Olle Hagman @ Skelleftea

Knowledge building was the theme of [Olle Hagman](http://www.sts.gu.se/staff/hagman/default.html)’s talk.

It connected well with the talk I gave just before (will put my slides online a bit later): he made the point that even if you have an image of the Mona Lisa, and even if you have the paint and all the other materials, that doesn’t mean that you will be able to paint it.

If we want to make universities better knowledge building institutions, we need to encourage risk taking and provide feedback and rewards. The audience feedback was that there is no conversation about this issue in most universities: there is no encouragement to take risks…

Olle mentioned that “save rooms” are important, places where you can take risks without being existentially threatened, complemented with feedback channels, that should enable more experimentation.

As a concrete example from the Skelleftea context, a student can develop an application that helps a PhD. student to obtain data for a sawmill simulation, all of it in collaboration with a local company, so that all involved build knowledge that is relevant to the others.

An obvious problem is how to evaluate this sort of student work. Another issue is that some will feel uncomfortable relinquishing control.

Olle mentioned some success stories, but also mentioned challenges, like professors raising funds rather than organizing the projects or processes, or the fuziness of “success” and how it can be measured. (I think that the latter issue is a REALLY big one that warrants serious debate…)

Gary Webster @ Skelleftea

Was again late – conversations are too interesting here, and I was asked to give some feedback on learning objects under development here for the [BioMine](http://biomine.brgm.fr) group…

[Gary Webster](http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/lnc/Webster.htm) talked about “Education Cultures”. In Sweden, a number of “excellence centers” are being funded to foster multi-disciplinary research in collaboration with business. One problem is that the different actors have different cultures, value structures, etc. For instance, Gary compared academics with corporates and also Swedes/Europeans with Americans.

One example? Swedes do personal stuff at home, professional things at work and leisure things at … leisure. Anglo-Americans do all three at all three. If you are unaware of that sort of difference, then uncomfortable situations may arise.

Another one? Is virtual communication really the same as what goes on in real spaces that are safe, neutral or casual?

I think that Gary wanted IT to better support social processes: he mentioned blogs, for instancee.

I asked whether there is really always that sort of juxtaposition: if we cut back on IT, then we may loose the opportunity to interact alltogether? He answered that sometimes people invest in IT rather than in for instance a cosy student pub, and then the one goes at the expense of the other…

Left me wondering, which I guess is good… There are ALWAYS trade-offs to be made, no?

Rex Taylor @ Skelleftea

[Rex Taylor](http://www.cc.gla.ac.uk/newstaff/r_taylor.htm) talked about multi-institutional campuses (campi?).

The University of South Scotland started in 1994 with a grassroots political campaign. The local government set up a campus and invited existing institutions to locate there. Glasgow and Paisley universities joined, as did Bell College and Dumfries and Gallloway College.

This was a bit more foreign as a topic to me, though I certainly appreciate the idea of sharing not only content and tools, but also campus infrastructure!

I liked the view that there were “centrifugal” and “centripetal” forces that strengthen or weaken collaboration.

Elza Dunkels @ Skelleftea

I was late for the talk by [Elza Dunkels](http://www.educ.umu.se/~eldu/) on “the digital native as a student” – of course, she referred to [Marc Prensky](http://www.marcprensky.com/) who coined the term “digital immigrant and native”.

Themes in her talk:

- natural learning: This was a bit unclear to me: I think Elza was referring to the more natural
- surfacing: Bullying can become visible, as can be the fact that students are messaging during lectures. Before, the fact that thoughts were wandering to other topics was less visible. Social feedback on eBay for instance similarly increases transparency.
- openness: This is more focused on users: blogs, moblogs, communities, etc. (Hey, this applies to me!) Dangers include predators like pedophiles.
- informal learning: For Elza, this refers to all learning outside of the educational system. A simple example is that youngsters now know how to type without taking classes, which is how Elza learned typing at school. Another example is a girl posting pictures she’s processed with Photoshop – they looked quite good. The point was that that girl had quite bad grades, and failed her art classes…
- collective learning: Elza had posted her own definitions from her web site to the Swedish version of wikipedia. The next day, someone asked in the discussion forum whether she had the permission Since, her original definitions have evolved and she has learned herself in the process.

Elza encouraged the participants to integrate informal learning into educational systems: not by adjusting to youth culture, but by using the forces of informal learning. We should develop strategies for change, rather than trying to fight it. Learning should be a collective process.

Interested? [Elza has a blog](http://kulturer.net/blog/index.html)…

Questions from the audience:

- Isn’t television and music a part of youth culture at least as much as Internet?
- Will the digital native still be able to critique the digital revolution, or is he just a part of it?

I had a question about whether the difference is not that we are moving to something specific that is different from what we have now, but that the rate of change is what is different: the digital natives of today will be digital immigrants of the world 5 years from now!

Philip Long @ Skelleftea

[Philip Long](http://www.tltgroup.org/about/long.htm) mentioned that nowadays 1250 of MIT’s 1800 courses are available in [OpenCourseWare](http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/). Courses are revisited every 3 years, to renew their contents. What he sees as the main difference of OCW is the institutional commitment, which leads to a depth and breadth of materials.

Interestingly, most hits from outside the USA come from China, India, Canada and South Korea. Twelve OCW sites are up and running, and 40 are underway, while 20 more are being considered.

Philip then talked about [icampus](http://icampus.mit.edu/) that is intended to complement OCW, based on the principles set out in [How People Learn](http://www.newhorizons.org/neuro/neu_review_bransford.htm). The tools in icampus are available under an open source license: MIT wants to assess how they can be put to use elsewhere.

[xTutor](http://icampus.mit.edu/XTutor/) focuses on an introductory computer science class that relies on scheme to help students think about computational problems: slides, full text and audio are complemented with interactive problems. The material is used in a blended learning approach, and students like being able to work at their own pace. Evaluations show that this is more effective for both broad concepts and detailed skills.

[iLabs](http://icampus.mit.edu/ilabs/) focuses on remote experiments, much as [we do in ProLearn](http://prolearn-project.org/articles/wp3/index.html). Five MIT experiments focus on signal analysis, polymer crystallization, shake table, micro-electronics and heat exchange. The integration into LabView looks quite nice and useful – I very much like the idea of integrating with what people already use and adding to that, rather than developing something completely new from scratch!

[xMAS](http://web.mit.edu/shakspere/xmas.html) is a cross-media annotation system: it enables referring to a clip from a DVD. The student will need a local copy – no copies are made, so as to avoid problems with intellectual property.

In wrapping up, Philip concluded that we’re sharing content and tools. What we are not doing very well is collaboration across institutions – I mentioned to him over coffee in the morning that I think we may need to find ways to progress these issues that do not require formal collaboration schemes, somewhat in a web2.0 fashion…

Questions from the audience related to quality and sustainability… Philip mentioned that faculty are short on time and that the people infrastructure to support them with cleaning up materials helps to convince them to contribute.

Emerging Pieces in the Higher Education Puzzle

Am in beautiful, snowy (!) [Skelleftea](http://www.skelleftea.se/) in Sweden, for a conference on “[Emerging Pieces in the Higher Education Puzzle](http://www.campus.skelleftea.se/ep/index.html)”…

Most of [the conference is streamed](http://www.norran.se/sektion_c.php?id=577582&avdelning;_1=102&avdelning;_2=0%20), so you can join today or tomorrow – and I believe that you will be able to see the sessions afterwards too.

BTW, if you have any questions for the presenters, just let me know and I can forward your comment or question to them – I’m here until Thursday 27 October, around noon… And, if you’re interested, my talk is on Thursday morning.

ENJOY!