Next generation environments will provide 'rich opportunities for learning'

More than 100 invited delegates gathered at <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 /?>AstonUniversity on Friday to hear how emerging technologies are set to transform the ways in which we learn, teach and undertake research.

The conference, organised by Jisc’s Users and Innovation programme, looked at the impact of the new participatory technologies – known as ‘Web 2.0’ – as well as some of the challenges faced by institutions in harnessing these and other new technologies in the classroom and beyond. 

Professor Peter Hartley, Head of Teaching Quality Enhancement Group at the University of Bradford, gave the keynote address and spoke about the increasing sophistication that students were showing in using new collaborative and social technologies. However, he said that there were challenges of ‘transfer and transition’ in their use in that, while students may be multi-taskers in the ‘outside world’, they could at times display what he termed ‘learner helplessness’ in educational contexts. It is the task of the teacher to enable a ‘transfer of confidence’ to occur which could overcome this disparity and give an educational context to otherwise familiar technologies. It is the task of the teacher to enable a ‘transfer of confidence’ to occur which could overcome this disparity and give an educational context to otherwise familiar technologies.

The modern university, he continued, must ‘know the students’. It must also support ‘the whole learning journey’, and while adopting the appropriate technologies, manage the boundaries between educational and social environments. 

Jisc’s head of development Sarah Porter looked at how Jisc’s newly updated strategy contains a strong focus on collaboration – through a commitment to modular approaches to software development (the e-Framework, for example), an emphasis on ‘community’ (open content and informal publishing) and a focus on the individual as well as the institution.

The Users and Innovation programme which has brought together a ’community of practice’ of more than 150 practitioners from around 50 institutions is, she said, a good example of this approach. It was, she claimed, a ‘different development model’ which uses Web 2.0 technologies and which promised to deliver a range of interesting and potentially far-reaching outcomes. 

Derek Jones from commercial supplier Blackboard gave the industry perspective and suggested that the institution of the future, operating simultaneously in local and global contexts, and supporting a ‘student-centred’ approach to learning marked by access to content unconstrained by time and place, was one to which the private sector could contribute a great deal.

Simon Whittemore, Jisc programme manager for business and community engagement, explored further the potential for collaboration between education institutions and the wider community, including business and the public sector. Speaking about Jisc’s burgeoning work in this area, he said there was enormous potential for the ‘knowledge services’ available in institutions to have commercial application, through consultancy, continuing professional development, the creation of spin-off companies, licensing activities and so on.  

There was also a growing professionalisation of activities in this area, he reported. Participation, decentralisation and collaboration are, he said, the watchwords of this particular engagement and technology could play an important role in supporting such ideas and enable institutions to support innovation and enterprise while also enabling change.

Dave Cormier, from University of Prince Edward Island, spoke about Canadian initiatives which have the notion of ‘community’ at their very heart and which are redefining what it means to learn and teach in the digital age. ‘If a single person is responsible for the management of a course,’ he suggested, ‘the many – the users – are going to be constrained by the imagination and limitations of that particular person.’  

Immersive environments, which use virtual reality techniques, can allow learners to have new and lifelike ‘experiences’. They have the potential to enable ‘far richer experiences of learning’, he claimed. The Living Life project at Prince Edward Island enabled students, he said, to digitise artefacts from Mayan history, build a virtual environment and to experience a ‘live-through tour’ of a Mayan temple. Links to external resources and the ability to construct private spaces gave the possibility to learners of personalising the environments for their own use. Such environments offered immense potential for learning and teaching, focussing as they do, he suggested, on the experience and needs of learners.

Linda Creanor, development director at GlasgowCaledonianUniversity, introduced a student, Ross Graham, to the conference. New social technologies are widely used among students, said the latter, but the question then became: how can both environments – the social and the academic - be integrated? There is a difficulty in doing this straightforwardly, however, since allowing educational interventions in social spaces such as Facebook and MySpace would negate their purpose: ‘I don’t want you in Facebook,’ he told delegates, ‘I enjoy it too much!’ 

Linda Creanor spoke about how Jisc-funded projects which looked at the learner experience had corroborated such insights. Attempts to incorporate new social technologies into formalised learning were often unsuccessful, she suggested, since students would often complete their learning tasks but not always in the ways that they were ‘meant to be completed’.

The personalisation of learning environments, the building of technology-rich learning spaces - such as the Saltire Centre at Glasgow Caledonian - and encouraging ‘appropriate’ skills learnt outside of education to be transferred to the learning context, could enable new community approaches to learning, supported by collaborative tools, to be integrated into the ways in which students, in fact, learn. 

Lively discussions were supported by a live blog throughout the day. To follow the ongoing discussions, look at the presentations and to comment on the conference, please go to: Blog 

A full report on the day-long conference will be available in due course.