E-flections

We were offered a vision of how the academic conference might be re-imagined with the final words of the 6th Designs on E Learning conference held at Savannah College of Art and Design. Owen Kelly, from ARCADA in Helsinki, Finland, where Designs will be held in 2011, gave an outline of their plans for the next meeting, which if they come to fruition sound really interesting and a real challenge to the traditional format of papers presentations and lots of talk over lunch.

The idea is that the conference will last for 6 weeks, with a long initial period of online interaction culminating in the actual f2f event. Presenters will be asked to upload their papers and presentations well in advance of the conference, and the participants will be able to interact with them, post comments, read and absorb them etc well ahead of time. At the conference itself, the presenters will give just a short outline of their work and then lead an in-depth discussion of the issues it raises. This promises to really engage the audience, and should lead to a much deeper debate than usual.

ARCADA Helsinki

All the sessions will be webcast live – this could be tricky if they really are going to go for an interactive discussion – and will have a live feed in from the online audience to ask questions directly.

Talking to Owen afterwards they really seem committed to this vision, and we discussed that perhaps the presenters could give the traditional paper as a webinar before the event, and that we could hold other webinars after the conference to keep the discussion going. We also thought that if it was presented as a real opportunity for the presenters to get peer feedback on their work it could be sold to the management who might otherwise question the challenge to the traditional format.

I think this has real potential, and could help to bridge the gap between the ‘unconference’ style event and the more formal one.

We also had some great discussions with Keith Bailey from Penn State and the SCAD team about how to make Designs part of an ongoing process of establishing a more solid pedagogy for art and design. A key part of this was the idea for an open journal, and that we would also collaborate on a project to imagine what a ‘virtual open studio’ might be in our disciplines – rethinking the VLE/LMS with an art/design twist. We had a good breakfast brainstorm on this and started a Google doc on what it might be; more on this in another post shortly. This should link the conference to an actual open source product, and to a reification of the production of the conference too, all good stuff.

All this adds to the debate James Clay and I started on the cognitive surplus of a conference and conference formatting.

In my own small way I tried to experiment with the presentation format as well, I had a fairly long session of 45 minutes for my ‘paper’, so gave a 20 min ‘talk’ and then broke the audience up into small discussion groups to brainstorm a question that related to my talk – and a question that I wanted some answers to. I asked them to talk about what ways might web 2.0 enhance reflective practice, and to sue examples from their own experience. We made a public Google doc and allowed everyone to post their ideas to it. This worked ok; although a MAJOR bug was that the ipad does not support Google docs unless you download an app, which we only discovered during the session. And as lots of the participants had ipads not laptops, his hindered our ability to collaborate. But as a concept it worked really well, the participants really engaged with it and the discussions were really active. Proof of the pudding was that most of them stayed on after the session ended to carry on their group discussions and I had to virtually force them out to go to lunch – now that doesn’t normally happen at the end of a sessions! And of course, we created an artefact of the session, which everyone could share and contribute to.

How else might we rework the conference presentation format??

Collaboration, co-creation, communities of practice,the ‘virtual studio’,  mobile learning and digital literacies were the emerging themes of the 6^th Designs on E Learning conference which was held this year in the stunningly beautiful city of Savannah Georgia, otherwise known as ‘Slowvannah’, and hosted by the impressive Savannah College of Art and Design, SCAD (they even have their own art deco cinema!)

The opening reception set the scene, and was held in one of the beautiful garden squares that dot the historic centre of the city; it was great to be out in the fresh air at the start of a conference for a change.

This is the only international conference focusing specifically on learning technology in art and design, and had a good attendance of around 100, mostly from the USA but with a good scattering of presenters and attendees from the UK, South Africa and New Zealand.

A major theme was that the ‘virtual studio’ can offer real advantages and affordances over the physical one, and that the potential for an ‘augmented studio’ is immense. Darrel Naylor-Johnson  of SCAD explained how art has always been affected by technology from the days of using animal fat for cave painting thru the invention of oil painting to today. He maintained, quite rightly, that the virtual studio, or at least the augmented studio, can have advantages over the traditional one. He gave examples of how repetitive activities can be better demonstrated using video recordings than ‘real’ demos – which typically only the students right at the front can see, and showed an augmented reality video that superimposed a clock face on a drawing class that made the technique much easier to visualise.

Keith Bailey of Penn State demonstrated their ‘Assignment Studio’, a drupal based interface to facilitate the sharing and managing of art works between staff and students. This has had real impact, students can curate their own digital galleries and it has saved up to 40% of tutors time in download/uploading of files for assessment purposes.

Nancy Turner of UAL argued that creating digitally literate graduates should be at the cornerstone of any university education, especially in art and design.  She saw the key drivers of e learning  being  student expectations,  diversity and declining resources of staff and space, but argued that the most significant factor was the need to provide students with arena to develop digital literacy. In this she foregrounded the idea of co –creation of projects between staff and students, citing the work of Elizabeth Saunders on the collaborative design process with non designers.  She then posed  the key question of  how often do we collaborate with our students in the curriculum design process? This is a really important issue, and its great to see someone raising it as a vital part of the curriculum and course design process. She also highlighted the work we have been doing together on developing the 5 C’s of digital literacy - curation, critique, creation, collaboration and communcation

Several presentations explored this idea of collaborative co creation in depth, and were really inspiring in terms of how they had brought together disparate groups of students to work with tutors in a non hierarchical way.

The Face Book project was was a brilliant exploration of identity and digital presence, and investigated  people’s first impressions of others in social media an how they ‘profile’ each other. It  led by Jenna Frye and Christopher Morgan, and was a collaboration between Morgan State University, which is public with predominantly African American students and mostly black and MICA, a private college that is mostly white. The project took advantage of student’s familiarity and use of facebook but critically engaged with it to investigate how profile pictures generate stereotypes. The students submitted profile pictures and then selected a collaborator by choosing from these images without any other information about the other participants-like in facebook

Each student then had to profile their collaborator solely based in their profile picture then sent it to partner, they then had to write profiles of each other again based solely on the photographs. Finally they shared their real profiles with each other. They then made a ‘poetic portrait’ of their partner, and all the collaborative ‘portraits’ were then put together in a book using blurb where they can be ordered as a book. The Face Book opened up an honest debate around race and stereotyping in Baltimore, and began to break down segregation between what were previously completely separate worlds – some of the students met up in ‘real life’ and began to build connections between the 2 colleges.

Another great project was LINKED, another co-creation between 2 institutions. it was presented by Helen Armstrong and Zvezdana Stojmirovic, both graphic design professors. Their central concern was how could co creation gain more importance in the creative process? They identified the emergence of the ‘amateur creative’ and participatory culture, and focused on how to bring the energy of this into the classroom. They had a fascinating position based on Dmitri Siegel’s idea of the ‘Templated Mind’, arguing that users today expect to contribute/interact with media in a ‘Templated way’ – flikr being a great example – where the technology provides a understandable framework into which participatory culture can emerge – a kind of formal structure into which informal content can be arranged.  They identified a real tension between proprietary market based artefacts and individual social and peer produced ones, and argued that ‘rather than endorse global universal visions we can encourage the expression of local voices’.

The also drew on Yochai Benkler’s idea of modules of work – small units of independent work that get contributed to larger project as an underlying principle for a participatory design project between Miami university and Maryland institute College of Art graphic design students. The project had 5 key concepts in that it had to be inclusive, modular, accessible, critical and type-driven. Over 4 weeks they each made their own individual ‘letter’ which fitted into the word LINKED, these 57 variations on a theme of type were then edited into a 17 second animation of the word. Here is the  the final collaborative piece on Vimeo

LINKED_FINAL_SOUND from Miami MICA on Vimeo.

What I really liked about both of these projects was that the technology was not the focus of the work but rather an enabler of it, and that both projects dealt with the issues of the social politics of technology in really interesting ways.  For me this was a real insight, and a great example of how to get students to begin to question the digital environment and think about what impact it has on social relations, but doing it in a situated way through an authentic collaborative learning experience.

Do you have any examples of this kind of project that critically engages with the social politics of the web??

New wine, old bottles was possibly the key theme of ALT-C in that much of the discussion flowed around questioning the relevance and role of traditional delivery methods of education in the digital age. From Donald Clark’s dissing of the lecture format, which he puzzlingly delivered by giving a pretty good lecture (in the sense that it was entertaining, polemical, well illustrated, he didn’t read from a paper, he engaged the audience, and he swore a lot, see Steve Wheeler , Peter Tinson and David Kernohan for more discussion on this ), to James Clay’s ending question about PLE’s that echoed last year’s clarion call that the ‘VLE is dead’, there was a lot of discussion about whether we need a new paradigm for learning that acknowledges that formal learning might need to be a preparation for informal learning rather than the other way around.

The key moment for me was when Sugata Mitra demonstrated that the key role of the educator is to set some parameters for learning then let the learner get stuck in: educators should ask the questions, he said, and let the learners find the answers. He proved the efficacy of this by telling the story of how he challenged a group of Indian schoolchildren to master the complexities of molecular biology completely on their own purely by interacting with the web; expecting the experiment to be a total failure he, and the audience, were astonished when after just a few months the group of children had collaboratively raised their understanding of the subject to close that of an undergraduate student. Mark Prensky and the Innovative educator seem to be thinking along the same lines.

But the overriding feeling for me at my first ALT-C was a sense of nagging disappointment that despite being populated with over 400 of the best practitioners of learning technology around today, what did we actually achieve in concrete terms, what artefact, statement, decision, conclusion or prediction did we build? (Although sadly this is true of most conferences whatever the subject) My disappointment was exacerbated by my expectations, I had expected that at a conference like ALT-C I would be blown away by examples of amazing ways to use learning technology to deliver ideas, presentations and collaborations; instead sadly I was blown away by how dull, boring and traditional so many of the sessions were. There is, and forgive me for shouting at this point, ABSOLUTELY NO EXCUSE FOR BULLETPOINTED POWERPOINTS THAT CANT BE READ at a conference like this, you’ve all had ages to prepare so YOU MUST DO BETTER. I’m not saying my style is perfect, but at least I show lots of pretty pictures and don’t read from my slides. Admittedly there were presentations that did something different, engaging and new – Thom Cochrane’s prezi seems to have been one although I missed it – and there were several that relied on the force of the presenter themselves – such as Dave White’s. (if you need some inspiration, see Presentation Zen for a start and follow his advice)

My disappointment was also at the traditional format of much of the conference too, lots of short and long papers, and the usual milling around at lunch and dinner. I had expected something much more creative and collaborative, along the lines of the unconference idea or barcamp for example. This lack of what we might call ‘organised informality’ is a key failure of so many conferences, and fails to exploit what we might call the ‘cognitive surplus’ of such events. Clay Shirky’s idea can easily be extended to the conference arena, just imagine if instead of answering the techies equivalent of a Sunday pub quiz, all that talent, brains and application had been harnessed for the evening to actually DO something. It doesn’t really matter what, but something. Collectively there was something in the order of 1000 work days at the conference, which if it was a research grant would have been in the order of hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of staff buy out. Even if  just a fraction of that had been harnessed in a more focused way, we could have done something amazing together. I do not doubt that there was lots of flow and exchange of ideas and experiences at the conference, and that lots of deals were done, but there is little coherent evidence of this, no artefact left to be proud of except the scatterings of blogs and tweets.

So here are some suggestions for future conferences.

One: aggregate all of the content of the conference in real time to make a live, digital publication – newspapers and magazines are published every day from scratch, so why cant a conference be reported on in real time. Take a team of volunteers – student journalists perhaps- and produce a publication that takes the twitter feeds, blog posts, conference abstracts, live interviews with flip cams whatever, to give what Dave White has suggested could be seen as a sense of ‘eventedness’ of the conference – this builds on the cool aggregation of the twitter feeds from ALT-C that Tony Hirst has done or Andy Powell’s analysis of their content

Two: Instead of a ‘pub quiz social’ make one night of the conference more like a barcamp event, except with a theme – a bit like a pub lock in – you are not leaving here until you have done something useful – really dig down and debate an issue and come up with a document or something – theme to be decided by the conference itself.

Three: organise the lunch sessions more into themed discussions, and make them longer – say 2 hours – birds of a feather tables for example, or get the keynotes/invited speakers/presenters to each sit at a table and lead off a discussion, more of a knowledge cafe format

So what ideas have you got to make use of the cognitive surplus of a conference??