as people to whom things are done. There is often a sense of technological determinism in that technology is the thing that’s doing this to students. And there’s a complete denial of the importance of tacit knowledge of teachers as expert practitioners. For example Merrill, who’s a key component of instructional design has talked about resting power away from so-called subject matter experts (SMEs).

This rather dismissive way of talking about teachers shows some of the politics around curriculum design and the various ways in which groups can position themselves relative to each other around curriculum design as a practice. Now it’s perfectly possible that some of these concerns are quite legitimate. That in many ways it would be desirable to have others, not just academics, involved in the curriculum design process. Traditions such as this have arisen for a reason. Nonetheless, we can still question whether the arguments being put forward are credible. Certainly positioning teachers as subject matter experts in this way means that the problem is reduced to quite a simple one of knowledge elicitation. Subject matter experts have information drawn out from them which others then codify and produce as instructional materials.

Constructing the curriculum in that particular way means there’s no longer any need for the designers to engage in the complexities of the discipline. They don’t have to be disciplinary experts to produce disciplinary materials. The benefits to instructional designers of claiming this, and therefore saving themselves the time that would be needed to fully engage with the discipline, the concepts, the epistemologies that underlie it, is quite obvious.

Slide 24
In recent years similar issues have arisen in relation to reusable learning objects [Littlejohn, 2003]. Put simply, reusable learning objects are any kind of thing that could possibly be used to support learning, with information attached to it. The idea of this information (which is formally called metadata) is that the objects can be found and then used by other people, so there is are easier way to incorporate them into new practices. And this raises a number of questions. First of all, how should you represent pedagogy? Should pedagogy be represented in relation to these objects at all? What information do you need to give (if any) about the context in which they were used? How large should these objects be, and what does large mean in relation to a learning object? Is it the number of words, the number of concepts, the amount of time it will take for people to work through it? There are always issues with reusable learning objects like how large they should be and how much contextual information is included because the trouble is, on their own these resources are just ‘stuff’. It’s only really when they’re related to learning objectives or particular teaching approaches or groups when they start to have a pedagogic value. And the question is, if they have no intrinsic pedagogic value, what’s the point in incorporating them into some repository of learning materials?

Slide 25
Now the metadata that’s used for these objects has been formalised by national and international bodies. One of the classic examples of this is the IMS learning design specification. Metadata in this case is specified as ‘a generic and flexible language that is designed to enable many different pedagogies to be expressed’.

Slide: 26
In relation to the issues in this paper this immediately causes some problems. As it’s already been argued, tacit practice is very hard to represent. This suggests immediately that the tacit elements will not be represented and therefore some of the most important parts of professional practice will not be associated with the learning objects that are shared. Another important issue is that this is a standardised language which is then given to people to describe their practice. In other cases their practices will be described on their behalf by somebody else who is an expert in the use of these languages. In either case, a standardised cross disciplinary language is being used to specify disciplinary practices. Questions immediately follow about whether the language is in fact rich enough to achieve that.

These kinds of concerns have led Steven Downes who’s known as one of the leading proponents of reusable learning objects to question whether the idea of reuse is actually compatible with the idea of learning design [Downes, 2009]. His argument essentially, is that once you’ve taken away the content from the structure, the structure itself is meaningless. Downes discusses the example of: 'first read this, try and understand it, complete a test, and if you don’t pass the test successfully go back and read it again'. Formally expressed, this would be A, then B, then A or not A. Now that might work as a computable formulism but it isn’t very informative to anyone coming to it for pedagogic inspiration. His response is that redesign might be a better phrase than reuse, and in that there’s a recognition that the tacit knowledge, the expertise, the professional wisdom of the practitioner is an important component of the design process.

Slide: 27
Another thing that arises from policy but is also strongly represented in recent research involves personalisation. However the exact meaning of this is ambiguous.

Slide: 28
There are at least two ways in which this word is being used. The first is for learners to be able to record the things they’ve achieved in some kind of e-portfolio or repository that’s theirs, that provides them with some sense of coherence in their educational journey over time. This understanding of the term is particularly important in work around student transitions, lifelong learning and the development of students' identities. Again, this is something that is oriented very strongly to things. It’s obviously able to record educational outputs, but these are used as a proxy for educational outcomes. Understood in a broader sense, that includes personal development, tacit experience and so on. Nevertheless, it’s important to recognise that these are being used in quite powerful and quite constructive ways, in terms of things such as formative assessment, the development of learner identities, and so on.

Slide: 29
The other sense in which this word gets used is in relation to what might be described as ‘the teacher in a box’. The idea is that there is some machine readable pedagogy associated with the resources such as learning objects, and that then this is used in order to present an appropriate material to learners in a timely manner. The selling point of this is the idea of instruction being adapted to the users of the system. A good case for this can certainly be made in relation to learners who have some kind of impairment, and in this sense there’s some very valuable work which can be done in terms of selecting appropriate materials and helping learners to interact with these in appropriate ways. For example if you have a very visually rich curriculum and you have a learner who has a visual impairment, there are going to be problems unless materials are very carefully selected.

However the broader debate around personalisation of materials tends to operate in relation to the selection particular content for particular learners in relation to their preferences. A lot of this work draws on the idea of learning styles as a point of reference, and there are various problems with this. One of the most obvious is that learning styles have been roundly criticised for example in Coffield’s review [Coffield et al, 2004] of the literature which showed that there was very little consistency of validity in the way that these models operated. It’s also interesting to draw a comparison with the work on intelligent tutoring systems which took place in the field of artificial intelligence between the 80s and mid 90s. This work involved developing increasingly sophisticated models of the learner so that relevant content could be presented to them in a timely way.

Eventually however, it’s been largely abandoned as being impractical and unworkable in all but very few cases, with the exceptions being in areas where it’s just too expensive or too dangerous to train people, such as with pilots learning to fly, or in areas where there’s already a strong formal model of the domain, such as teaching based in mathematics.

Once again we see a problem here in terms of ignoring the tacit parts of professional practice, reducing the whole of the teaching process to a computable model.

Slide: 30
Within the UK there’s been the development of a related strand of research work which has been described as designing for learning. In part the research into designing for learning is a reaction against the formality of learning design. Rather than taking a very computational model of how things should be developed, the idea is that it starts from looking at practice and goes on to ask about how this could be represented, and whether those representations can be formalised computationally. The idea behind this is that rather than automate the design process entirely, practitioners are left in charge of the design process, but computational devices help them in terms of preparing or organising or managing the materials they’re working with. There are two examples of this that I want to draw on. One of them is the London Pedagogic Planner, the other is a tool that goes by the acronym of PHOEBE.

Slide: 31
Now the reason for selecting these two is that they offer contrasting perspectives on how the design process can and should be supported. PHOEBE works by giving practitioners a way of describing their practice, it’s largely qualitative, it’s intended for use in an informative way, it gets them to describe what they intend to do and then flesh out those designs prompting them with questions which is designed to stimulate reflection on their practice. By contract, the London Pedagogy Planner provides a way of modeling practice. It does this by asking practitioners to describe their work in a formal way, providing quantative measures of tasks, time spent on them and so on. This formulism allows the models to be handled computationally, and suggests that it would be possible to create runnable designs. In other words specifications for curricular the machines could actually put into operation.

Slide: 32
This computational model is a very appealing idea in some ways; it has a great elegance to it. There are clear analogies to Bigg’s idea of constructive alignment [Biggs, 1999], in that learning outcomes should be linked to assessments, these should be linked to teaching approaches and the whole thing should be tied together in a way that leads the learner through a coherent, structured and organised process. Almost as a side effect of this, you’re able then to generate costings of courses in a much more precise way than you would be otherwise. If teaching hours are specified, and a cost per hour for a teacher can also be entered, calculations can quickly be run off about break-even points in terms of things like student recruitment. The other possibility, as I mentioned, is that the outputs from a system like this could be entered into other systems that might then be able to run them. Things like the Learning and Activity Management System or LAMS has been discussed as one possible system for taking designs like this forward.

Slide: 33
However the downside of this is that the designs need to be specified in a very coherent and integrated way. As this formal language isn’t something that practitioners will be used to working with, the efforts involved in getting their informal designs into this formal specification will be quite considerable. So although this has computational power and a great elegance about it, there’s a considerable gap between implementation through the London Pedagogy Planner and many people’s conventional practice.In this sense, PHEOBE is much more forgiving, in that people’s simple narrative descriptions of practice are much easier to produce. Therefore it offers a step towards developing a formalism, rather than requiring practitioners to make the leap straight from practice to formal descriptions of practice in one go. Of course the downside of this is that they don’t necessarily have to resolve the inconsistencies in their practice. By representing their practice in a familiar but messy way, they can leave it more or less as-is. However, arguably providing some kind of narrative can help people move people move towards a more formal account of their practice. In that sense this first step with PHEOBE is a useful transitional one to produce something more formal at a later date.

The other advantage is that this fits more with the conventional practices around curricular design. There are real problems in terms of the politics of the curricular design process. For example, Millen produced a paper which looked at how academics produced reading lists for their courses [Millen, 1997]. Her argument is that these are not simply a collection of useful resources that are attached to a course: instead they do useful work in terms of positioning the course and the teacher of the course in relation to other courses in the area, in relation to other academics and particularly academics whose work is drawn on for the course, and to academic peers who may need convincing of the credibility of the course teacher. Whether or not it may be desirable to try and rule these elements out of the curriculum design process is among the things that people nonetheless face in their academic practice. A system that doesn’t allow them to engage with these will prevent them from doing parts of the academic work that they need to do to sustain their professional identity. [Oliver, 2003]

Slide: 34
I want to turn now to an older tool, which also fits broadly within this tradition of designing for learning. Media advisor was produced a few years ago and the idea was it provided a very simple way of modeling people’s curriculum practice. The first step was that they described their teaching approaches by rating them against a cut down version of Laurilard’s conversational framework. They then specified a number of hours that they were going to commit to each of these teaching approaches, and the output was a bar chart which gave a proportion or an emphasis of their teaching approach on different elements of that framework. So it would tell them whether they were concentrating primarily on dissemination for example, or whether they were supporting discussion, primarily and so on [Oliver and Conole, 2000]

Slide: 35
The idea of this was not to provide hard and fast guidelines about what teachers should or should not be doing. Instead, it was development to help support staff development and quality assurances processes. Academics used it to develop rough plans, or else to start their own processes of reflection. The model itself was merely a means to an end. It was not considered to have strong validity as a representation of the course, instead its primary function was to offer a representation, no matter how bad, that may then get academics thinking about whether this was or was not the kind of course they wanted to commit to. As a research team we had been asked whether or not average values for lectures could be provided, for example to characterise typical educational practice. However, the way in which the theory was so simplified and the multiplication of things that weren’t really numbers in order to generate proportions led us to steer people away from placing any great faith in the numbers themselves.

Slide: 36
However the model, no matter how flawed, was useful in a number of contexts. Some academics found it very useful as a way of starting to engage their managers who seemed to be quite keen on numbers, with the complexities of curriculum design. Others wanted to use it as a rough and ready check of the internal consistency of what they were doing, or as a spur to reflection. Others used it to sketch out possible options for the possible development of their course, then to think about the difference between where they were currently, and where they would end up. And finally people found value in the way that this provided a very simple language to start describing their teaching practice.

Slide: 37
Now unlike formal meta-data, no strong claims were made that this was a way of describing all teaching practice. Instead, academics were brought together as part of a workshop, asked to describe their own practice using this tool, then produce a development plan and agree a way forward as part of curricular redevelopment initiatives. [Oliver and Conole, 2002]

Slide: 38
What was really interesting however, is the way that these models prompted discussions within the course team. Typically members of the same course team would turn up with models that looked slightly or in some cases very different from each other. This was because in practice, their teaching was actually quite different from each other. However they’d never had to explain this to anyone else before, nor had they attempted to represent it. So these differences had been hidden. These differences were then used to prompt discussions which started to explore some of the previously tacit elements of practice, and which opened up the possibility of talking about the lived curriculum as opposed to just the planned one. In other words these models were useful not as a specification for the curricula, but as a point of departure. Tacit practice was made explicit, but this was as a means not an end. The end to which this was put was the negotiation of future practice.

Slide: 39
Now briefly I just want to mention the idea that implicit in this process was something about models having a rhetoric of their own. These models were representations of practice, they were created in a way that described practice and this was useful for spurring discussions. However, the model also embodied a set of claims about the world. Specifically in the case of Media Advisor these claims were that the conversational framework in its simplified form was a way of representing pedagogy and also that contact hours were useful as a way of specifying courses. Now obviously both of these assumptions could and should be critiqued. In this case that was one of the reasons why the tools we used in preparing people for a face to face workshop where they could go on to discuss their own practice. More generally though, this raises questions about the way in which these computational models are read by others. When faced with the output of one of these systems for the first time, the real question is about whether we know how to make sense of it, how to read that representation of pedagogy. Questions should also be asked about the visibility of the assumptions that underlie the model. If the system simply has to be adopted, if it’s not open to critique from a different pedagogic or a different disciplinary perspective, then this will cause problems rather than opening up opportunities for people to explore their own assumptions, their own tacit practices and see how these differ from other people’s.

Slide: 40
I’d like to frame this in terms of the idea of consumers and producers of the outputs of these tools. Arguably the person who has the most to learn from a toolkit like this is probably the person who has to develop it in the first place. They have to engage with a range of different possible representations of practice, and come to an informed position about which of these they’re going to choose as the basis for their design. If we can engage people who otherwise might be positioned just as end consumers of these tools, as co-designers, as for example having to engage with the assumptions underlying the tool so they represent their own practice rather than having someone else’s representation given to them, this could open rich new possibilities for sharing knowledge and understanding about teaching practice. However at a practical level, requiring people to do this would obviously add to the burden of the redesign process and is likely to be seen as a hindrance rather than an asset.

Slide: 41
I want to move now to draw some conclusions about this. The first thing to say is that consistently across the analysis of policy, and again echoed within the processes of research, it’s clear that we haven’t solved all of the problems of curriculum design and we really still don’t understand fully how technology should be used to support curricula. However, I want to suggest that there’s quite an optimistic way of looking at the situation. Every time a new technology is developed, and incorporated into education, we need to make sense of it again in terms of our own teaching practices. In almost every case, managing information is going to be the quick win. It’s hardly surprising then, the first step with most of these technologies has been to focus on course materials. Although in each case people might try and move beyond this, taking a richer account of the curriculum and of the tacit practices of the people who produce it and of the experiences of the students who engage with it, we have to recognise that this is hard, it’s complex and it isn’t always going to be successful. However the point may not be to reach a perfect representation of the curriculum for each new technology that arises. Instead, it might be more useful to look at the points where difficulty arises. Looking back across the things that have been reviewed for this paper (for example in terms of the policies that have been looked at) issues like personalisation come up repeatedly. This is because it’s well recognised that it’s hard to design curricular for a diverse group of students. The important thing then, is not necessarily to solve this issue because the issue may not be solvable, it may just be an issue that we have to live with on an ongoing basis. For example we will always have diverse groups of students. Trying to engage with this issue with the new technology however, gives us two things. First it gives us some short term help in terms of dealing with this problem now. Secondly it may give us the opportunity to develop a fuller understanding of the issue so that the next time that we have to engage with it, for example the next time that we have to integrate a new technology into our teaching, we’ll be in a better position to do so because we have a richer understanding of what we’re doing.

Slide: 42
However that’s not to say we should grow complacent. Clearly there are things that we should and could be doing better. If we accept the argument that there have been cycles of development and that these problems keep coming up, then by developing an awareness of how these cycles progress we should be able to progress further, faster, each time. For example being aware that the information management aspect is just a quick win, and needs to be got over before more interesting work can be undertaken, should mean that in future when new technologies arise we should start to look beyond this initial point to more interesting questions about engaging people, developing knowledge socially and so on.

Additionally, we should be in a position to learn from the past and from our own past mistakes. If we’re able to remind people of where things like this have happened before, we may be able to learn from analogy and bypass some of the mistakes that have been made previously. Strategically this should put us in a stronger position. If we’re able to engage with cycles of technology development and appropriation in a more informed way, we may be able to steer this process so we end up in a position that’s more interesting educationally than we would get to otherwise. Obviously what we count as interesting depends on what we think is important, and this starts to raise the questions about values and purpose that underlie the educational endeavor.

Finally then, what remains is not a set of easy answers, not a set of recipes about how we could or should accept technologies. Instead it’s a list of issues and themes and values, things that are important in terms of our educational practice, such as an awareness of the lived experience of the curriculum rather than merely its formal planning. These issues and values then form the basis of critique, and the important thing is to sustain this critique. This isn’t something that can be done once to rectify the mistakes of the past, this is something that needs to be done on an ongoing basis so that we can recognise the new mistakes we make. Returning to Terry Maye's paper, well over a decade old, the most important conclusion to draw may not be a fatalistic one, that we’ve failed to understand how technology should be used in the curriculum, but instead an optimistic one that in spite of this length of time that we continue to struggle, we still haven’t given up critiquing and developing our ideas.

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