The 2011 Horizon Report includes predictions on the technologies that will enter mainstream use in Higher Education over the coming years. I’m a bit sceptical of these predictions as they always seem overly optimistic. For 3-years in-a-row Mobiles have been listed as entering mainstream use in one year or less… (or more it seems).
This year’s report suggests the following will be entering mainstream use in:
One Year or Less
Last week, we were sent this article by a colleague in the philosophy department, entitled “Fortune favors the BOLD (and the Italicized ): Effects of disfluency on educational outcomes”. It’s an interesting short paper that describes the outcome of two experiments which support earlier research claims about the educational benefits of using disfluent, i.e.“slightly difficult to read”, fonts.
The motivation for these studies stems from earlier research into fluency, the feeling of ease we associate with a particular thinking operation. Apparently, we tend to have a bias in favour of fluency, so much so that it affects our judgment, e.g. to the extent that “stocks from fluently named companies are judged to have higher value, [driving] purchasing decisions, which inflates the actual value of stocks” (Oppenheimer, 2008).
The annual Horizon reports track emerging technologies that are likely to have an impact on teaching and learning in the future. The predictions of earlier reports are available elsewhere on this blog: 2009 2008 2007 and if you want to go further back see the Horizon website.
A short preview of the 2010 report (PDF) is already available. The technologies it highlights (time frames for becoming mainstream to be taken with a pinch of salt perhaps) are:
If you want to know more about any of these then the preview is short, worth a look and has links to examples. The other aspect of the Reports are the key trends and challenges that it highlights:
Last night on Radio4’s Front Row novelist Susan Hill, talking to Mark Lawson about her new book (which charts a year in which she resisted buying new books, instead finally reading or re-reading those from her own collection), revealed that she had also used that year to restrict her use of the internet, in particular her internet reading.
She had previously become aware that her concentration was not what it used to be and suggested that “if you use the internet a lot you notice your concentration begins to become fragmented and you don’t have that complete concentration for two or three hours.”
With these comments she was not making a moral judgment, she was not condemning the internet for its pernicious, ruinous effects on the human ability to read; rather she was explaining how reading on the internet can embed the habit of skim-reading, of flitting from hyperlink to hyperlink, as most web pages encourage sound-bite (or rather: vision-bite) reading.
Or rather, today’s technologies for tomorrow’s teaching.
The 2009 Horizons Report has just been published. The annual report highlights 6 technologies that are likely to enter into mainstream use at educational institutions. The six technologies and their likely time frames for mainstream use are:
The horizon reports are always interesting and provide food for thought but the time frames rarely ring true to me for UK education (but perhaps they are not supposed to as the report advisory board is pre-dominantly North American). This time around, the one prediction that does seem likely is the idea of a personal web:
a collection of technologies that confer the ability to reorganize, configure and manage online content rather than just viewing it… …[to support] one’s social, professional, learning [activities]
There are many free tools already in use that allow this – delicious, WordPress, twitter, flickr, netvibes, citeulike, rememberthemilk – to name but a few. Some of these tools are looked at in the workshops that we run for staff. The report also highlights critical challenges facing educational institutions over the next five years, these include:
The CLT staff survey was conducted using Bristol Online Surveys between 30 May and 4 July 2008. There were 86 respondents, recruited from members of the clt-announce mailing list and from the readers of this blog.
Report
The following summary highlights the key results.
One final comment we particularly liked:
“CLT has done a magnificent job over the past year and there are no suggestions for improvement.”
Given that, and the fact that it’s 6pm on Friday, I’m going home.
Methodology and design
A focus group was conducted in place of the survey that has previously been used to evaluate video lectures. A series of open ended questions were devised in order to gather opinions about student experiences of lecture capture including both video and audio lectures. This report includes student feedback, problems and issues and the value of recorded lectures as a learning aid.
Three students attended the focus group, so generalising about their experiences is difficult but their experience was varied and offered valuable insight. The first student recorded lectures himself with an audio recorder with permission from his lecturers. He said that the lectures were so inspirational that he wanted a recording to be able to listen to them again and again. A second student had access to recorded lecture material centrally provided by the Media and Communications department. The third student had access to both audio recordings (podcasts) and video lectures and could comment on the value of both types of recordings.
Value of Lecture capture
All three students commented on the value of recording lecture material. In particular they said it was extremely useful for revision. One student found recorded lectures very useful for a statistics course, commenting that they were especially useful for postgraduates who have to work and study at the same time. All students mentioned that recorded material was useful if you couldn’t attend a lecture or you want a recap, saying it’s “like having your lecturer with you any time you want”.
The students commented that were more likely to dip into certain parts of the lecture rather than watch the whole lecture again. This approach was particularly useful for revision but also really helpful for grasping a point they might initially not have understood. Students talked about how lectures could be extremely content rich or ‘dense’ and that the ability to go back and review the material really helped their learning.
Audio verses video
The student who had access to podcasts and video lectures commented that video lectures are much easier to follow than audio lectures. He said:
“Podcasts have the effect of nearly dosing off, you try to concentrate but all you see is the PowerPoint slides…because you lose the personal touch, you don’t see the face, you don’t see someone moving, interacting”.
Being able to see more than just PowerPoint slides was particularly valuable in economics courses for example, where the recordings are of limited value if you can’t see the graphs or additional notes the lecturer makes. However, one student felt that audio would be sufficient in his subject, which was not so reliant on visual material. Overall, in terms of retaining interest, the video lectures where the lecturer and the PowerPoint could be seen were preferred.
Access and Quality Issues
Students reported no real problems accessing video lectures both on and off campus. That said, later on in the focus group the students stated that the recorded lectures should be easier to find. They thought it would be helpful to have a podcast web page, perhaps under departmental headings or an archive of recordings. Another student commented that it was difficult to find the statistics lectures on the Methodology Institute website. In terms of navigation, the students did not report any problems with the format of the videos. One student felt it might be nice to divide the video into chapters, although he appreciated this would involve considerable post-production work.
In terms of quality, it was felt that the audio could be improved. The audio quality of public lectures in large theatres was noticeably better than some of the recordings from classrooms.
Value as a learning experience
One student commented that it was reassuring to know that certain lectures in statistics were being recorded, so they could go back and revisit the material. Another student found many of his lecturers inspirational and knowing there was a recording of the event allowed him to enjoy the lecture without having to take detailed notes. Again it was commented that being able to review the material for a second or even third time was valuable to ensure they grasped everything that was being said. The students felt this was especially good for students for whom English was not their first language.
The challenge of taking notes and listening to a lecture properly was mentioned by students, who felt it was “Humanly impossible to make notes in full” without listening again. This student felt you might miss around 35% of what was said during a lecture. They found it both reassuring to know the video lectures were available and extremely helpful for their revision. Students also commented that being able to listen to the lecture again often saved the students from needing to consult their lecturer with questions at a later date.
Lecture capture and attendance
The students were asked specifically about whether lecture capture affected attendance and certainly some of the students had friends who didn’t attend some lectures because they knew it would be available as a video lecture. Students tended to skip those subjects that were perceived as less interesting or more generic if they knew it was being recorded. However, in general the students we questioned talked about enjoying attending lectures and didn’t think the recordings had affected attendance overall. They reported that even if they didn’t attend a lecture they still needed to dedicate the time to listen to or watch the recording, so it was really easier for them to attend. As one student said:
“You need to go to the lecture to make it real, solidarity with your friends…you want to see the people, ask questions and see your friends asking questions.”
Future Developments
The students were keen to see all lectures at LSE recorded if possible and they also thought it would be useful to have access to recorded lectures after the course finished.
Students were asked specifically about whether they might be interested in listening or watching the lectures via mobile technology, such as on their mobile phone. Two of the group felt this might be useful, although they felt they were more likely to listen to public lectures and inspirational lectures on the bus, rather than material you needed to concentrate on in detail.
JS / SL
May 2008
Oracle Building, Moorgate, 20 Feb 2008
This was a chance for various e-learning labs to show off their work and look for opportunities for collaboration. There were 16 labs represented in all, and chances to see 4 different presentations during the day. Unbelievably, there was no internet access in the presentation rooms on the day, so live demos were impossible and presenters had to use screenshots.
Notes from the 4 presentations I saw:
Chimera, University of Essex
This was previously a BT research lab that was taken over by the University, and it still has close ties to BT, who provide a lot of CASE studentships. They’re not specifically an e-learning unit – their research covers a wide range of subjects around the personal and social use of ICT.
On their site they have a dedicated 2-bedroom flat that they use for research into household technologies and ethnographic studies of how people interact with technology.
Projects include:
CARET, University of Cambridge
This unit is independent of faculty or colleges, and is centrally funded, so it has to justify its existence by being as useful as possible. There is no institutional VLE at Cambridge but Sakai (a.k.a. CamTools) is a de facto standard on all their projects now because they like it so much. They build bespoke specialist tools, such as a molecular structure visualiser, and integrate it into CamTools.
Other projects:
ILRT, Bristol
They host Intute, BOS and TASi, which will soon have a moving-image remit as well.
Projects:
IET, Open University
I didn’t really get a great deal out of this one, but here are some disconnected tidbits:
All in all quite an interesting day.
Steve
The annual Horizon reports from the New Media Consortium highlight emerging technologies that they believe are likely to impact on learning & teaching over the next 5 years. The 2008 Horizon Report (PDF) suggests the following are set to become mainstream in learning-focused organisations over the next few years:
Some new terms to me there. Looking back at a post on this blog about the 2007 report it seems to me that the horizons have previously been a bit optimistic… while user-generated content & social networking (last year’s immediate horizons) may be considered mainstream in the wider world, I don’t think that’s the case in “learning-focused organisations”, particularly UK HE institutions. Far from it. While some individuals within these organisations may be ‘generating’ and networking I don’t feel its mainstream practice, certainly not here in the UK HE. Only a few organisations have implemented & encouraged such activities at the institutional level. Timing aside, an interesting look into the future.
What are the emerging technologies likely to impact on learning & teaching in the next 5 years? According to the 2007 Horizon Report (PDF) we might expect the wide adoption in education of:
in the next year or less… and
in two to three years… and
in four to five years.
The report is worth a look, each section contains links to existing examples and further reading plus the del.icio.us bookmarks used by the writers. It’s quite US-focussed so perhaps add a few years on?
It’s a collaboartion between EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative and the New Media Consortium and earlier predictions are available.
I spotted it on SocialTech written by Josie Fraser who seems to be the only UK-based member of the 27-strong Horizon Advisory Board (the authors).
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