Logos & Mythos:the political dilemmas of Web 2.0 in an accreditation-driven educational environment

Contact : Michael.Begg@ed.ac.uk

Learning Technology SectionCollege of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine

University of Edinburgh

Michael Begg, Rachel Ellaway, David Dewhurst, Hamish Macleod

Logos & Mythos

Who are we? And why?

• Educational Informaticians

• Academic Skunkworks

• ICE 2 “In a Glass Darkly”

• Proximal Developers

• Being proximal we are “at odds” occasionally “threatening” and usually “awkward” at an institutional level

So…

US!

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It was a simple proposition

• Web 2.0 is lovely

• Institutions are old fuzzy wuzzies

• They don’t like it up ‘em

…But

Logos & MythosDon’t Panic!

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Logos & Mythos

What’s the problem?

• What is Web 2.0, and where are the standards?

• Why do institutions say they like it, and do so little?

• Who is implementing this - and who owns “it”?

• From where does the claim arise that its going to make things better?

• What makes us “us” and the institution “them”?

• Is Web 2.0 for us or them?

• And students?

… So

Wee bit of Panic!

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Logos & Mythos

P.O.V 1 - institutions• eLearning increasingly embedded, but open to individual

interpretation

• Institutions now reliant upon technocracy for increased activity, increased numbers, increased distances

• Growth of “managerialist” “top down” “centralist” processes

• Often overbearing - and largely unsubstantiated - caution over committed implementation of user-centred technologies

• Implementation (if any) at teaching not reflected in alignment of assessment

Underlying framework

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Logos & Mythos

P.O.V 2 - Web 2.0

• Definition open to interpretation, few standards

• Powerful corporations steer the democratisation of content

• Implementation “hype-cycle”… but a lot of good work out there!

Underlying framework

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Logos & MythosUnderlying framework

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P.O.V 3 - Learning Technologists• Role, purpose and function open to interpretation (see a pattern?)

– Professionalism?

• Activities aspire to pedagogical interventions but largely amount to enhancement of existing centralist administrative paradigms and tasks

• Direct eLearning activity carried out at a sub-institutional level, in cahoots with individual teachers, equally operating beneath the institutional radar

• Learning Technologists delivering eLearning as a partisan activity

Logos & Mythos

P.O.V 4 - students

• HE is now - and has been for some time - a system of accreditation

• Students are complicit in this

so…

• “the suggestion that students are engaged either willingly or subconsciously with their own education as a means towards accreditation rather than a period of their life devoted to the self enriching and societal advancing qualities of academic engagement

begs the question – who are the partisans fighting for?”

Underlying framework

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Logos & Mythos

Towards Logos• High occurrence of “personal interpretation” with regards to

eLearning, Learning Technologists and Web 2.0

• Lack of concrete definition for Web 2.0

• Lack of common standards within Web 2.0

• Little of substance in institutional adoption (or lack of) strategies

• SPIRE (JISC funded) explored usage

• Work required to explore alignment of institutions, L-Techs and Web 2.0 - political and personal constructs

So…

Towards Logos

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Logos & Mythos

The politics of Web 2.0 engagement

• Dialectic between corporate and individual

• Potential value beyond Web 2.0 to address power and influence more fully

• Questionnaire returns?

Socio-economic positioning

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Logos & Mythos

Personal construction of domains

• Personal Construct Psychology

• Elicitation - new phenomena “anticipated”by existing knowledge and beliefs

Reifying personal belief structure

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Logos & Mythos

Soap Opera Reprise

• New democratic tools being offered by multinational corporations

• To institutions who love the idea but cannot get under the skin

• While partisans work beneath the radar to provide “good stuff”

• To a user-base more interested in getting their certificate of attendance

Soap Opera Reprise

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Logos & Mythos

More than soap• The relationships between institutions, practitioners and applications

are personally construed and collectively positioned in socio-political terms

• The terms can only be negotiated when irresistibly clear for all to see

• Such terms are not negotiated through championing individual activity or hollow dogmatic reservations

• All factors are relevant (Art Worlds) It is unreasonable to expect the logical exploration of Web 2.0 (or 3, or 4) to NOT include consideration of personal and institutional politics, power and philosophy

More than soap

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Thank You!

Contact : Michael.Begg@ed.ac.uk