JISC

John Davitt´s closing keynote, The Difference Engine Runs Again, focused on the wonderful opportunities which are made available by technology. But, he argued, we are in danger of being judged by history, which will ask "...they had what tools.... and they did WHAT with them..." If we want to escape this fate, we will need to make better use of the tools to provide nuanced and active learning. John´s pertinent comment on this was "After I bought one item on eBay I received more formative feedback and assessment than I got in 18 years of formal education". This message came through from the start of the session, when John posted a collaborative crossword, and we all participated in solving it. A number of posters in the chat said that this was the first time they had realised that they could write to the whiteboard, and throughout the session we had additions to the slides by the audience. One of the most effective aspects of the session was a web tour of a number of different web applications which illustrate effective use of technology. The most popular amongst participants was the Learning Event Generator, which generates multi-modal tasks for learners from adaptable lists, with participants sharing a range of challenging and sometimes unlikely tasks. You can try it out at http://legwork.pbwiki.com . One participant pointed out the similarities with Enos Oblique Strategies. John said that when he started using this with teachers something wonderful happened. People were pushed outside their comfort zone, but were provided with structure for exploring the whole area of modality to support them.

John argued that not everyone responds in the same way to the same environment, and we don't all have the same needs. He suggested a metaphorical use of Babbage's term the Difference Engine, to emphasise that computers and the Web are capable of supporting learners in a wide range of different ways. Not only are applications varied, the devices themselves are becoming more diversified.

The discussion picked up on the debate of Prensky's ideas of the digital native and immigrant earlier in week, and John proposed that the active - passive axis may be a better way of understanding engagement with technology. He said that the traditional media industry in general wants us to be passive. A delegate pointed out in the forums that the situation is more nuanced than this suggests: "While I definitely think alarm bells will be ringing in the creative industry over copyright issues I also think they're wise enough to see that the tidal wave of consumer created content will not abate and that they can embrace it and benefit from it". John's argument was that learning is inextricably linked with doing, and that within the range of active and passive media experiences our task is to move those that we want to inspire down to the active end of the axis. Learners need to the chance to wander around the envelope of ways of interacting, and this is part of the promise of virtual worlds, which incorporate moving as a key metaphor. John related this to the Latin phrase 'solvitur ambulando' (it is solved by walking). In the chat a person commented that Plato's Academy had a formal space for learning, the Academy itself, a place for non-formal learning, the field to walk in, and an informal place, the gym. So the original Academy was more multi-sensory than academic learning now.

The concept of Struggleware was introduced, and John described how he interviewed an eight year old girl, who was using Flash. "She said 'Don't think this is easy for us. Don't tell people this is easy. This is a struggle for us.' And I thought Alleluia!". He argued that in the early days of these tools we treated them as this as cut and paste opportunities, and there wasn't much room for things to be going on in the mind of the learner. Applications which do provide these opportunities he describes as Struggleware. In asking how we make sure that people do struggle and learn from that, there's an interesting inversion of the usual requests for ease of use and transparency.

Responding to a question on continuity and change, John commented that (at the risk of sounding like a sad old man in a corner) we had lost a lot of powerful tools too early. HyperCard enabled you to make software even if you weren't a programmer. There is a lot of vested interest in keeping us in consuming the productions of others but not making our own, which is why he seeks out tools like Flash that have that have that struggle associated but take us through to new opportunities. Video editing is one area for this, for example the task of cutting down a 12 minute documentary on WWII to one minute and still preserve the key issues, perhaps with QuickTime Pro. In the text chat one delegate described this as an IPR nightmare, which led to a number of posts about the problem, and the speed with which this was sparked off suggests that this is a hot topic. Some posters were concerned to respect copyright and to educate users, and said that authors care about IPR and copyright, and that learners should be educated about creative commons etc., so learners know what they can use. Others were more doubtful, such as one who wondered "how many people who upload to youtube actually care" and another, who argued that "IPR can be taught and can also be ignored. Also if processed heavily enough it may not even be recognisable...We need to adapt". Clearly this was a big issue for a lot of people.

One participant asked "I have seen so many useful pieces of software, how on earth can I keep up to date with all that's going on." Similar points were made in the forum by others ("my experience over the past few days of being in or visiting this on-line conference has been more supermarket dash learning - not enough time and so much to explore/interesting but so frustrating"). Another commented ("the sheer wealth of information is so overwhelming - not to mention the distractions on tap - that it becomes hard to focus down on specifics. So then you have lots of people that know snippets of things across a variety of topics"). John's answer was that you can't keep up with it all, or you need an eight day week. For him it's a right brain activity, remembering where things are in a spatial sense and going back to them. Twitter is really useful, and we've had loads of tweets during this session, picking up on some of the web sites. In the forum a delegate made the point that within this variety "there IS an issue about 'factionalism' - there are constant groups springing up promoting the use 'whatever' for teaching and learning, camps forming, for and against. This is both a good and bad thing I suspect - stimulating for some and alienating for others?"

The question was asked: where we will be in five or ten years time?. John's response was that currently we don't support the ebb and flow between the online and real world. The interfaces will improve so that we can move between the hand scribble and the digital master back and forwards with a lot more ease. That's where the opportunities accrue. "I carry around a notebook in my pocket, and I was going through an airport and I saw they scanned my passport in less than a second. Quick google search and I found me a passport scanner and in an hour I had managed to scan in five years worth of note books to the computer and to my iphone... Which world would you prefer to live in, in the battered old notebook, or in the iPhone and flick the pages by. And the answer is that we want to live powerfully in both, but we want to oil the interstices between the tools. We're only just starting to do that. We need more subtlety and nuance. That's where I see us in a few years time. It'll be a lot easier to live well in both worlds."

Another questioner asked John to comment about blockages to making use to the tools he'd been showing. He replied that he'd ended up very optimistic, and that we'll get a flip, with the back channel becoming the front channel. The National Grid for Learning cost millions, and they thought meta-tagging was so important that it couldn't be left to teachers. Yet now we've got Delicious and Flickr. The final comment, and a positive note to end the conference on, was "I'm hopeful, and when I see things like the crossword" (an unplanned activity, shared, solved and annotated by the participants at the session) "I'm even more hopeful!"