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Some of you may have seen this article in HEPI in which the author makes an argument against the possible establishment of a city centre base for the Open University. I will say up front, I have no insider knowledge here, and as I’m leaving, no skin in the game, these are more just thoughts based on being a long time OU and distance/online learning advocate.

The article makes a strange case, partly aligning their opposition to the move on the basis of CO2 emissions, which I’m not in a position to judge (but equally they offer no evidence for). Their argument is basically, if we all wish hard enough, academics will want to come to the existing Walton Hall campus. Yeah, that ship has sailed. Saying we could make it more attractive by innovating and that will attract new staff is going the wrong way I’d suggest – being able to work remotely and live, say, in beautiful West Wales while still being a full, active member of staff would be more of a draw for new staff I’d suggest.

The possible city centre provision (and from what I understand nothing has been decided yet, but options are being considered, which seems sensible), would not necessarily be for existing OU students. We might think of it as a separate offering, let’s call it F2F-OU (to be clear, that’s what I’m calling it, not a proposed brand name), that shares some resources with traditional OU, such as content, expertise, accrediting powers, etc. In this model students would either enrol with F2F-OU or Trad-OU (maybe there would be different fees? I don’t know). This does not contradict the existing OU offering or its open, distance, four nations remit.

There are some areas for concern here, the OU has not been great at large scale strategic moves (see USOU), and finances are tight across the sector. It’s an understatement to say this is not the ideal time to be thinking about opening a new F2F university. But I’m not in the meetings so don’t know what finance models are being proposed, I’d hope some independent oversight would be given to these. There are also legitimate concerns about lab facilities, particularly in STEM, and these would need to be resolved to maintain a decent research status. It might also be a huge distraction when we cannot accommodate it.

The bit I do find interesting though is more sector-wide. I occasionally give talks, during and after the pandemic, to HEIs who are now in the position of having to shift some provision online, become more flexible and find hybrid models that work economically and pedagogically. It would seem logical (but again, no inside knowledge here) that the F2F-OU offering would make use of existing OU content and supplement this with some F2F provision. Getting this hybrid blend right, so students have some of the benefits of F2F and the flexibility of high quality distance learning materials would be an attractive offer, not just to students, but as a model to the sector more widely. As F2F universities are embracing elements of an OU model, perhaps it makes sense for the OU to embrace elements of the F2F one. Whether the city centre move goes ahead or not, I think cracking that model would be the innovative and exciting piece here, whether for OU students or in collaboration with partner institutions. I don’t really care one way or the other about the move itself, but academically, if it is a catalyst for developing sustainable hybrid education models, then that is interesting (to me anyway).

These types of proposals can induce a good deal of anxiety, particularly around core values and mission and I’ve seen plenty of people projecting fears on to the proposal which are not part of what is being suggested. Maybe that’s inevitable when the proposed solution is still in relatively early stages. I had the sense of doom with the 2018 OU crisis, but I don’t feel it with this proposal (with the large caveat that this is only if the finances work out), since it doesn’t undermine the traditional OU offering and potentially offers a new model that is suitable for the type of robust higher education I have talked about elsewhere.

But hey, I’ll be on a beach sipping cocktails by 2030, so what do I know?

It’s been a busy presentation month. I gave a metaphors talk for Rikke Toft Nørgård’s Digital Pedagogy and Learning special interest group. I like these more informal presentations, and we had a fun chat about Nordic metaphors afterwards. I hosted a session for the European Digital Education Hub, on learning environments. Preparing for this prompted me to think more about AI enhanced learning environments, so it was one of those presentations that help move along your own thinking. Dominic Orr joined me and gave an excellent overview of the work they do at Atingi. I’ve blogged about the OER24 experience, so won’t say more here except to say it warmed this cynical old man’s heart.

On the book front, I’ve been a bit immersed in horror and Stephen King this month. King was an author I read a lot as teen, the classic era of his writing. But then I put those childish things behind me and read “proper” literature. Returning to his writing some 40 years later I am chastened by that snobbish attitude, and also really able to appreciate his craft in creating characters you like spending time with. If he were less of a genre writer he would probably be feted more as serious literature (not that it bothers him I suspect). I enjoyed Nige Tassel’s odyssey to track down all of the artists who had appeared on the NME’s C86 tape. It’s a warm, humane book about what happens after brief brushes with fame. Many of the people he spoke to still play music in some form (and a surprising number seem to be into cycling), and it is that sense of creating music for its own sake that comes through (and also that the NME was pretty shitty to a lot of them having created this genre themselves).

It’s been a good vinyl purchasing month with the release of new albums from several artists whose previous albums had been firm favourites. Hurray for the Riff Raff’s new release, The Past is Still Alive was a more subdued affair than the “nature punk” of Last Days on Earth. On it Alynda Segarra’s chronicles their chaotic youth of being a teenage punk runaway, jumping trains and dumpster diving. As with the last album the sound is deceptively upbeat whether they are singing about ICE brutality, transphobia or fentanyl abuse. But that’s kind of the point, they find humanity in the tales of the dispossessed, in the tradition of Steinbeck. Brittany Howard’s new release, What Now, has a LOT going on. It’s a massive sound, with funk, soul, complex jazz rhythms & orchestration. Every track is a good album in itself. My favourite of the month is Waxahatchee’s Tiger’s Blood. I quite iked Waxahatchee’s last album, Saint Cloud, but her collaboration with Jess Williamson, as Plains was incredible. This album continues in that vein of country with the benefit of hindsight. If it was a person they would live in a trailer, drive a battered pick up, swear like “a dry county welder”, and be the smartest person you know.

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I mentioned my visit to Cork to pull off One Last Job at OER24, which I am now safely and legally returned from. There I gave a fun presentation with Maren on podcasting and internet radio, and one on the afterlife of my 25 Years of Ed Tech book. The conference was excellent, with thought-provoking, engaging and warm keynotes from Rajiv Jhangiani and the double act of Laura Czerniewicz and Catherine Cronin.

We had a compact, full GO-GN workshop the day prior to the conference. I like seeing new generations of GO-GN scholars coming through, there were few of the attendees who had been before and it felt like a new wave of scholars now benefitting from the network.

The OER conference has long been my favourite one to attend, with its combination of quirkiness, critical perspectives and generous people. This was the first one to be hosted since Maren departed ALT, and much kudos goes to CEO Kerry Pinny and events manager Katie Johnson for making it such a success. It is always difficult when taking over from someone who has been at an organisation for a long time. Often the temptation is to make your mark and just change everything. Kerry and the team maintained the ethos and warmth of the OER conference, but also tweaked things and made it their own. It was an exemplar of how to move onwards sensitively, and yes, maintain that meticulous informality (I’m going to make that term a thing).

A couple of small things that I thought worked well (and it’s often the small things that make a conference). The format was generally three- 15 minute talks and then a 15 minute question period in one session. This meant the sessions all moved very quickly, there was never any sense of “I’m trapped in a never ending session that I zoned out from ages ago” which sometimes happens. The timekeeping was something Tom Farrelly had apparently drilled into the session chairs, and the use of the Tomato of Doom timekeeping apparatus kept everyone on schedule. This also meant you could reliably switch between rooms and attend different talks. The conference programme software was a bit confusing at first glance, but it really came into its own when sessions were live and you could see what was happening and upcoming.

There was also an ego-indulgence at the end, as this was possibly my last OER conference (certainly my last as GO-GN director), and Rajiv said embarrassingly nice things about me and everyone generously allowed me to babble on a bit. If you enjoy seeing reserved British men squirm, then this video is for you (watch the amazing Gastas first though).

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Next week I head to Cork for OER24. While I may get invited to conferences once I leave the OU, this could well be my last one, and will definitely be my final one as GO-GN director and OU employee. That’s right, before I head off into the sunset, I’m going to do One Last Job, what could go wrong?

In the manor of all One Last Jobs, a crack team has been assembled to pull it off. We have the GO-GN squad, running a workshop the day before the conference for a small team of explosive experts OER Researchers. As I’ve probably mentioned before, working on the GO-GN project for the past 11 years has been a delight, and by far the most enjoyable and rewarding externally funded project I’ve been part of. So I’m pleased to go out with a final workshop.

Reservoir Penguins

Then there are the getaway drivers, I mean, co-chairs Tom Farrelly and Gearóid Ó Súilleabháin, and the location of Cork. A fine pairing to ensure the meticulous informality I like so much in conferences. What a place to pull off the heist of the century. And of all the conferences I attend on a semi-regular basis, I have to say the the OER one is my favourite. I have attended every year since 2014, and I think it has really grown and developed over that time in terms of the critical and thoughtful lens it brings to open education in general, but also in establishing its identity and own way of doing things. If I had to choose the venue for One Last Job, it would definitely be the OER conference.

At the conference I will be cracking the safe with Maren Deepwell as we talk about podcasting and internet radio as open practice (you can hear us discuss this in the podcast), undertaking crowd control with a talk on 30 Years of Ed Tech and the curious life of an open access book (along the lines of this), and blowing the joint with a GO-GN session on 10 years of the network.

And then I’m outta there! Maren has also arranged for some drinks on the Thursday at a pub (this just means we’ll be there, we haven’t laid anything on, no free booze I’m afraid. I repeat, no free booze).

Because we all know how One Last Jobs end, you don’t have to wait until I’m dead to say nice things about me – Maren has kindly set up a Kudoboard where you can share embarrassing selfies of us gurning at the camera.

One Last Job, that’s all I need…

In my last post I was doing a backwards glance prompted by the Accenture-Udacity deal. In this one, I’ll look forwards. Apart from the MOOC angle, the other key aspect of the announcement was the investment in AI-enhanced learning environments.

In terms of learning environments, the VLE/LMS has been the main player since around 2002. Prior to this there was a mixed economy, combining different commercial solutions, home spun set ups, open web tools. It was both a delightful cottage industry and something of a wild west. From the turn of the century the shift to an institutional wide, enterprise solution became inexorable until by the mid-2000s pretty much all HEIs had a VLE of some sort.

From then it has largely been a case of integrating new technology into existing systems – the addition of learning analytic dashboards, different forms of assessment, improved content management, etc. But it has been a steady, regular set of improvements with no major shifts once the main players settled down. Someone from 2004 would not be at a loss presented with a VLE from 2024. This is not a bad thing, as I said in the last post, the notion of technology revolutions is oversold.

But with the advent of AI we may be seeing the first major shake up in the industry for a while. I should stress, I am not being a cheerleader for these new platforms, there will be plenty of breathless excitement about their potential to transform education, revolutionise universities, etc. But there will be plenty of sales pitches made to HEIs, and pressure to change or upgrade, as well as new possibilities to legitimately explore. What I want to explore here are the questions we need to ask of such platform vendors, and ultimately, of ourselves as educators.

Electric Dreams

Let’s consider what the new AI-enhanced platforms will offer. There’s likely to be a few key elements:

Personalisation – the desire for personalised education is never ending. It is largely unquestioned – of course, more personalisation is better. We’ll come to that later, but one offer will be that AI can enhance personalisation for learners. If a student can’t understand this content, then they can generate further versions. Plus they can have intelligent on demand tuition (see below)

Content creation – being able to generate content, or have your own content AI checked will be a strong offer. You can create smart looking online course quickly, allowing you to concentrate on the important stuff. Labour saving is a persistent promise of technology from washing machines to driverless cars.

Enhanced content – as well as creating content, what will be offered is different types of content – simulations, virtual worlds, lectures from historical figures. This type of content has traditionally been very costly to create. Now, maybe not.

Assessment and feedback – AI will generate automatic assessment, that will be unique to each student, so cannot be cheated and will offer immediate feedback. More labour saving now you don’t have to create those pesky multiple choice quizzes. It will also check for cheating by students

Monitoring and Control – AI enhanced analytics will monitor student performance, and either alert the instructor or offer interventions itself (An Einstein looking version of Clippy pops up “You seem to be struggling to understand quantum equations, would you like additional support with that?”).

Tuition – the very early forms of AI were often focused on the development of Intelligent Tutoring Systems. They failed because mapping a domain turned out to be way more complex than people anticipated. But generative AI doesn’t need that mapping, it “just” crunches the numbers on everything it has. So a friendly looking AI tutor can offer support on just about any topic the student wants help with.

I’ve probably been a bit facetious with some of the above, but for a learner, judicious use of these tools might be pretty helpful. Students, particularly those studying on their own at a distance, will often stumble when they don’t feel they understand something and it prevents them from progressing in that study session. If you live with a house of students you can go and ask one of them, or pop a question into WhatsApp. But if you don’t have these networks to hand, an AI tutor could be very useful in helping you continue, for example.

Keep feeling fascination

All of which brings us onto thinking about the type of education we want to foster, and the role such a system will play in that offering.

What about the community – in all of the elements above, social interaction between humans is missing. There may be some AI element to this (chatbots in forums?), but it’s probably appropriate that we don’t really want AI in there much. But it is often a crucial element in education. In some research we’ve done with Open Degree students, it’s become evident that the question “how does this impact student community?” is one that is rarely, if ever, asked in IT procurement decisions. Community is often just assumed to arise in campus universities as a by-product of co-location. But if we move to more hybrid, online models then this cannot be taken for granted, it has to be more explicitly fostered in the learning environment. How does the new platform do that?

What about the cohort – similarly, if we promote personalisation, that comes at the cost of a shared sense of cohort. If my cognitive psychology is structured differently to yours, what are we sharing in terms of common experience? Progressing through with a cohort is another social connection component that is very powerful for some (not all though) students.

Quality issues – the more that content and support is outsourced to AI the greater the danger of errors sneaking in. Apparently humans do not generally have six fingers. Given the link to vocational and professional awarding bodies there will be a strong legal component to this and quality control.

Ethics – it’s probably not a question asked often enough, but there will be a whole bunch of ethical issues with the large scale adoption of AI. Does it rely on cheap labour elsewhere? Is it building of existing content without permission? What if a student has ethical objections to its use? What are the mental health implications of students feeling that they are continually monitored? Is it ethical NOT to use AI when the students will be encountering everywhere in society? Plus many more we haven’t thought of I expect. These won’t be easy to answer but they need to be at the forefront of any procurement decisions, not awkward after thoughts

Being boiled

If I was to draw out one theme from observing learning environments develop since the mid-90s, I would say that we see a constant tension between control and freedom. And more control nearly always wins. It’s probably cooler to be on the freedom side of this equation, but the control aspect is not without its merits, particularly for learners, and doubly so for learners at a distance. A more controlled environment is one the institution can support and manage effectively, and therefore offer support. You really don’t want the technology to become a barrier for distance learners and having an environment you can help with easily is a must.

Plus it helps students know that they’re on track – “am I doing the right thing? Am I doing enough?” are common concerns for many learners and you don’t want to add in constructing your own learning environment into that.

Then we add in GDPR, duty of care, privacy and security issues and increased control of the platform seems like the only sensible decision. But it comes at a cost for learners and educators. The open web is more like what they will experience in ‘real life’ and it also provides rich resources, and modes of expression that the stripped down, sanitised VLE cannot. But it also contains toxic behaviours, rampant commercialism and misinformation, which are problematic in education.

The point of this ramble about control is that dynamic will come into play once again with AI-enhanced platforms. If my conclusion that control wins holds true here also, then we need to consider what a very controlled, locked down version of such platforms look like. These could be the worst of both worlds – the invasive, inflexible monitoring of AI systems without any of the freedom to use those tools creatively. There is a line of questioning to be followed around the nature, and desirability, of control that these platforms will offer.

We’re only Human

Ultimately the most interesting thing about the application of AI in any domain, including education, is what does it reveal to us about being human? (And not, how much money can we make from this?) This will be at the heart of any adoption of AI learning platforms. What does it mean for the human learners? What do the human educators do in this environment? How do we promote and support interaction between people?

These are big questions, and they are not the type of ones that crop up on a features list when conducting procurement. The danger then is, that they never get asked. We shouldn’t see this new wave of VLEs as just an upgrade, a new version on the roadmap, because then in ten years time we’ll find we didn’t ask these more fundamental questions and we’re too deep in now with the configuration of platforms to reshape them. It may be awkward, but in the next few years as HEIs consider new platforms, make sure there are people in the room who ask these questions.

Anyway, I’m not sure why I went on a Human League riff with the titles here, perhaps because students and educators are the Human League in this new world and need to stand together. So, here are the aforementioned League, with that hairstyle and that song:

Because I was too busy indulging in self-pity in my last post I forgot to blog about Udacity being acquired by Accenture to build a platform to take advantage of AI, blah, blah. Audrey Watters taking a rare foray back into ed tech to say “I told you so” reminded me to blog something. Audrey says it better, but that’s never stopped me before… There are lots of takeaways from this tale. Here are some that occur to me:

Self-Reflection is the real unicorn. Investors like to talk about unicorn companies, but it seems the real unicorn (as in, it doesn’t exist) is any sense of self-reflection or humility in the media or silicon valley narrative. Guess what? MOOCs didn’t disrupt higher education! Who could have guessed? Apart from everybody who knew anything about it. See also: Blockchain, Virtual Worlds, microcredentials, etc, etc. And yet, when outlets like Bloomberg report on this there’s never any “wow, we got that wrong folks!” It’s always, either the fault of the company or tech involved, or it was really a success and onto the next thing.

Low impact is the norm. It is, of course, not the case that all technology fails to impact higher education. The web, social media, online databases, even the humble VLE have all had significant impacts. But the number of over-hyped solutions to imaginary problems that disappear quietly outweighs these. Our default assumption should therefore be that any new tech will have a minimal impact, not the current view that every new tech will fundamentally change the entire ecosystem. I previously categorised technology, or rather the talk around technology, into rapture or useful pitches. We get too much of the former and not enough of the latter.

MOOC? What is MOOC? Maybe Udacity will claim a success in being bought out and perhaps turning a profit(we don’t know how much of the $1 billion supposed investment in AI went on purchasing them. 50c would constitute “part of”). But it’s the last meagre wave of the flag for MOOCs surely, after all that hype and promise. At JIME we recently put out a call for a special issue based on learning at scale and the legacy of MOOCs. When people who had been prominent in the MOOC research were approached by us, many of them responded along the lines of “I don’t have anything to do with MOOCs anymore and I don’t want to write about them”. It was as if this was a shameful period in their past, now it’s like “MOOCs? No, doesn’t ring a bell, did he play for Chelsea?” The focus of the special issue is learning at scale more generally but also what can we learn from over a decade of MOOC research (we now have lots of great submissions along these lines). This desire to abandon the past and move onto the next thing is another version of the self-reflection unicorn. It also brings me onto…

Education Technology is, like, over, man. To reinforce something Audrey comments on, the Bloomberg article begins “Remember education technology?” Wait, what?! I wrote a book railing against the amnesia in education technology and this quote would have been a summary of the “Why write this book?” section (Downes said I was wrong about amnesia, I just wasn’t looking properly. Hmmm). Remember the pandemic? What was it that kept education going on a global basis with about 3 weeks preparation? Oh, yeah educational technology. And for those at the back, MOOCs didn’t invent educational technology and are not synonymous with it. Do we have to repeat this, like, forever?

Yeah, but AI. The obvious comparison with MOOC hype is AI hype. So one could draw the conclusion that in 10 years we’ll be going “remember AI?”. I think that’s unlikely, it looks set to be a technology that will integrate into existing tech and is causing higher ed to ask fundamental questions of itself and practice. If AI does nothing else but get rid of the essay as the default assessment mode, then it’s impact is profound. But the MOOC lesson should at least give us caution over some of the more revolutionary, rapture type claims. I’m sure everyone will make sure they don’t make any over the top claims this time, eh?

Overall, the takeaway for me is that we should assume that generally tech revolutions in education end in a whimper, not a bang. Set your expectations accordingly.

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If you live in the UK you will probably have seen the story last week about the Willy Wonka Chocolate Experience in Glasgow. It promised a rich immersive experience, but turned out to be a disappointing, depressing warehouse with some bad props. We get one of these stories every year usually about a Santa’s grotto which is, well, less than might be expected.

These stories often go viral, the mismatch between promise and reality is ripe for memes. This one I think offers an interesting prompt for considering issues around AI. For a start the advertising of the experience used AI generated images, so there is a good example about the expectation and reality of AI itself. I mean, there is a whole thesis to be written about these two images:

The BBC article also reveals that the owner of the company published 17 novels last year, which seem to have been written by AI, and one of the actors at the Wonka event said the script was gibberish and appeared to be written by AI. Now, it could be that the phrase “written by AI” has just become a synonym for “badly written”, but it seems there may be an element of truth here. This raises the issue that AI lowers the cost for producing novels, scripts, advertising. This is a grifter’s dream as it means they don’t have to pay people for any of this stuff.

This obviously opens up avenues for misuse, but lower cost of entry has possibilities also. The internet has always been about removing barriers for participation. You can take the view that AI is ‘bad’ because it comes with so little ethics attached and so much power, or you can view it as just a tool. You can use a word processor to write beautiful poetry or racist diatribes after all.

Questions to ask then are “do the potential benefits outweigh the inevitable misuses?” Because there will be both. Do we get more of the first picture or more of the second?

Lastly I think it is a solid reminder of the importance of our embodied experience. We are people, who inhabit bodies in a physical world, taking in information from many senses. At the end of AI magic there is always that crunch point.

Anyway, I think if you want to have some fun conversations about AI, the Wonka experience offers a useful prompt for considering different aspects. Plus, it’s quite funny.

(photo shows Irwin DeVries, Audrey Watters, Brian Lamb and Rajiv Jhangiani in 2015)

As February comes to an end, I feel I am entering the wind down phase of my Open University career, with departure scheduled for June. The replacement for my role on the Open Programme is being recruited, we’re planning for my last GO-GN workshop at OER24, and I’m handing over editorship of JIME. It leaves one in a slight liminal space mentally and work wise – I’m busy doing handover, and continuing workload, but I’m not required for planning things that will take place after I leave. It’s not so much that I have less work, but rather that mentally it’s less demanding as there are so many topics I can just shrug my shoulders about now. I read this article about effectively designing inbetween spaces, particularly staircases. The author states “Done right, the staircase becomes a world unto its own – a place to linger, to get views outside…, a place to reflect, to connect and to be active.” I guess I need to find an equivalent for this career period, and avoid “soul deadening transitions”.

I would like to pay tribute to a colleague who passed away at the end of January, Irwin DeVries. I met Irwin for the first time on a seemingly interminable conference dinner outing in Bali in 2014, and we usually met up at conferences once or twice a year after that. He was a funny, humble, insightful and generous person, the sort who made everyone better for knowing him. In his leadership and humanity he was a role model for so many of us to follow. Brian Lamb has a touching tribute to him, I know I’ll miss his bumbling persona and quick wit.

An ed tech news story that lots of people commented on this month, was the use of holograms at Loughborough. To which my response was *gallic shrug*. Apparently students “absolutely love” the technology and have been begging for selfies with the gadget”. Well, duh, it’s fun and new. I expect people would love selfies next to a tank of snakes also. This kind of tech is only really interesting when it becomes ubiquitous – sure if we can have holographic meetings, then why not? But until then the thing it’s competing with – 2D easy access representations – are good enough, and the gain from this tech is not worth the cost and inconvenience. As for AI powered holographic lectures from Einstein, I’m sure that’d be fun for a week or so, then it’d be back to actually learning. It’d be interesting to revisit this story in a year’s time and see if that hologram kit is still in heavy use.

On the books front I am smashing it this year. I read 17 books this month (although a few were novellas), perhaps highlighting the decreasing work demands I mentioned above. I’ve blocked about the excellent feminist and race critiques of horror that I read, the metaphors in Entangled Life and thoughts from the apocalypse fiction ones. I read a fascinating account of the history of the music press, Totally Wired: The Rise and Fall of the Music Press. As someone who read Smash Hits avidly and then transitioned to the NME in the 80s which was a life bible, it was insightful to see those periods placed in context. However, the author’s contention is that this period of music journalism mattered because people wrote about it as if music mattered. He makes a noble attempt to bring into focus voices other than the dominant white male rock journalists, but ultimately the tale is so full of arrogant, often misogynistic and homophobic, men with drug problems that it becomes counter-productive. You begin to think that maybe it didn’t really matter at all.

Vinyl wise, I picked up a lovely edition of Gruff Rhys’s new album Sadness Sets Me Free, and also acquired new releases from Grandaddy and J Mascis. All three of these are fine examples of artists who have stuck around, doing what they do, while refining and tweaking it. Hey, just like blogging, eh?

As you probably know I spend too much/nowhere near enough time reading horror fiction. I know some people feel that’s kind of juvenile, but after years of challenging myself to read difficult literature, I decided to just enjoy reading. Plus genre literature gets a bad press and people are generally snooty about it. All of which is a precursor to try and justify the number of horror related analogies cropping up in these posts. Speaking of which…

I’ve been on an apocalypse literature riff recently – you know the sort of thing, zombies, vampires, ecocide, virus, mutant insects, more zombies. These were nearly all written pre-Covid and its interesting to read them now in light of that experience – we’re all pandemic experts now. I’ve also been giving a version of my “Developing robust models of higher education” talk at various events. My argument is that we need to develop a robust model of higher education as the pandemic revealed weaknesses from a system based so heavily on physical co-location, and that it isn’t just about Covid, but any number of crises at an individual, institutional, national or global level that may cause failure in the traditional model.

Reading this sub-genre and giving these talks was coincidental (I think – maybe there was some subconscious prompting in my fiction choices going on, but let’s not psychoanalyse this), but it has led to some cross-fertilisation. As I read of the success or failure of dealing with another version of the apocalypse, I couldn’t help but wonder if there are some more general lessons we can draw from this literature that can be applied to thinking about building robust models of higher ed. So here are my 10 lessons from apocalypse horror for ed tech:

1. Always underprepared – whenever the crisis hits there are a number of decisions prior to this that mean the protagonists are underprepared. This can be the government cutting funding for warning programmes or individuals not having sufficient provisions. In the higher ed case this can be seen with an over-reliance on the traditional campus model and insufficient planning for more flexible models.
2. Existing technology is reversioned – we see this a lot, with the wizened old hand demonstrating how their ham radio can still communicate or the sharpened shovel becomes the ideal zombie decapitation weapon. The point is that often existing technology is good enough, and placing emphasis on existing tools such as the VLE, the content management system, telephone support lines, eportfolio systems, online journals and blogs can create a varied, functional education system even if they are deployed in a different or more scaled up version than currently.
3. New technology is developed – having said that, some wiz always comes up with a new piece of tech that vaporizes those vampires on an industrial scale. I’m always dubious of technosolutionism (see the next point also), but any crises usually sees a technology if not invented then its adoption dramatically accelerated. Look at Zoom and Teams post-pandemic, that way of working is now the norm for many instead of an awkward additional request. For higher ed it’s important to recognise these shifts and to adapt practices accordingly.
4. Grifters arise – there’s always someone selling a fake cure, or setting up a commune of their own in the apocalypse novel. People want certainty, answers, reassurance. The same is true in higher ed, people will use any crisis as an opportunity to sell their blockchain, unschool, digital natives, hole in the wall bullshit solution. Knowing how to differentiate these from the tech or approaches in the previous point is a key skill.
5. Cooperation is key to success – after the initial panic and death toll, people inevitably begin to cooperate. Sharing resources, building defences, allocating expertise – it’s all essential to get through the crisis. Those zombies pick of the lone wolf quickly enough. In higher ed we are conditioned to be much more competitive, at least in the UK, where we are fighting for students, research funding, NSS rankings or whatever. The only way to effectively prepare for and cope with the next crisis is to similarly find modes of cooperation. Whether that is around mutual goals, shared teaching resources, memorandums of understanding that allow students to study modules from other providers or shared tech infrastructure, we’re just not as good at this as we should be.
6. Many existing practices are inadequate – a lot of existing knowledge is not only inadequate but positively dangerous in apocalypse lit. Fighting a rational enemy with supply lines provides a mode of warfare that is inappropriate for combatting the undead. Similarly in higher ed, we revert back to many hallowed practices – the lecture! – which is simply not a valid approach in the face of a new reality. Weick uses the analogy of firefighters who didn’t drop their tools when fleeing a brush fire, despite this impeding their escape, stating “Dropping one’s tools is a proxy for unlearning, for adaptation, for flexibility, in short, for many of the dramas that engage organizational scholars”. Higher ed is not good at knowing when to drop its tools.
7. Adversity shows us who we are – this is an old adage, and is often the moral lesson of apocalypse stories. We get to see how people react in adversity and often it is not the way we might predict. In higher ed, adversity can reveal aspects of the system itself. Does it really care about students? Can we really find ways to share knowledge and cooperate effectively? There were a lot of positive stories from this during the pandemic, but equally we have to have systems that allow those positives to flourish.
8. Things are forever changed afterwards – a lot of fiction will end with a wistful nod to how things have changed forever now. Remember during the pandemic we thought a more caring, respectful society might emerge afterwards? Yeah, maybe not so much. In higher ed some things have changed, more often around ways of working. Having virtual meetings or online conferences is often the norm now. I remember how pre-pandemic I’d have to travel for some meeting in Manchester or London, which could have just as easily been done online, but that just wasn’t the norm. Students have become accustomed to accessing resources online, and attending (or catching up on) lectures online. Being able to incorporate these prolonged changes into practice post-crisis is vital for the sustainability of the sector.
9. Things go back to exactly how they were afterwards – equally, lots of this fiction portrays how people just go back to how they were before within a year or two and put it out of their collective memory. We’ve seen this a lot in higher ed, the demand to return to campus and face to face lectures. To apply all of our resources to returning to how it used to be misses the opportunities for development, and also sets up a conflict with the previous point about adopting new elements. Hence all those empty lecture halls.
10. It couldn’t happen again… a common epilogue in this literature, after the seeming victory, has one mutated insect/rat/zombie/vampire crawling out of the wreckage, leaving the reader with the inevitable, “here we go again” feeling. Partly this is because horror doesn’t like happy endings, or the author wants a sequel, but it can also be taken as a warning against hubris. All the victorious backslapping should be accompanied by a memento mori, not so much remember you are mortal, but remember this can happen again. This is the point I attempt to make in my talks. We need to be preparing for the next crisis (if we’re not already in it), be it cost of living, political upheaval, another pandemic, global conflict, pollution, climate change, or more locally at an individual or institutional level.

If another major crisis hit next month, would we be much better prepared than 2020? Are we ready? I would hazard that we are not. Although I’m being somewhat lighthearted in the use of the horror literature medium, these are all lessons that are worth considering. Maybe we should start leaving World War Z on our senior execs desks instead of the latest management report.

I’ve been reading some interesting takes on horror recently: the meta-fiction of Native American author Stephen Graham-Jones; the influential feminist analysis of horror exploitation movies Men, Women and Chainsaws by Carol Clover; a personal account of the importance of horror in Kris Rose’s Final Girl: How Horror Movies Made Me a Better Feminist; and The Black Guy Dies First, Robin Means Coleman’s analysis of black representation in horror. And it got me thinking about analogies to ed tech. I know, as usual. First of all, the horror take…

It has to be acknowledged up front that horror is often problematic – slasher films centre on the male gaze; women tend to die more horrifically and in close up; in the occult film the central focus is male transformation to a gentler version and the woman has to do the emotional labour (in this case being possessed by a demon) in order for the guy to realise it’s ok to eat avocado toast; and there are a number of racist tropes in horror such as the magical or sacrificial figure, whose function is to help the white character.

But there is also a lot of positive interpretations to be found. For example, Kris Rose argues “Another relatable thing about Final Girls, they often aren’t believed when they try and tell people that their lives are in danger. Not being believed is a daily fact for most women. When we see this being portrayed on screen it can be validating for women. … Often in real life scenarios women who ask for help are not believed or are dismissed as being over dramatic… A lesson I think we can all take away from our Final Girls is that we should believe women more.”

In Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, the book that coined the term “final girl” Carol Clover examines exploitation horror movies as a serious genre, and becomes something of a convert. She highlights that in the Final girl there is cross-gender identification in that the predominantly young men in the audience identify with and root for the female hero. The men who might act as rescuer, as per traditional folk tales, are usually incompetent and end up dead. The woman has to do it herself. The killers are nearly always male, and sexually immature or frustrated – sort of Leatherface as the original incel. So there is little here by way of traditional male identification.  She argues that if Rambo strayed into a slasher or occult movie he would end up dead or reformed. Arguably horror represents a better grounding for raising young feminists than the conventional action film.

Robin Means Coleman proposes that “black horror is our social syllabus” in that it is used to expose, confront and challenge racial issues, from the black protagonist getting killed by troops at the end of Night of the Living Dead, to the oppressive pseudo white liberalism of Get Out.

And so, tentatively, to ed tech. I think part of what has enabled these positive aspects to emerge in horror is that it is a genre often ignored or dismissed by ‘serious’ film makers and writers. The studio thought Hitchcock had lost the plot when he wanted to make Psycho, until it made them lots of money. This allows a degree of freedom to subvert and invent. It becomes a board church (perhaps not the best term to use in relation to horror) that welcomes anyone to come and have a go. The films Clover writes about were all largely independent movies made outside of the mainstream. There is a burgeoning indie horror author field.

This brings us back to the notion of the indie ed tech approach. Using open source or self-hosted options, the sort of things that Brian Lamb and Jim Groom wrote about long ago. If the VLE, Meta, X, etc represent the big studios then lightweight tools self-hosted are the indie alternatives. These can be relatively simple, for example the metaphor generator, or any of the fun stuff Alan Levine creates. My point is not so much that this tool can do this, and here’s one for something else, but rather by operating in an indie way we create new literacies. Clover comments on how the moral panic around horror in the 80s was very patronising and didn’t appreciate how knowledgeable and literate the audience were in watching horror. Mainstream conventions had been inverted. I would like to think the same happens with ed tech where an indie approach can help in similar subversion of the dominant tech bros narratives.

In Metaphors of Ed Tech I suggested that we should approach metaphors drawn from nature with caution, writing:

“it is worth emphasising that metaphors drawn from nature are probably the most prevalent, and the most dangerous, of metaphors. Making appeals to what is deemed ‘natural’ and applying it to any form of human endeavour has led to justifications for social Darwinism, misogyny and repression, with the implication that certain states are naturally occurring and therefore inevitable.”

But the opposite is also true – we need to be wary of technological metaphors applied to nature. I came to appreciate this because I’ve been reading Merlin Sheldrake’s intriguing overview of fungal life and science, Entangled Life. He sets out the many different ways that symbiosis and natural networks operate, including the oft-quoted Wood Wide Web, wherein resources are shared in through a complex mycorrhizal fungal network. Sheldrake points out however that the phrase Wood Wide Web leads us into “plant-centrism”, which ignores the active role of fungi, stating:

It is a metaphor that tugs us into plant-centrism by implying that plans are equivalent to the webpages, or nodes, in the network, and fungi are the hyperlinks joining the nodes to one another. In the language of the hardware that comprises the Internet, plants are the routers and fungi are the cables.”

“Fungi are not passive in the network and gain from the web and shape it themselves. This is not just unfair to fungi but also distorts our focus and understanding of the processes in play. In popular accounts the emphasis in always on trees, ignoring the role of the fungi. “Everything changes when we see fungi as active participants”.

He further argues that the metaphor is problematic because it encourages people to impose values and utopias onto the natural system. As the Internet promised non-hierarchical, more community based systems, so many people have latched on to the Wood Wide Web as demonstrating the value of sharing, and altruism. While there is some truth in this, it also varies widely, some plants just take, some take now and pay later, some make exchanges, etc.

The Wood Wide Web was a useful metaphor for what was quite a mind-blowing concept, that there was this subterranean connection between the visual forest we perceived. But while metaphors drawn from nature abound in much of our everyday language and as I argued, I’d always be wary of people proposing ‘natural’ metaphors for human activity, the book was also a useful reminder to see the manner in which technological metaphors applied to nature can be limiting also. Anyway, it’s a fascinating book. But it’s fascinating because it’s about fungi and that is enough in itself, their value is not determined by what we think it can teach us about ourselves.

PS – congratulations if you read this post without making the “he’s a fun guy” joke to yourself. I failed.

A few years ago, I used the term ‘meticulous informality‘ to describe what I liked about the ALT conferences. Maren has blogged how it’s a term we’ve discussed since occasionally on dog walks. Both parts of the term are equally important for participants in an event: informality encourages participation and suggests equality; meticulous means care and support. One without the other is not sufficient – just meticulous can be stuffy and hierarchical, and solely informal can be chaotic and confusing.

Without it being an explicit intention, it captures our approach to GO-GN also. Having just hosted the largest GO-GN workshop in Edmonton, I know how much time and care goes into getting so many people to one location, when you are responsible for every aspect. The work our administrative team of Kylie and Hannah do in organising travel, hotels, meeting spaces, food and entertainment is meticulous indeed. I feel this kind of labour is sometimes overlooked in academic circles (and I also think even some GO-GN members don’t appreciate the level of work required). At the workshop we create an informal environment through the activities and the manner we structure the days.

I have joked that the breakfast is the most important part of the GO-GN workshops. I feel this because it’s a time when all the members are together and breakfast is an inherently informal meal. But the meticulous informality pervades many aspects of GO-GN, not just the workshops. The Research and Conceptual framework reports have been successful in part I think because they combine meticulous depth of the research from members, expertly curated and added to by Rob Farrow, combined with the informal, approachable graphics from Bryan Mathers. Come in, those graphics say, you are welcome here. The same would apply to webinars we host, or our communications I feel.

It’s just a hypothesis, but I wonder if part of the disillusion many feel in higher education is that we have drastically increased the meticulous part of the equation, while simultaneously decreasing the informality aspect. As I contemplate my post-OU life, I think meticulous informality will be a guiding principle for projects I want to be involved with.

Despite being 27 weeks into the year it is still only January apparently. I gave a keynote at an excellent event organised by the Open University in Wales (pictured with my colleague John Butcher), to celebrate the launch of their Access Insight Project, looking at the experience of Access and Foundation students across Wales. It’s an excellent report, with HE and FE providers across Wales all collaborating effectively (not always the case in higher/further ed). I was asked to give a ‘provocative’ talk before lunch to get people chatting. Provocative can often be a synonym for ‘obnoxious’ but I hope I avoided that. I worked up the metaphor of the internet design for building robust systems in Higher Ed, looking at the systemic, institutional and course level. My slides are on Google.

On the GO-Gn front we have organised a one day seminar for 12 members who we are bringing to OER24. If you’re going to that conference (and why wouldn’t you?), come and say hi to us. This may well be my last OER conference, so I’m glad it’ll be in a fun place (Cork), with friends such as Rajiv Jhangiani, Catherine Cronin, Tom Farrelly, and Laura Czerniewicz. Speaking of prepping for my OU departure, I’m also very pleased that my colleague Rob Farrow will be taking over from me as co-editor of JIME (along with Katy Jordan) when I step down in June.

I have been hitting books hard in this longest of months with fifteen completed. I’ve reactivated my Goodreads page for 2024, so you can track all my reads there. I’ve also dipped into using The StoryGraph, some stats shown below (they need to make these embeddable).

Marie Arana’s scholarly, comprehensive and hugely readable biography of Simon Bolivar is worth reading for the narrative alone, but it probably contains lots of lessons about revolutions, aspirations and the hard work of everyday governance that one could apply to many sectors (not least, educational technology). I am a big fan of horror writer Stephen Graham Jones, and the second of his Indian Lake trilogy, Don’t Fear the Reaper is a meta-fiction in slasher lore. Having grown up watching VHS horror in the 80s, I like the idea of this literacy in the subject – I wasn’t bunking off school, I was studying. I’ve been boring everyone talking about the importance of microbes – basically everything is down to microbes after reading I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong. Other notable reads this month: finally got around to reading last year’s hot novel, Yellowface, which was a funny, nimble take on social media, publishing, and racism; Jordan Peele edits a fine anthology of black horror writers short stories in Out There Screaming; another excellent Mexican horror from Sylvia Moreno Garcia, featuring film and Nazi occults in Silver Nitrate.

I started 2024 with some solid vinyl buying options. Maren picked up this Welsh/Brazilian fusion album from Carwyn Ellis which makes you wonder why there are not more Latin Welsh albums. It’s marvellously sunny and uplifting, which was very welcome in January. I don’t know if January is too early to call album of the year, but Bill Ryder-Jones’s Iechyd Da (Welsh for Good Health), is going to be a contender. Cinematic, sweeping & romantic, many tracks start with a simple piano and climax with strings & school choir, as if each one poses a mournful question and finds its own optimistic resolution.

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I recently read an account of the infamous Victorian murder of three-year-old Saville Ken, investigated by Jack Whicher. At one point Detective Whicher is widely pilloried for his conclusion (later prove to be correct), and he resigns from the police, with “congestion of the brain” cited as the reason. The Victorians were big on congestion (at least three people die of congestion of the bowels in the book), with its hunts of ethers and natural flows. Congestion of the brain could mean literal blood clotting, and a cause of strokes, or dementia, to a more symbolic, metaphorical congestion. It was cited as the cause of Poe’s death, probably as a euphemism for alcoholism. It is also one of those vague, all encompassing maladies that was used to put women into asylums if they were deemed a bit unruly.

In the case of Whicher it was probably intended to infer an obsession about the Saville case, or anxiety over his treatment. Matthew Arnold used the term metaphorically to propose a malaise in English society and its general “unpoetryness”. I’ve also seen it used in a loose wellness sense, and I guess that is how I’m thinking of it here.

After encountering the term I was in the middle of conducting an annual quality review, and also completing one of three monthly reports I contribute to. I was thinking ahead to June, when I leave the Open University. Part of the reasoning behind that decision was to explore creative options. I am hoping for an “open the floodgates” moment, and this may hint at a ‘brain congestion’ type metaphor I have implicitly. All those reports, meetings, priorities, strategies, emails and systems – it feels like they clog up the creative process, creating this congestion waiting to be relieved.

The counter to this, is that of creative constraints. Maybe I’ll find in June that now I can do anything, I don’t know what to do. There is a saying that “creativity loves constraints” and you often see this in education, for example writing prompts such as write a story in 6 words, or retell a classic story in an epistolary novel style, etc. It forces people to come up with new ways of approaching a problem. In this review, the authors found that creativity in organisations does often benefit from constraints, but the right type and level, concluding that “our framework also suggests that constraining the creative process too much backfires after a threshold. As such, the formula to unlocking the creative and innovation potential of employees, teams, and firms is applying the right amount of constraints.”

It’s entirely possible then that the constraints one is placed under at work foster creativity – it’s why I started this blog after all. So, the question I’ll face in July is – was it congestion of the brain stopping me being a creative wunderkind, or was that a creative high point under those constraints? We shall see…

I expect we’ll see a lot of these types of posts so I apologise in advance for bandwagon jumping. For those outside the UK, there has been a recent TV drama, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which has dramatised the Post Office scandal, where hundreds of sub postmasters were falsely accused (and convicted) of fraud because of a faulty accounting system that was rolled out in the 00s. The TV series has caused fresh outcry, actions and recriminations, and is probably one of the most important drams made in the last decade or so.

Like many people I had vaguely followed the story, but not until the TV series had I fully appreciated the scale of it, the impact on those involved and the duplicity of the Post Office senior management. People who are more knowledgeable than I can write insightful pieces about management cultures, or large IT system procurement. But one thing that I do know about is the kind of technology culture war that was in part responsible for the continued stance of the Post Office to victimise and blame sub postmasters rather than their technology. I say in part, because political ambition, career self interest, class attitudes and arrogance were probably all more significant factors.

In the intro of 25 Years of Ed Tech I set out the “adapt or die” narrative that is often levelled at higher education, with regards to educational technology:

An opinion often proffered amongst educational technology (ed tech) professionals is that theirs is a fast-changing field. This statement is sometimes used as a motivation (or veiled threat) to senior managers to embrace ed tech because if they miss out now, it’ll be too late to catch up later, or more drastically, they will face extinction. For example, Rigg (2014) asked “can universities survive the digital age?” in an article that argues universities are too slow to be relevant to young people who are embedded in their fast-moving, digital age. Such accounts both underestimate the degree to which universities have changed and are capable of change while also overestimating the digital natives-type account that all students want a university to be the equivalent of Instagram. Fullick (2014) highlighted that this imperative to adopt all change unquestioningly, and adopt it now, has a distinctly Darwinian undertone: “Resistance to change is presented as resistance to what is natural and inevitable” (para. 3). 

I see some of this in the Post Office scandal. It was brought about by the introduction of a national accounting system using electronic point of sales, replacing the existing paper based system. They were not wrong in seeing this general direction of travel – think of where we are now. But I suspect they went for an over-complicated system when the technology was not quite ready. This sets up a binary narrative however – the old paper system in the 21st century or our new digital one. No other choice is available. Senior management were inevitably on the side of progress and change, while they no doubt viewed sub postmasters as resistant and old-fashioned.

This narrative becomes deeply embedded to the point of being meshed with identity. This explains (partly, although see those other factors above) why it was so difficult for those in charge to shake themselves from the pro-Horizon stance. It was in part, an existential crisis. They couldn’t be wrong that change had to happen could they?

Of course, the answer is that change probably did need to happen, but there were degrees and ways of that. It wasn’t a case of this change or no change, but that’s how these things come to be perceived. Which brings us to ed tech. We see a similar narrative often in play in our sector. Think MOOCs, and avalanches that were coming. Ed tech companies and thought leaders are the pro-change gang and fusty old academics, are, like sub postmasters, seen as out of touch.

And now, of course, think AI. Many prophecies of doom. Of “get on board or die”. And equally they other way dismissive cries of “it’s all rubbish”. What the Post Office scandal tells us is that these binary narratives are positively dangerous.

It also illustrates what happens when trust breaks down – did the Post Office really believe hundreds of previously loyal sub postmasters decided to become embezzlers overnight? It was easier to trust the technology than question that. We might do well to consider that when it comes to student plagiarism and proctoring also.

I finally got around to reading David Epstein’s Range last year. It’s one of those popular books that makes a very powerful case, although you suspect some reporting of the academic findings may be over-simplified or contrary evidence maybe overlooked. But even so, it is a valuable validation of the multidisciplinary approach to education.

As the Director of the Open Programme at the OU, which has a multidisciplinary open degree where students can combine over 250 modules into their own pathway, a combined stem degree focused on science pathways and a postgraduate Open Masters, this is of course, something that appeals to me. I’ve talked about interdisciplinarity in educational technology before, and also the benefits of having a flexible pathway, but there were a couple of other parts of the book that resonated also.

The first was the benefit of offering different forms of assessment in establishing longer term and deeper understanding. This interleaved practice offers better results in the long term it seems over similar types of batch assessment. Within any one degree or discipline it will usually be the case that students experience different forms of assessment, but some types will dominate. A more multidisciplinary curriculum will, almost necessarily, offer a range of assessment formats, problems and experiences. So without even trying really, a by-product of such an approach is an automatic interleaving of assessment.

The second was the justification of being a bit of a dabbler. Epstein recounts how people are often embarrassed about the circuitous routes they take to a profession, or feel that their mixture of experience is not representative or valid. He makes the case that this is both more normal than we appreciate and also often essential to a sector. As someone who likes to dip into lots of subjects, it felt good to have this approach validated – I’m not being a dilettante, I’m developing range doncha know? In general an appeal against the idea that super-specialisation is the only way to go (it is definitely required of course) in society is a message we should push more often.

Lastly, as a pusher of metaphors, the value of bringing in external perspectives to solve problems was emphasised. Epstein highlights how large corporations and governments have started opening up difficult problems to everyone to pitch ideas. Frequently these collective intelligence approaches are simply ways of gathering feedback, but they are also ways of effectively generating metaphors – people bring their experience from outside the domain, and that can sometimes provide a solution.