Elearning and Academic Governance – Page 3

Watching your kids on the internet …

I was saddened to read of the deaths of two teenage girls in Melbourne, reported to be as a result of a suicide pact made online through MySpace. There has been a lot of mainstream media coverage of this tragedy, much of which is exhorting parents to monitor what their kids are doing online. There is an insidious element of implied criticism of the girls’ parents – seemingly suggesting that these parents were somehow negligent in not knowing what the kids were doing because they were doing it in secret on line rather than in the open spaces of the “real world”. There is a not-so-hidden implication that we are being irresponsible parents to allow our kids online for too long. As a mother of two adolescents (a girl and a boy) who each spend a reasonable amount of unsupervised time online, I am reading the coverage with some interest.

I am particularly bemused by the commentary by some of the supposed experts in adolescent psychology … adolescence is a tricky time, and one that we all hope our kids get through relatively unscathed … but I would have thought it is precisely the time when we should be allowing our kids room to explore the world. It is a world that has always had a dark side and has always involved kids exploring some of the things their parents told them not to do. Mostly they survive. Often, parental boundaries are set with the naive intention of avoiding their kids being exposed to the dangerous things they chose to do themselves as adolescents …

The thing about suicide is how unpredictable it can be – there is no way to predict what is the precursor to suicide, although there are many ways to see the evidence with 20/20 hindsight. Suicide leaves a devastating after-effect, including an increase of suicides among those affected. But surely drawing attention to the “likelihood” of copycat suicides is tantamount to giving permission to copycats to go ahead by normalising their action?

There is no doubt that when you are touched by someone’s death, it is a good time to hold your special people close and to remember to tell them that you love them. But it is not the right time to suffocate them and to stop trusting them because someone else has shown poor judgement.

The thing about the internet is how much opportunity it gives us to observe the things that would otherwise be transient and unobserved by anyone who wasn’t right there at the time. That is to say, in many ways we can see way more of what our kids are doing online than what they are doing offline … in our houses, we don’t monitor all the conversations our children have, and we don’t control who they interact with at school or elsewhere unless we take them everywhere … I even suspect there are quite a few grandparents whose main contact with their grandkids is online.

Which brings me back (in a somewhat rambling way) to the theme of watching your kids on the internet … my 15 yo son is an avid internet user and I drop by his website occasionally to see what he’s up to and who he’s “hanging out with”. My argument is that he is bringing these people “into my home” through the computer and I want to get a feel for who they are … I try not to hang around his site too much because, frankly, I don’t need to see the adolescent details of his life, just like I don’t need to sit with his friends in the school yard, or listen to the details of their conversations at parties, or read their “I’m bored” / “Me too” / “Me too me too” deep bonding (!!) … would I know if he was using drugs or deeply unhappy or doing evil and / or illegal things on the internet or in real life? I like to think so, but I suspect he could easily lead a double life without me knowing and vice versa if he were intent on so doing – he’s smart, and we just hope that he uses it for good not evil through the values we have offered him through our own example as family and friends.

For the past few days his Journal has had an “Emo” theme of “Going to die in 5 days” with something about it being his foray into attention-grabbing journal entries so he can say he’s tried out the genre … and his “mood” is listed as bored and, amongst other things on his profile, he watches “anything other than the news”. There were a whole string of fairly mundane comments and stuff from his friends associated with the journal entry – ie nothing other than the title to ring any alarm bells. He writes a bit of “dark” poetry occasionally along with lots of light creative things too. We talk sometimes, but not all the time, and we don’t share everything with each other although I like to think we have a healthy respect for each other.

So what is a responsible parent to do with something like that? Is it a joke? Is it a cry for help? Is it nothing? Is it something? Should I be reading his online journal (which is online and therefore presumably fair game for anyone to read including his mother (although I feel like I should knock first before entering as I would into his room if he had friends over))? And if it is something to worry about, how would confronting him be likely to help? Will it exacerbate his crisis or lead him to the sudden realisation that parental love solves everything? Should I put him on suicide watch, cancel all ground-leave, medicate him, take him to a psychiatrist, yell at him?

As it turned out (more than 5 days later … ;-)) – it was about as meaningful in terms of any imminent death as my saying “I’ll kill you if you eat my last chocolate teddy bear biscuit” … (and I leave it to the reader to ascertain the level of threat associated with eating the last chocolate biscuit in my household :-)). Since my son doesn’t watch the news or read the paper, he was completely unaware that it was an ‘insensitive’ journal entry to have made in terms of timing … It has since been edited to say “Going to HAVE A COOKIE in 5 days” … which shows just how inane the whole journal thing can be and why parents might tire of watching their children endlessly online …

So to make a long story even longer, I read the post a few days ago, raised my eyebrows, checked that my son didn’t seem too distressed or secretive and let it go at that. Then I started wondering whether I was being a bad parent, a lazy parent, too confident that I know my son, too insensitive to “see his pain” (ie see pain that is beyond what is bearable for any healthy adolescent) … and started asking myself the question of “how would I feel if I ‘missed the sign'”? … And if I be honest, I probably only asked my son about the entry because I was worried about how I would explain having “seen the sign” and ignored it … especially as a Registered Psychologist ™. But then again, maybe I should have trusted my instincts as a scientist a bit more – watching our kids too closely will also have effects, not all of which are straightforward or “good” no matter what our intent. Heisenberg or Einstein or Schroedinger or someone particularly clever with Quantum Physics said something about the nature of observations and how they relate to the longevity and well-being of cats, and I suspect, along with Kath and Kim, that it may also apply to humans …

I should now be smiling wryly and saying “better safe than sorry” but that actually misses an important point – if my son was seriously suicidal in a pre-meditated way, knew I was watching him, and did not want to talk to me about it, he would probably change his method not his mind. Sometimes we overestimate our power and influence as parents, and we misunderstand the value of our love – adolescents are not really ready to understand the nature of parental love – maybe they are completely used to it and do not actually understand its value, maybe they feel betrayed by some element of it that they don’t understand, maybe they feel smothered by it, maybe they have never experienced it … but many adolescents are betrayed or devastated or overwhelmed by relationships and experiences outside of the family which they feel they need to deal with outside of the family, and in these things we sometimes support our kids best by trusting them to be able to cope. We can not fix everything for our kids (or anyone else), bad stuff does happen, we are not responsible for other people’s happiness (although that’s not to say that we can aren’t sometimes responsible for their unhappiness …)

Suicide leaves a trail of devastation behind it, and loneliness and unhappiness can be relieved by people taking time to care for each other. But life does have ups and downs and perhaps we should embrace a broader range of life’s experience to become resilient to some of the bumps along the way. Perhaps rather than referring people to Lifeline too quickly, we can make it our own crusade to look after the people around us. I think I am understanding my grandmother’s saying “Charity begins at home” a little bit more …

Jakob Nielsen on Life-Long Computer Skills

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox on Lifelong Computer Skills reiterates the idea that education is about learning fundamental concepts rather than how to do specific things in a specific context.

Teaching life-long computer skills in our schools offers further benefit in that it gives students insights that they’re unlikely to pick up on their own. In contrast, as software gets steadily easier to use, anyone will be able to figure out how to draw a pie chart. People will learn how to use features on their own, when they need them — and thus have the motivation to hunt for them. It’s the conceptual things that get endlessly deferred without the impetus of formal education.

He goes on to list Search Strategies, Information Credibility, Information Overload, and sundry other things relating to creating and evaluating online content as the appropriate skills to be taught as the basics of information literacy.

Website renovations and productivity tools

Well I think I’ve finally sorted out how to keep my website a bit more organised. I’m over “hand-crocheting” websites, although the USMA Taekwon-do site is still hand-done. I’m using WordPress for most of my writing these days, and Aperture to manage my photos and make web albums. I’m beginning to play with video editing, but I haven’t really had enough time to do too much other than minimal work using iMovie to archive to DVD.

I haven’t found MediaWiki to be as good for collaborative writing as I thought it would be – maybe because I don’t always have access to broadband internet in the way I have grown used to (and possibly because I destroyed my MediaWiki installation through trying to move the index page … D’oh!). But on mature reflection, the most likely explanation is simply that wikis have a much more limited niche than initially anticipated. The more successful wikis (eg WikiPedia, various codices) seem to be those in which specific agreed-on content (documentation) needs to be collated efficiently by a group of people with overlapping knowledge that is not controversial. I beginning to be convinced that wikis are just not the right medium for creative content that “belongs to an author”, and wikis are not as useful as I envisaged for evolving my own ideas. The refactoring process feels inefficient with multiple versions of, for example, a Word document, but that is because the inherent nature of task (organising ideas into some sort of framework) is an inefficient process.

Spookily, I’m actually finding M$ Word and Powerpoint to be useful individual work tools, especially with Word’s new Notebook layout and the much improved Powerpoint > HTML conversion. Maybe the honeymoon period will end soon and I will have another go at wikis, but M$ is certainly heading in the right direction in terms of creating a tool that synchs with the way I actually work and makes it easy to give a face-2-face presentation which can be also web-distributed with minimal overheads.

I must be getting old because I’m also finding that communication spaces have shifted recently – I no longer use goofey, that wonderful little instant messaging service run at Monash way before anyone much was using online chat. It was an extremely efficient collaborative work tool as well as being an active online community and there were quite a few people I got to know on goofey before meeting them face-to-face. I have cycled through MSN, ICQ and email depending on who was limited to what by their workplace firewalls. I recently had a bit of a love affair with my new phone (a Nokia 6280) – the 2MP camera is pretty effective, and with a 2GB memory card, I no longer feel a need for an iPod. Most of the people I want to talk to will now engage in text messaging, and it’s probably my instant messaging medium of choice.

Almost a year of working at DSTO on the restricted Defence Network has desensitised me to the inconvenience of having inconsistent email availability – I can’t access DSTO email from anywhere other than on-site, but while I am at DSTO I can’t reach any of my other email accounts. All-in-all, just as the rest of the world is catching up to the “always-online” expectation, I have moved away from it a bit. I have pretty much managed to avoid MySpace and YouTube and almost all my email is work-related. In fact I rather like the idea of postcards and letters.

Hopefully with a revamped site based around WordPress, a totally cool MacBookPro, a camera, phone and video camera, I’ll be able to create good contet a lot more productively now.

Simulations in aviation and medicine

I gave a talk last week on simulations in aviation and medicine as part of the MUVES seminar series at the University of Melbourne. It covers a wide range of ideas that I hope to capture better over the next few weeks and months.

– Link to powerpoint slides and notes

As an aside, I have recently installed Office 2004 for Mac and this is the first time I’ve used this version of Powerpoint – against all odds, I’m pretty impressed with the Presenter Tools which allow a timer, the notes and upcoming slides to show to the presenter while mirroring only the slideshow itself to the audience. I am also reasonably happy with the web output as per this link. It is now pretty straightforward to prepare a presentation, present it and post it on the web. And with the “save as picture” option for slides, Powerpoint becomes a fairly useful tool for preparing diagrams.

When the tool actually does the job I want it to, I am much less inclined to bag it – though I reserve the right to be deeply offended when people use the wrong tool for their job.

Corruption in evidence presentations – Edward Tufte

I have just received my copy of “Beautiful Evidence” and I love it already …

“Making a presentation is a moral act as well as an intellectual activity. The use of corrupt manipulations and blatant rhetorical ploys in a report or presentation – outright lying, flagwaving, personal attacks, setting up phony alternatives, misdirection, jargon-mongering, evading key issues, feigning disinterested objectivity, willful misunderstanding of other points of view – suggest that the presenter lacks both credibility and evidence. To maintain standards of quality, relevance, and integrity for evidence, consumers of presentations should insist that presenters be held intellectually and ethically responsible for what they show and tell, Thus consuming a presentation is also an intellectual and a moral activity.”

Decision making at universities

from The Age: Melbourne Uni row over degrees

“If you take heads of departments somewhere and tell them we’re about to climb Mount Everest with one sherpa and no oxygen, they’ll say ‘of course’,” he said. “It’s only when you get to camp two they say, ‘Why are we doing this?’ and ‘I didn’t realise I was going to have to carry my own provisions.’ “
Professor Stuart MacIntyre – Professor of History

This quote captures the problem of corporate-style decision-making in the age of marketing and spin – who needs to worry about the details when the glossy brochures looks so good? Only nerds seem to read the fine print or worry about the substance of an argument these days, and then – shock !! horror !! – they are so surprised when things go pear-shaped in ways apparently noone could have foreseen – at least not while wearing their HHGTTG peril-sensitive sunglasses.

LMS Governance Final Report

For most of the past 9 months, I have been working with my colleague James Quealy on a Melbourne Monash Colloborative Project on Learning Management System governance.

The final report was posted on the Melbourne/Monash Committee for Collaboration in Educational Technologies website for 18 months and was available for download as a PDF. This website had disappeared in the new-look University of Melbourne website, so I have taken the liberty of posting it here.

Download PDF (1.6 MB)

The major conclusion from our research was that enterprise LMS software is primarily an administrative tool for delivery of subject-based content and for communication rather than a vehicle for pedagogical transformation of tertiary teaching. Therefore an LMS, as a piece of software, doesn’t require any particular special governance so long as good IT governance practices are already in place.

Most of the governance issues relating to LMS are either academic governance issues, IT governance issues, or derive from the mistaken belief that “new technology” has so radically transformed the educational world that old academic principles no longer apply, and anyone who says otherwise is in denial and/or a dinosaur, and is not worth arguing with.

In our report. we have attempted to outline issues of IT governance in higher education, and we have tried to outline an online future (“Elearning 2.0”) where LMS is largely irrelevant, and online tools are so much part of the furniture that they don’t need governance.

The Annotated Bibliography is a work-in-progress. It was originally housed at http://www.mdhsonline.unimelb.edu.au, but given that the server has been decommissioned, I have taken the liberty of moving it to my own wiki site (Aug 2007). Maybe James and I might find some time to continue working with it …

Blogging at work

I had an email today from someone wanting to talk to me as an academic who blogs and asking how blogging might help with my work. The amusing aspect of this request is that in the past week I have taken down my work blog on the basis that I am generally uncomfortable posting anything even mildly controversial to it, and the wider its readership (currently not wide because I don’t actually advertise my blogs anywhere), the less controversial I would be willing to be.

This is more of a reflection on my perception of my workplace than on whether or not anything I say is truly controversial or whether or not management actually has a view on blogging – but it is a still a disturbing aspect of the “new academia”. I am not comfortable having a blog as my personal commentary on issues of the day. I suspect part of my lack of comfort is because it would not have the balance of a range of other commentaries on the same issues when few other academics at my institution blog. Also in the field of online learning, it is not clear who are the “experts” since online learning is still relatively new.

But there also seems to be less of an ability or willingness these days to distinguish “role-based professional views” (me in my organisational role) from “professionally-informed personal views” (me as an academic psychologist) from “personal views” (me). My views on blogging and on online learning and the world in general differ in my recent role as Head of an Online Learning Unit, versus my academic role as a cognitive scientist / IT specialist interested in forms of communication, versus as me unbeholden to anyone else.

I would love to be able to say that blogging has allowed a return to the more collegial aspects of intra- and inter-disciplinary engagement, providing an avenue for sharing informed but relatively informal perspectives on current topics despite the busy-ness of the academic day compared with 20 years ago. I would love to be able to say that I have got to know a range of my colleagues I would otherwise not have known by reading their “conversations” on their blogs or having them interact on my blog. But in fact, through blogging, I have got to “know” a range of people from across the world rather than from my own location – this is good, but it is also a bit disappointing. All my previous forays online have primarily involved maintaining social networks that exist face-to-face rather than meeting new people. I have spoken on a number of occasions formally and informally to colleagues about blogs, but the response has been luke-warm at best.

The main reason I blog as an academic is that it forces me to think through what I write at a sufficient depth to “put it out in the world”. I tend to blog longer pieces on a particular idea rather than shorter commentary on issues of the day. It may be a quirk of my own style that I need a potential audience to clarify my academic thoughts, or it might just be a quirk of being an academic in a non-teaching role … perhaps as a teaching academic, the audience of students continually tests one’s thoughts. Then again, as a teaching academic, I would be much more likely to blog regularly to round out the topics being taught beyond the formal curriculum. I would also encourage students to blog and to share bookmarks.

I originally got into blogging as a way to store annotated bookmarks to things I’d read online – still at bloki.com from 2003-2004 but I now think that something like MediaWiki offers a better solution. The blog version allows me to find things that I read in passing and deserve a closer look, whereas the wiki version allows me to keep the most up-to-date view of what I’ve read prominent, and lists articles by topic.

I’d have to add that another reason I blog is that I think scientific publishing is struggling. In the attempt to quantify research quality by counting publications, academics responded by publishing every idea as a separate little paper rather than saving things up until there was something worthwhile to publish. So it is very hard to read “the literature” because it is heavy with quantity but light on quality. It is hard to find “seminal works” in an area over the last 20 years because everything comes out as drip feeds to ensure maximising publication quantity. Blogging allows a constant feed of fresh ideas without burdening the academic publishing system, and I would rather publish regular blog articles online while I write a substantive book than churn out a series of low impact publications, each of which says very little. Blogging ensures that I am contributing to the general knowledge base if people want to read what I have to say, but I’m not forcing my views on anyone who doesn’t want to listen.

The major difference between “blogging” and maintaining a personal website is the fact that blogging is based around date-based entries whether or not the temporal aspects are important, but that distinction is blurring. The ease of use of blog tools makes them a tool of choice for webpublishing irrespective of the “bloggyness” of content. The best improvement in WordPress (my favorite blogging tool) is the ability to create static web pages as well as blog pages, although I haven’t really played with it much. The best improvement in MediaWiki(wikis being the obvious alternative to blogs as an easy web-publishing tool) is the new focus on allowing restrictions on authoring – this is against the true web spirit of total openness, but much more realistic in terms of understanding human nature (there really are people out there who have nothing better to do than deface other people’s work) and accepting that it takes time and a certain degree of exclusivity to build online communities.