The third resource I have to study is a press release from VNU. ‘Why do award-giving bodies value innovation?’ is the question i the course materials.

Well, remembering VNU as a company not concerned with quality or development but only interested in the money – I’d say they value innovation because it gives them an opportunity to make money.

Innovation means VNU can sell advertising space to the innovators. Then they can sell advertising space to their competitors. Then they can cobble together some editorial on the innovation so that people buy the magazine and they can tell advertisers that they have a healthy circulation.

Also, if you give someone an award they tend to mention it a lot, so VNU gets mentioned a lot.

Cynical? Moi?

I don’t like this article. It appears to muddle its technologies, it throws in terms and references without explaining them and I feel it conflates time periods. I don’t believe that the ‘concept of adding value was identified from the start [1992]’ because I don’t believe the concept of value added came in until a few years after that.

I suppose something it highlights is how quickly innovations cease to be innovative. Thirteen years ago, City University introduces email – students need skills training, they’re resistant, they can’t see what the point of it is.

Having spent some time earlier this year teasing out the differences between IT, ICT and new technology, I’m wary of people who opt for IT in an educational context. Information technology is about storing and accessing information – it gives you the tools to do well in a pub trivia quiz. It is a tool and a resource, but for learning to be taking place you need communication. Most of this article is about IT.

So I don’t think this article is focused on elearning, but on the technologies involved in elearning. It is highlighting the points that innovation requires new skills, that innovators are likely to encounter resistance, that innovation requires a willingness to change practices, and that innovation may require the use of new resources.

There was a long list of advantages to videoconfeence lectures – there are also disadvantages:
• video quality was variable
• audio quality was variable
• connection was sometimes lost
• 1-3 technical support staff were needed
• difficult for students to prepare in advance of the lecture
• lectures were not directly related to course material
• students wre shy about talking to an expert
• students found it difficult to talk to the camera
• lectures were tiring if they did not involve interaction
• needed considerable planning and preparation by staff
• time delay

I’d add to the disadvantages they mention, the loss of a chance for informal discussion. Normally, if yo have a guest lecturer from anothe country, there’s probably a time for studetns to meet them informally, and there would certainly be opportunity for faculty to do this, and to build strong links by getting to know them as a friend, not just as a lecturer.
There’s probably also a problem of timing the lecture if students and lecturer are in very different time zones.

What does this have to say about the ‘innovative nature of…the technologies used for elearning’? Perhaps it says that work is needed to remove the focus from the technology and put it back on the teaching and learning.

It appears that innovative use of technology has the potential to excite students. When it’s there and it’s working, the innovation aspect makes them more enthusiastic about a learning activity than they might otherwise be. On the other hand, if the technology becomes obtrusive by not working, it has the potential to put them off an activity they would otherwise have enjoyed.

I wonder what this videoconferencing does tot he students’ sense of community? Are they so focused on the screen that they cease to engage with the people around them?

So Luck and Laurence arranged videoconference lectures for students in New Zealand and Canada.

Advantages they identified are:
• provides students with different perspectives and new ideas
• enhances student knowledge
• enables collaborative learning
• saves time and money
• opportunity to try out new educational technologies
• followed good educational practice in many respects
• provided students with excitement in learning
• students were able to encounter and question experts in the field
• Multi-institution collaboration is possible
• New communities are built
• Discussion is promoted
• Students saw it as a high point of their course
• Provided a change of pace for the course
• Students wanted to do this more in the future.

Sounds really good, doesn’t it? Students are happy, funders are happy. I don’t think staff are quite so happy.

What does this say about ‘the innovative nature of elearning’ (is elearning really innovative by nature? Will it always be innovative, or is it just innovative at a time when there is an explosion in new technologies?)

Well, I was going to say that it provides opportunities to do things that you couldn’t do before. But is that true? Most of the advantages listed above were available in the past.

I guess students do have more time to meet and question experts in the field. This case study prhaps doesn’t show that as well as it could do. I assume tourism experts from New Zealand are fairly mobile. Some experts are presumably unable to travel because age, disability, lack of money, family commitments. Videoconfrencing could make their expertise more accessible.

Teaching methods that excite and inspire students are probably a good thing – though there was no evaluation of their learning. If they’re focused on the expert lectures and not paying much attention to the rest of their course, that’s not necessarily a good thing.

Is this an innovative use of the technology? I’m not sure. Presumably videoconferencing was developed to do exactly this. On the other hand, they appear to have altered and developed the technology, so I suppose that was innovative.

I’ve read five of the case studies now (all the ones without videos. Downloading videos without a broadband connection is generally a waste of time).

As individual studies they’re all exciting and whizzy but, as a whole, I find them rather soulless. They’re all about the equipment, they’re not about the people or the learning. Or, rather, the people and the learning are there, but they’re buried under details of how many PDAs are available and how many interactive whiteboards there are.

And the administration seems to get mixed up with the learning – it’s good to have a lot of computers because then you can do registers on line, and contact parents if children aren’t there, and you can teach the students as well. This seems to be confusing two very different things.

Some of these projects will have horrendous operating costs: in-service training, student training, software licences, equipment upgrades, maintenance contracts.

Perhaps I’d better stop looking at them en masse and start looking at them individually to see where there is genuine innovation and where there is just technology.

Gill commented:
Hi Rebecca,

I think it is very easy to get caught up with the excitement of the new technology and to forget the underlying reasons for using it in the first place. I’m having to fight that temptation all the time!

I’ve also agreed to do this H807 activity. Wonder when I’ll get the materials?

Or do I have them already – perhaps lost amongst the electronic clutter of my inbox.
cheers
Gill
Comment from euphloozie – 05/12/05 19:26

Reading through the H807 case studies – the course materials require me tomake blog entries.

The one I’ve just read is ‘Any time, any place learning: Multimedia learning with mobile phones’. It’s based on an initiative at City College, Southampton.

They provide ESOL students with whizzy mobile phones which have camera and PDA abilities.

Then eg the lecturers upload an image such as a map of the college campus and create zones within it. Learners work in pairs to send images and messages from each zone, and a composite picture is built up.

This is to help students integrate and to help them develop linguistically. As the course goes on they can be asked to do more grammatically complex things and to find out information and answer questions.

There’s a claim that learners are practising ‘grammar, idiom and pronunciation’. I’m not quite sure how this works. They get to record audio files, but there doesn’t seem to be much talking going on.

I must say, I’d be wary about teaching people English in an environment which requires a lot of texting. Is there not a danger of developing some bizarre Pidgin English style based on learning the language via text messages?

It does sound good fun, though, and I think I’d enjoy learning a foreign language in this way. They don’t say what happens if you come from a background that uses a different character set.

I’ve started looking at the H807 course materials, which I’m reviewing. I’m supposed to jot down a few initial ideas of my own on innovation in e-learning. E-learning is to be understood as ‘learning facilitated and supported by the use of information and communications technology (desktop and laptop computers, mobile and wireless devices, electronic communications, software and virtual learning environments)

It specifically says don’t bother to examine the concept of e-learning, so I won’t waste time trying to pick that definition to pieces.

Innovation, then. Well, it’s doing something new. Except it’s not quite, because I’d be doing something new if I went to Slough, but I don’t think I could claim that was innovative. And it’s not the same as invention.

Is it using existing objects and methods in new ways? How long would things stay innovative? Are they innovative the first time they are done, or the first time someone new does them, or for a few months or a year?

So an innovation in e-learning would involve using ICT for some learning purpose for which it had not been used before. Or it could be using a familiar bit of ICT for a new learning purpose. Or it could be using a familiar bit of ICT in a familiar way but using it with a new set of learners.

For example?

Well, picking on the video ipod. If I used that to show a video clip of Pride and Pred to a seminar group, that would be innovative. It would probably still be fairly innovative the next term, and it would be old-hat after a year.

If we had the video ipod for a year and I gave them to everyone in a seminar group and asked them to work together to identify the elements of an ideal happy ending, that would probably be innovative again.

If I then took the video ipods to a nursery class and showed them clips from Disney movies and talked with them about what made them happy, that would be innovative.

I guess it’s pretty easy to be innovative with a new technology, because anything you do with it in an elearning context is going to be innovative.

‘Innovative’ has a sort of shiny, happy flavour for it, but I guess most new uses/applications of technology must be unsuccessful. So perhaps it only counts as true innovation if it endures, or influences others or is successful in some way.

Inventing a car with red headlights thus wouldn’t be classed as innovative, but as stupid.

OK. That’s enough on innovation.