JISC

JISC 2008 Conference, ICC, Birmingham, Tuesday 14 April 2008

It’s a genuine privilege to be invited to speak to you here this morning.

Since the subject of my speech is education and technology, I thought I’d begin with a story which a friend of mine who works in telephony told me just last week.

Digging to a depth of over 100 meters at a site adjacent to Balliol College, archaeologists recently found traces of copper wire dating back 1,000 years.

They came to the conclusion that Oxford must have had some primitive form of telephone network centuries ago.

Not to be outdone by Oxford, scientists over at Cambridge started a similar dig alongside the walls of Trinity College to see what they could come up with.

Shortly thereafter headlines in our newspapers proclaimed: "Cambridge archaeologists have found traces of pre-Roman fibber-optic cable, and have concluded that Cambridge had a fairly advanced digital communications network as much as a thousand years earlier than Oxford."

One month later a newspaper in Milton Keynes reported the following:
"After digging to a depth of over 1, 000 meters on the site of the Open University scientists found - absolutely nothing.
The only possible conclusion is that 5,000 years ago, local ancestors in Milton Keynes were using wireless technology!”

In fact, it’s almost exactly one year ago that I was formally installed as the fifth Chancellor of the Open University.

That day, during my acceptance speech, I tried to convey the tremendous sense of pride I felt, and continue to feel, in formally taking up what I see as an extremely important role.

The reasons are simple; not only is it the University that most closely equates to my own, rather bumpy, academic journey – it is also the repository of the dreams of hundreds of thousands, like me, who thought that the possibility of higher education had, for whatever reason, passed them by.

During a career that’s spanned a little over fifty years I’ve occupied myself in a number of quite distinct areas of interest, but there’s always been an important connecting thread that’s helped make each transition that much more rational.

That thread can be variously described as the acquisition of knowledge, understanding, ‘education’ or simply, experience.

What’s certain is that everything - and I really do mean everything I’ve learned through my work in Cinema, for Unicef, and in various spheres of Government, has only reinforced my view that, in the words of the author and scientist H.G. Wells, the future really is a race;

“a race, between Education and Catastrophe”.

Personally, not finding the idea of catastrophe all that attractive, I decided some while ago to throw in my lot with Education!

The OU itself was of course a perfect example of the marriage of learning to technology and innovation.

Prior to becoming Chancellor of the OU, I’d spent ten happy and thoroughly productive years as Chancellor of the University of Sunderland.

A university which, well before I arrived, was actively embracing technology; a university which saw technology as a bridge to a regional constituency that needed every scrap of help it could get.

A university which, from the outset, understood the potential technology offered for enhancing access; and the possibility of re-imagining the whole process of learning.

At Sunderland, there was no room for misconceptions or ‘over zealous’ attitudes towards technology whereas, had I become Chancellor at one of the older – copper wire - universities, it’s possible that attempts would have been made to extinguish at least some of my sense of adventure!

But at Sunderland, we positively rejoiced in an altogether awesome home for the informatics department – designed to have the same effect on visitors as did the Berber Court at the Foreign Office!

But this morning I’d like to reflect on the impact technology has already had upon learning, in the hope of encouraging us to think about ways in which might strengthen and broaden that impact on the FE and HE sectors as a whole.

After all, as I’ve mentioned, the OU is itself a product of harnessing the power of technology to promote learning; and in doing so, massively increase access to education.

In this respect, and sometimes against the odds, the OU has remained ahead of the curve. We pioneered the first significant use of e-learning for higher education, through networked student and tutor conferencing in the early 1990s, followed by a hugely successful course entitled “You, your computer and the web” which only finished four years ago.

Yet, despite this pioneering work, can any of us working anywhere in Higher Education, certainly here in the UK, honestly claim to be doing everything that’s possible to enable technology to transform standards of achievement – at best I’d have to say, ‘nothing like enough’.

Our all too obvious challenge is to prepare today’s students for a world of increasing unpredictability, equipping them with the necessary sense of compassion, co-operation and agility to anticipate and deal with whatever lies ahead.

It’s my personal belief that they’ll find themselves facing problems significantly more complex than anything we’re in a position to wholly prepare them for.

And who exactly are ‘they’ – well last night I was explaining to a group of award winning teachers that the young people in their classrooms are likely to face a set of options very different from those that existed even a few years ago.

By way of example; when I entered the film world in 1971 I was among only 10% of the workforce who were self employed, and we ‘freelancers’ where regarded as well below the salt in terms of the industry pecking order.

However by the time I left the industry in 1997 the situation had exactly reversed itself, and less than 10% of the work-force were permanently employed!

Could this be the established pattern of the future world of work?

After all the notion of there being any ‘jobs for life’ is already a cruel fiction.

That being the case, can we with any honesty claim to be educating all of our young people for a lifetime of self employment – and the lifetime of self improvement that will necessitate!

Having spent most of the past year chairing the Joint Parliamentary Committee on the Climate Change Bill I’ve learned to take very seriously Einstein’s injunction that:

“It’s no good trying to solve problems with the same sort of thinking that caused them.”

But the truth is, in stark contrast to our rapidly changing social, cultural and economic environment; much of the form, the content and even the method of formal education, continues to remain relatively unchanged - rather more in tune with the immediate past than the immediate future!

In many senses, we – the active influencers of change are, at least in my judgment, underachieving as a result of stifling our creativity, our ambition - and our imagination for what the future of learning might look like.

As a teenager, the closest thing to a source of unquestioned knowledge in our home was twelve volumes of the ‘Everyman Encyclopedia’ – and even then, it was twenty years out of date!
But then this was the mid-fifties, at which point being twenty years out of date didn’t matter all that much; except in relation to the length of your hair or the width of your trousers!

In stark contrast, we’re now beginning to see learners of all ages using digital technology to gain access to a vast and dynamic ‘web’ of information, people and digital tools.

As a result, we are finding that young people expect a new form of engagement with the world around them; one that doesn’t simply rely on accessing information but on creating new knowledge, new products and new resources.

We are seeing people engaging with learning in online communities, taking on the role of teacher, expert, mentor or just plain ‘adviser’ to other people - irrespective of their age and experience.

Only by engaging with these new and extraordinary learning processes, facilitated by digital technology, and by taking ownership of the ethos that drives them, will we produce a generation of creative learners with a breadth and a depth of understanding capable of dealing with the immense challenges of this new century.

By way of example; just imagine being able to harness the viral power of Wikipedia, Facebook or even massively multiplayer online games to nurture, encourage and reward skills such as collaboration, problem-solving, resilience and creativity, skills that are going to be more vital than ever in the next twenty to thirty years?

What I believe we will see is the development of an ever greater layering and depth to online research.

For example, I spend a fair amount of time on sites which have advanced search capacity embedded into them.

As a result, I can easily envisage a time at which a number of these sites will offer paid access to far more detailed information – just as the online versions of The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times already offer far more detailed access to financial news if you take the subscription version rather than merely accessing the “free” pages.

And when that happens; the greater the depth we seek, the more reliance we are likely to place on the information we find; and it’s then that the really important qualities will be just what they’ve always been; breadth, depth, quality, and the ability to interrogate and review the conclusions we come to.

And of course, what the Internet, really opens up is the possibility of far more wide-ranging and sophisticated forms of Peer Review.

As Wikipedia and other sites based on knowledge and learning evolve, I have no doubt that we will see them develop mechanisms which begin to establish a far greater degree of credibility, gravity and responsibility, and really open up the opportunity for experts from a huge variety of areas to Peer Review material that finds its way onto these sites.

I guess the sub-text of all of this is my belief that we’ve barely even begun to explore the possibilities these technologies offer.

We’ve yet to absorb the fact that that these changes have the potential to be every bit as radical and transformatory as was the OU when it first harnessed the nascent power of the Public Service Broadcasting to enrich the lives of thousands – eventually hundreds of thousands who had, until then, been forced to inhabit what in hindsight one can only describe as the ‘twilight zone’ of educational opportunity.

So there are tremendous opportunities as well as huge challenges ahead in making our education system relevant to the needs of all the learners it’s now required to serve.

Whether we possess the will or the expertise to tackle all of those challenges is a huge question, and one to which each of you will have your own answer.

Certainly, I’m aware that it’s often a lot easier to have the ‘vision’, than to develop the stamina to wrestle with the institutional forces of inertia, or sometimes even active resistance that you inevitably find yourself coming up against!

I’m also keenly aware that while the UK has always been a highly innovative and creative nation, we have never been particularly good at exploiting that innovative capacity.

As often as not we seem to leave it to others to market our products overseas - forgetting that is where so much ‘added value’, certainly in terms of profitably, lies.

We’ve also never really understood the conditions under which innovation flourishes; nothing like enough work has been done on this ever-more important question.

But whilst it’s true that this Government has at least attempted to address the problem, we’re still a very long way behind nations like Singapore and South Korea.

You only have to look at how those two nations in particular have put in place ultra high speed, ‘next generation’ broadband networks, to see the degree to which they understand the relationship between infrastructure and innovation, and its importance for any highly competitive economy in this era of globalisation.

What’s certain is that, should we in the UK collectively fail to achieve the transformation I’ve referred to, we will not only be massively disadvantaging a entire generation of learners, we will also run the risk of relegating the very concept of State funded Higher Education to a form of second-class, or ‘optional’ status in the information age.

And should we allow that to happen, the result could only; to paraphrase H.G. Wells, be a tilting of the balance, away from education, and ever closer to catastrophe!

We also know that, in reality, every hope we have for the future lies, in one sense or another, with education.

And of course it’s not just about this country; knowledge and understanding are the twin pillars upon which rests any form of sustainable future for the whole of this planet.

Without doubt our colleges and universities have an increasingly important role to play in tilting the balance away from the catastrophe we sometimes seem intent on inflicting upon ourselves.

As I see it, only by building upon the possibilities of digital technology – can we ensure that it is not catastrophe, but education that finally triumphs.

Thank you very much for listening to me,

It’s only left for me to wish you a very, very productive conference.