Research – Page 30 – Digital Learning Dispatches

In June 2016, a small DCU delegation visited China as part of an externally funded collaborative research project with the Big Data Centre for Technology Mediated Education at Beijing Normal University. The project known as BigEdData is exploring how the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) movement is being represented through social media. More specifically, the project involves critical discourse analysis relating to the discourses playing out in social media such as Twitter and who is engaging in them. The study is situated within a wider critique of actor-agency and the notion of power and politics in discourses of social media and in learning.

A variety of network and social analyses will be employed in the empirical analyses to model the actors and their characteristics within the dataset. The dataset was created by downloading tweets from public twitter in 2015 using #MOOC and the keyword MOOC as an organizational and selection filter. Research on the proliferation of articles and news stories relating to MOOCs in traditional and online media has been conducted by a number of authors, including a team in the NIDL.

Learning Analytics: A Messy Research Construct from Mark Brown

During the visit to Beijing Normal University several talks and more formal presentations were offered on a range of topics, including the one above on the messy construct of learning analytics. A preliminary paper on the BigEdData project was presented at the EDEN conference in Budapest in June, as outlined in the slide-deck below. Further presentations are planned over the course of 2016.

BigEdData: The MOOC Story Deconstructed from Mark Brown

By Professor Mark Brown

The reality is that our field is full of hype. Neil Selwyn (2015) puts this even more bluntly by claiming that much of our ‘Ed-Tech Speak’ is full of B.S. Currently there is a lot of hypebole surrounding the potential of digital badges, flipped classrooms, learning analytics and of course MOOCs. The overselling of Ed-Tech is not new as there has been a long history of ‘talking up’ the transformative potential of successive waves of technological innovation (Selwyn, 2015). The language of predictions, promises and latest panaceas for the problems of education is an uncomfortable truth of our field. Despite best intentions we are still prone to the ‘fickle’ and ‘faddish’ at the expense of more serious critique. This is the untold story or often underbelly of Ed-Tech. Thus, more often than not there is an ongoing cycle of hype, hope and disappointment (Gouseti, 2010).

GM_Gartner_Hype_Cycle

Over the years I have been guilty like many others of uncritically borrowing the Gartner Hype Cycle to help explain this repeating pattern. I usually illustrate the cycle by starting with the following quote from 1894 referring to the invention of the Wax Phonograph Cylinder:

“With the coming of the New Media, the need for print on paper will rapidly diminish. The day will soon arrive when the world’s literature will be available from The Automatic Library at the mere pressing of a button” (Uzanne, 1894; cited in McFarlane, 1997, p.173).

I often follow this claim up with a frequently cited quote from Thomas Edison (cited in Smith, 1913, p.24) referring to the evolution of the Vitascope:

“Books will soon be obsolete in public schools. Scholars will be instructed through the eye. It is possible to teach every branch of human knowledge with the motion picture”.

To further establish this pattern of bold and typically failed predictions I draw on a lesser-known quote from Benjamin Darrow (1932; cited in Horrigan, 2016, p. 9-10) referring to the potential of radio:

“The central and dominant aim of education by radio is to bring the world to the classroom, to make universally available the services of the finest teachers, the inspiration of the greatest leaders… and unfolding world events which through the radio may come as a vibrant and challenging textbook of the air.”

Of course the story would not be complete without sharing early claims related to the invention of television:

“We will undoubtedly have lectures of every conceivable kind presented to us right in our homes, when practical television arrives, possibly a year or two off” (Short Wave Craft, 1935; cited in Horrigan, 2016, p.10).

You can read more on taking the hype out of the hype cycle by going to the EDEN President’s Blog where Mark’s think piece was first published.