Week 17: Activity 2. Students’ frustrations

Week 17: Activity 2. Students’ frustrations


Hara and Kling (1999), ‘Students’ frustrations with a web-based distance education course’
http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/710/620

Main points

• feelings of isolation
• technical problems
• lack of effective advising from instructors
• The expectations for technology to transform higher education are disproportionately high
• absence of physical cues
• frustration with technological problems and the absence of personnel to provide technical support

Interesting points

Most of what we read or hear about computers in education emphasizes only one aspect, usually the good points, but occasionally the bad, to the exclusion of other points of view. This is at least partly due to the screening effect of the popular press, who favor the excitement of extremism over the calm of rationality, preferring in the name of "reader interest" to create what Monosky (1984) calls an artificial dichotomy (Ragsdale, 1988, p. 50). Also see Charlie Brooker.

Various criticisms of traditional classrooms appear frequently, such as lack of personal attention, boredom, outdated knowledge, lack of appropriate skills for workplaces and inappropriateness for a diverse population (Diamond, 1997; Gardiner, 1997; Handy, 1998; Roueche, 1998; Wingspread Group on Higher Education, 1993).


Week 17:Activity 4 Oversold and Underused

http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/resource/view.php?id=502670

Using the recent history of Stanford, Cuban proves how new technology adds little value. The figures are in some cases astronomical. In 1994 Anerican Colleges and Universities spent $6 billion for IT techonologies including support- thats $400 for every student. This model was first promoted by the ivy league universities and filtered down. These universities grew in reputation based on the credibility of their research. Tenured staff wanted more time for research and IT was the answer to this teaching vacuum,.

Universities were told they had to adopt these new techologies or get left behind. Either distance learning institutes would take their place or students would seek less formal educational institutes.

Yet in his study, Cuban proved the predominance of the traditional lecture in teaching. While IT technologies were increasingly incorporated by the teaching staff, this was only for the preparation of lessons, lectures, etc; not in conducting the lesson itself

Week 17: Activity 1 Digital Diploma Mills.

Activity 1a What kind of vision of students?

Mike Wesch’s video ‘A vision of students today’ (on youTube).

The biggest theme for me was that of the disconnection between the students and the tutors. One student hold a sign which says only 18% of her tutor knows her name, while another says there are on average 140 students in each class. It is interesting to contrast this with the  ECAR  which report 90% of students using social networking sites yet only 8% use this medium to contact their tutors (Smith and Caruso, 2010) http://www.educause.edu/Resources/ECARStudyofUndergraduateStuden/217333



 Activity 1b: ‘Digital diploma mills: the automation of higher education’. Noble (1998),

Key points

• 'technological changes in universities..(the distribution of digitized course material online, without the participation of professors who develop such material)...is rapidly drawing the halls of academe into the age of automation'. This is similar to the 19th century vision of school/university envisioned by Wesch, however it means the automation of materials with little input by professors and indicates a divide between administrators and companies that sell educational products on the one side (eg Educom); and teachers and tutors on the other. 
• 'Or the classroom versus the boardroom'. Examples include theUCLA administration launching its historic “Instructional Enhancement Initiative” and Canada's York University unilateral  initiatives in the implementation of instructional technology (which was overturned by strike action). This initiative were taken without faculty oversight.
• Reason for change: 'A short answer might be the fear of getting left behind, the incessant pressures of “progress”. But there is more to it. For the universities are not simply undergoing a technological transformation. Beneath that change, and camouflaged by it, lies another: the commercialization of higher education.' involving 'systematic conversion of intellectual activity into intellectual capital and, hence, intellectual property'.
• This happened in two phases.  in first phase: In 70s... in wake of the oil crisis and intensifying international competition...major industrialized countries recognised they were losing their monopoly over the world’s heavy industries and that, in the future, their supremacy would depend upon their monopoly “knowledge–based” industries (space, electronics, computers, materials, telecommunications, and bioengineering). Universities were their chief source especially research departments. This led to 'proliferation of industrial partnerships and new proprietary arrangements' and a' wholesale reallocation of university resources toward its research function at the expense of its educational function'. At the same time, tuition soared to subsidize the creation and maintenance of the commercial infrastructure (and correspondingly bloated administration) that has never really paid off. In the end students were paying more for their education and getting less, and the campuses were in crisis
• 'The second phase of the commercialization of academia, the commoditization of instruction, is touted as the solution to the crisis engendered by the first'. This led to 'transforming courses into courseware, the activity of instruction itself into commercially viable proprietary products that can be owned and bought and sold in the market'. The foremost promoters of this transformation are (a) the vendors of the network hardware, software, and “content”; (b) the trainers;   (c) the University Administration,(who view view computer–based instruction as a means of reducing their direct labor and plant maintenance costs),  and (d) technozealots who think technology is the answer to everything 
• There was also a movement towards nationally connected universities (eg Canada's “Virtual U” network), and completely virtual universities (University of Phoenix) 'market orientation behind these initiatives is explicit'
• 'The implications of the commoditization of university instruction are two–fold in nature, those relating to the university as a site of the production of the commodities and those relating to the university as a market for them. The first raises for the faculty traditional labor issues about the introduction of new technologies of production. The second raises for students major questions about costs, coercion, privacy, equity, and the quality of education'.
• As in other industries, the technology is being deployed by management primarily to discipline, de–skill, and displace labor.  once the faculty converts its courses to courseware, their services are in the long run no longer required. They become redundant, and when they leave, their work remains behind.
• for all the democratic rhetoric about extending educational access to those unable to get to the campus, the campus remains the real market for these products, where students outnumber their distance learning counterparts six–to–one.

Week 17: Technology – imagined negative futures Course content

Week 17 Overview

This week is looking at disutopian view of the education and technology. By using papers which are now quite dated we will review if this pessimism was a well founded. It starts with a quote:

'a warm and dark space for people with too much time and too few ideas’ (Brabazon, 2008, p.50). reviewing 'Here Comes Everyone' by Clay Shirky. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=401300&c=2

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week 14: A3a: Reading vignettes

Week 13 & 14-A2: Methodological issues in exploring the learner experience

Week 13/14: A2a: Reading Conole et al


Ideas that technology can be a catalyst for educational change have only been a load of hot air, however, it is now argued that with the collaborative and distributed nature of Web 2.0, this prophecy is closer to being realised. Students are now changing the way they consume (and produce) education. A wide plethora of technologies are used and students are not a homogeneous entity. Each likes to use technology as they see fit.

' Oblinger and Oblinger’s book ‘Educating the net generation’ provides a useful baseline reference for research on students’ use of technologies (Oblinger & Oblinger, 2005). They describe the characteristics of the ‘net generation’ – students born after 1980 – suggesting that these students fundamentally differ from pre- vious generations in the way they process information and communicate (and hence learn). They argue that these students are comfortable with technologies and suggest that the ways in which they learn is task orien-

tated and experiential. '

Research methodology

an online survey, audio logs and interviews

Finding were split into 4 categories:

Information seeking and handling Communication Assignment preparation Integrated learning.

Key Findings

·     ‘students are learning in a complex and changing environment, using a plethora of technological tools to support their learning’


·     ‘Computer ownership is high and students have become accustomed to being able to electronically access information or people on demand’


·     ‘students are adept at finding and manipulating relevant information and synthesizing across different information sources and use a variety of communication tools to support their learning needs’


·     ‘there is evidence from the data that there is a shift from passive to more interactive interactions across all aspects of their learning, which is another characteristic of the net generation’


·     ‘Universities are ill-equipped to educate a new generation of learners whose sophisticated use of emerging technologies is incompatible with current teaching practice’.
‘Our findings support this and point to a mismatch between our current offerings and student use and a further mismatch between institutions’ perceptions of student use of technology and actual use’.


·     ‘The data indicates that technologies are being appropriated by learners to play to their strengths in terms of visual and auditory capabilities’


·     ‘Both our study and the LEX study highlighted personalisation and appropriation of technologies as major themes to have emerged from the data. Students appear to place greater value on technologies they have ‘discovered’ or selected for themselves. (‘Importantly if students did not find the technology or platform provided by the institutions useful they were in a position to by-pass it in favour of their own personalized approach and preferred tools.’)


·     ‘One of the objectives of our research was to try to gain a better understanding of the different ways in which technologies might be used across disciplines (‘The evidence from our data did not draw out major discipline difference of this kind, although some patterns in discipline differences were evident’)


·     ‘One of the most striking features to emerge from the data is the extent to which students are capitalising on the social affordances of technologies, much heralded under the banner of Web 2.0 (Alexander, 2006), in terms of peer support and communication – the picture emerges of a networked, extended community of learners using a range of communicative tools to exchange ideas, to query issues, to provide support, to check progress.

Ideas that technology can be a catalyst for educational change have only been a load of hot air, however, it is now argued that with the collaborative and distributed nature of Web 2.0, this prophecy is closer to being realised. Students are now changing the way they consume (and produce) education. A wide plethora of technologies are used and students are not a homogeneous entity. Each likes to use technology as they see fit.

To what extent this social peer network replaces or complements existing support mechanisms is not clear. Students evidently do still use traditional support mechanisms – contact with tutor, study guides, additional institutional workshops and training – but it would be interesting to investigate further how much some of these are being replaced by students choosing to turn first to a fellow student for guidance.

Week 13 & 14. Activity 1.

A1a: A vision of students today

 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=en-GB&v=dGCJ46vyR9oconfirms)
Michael Wesch video is less academically and statistically studies in the previous blog, yet he underlines anocdotally how pervasive technologies are. His persuasive style shows a number of students in short clips explaining how much laptops, social networking sites, etc; although not necessarily always for educational purposes. Emails and Facebook updates were viewed more than books for instance, also technology made multi-tasking more feasible (and in fact multi-tasking was now a necessity. There are a couple of contentious issues that were brought up.

The video started with a quote from Marshall Mcluhan who suggested how antiquated the education system was, set in a the standards of the 19th century. The system was designed for the regimented factory line  society, and the relevatory technological innovation was the charkboard. This arguement juxtaposed against the modern available technology indicates to me that the school sytstem now needs to move on. (there is also a interesting video covering this arguement: http://www.thersa.org/events/vision/archive/sir-ken-robinson)

A second point was about how the much there is a digital divide between rich and poor countries. One student holds up his laptop which he suggests is worth more than a lot of people earn in a year.

 This video was more provocative than the other research discussed in the previous blog. It also tells a lot on information in a short period of time. However, because it is anocdotal it does carry less gravitas, it is hard to reference and check the truth of what was said. This is ironic, since you are using 'old fashioned' research techniques to research new technologies with the results of the research suggesting that 'new' technologies are increasingly being utilized by students. The research does not suggest ways in which this knowledge about students use of technology can be taken advantage off by educators.

If the use of technology has become ubiquitious then it stands to reason that these tools should be used for education. Facebook is a useful tool because it is so popular, likewise other social networking tools. While the chalkboard has been replaced by the powerpoint, it is still the same style of presentation (i'e all students staring forwards towards a central teacher). New forms of education need to implimented, rather than old forms merely modified with new technology.

A1b Readings

Smith and Caruso  (2010) ‘The ECAR study of undergraduate students and information technology, 2010’.

This study looked at 40,000 undergraduate students and their use of technology. The methods used to gather the data were questionaires (web based- where most of the students participated) focus groups (from 84 students), student comments, a literature review and a comparison of previous study. Immediately we can see a problem with the survey. If most of the data was from a web-based questionaire it stands to reason that most of the students would be computer literate and this would sure escrew the findings.

 Students were questioned on the types of hardware they pre-existing used, the media they used (social networking site, blogging, etc), whether they used there web for colloborative work. It also analysed their competances with this technology.

The key findings

Most students consider themselves competant at using the internet to seach (80%), how only 57% knew how to check if they were looking up was from a credible source, and also the ethical and legal implications.

98% students own a computer- the majority a laptop. 70% owned a computer that was less than 2 years old. 80-90% use basic applications such as speadsheets and accessing university library resources. Approx. 40% create and share content via web 2.0 applications. 66% own internet enabled mobile devices but this number is growing.

The biggest use of technology is texting and social networking with 90% of students saying that they do this everyday, yet only 30% used this for academic purposes, likewise online colloboration was hardly used used, yet the figures in both cases are increasing.

Course Management Systems (CMS) are prominent in univesities (90% of institutions have their own systems). Students are reliant on these systems with 90% using them, although some quite sporadically. (30% use them daily, but 30% did not use one for months). The popularity of CMS has decreased in the years. (47% thought their tutors were good at IT).

Instructors where not using IT (such as blogs, and social networking as much as their students and are actually falling behind, except in the use of CMS. Tutors rely on old fashioned modes of teaching. Most students have noted their tutors lack of competances and are less than positive about their IT literacy.

Students perceptions about IT where that they made activities more convenient to carry out (70%), yet only 50% felt IT improved their education per ce, and only 30% felt IT made them particate more in their courses. IT then is an extension to pre-existing traditional concepts of education. Students did not want their courses to be wholly online and only wanted a moderate amount of IT in its content. This was consistent result to a similar report 6 years ago which indicates even though technology has moved on, perceptions of learning has not. An alternative view is that the commodization of IT means that what is perceived as a moderate amount of IT in todays courses is qualitively different than what this would mean 6 years ago.

Do tutors adapt tools which suite 'old fashioned' styles of teaching (eg such as Powerpoint). Could this be where the differences of the uses of technology diverge between students and tutors.