lunchtime lecture for laggards

Found myself, once again, revisiting a Blog post I made in early 2009. I’ve even renamed it ‘Early adopters or early majority?‘ I seem to be getting a lot of visitors to this page.  Perhaps I should have made it a Wikipage, rather than a blog entry?

Something that has been on my mind for quite a while now, is – how can we effectively move ideas, innovations, technology, research, etc. from out of the domain of ‘the few’ to the wider audience in education establishments?

Having been involved in many case studies and project reports, I often wonder how effectively they (case studies and good practice reports) are taken-up by the early majority, late majority and laggards at my own college and other education establishments?  I have voiced my concerns many-a-time, as I am genuinely worried about schools and colleges where there are no innovators/early adopters to help drive the take-up of new technologies and learning methodologies.  What happens to the learners and what effects are there on the staff in terms of embedding technology into the curriculum?

Now I guess you could argue that schools and colleges don’t need to be operating at the cutting edge in order to achieve results.  Which brings me round to wondering if education is about ‘results & statistics’ or about facilitating a ‘useful rounded education’ that prepares learners for life.

Anyway – that’s my lunch hour over… I’ll just get back to some un-innovative paper work.

the future is bright, the future is augmented

[Vimeo=http://vimeo.com/8569187]

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.

There are a couple of threads about ‘the future of the web’ & ‘mavericks/innovators’ on the ‘BECTA Technology Exemplar Network’ Ning – which unfortunately for those outside the project, is a closed Ning group.

James Clay posted up this incredible video of the potential future for augmented reality in the home. Is this the kind of future you want? How should technology interact within your own personal space?

Telling Tales – Mimas #mimasmob09

I have to admit, I wasn’t too sure what I had been signed-up to… I say ‘signed-up to’ because I quite literally was!  We had an exhibition stand at the recent JISC RSC NW annual event – I had just been off watching a few cool Pecha Kucha shows [David Sugden, Kevin Hickey, Liz Bennett] and came back to our stand, to be told I had volunteered and been signed-up for Mimas: ‘Telling Tales’ conference.  OK, I was going to be down in London for the elearning@greenwich conference the day before, so that was cool.

Of course, I looked-up Mimas and realised what the event was – mobile learning, with the added bonus of a James Clay presentation on ‘the future’!

I arrived, grabbed a coffee and sat at a table, said hello, etc. looked at names on badges – then looked at the running order.  The people at my table were ‘big players’ in the mLearning world – I suddenly felt a little out of place.  But then thought, why should I feel out of place?  Everyone seemed to know each other and I knew a few people, so just go with it.

What a great bunch of innovative, radical thinkers!  The day was excellent.  It was interesting to talk to some new contacts about general ‘learning with tech’ [I'm trying not to box and label, James]   One thing that stuck out for me, apart from the wonderfully interesting presentations, was that there appears to be plenty of funding bodies, willing to fund research projects – but they don’t appear to follow them up or apply the findings.  I’ve been to many conferences now and there seems to be a few Universities and Colleges doing similar research work, funded by different bodies – is there no cohesion at ‘the top’??

One interesting point raised towards the end of the day, during a reflection session, was that the kind of technology we’re currently looking at and researching will be so out of date by the time it comes to being embedded into learning.  Are we wasting our time and resources on researching ‘the tech’ (which will develop anyway as part of the consumer culture) when we could be researching the pedagogy?

Mimas: Telling Tales

To quote a Tweet exchange during the conference:

RT @jamesclay: #mimasmob09 @colhawksworth maybe we should ignore content and concentrate on activity first?

Thoughts, anyone?

Early adopters or early majority?

Rogers' modified by Moore

Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation model modified by Geoffrey Moore.

Whilst Rogers mentions early adopters as the opinion leaders. Moore argued that this is actually vital in order to target the early majority – he argued that there is a chasm between early adopters and early majority – explaining why some innovations become merely a minority interest.

Rogers does not agree with Moore:
‘…some scholars claimed that a discontinuity exists between innovators and early adopters versus the early majority, late majority and laggards (Moore, 1991). Past research shows no support for this claim of a ‘chasm’ between certain adopter categories. (Rogers, 2003, p.282)

Further reading:

MIT – Moving from Technology-Centered to Human-Centered Products

The Life Cycle of a Technology

Proven Models

‘Crossing the Chasm’ – Wikipedia entry

Les Robinson – ‘Enabling Change’

Notes on Rogers

Forgot to post this up a couple of weeks ago.

Diffusion of Innovations
Innovators; early adopters; early majority; late majority; laggards.
Rogers’ model adapted in an interesting way by Geoffrey Moore – idea of a chasm separating innovators and early adopters from the rest.
Rogers looked ‘outside the box’ “I was convinced that the diffusion of innovations was a kind of universal process of social change” (2003, p.vxi)

Innovators: tolerate & enjoy high levels of uncertainty and risk – technical knowledge is crucial – their community may react with criticism, uncertainty and scepticism; will probably look for support from a geographically scattered ‘clique of innovators’ (Rogers, 2003, p.282)
Early adopters: larger group – much rooted in their local community; usually respected as opinion leaders: more cautious colleagues rely on them for judgement.
Early majority: a still larger group – one third in total. People who tend to think carefully before adopting an innovation: they don’t want to be first in, neither do they want to be the last – staying well behind the leading edge.
Late majority: Sceptical and cautious – uncertainty must be removed before they feel safe to adopt. Don’t make a change until there is lot of pressure from their peers – logic in their position – they can’t afford failure.
Laggards: ‘near isolates in the social networks of their system’ he argues, he does not mean any disrespect .

Rogers describes later adopters unfavorably in terms of personality, saying they are generally less empathic, have lower ability to deal with abstractions, have fewer years of formal education.

Activity 1.4: Reading the Paper (1)

Questions: What research questions are being addressed?
Is the Virtual Classroom a viable option for educational delivery? (On the whole, are outcomes at least as good a those for traditional face-to-face courses?) What variables are associated with especially good and especially poor outcomes in this new teaching and learning environment?

Setting: What is the sector and setting? (e.g. school, HE, training, informal learning)
The setting is the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) and Upsala College – where both authors are employed. They have created a ‘virtual classroom’ as part of a two year funded project. The observations are across a variety of course within the same faculty, with a similar students base and implemented environments. “The primary research design rested on matched but ‘non equivalent’ sections of the same course taught in the Virtual Classroom (VC) and the traditional classroom (TC).”

Concepts: What theories, concepts and key terms are being used?
One of the quoted concepts is ‘Knowledge is not delivered to students; instead it emerges from active dialogue among those who seek to understand and apply concepts techniques’ (Bouton and Garth 1983; Whipple 1987).

There are two main hypotheses within the paper, stating that ‘there will be no significant differences in scores measuring mastery of material taught in the virtual and traditional classrooms.’ And that ‘Virtual Classroom (VC) students will perceive the VC to be superior to the Traditional Classroom (TC) on a number of dimensions: Convenient access to educational experiences. Improved access to their professor. Increased participation in a course. Increased level of interest in the subject matter, which may continue beyond the end of the course. Improved ability to communicate and cooperate with other students in doing classwork (group collaboration skills). Improved overall quality, whereby the student assess the experience as being better than the TC in some way, involving learning more on the whole or gaining more from the course.’

Methods: What methods of data collection and analysis are used? (e.g. the number of participants; the type of technologies; the use of interviews, surveys, observations, etc.)
The study covered a number of courses across two different educational establishments with a very distinctly different student type. There were two obvious time-lines to the study – The initial trial groups – ‘several’ mixed-mode courses… In total 107 students in six sections, 1986/87 – and the follow-up, with 96 students across six-mode courses, 1987/8. The five matched courses (87/88) included Introductory Sociology at Upsala College. The two colleges provided very different implementation environments. Upsala is a small ‘liberal’ arts college with only one computer lab (not uncommon for the time). Conversely, NJIT is a large technological university where students have been issued with IBM-PCs for use in their studies. Data collection – pre-and post-course questionnaires were issued, also objective behavioural data (grades, SAT scores and records of on-line activity). There was also some qualitative data collection (participant observation in class conferences, personal interviews and case reports).

Findings: What did this research find out?
Overall the results of the trial were ‘generally positive’, and they support the hypotheses. The full study had over 200 variables and over 50 hypotheses. The findings / outcomes are listed as:
OBJECTIVE OUTCOMES: MASTERY OF SUBJECT MATTER
It was found that there were no significant differences in midterm or final examination scores across any course. When the quality of graded assignments as well as the midterm and final examinations were taken into account – the computer science students did significantly better in the Virtual Classroom that in the traditional classroom – however, there were no significant differences in grades for other courses.
SUBJECTIVE ASSESSMENTS
The hypotheses related to characteristics of the Virtual Classroom as compared to he traditional classroom were explored mainly on the basis of student self-reports.

Limitations: What are the limitations of the methods used?
In any empirical research there are bound to be limitations. in this case, one overarching limitation has to be the ‘quality’ of the technology. In 1986-88, computer systems were primitive in comparison to today, there was little proliferation outside of education, defence and some businesses – therefore little chance of user experience. Technical support and tutor support would also be very limited by lack of experience with this new technology. Differences in learning capabilities and ‘brain power’ would also be difficult to quantify. Would students perform differently if swapped over on to VC part way through the course?

Ethics: Are there any ethical issues associated with the research?
There are some ethical questions relating to this work… perhaps the main concern is that of grading the students. As the students were using new technologies, as perhaps were the professors – what was the guarantee of quality? What could be done if a student

Implications: What are the implications (if any) for practice, policy or further research?
The implication was that no further research could be carried out on some of the subject areas – at the most basic level on the sociology course at Upsala.

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Reference

Hiltz, S.R. and Meinke, R. (1989) ‘Teaching sociology in a virtual classroom’, Teaching Sociology, vol. 17, no. 4, pp. 431-46.