All 6 entries tagged Warwick University

Decelerated Learning and technology

Follow-up to The Decelerated Learning movement from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

'E-learning' technologies have always been caught up in this debate. For many people, technology and acceleration are intimately related. Perhaps this partly explains the distaste that many in academia have for e-learning? For many institutions, the justification for the expense of e-learning is to reach a bigger market with the same amount of content more quickly. Increase turnover, improve profit margins.

But here at Warwick we like to take our time, do things properly. Am I sounding like a Grolsch advert again? Rather than accelerate content transmission, technology can be used to give people time to reflect, review and create. In this way learning becomes less like comsumption, it becomes activated and creative. This is why we are more interested in technologies such as Forums, BlogBuilder (Warwick Blogs), SiteBuilder (used in a dynamic and creative way), and mind/concept mapping. These asynchronous technologies all have the capability to provide time and space to the student and the academic.

For example, consider the possibilities of these technologies in enhancing seminars, for avoiding the dreaded 'seminar silence' that is far too common. In many seminars the student turns up having read the paper under discussion at the last possible moment. They are expected to formulate and express a response right away. Technology can be used to aleviate this. The student could, instead, slowly develop a response to the paper in their blog. The seminar then becomes more like a work-in-progress report.

I'm not saying that this is the best practice possible. There are many other things that can be done with these technologies, many other ways in which we can do less better. We just need to abandon our preconceptions about technology, and then experiment a little.

Robert O'Toole : 20 Sep 2004 07:59 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The Decelerated Learning movement

"Stop! This student is not ready yet." If Grolsch were in charge at the Department for Education, things would be rather different, but definitely better.

Is there such a thing as the Decelerated Learning Movement? If not, why not? The term was coined, I believe by a British educationalist (I'm trying to identify who), in reaction to the appaling and ill-considered drive towards force-feeding huge quantities of low quality content into curricula at all levels. The slogan of the movement is, as my wife (Head of KS1 at a primary school) always says: "do less better". Yes, quality matters, not quantity. In this sense there is a shared agenda with the Slow Food Movement, off which I am also a supporter.

I heard on Radio 4 today about an American politician who holds the record for the fastest completion of their degree. I think he may have missed the point somehow. We must act now to stop this lunacy before it is too late. Sit down, open up a copy of The Logic of Sense, and slowly, very slowly, do little but contemplate the implications.

Now I have a genuine excuse for taking 11 years to even get to the point of actually starting a PhD.

As for all of the new students starting their courses over the next few weeks, I have this to say: you really do have plenty of time, so enjoy it.

Robert O'Toole : 19 Sep 2004 20:15 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Semantic querying and the future of search engines

Follow-up to Emergent semantics (from Deleuze) and the semantic web from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

Prof. Wendy Hall of Southampton made this important distinction between two types of web query:

• A query that simply aims to provide a specific piece of information, an answer to a closed question. She calls this an 'uh…uh' query.
• A query that aims to go from a semantic map of a document to other documents with a similar map, the aim being that the second document will expand and illuminate the first. This she calls an "er…er" query.

People typically do the second more open type of query by identifying a set of keywords from the first document, and typing them all into a plain google search. In creating their own keywords list they are creating a semantic map of the document, a map that makes sense to them. Perhaps a useful development in browser and search engine design would be to add functionality that makes this easier. A user could select words and phrases from the source document to create the map, and then do a search for related maps. Perhaps these maps could be represented diagramatically?

As you can see, i'm just starting to get the relationship between Deleuze's work on semantics and creativity, the work in AI that I did at Sussex, current work on the semantic web, and e-learning.

Robert O'Toole : 16 Sep 2004 07:44 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Plagiarism prevention, research based teaching, reading lists and Oxford

Follow-up to The positive reason to care about plagiarism (and why Warwick is great) from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

And we are, of course, not the only institution that cares about this. Yesterday I went to Oxford for a one day conference on reading lists. The division between institutions with a transmissive/instructional approach and those, like Warwick, with a research based approach, was stark. The transmissive/instructional approach sees reading lists as the sole property of the academic and the library. At the start of a course they transmit a list of readings to the students, who consume each book in turn. Within research-based teaching, the reading list is seen as a set of suggestions that must be analysed, extended, critiqued and synthesised by the student. The aim is for them to develop their own reading list, their own bibliography, in the same way as any academic would.

Howard Noble, of the Oxford University Learning Technology Group did a presentation of a project that he is working on to create a generic resource list building tool, to be used by both staff and students. The rationale behind this seems to research based teaching. Interestingly, the LTG have also taken an interest in plagiarism . I have realised that we have much more in common with them, and much less in common with the majority of the UK HE community. I shall develop these links (I have several contacts in the group already).

Also, more on Howard's project when i can find the url!

Robert O'Toole : 10 Sep 2004 08:29 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The positive reason to care about plagiarism (and why Warwick is great)

Follow-up to Plagiarism, and i'm suddenly worried about my chaotic study skills from Transversality - Robert O'Toole

Have a look at the learning object. It makes it clear that it is OK to quote and rephrase the words and thoughts of others, so long as there is some "added spice" – a critical or analytical addition by the student, just something that they can contribute beyond the original. After all, without that process of addition, critique, analysis, synthesis, and summarization academic work is pointless and goes nowhere.

I suppose the anti-plagiarism movement is driven by the need to ensure that the academic process is worthwhile and does move onwards. What would we prefer, lectures that are simply repetitions, or lectures that are exciting and move things onwards somehow? The movement is particularly strong at Warwick because we value the academic process highly. And this is a key point. We value it more highly than many other institutions.

In trying to define what Warwick is about, we usually focus on something called 'research based teaching'. We oppose this to the approach taken in other institutions that is essentially a 'transmissive/instructional' approach in which students are seen as mere consumers of content. Research based teaching is, roughly, the idea that the academic process of being an undergraduate, a postgraduate and an academic is the same. They all follow the same research process, and as such are expected to analyse, critique, synthesise and extend current knowledge in some way. For everyone, whatever level, to adopt this research process, they must also embrace an anti-plagiarist stance.

Anti-plagiarism is, as such, not a reactionary right wing policy. It an ethic at the heart of a progressive stance.

Returning to our problem, and why we see it as important that we address it, we are starting to recognise that our academic process is not universally understood. We cannot expect students to arrive at Warwick fresh from A-levels or from all points of the globe, with an understanding and acceptance of anti-plagiarism, and the subtle skills that are required for it. So we consider it to be a key skill that we might need to teach and reinforce in a positive way.

Robert O'Toole : 10 Sep 2004 08:12 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Is BlogBuilder far off from being an academic writing tool?

Here's an example of the academic writing process that i'm developing using my blog. I'm doing this for real, so real requirements for how it can be used to support academic writing are emerging…

I've just created two entries, one called Bacon's malerisch, Van Gogh's diagram, and the baroque fold the other called The artistic diagram and its relation to the statistical diagram. They are follow-ups from another entry on Van Gogh's relation to Bacon (via Deleuze), which itself is a follow-up to some entries stretching back to an entry on Miro (quickly written whilst at the Miro Foundation). Those earlier entries were quite limited and not intended to be developed into anything in themselves.

These two latest entries, however, are intended to develop into chapters of a thesis. At the moment they are just notes, sketches of arguments, incomplete and relatively unlimited. They will be developed. Privacy is set to 'just me', but that will change as they develop.

There are some aspects of these entries that present different requirements for how they are treated and represented. Being both work in progress and more significant than standard entries, I would like them to be represented somewhere in a permanent list, so that I can easily keep working on them and keep writing new entries reflecting on them. At the moment there is a fairly straightforward relationship between these two entries. This may develop into one entry being the natural precursor of the other. There may also be more similar such significant entries. These could have more complex and changing relations, perhaps better represented in a mind-map style diagram which can aid the development of the overall thesis.

So why develop them in my blog? Because they have emerged as follow-ups to more blog like blog entries, and that's how philosophical writing happens, as a synthesis of smaller notes and ideas. Note that this implies that we should allow an entry to be a follow-up of more than one other entry, perhaps as a kind of summary entry. Also because Warwick Blogs is just so damn good, especially with its privacy control, editing facilities, commenting, track-backs and follow-ups, and its galleries. It just seems such a good place to do this.

So to conclude, I can see that with just a few small tweaks Warwick Blogs can become a superb tool for academic writing.

Robert O'Toole : 29 Aug 2004 08:31 |  Tags: E-Learning Warwick University |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem