A couple of snippets from Martin Bean's presentation at the OU Teaching Awards

A few things I wanted to keep from the presentation of Martin Bean, OU Vice Chancellor, at the OU Teaching Awards yesterday.

"Transforming information into meaningful knowledge"

In … a world (in which information is everywhere), sense-making and the ability to assess the credibility of information are paramount.

Mentoring and preparing students for the world in which they live, the central role of the university when it achieved its modern form in the 14th Century, is again at the forefront

Horizon Report 2010 [http://wp.nmc.org/horizon2010/chapters/trends/]

As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes”

Denis Diderot, "Encyclopédie" (1755) [Online, I could only find this in wikipedia]

Conclusion: Teaching Matters

“..it is the role of us teachers, to make sense of the information that’s out there. To think differently, to act differently, to solve problems, to confront society in different ways”

ICTs in an unequal world

Today I'm going to interview Hannah Beardon for a podcast to use with OU Course T324: Keeping ahead in ICT.

Hannah is the author of a report on the use of mobile phones for development that we are using in one of the assignments for T324 this year.

One of the contributors to a video used in T324 ("African Renaissance', originally produced for the discontinued course T305), a phoneshop owner in a South African township, says that cellphone are 'what Africa has been waiting for', and there's no doubt that mobile phones have been taken up and used by the people in developing countries in remarkable ways. But, as ever, it is not quite that simple.

Hannah says in the final section of her report:

As this guide shows, mobile technologies have great potential to enhance access to information and communication capacity and contribute to social development or change objectives. Some of the issues of access, affordability or usability which may undermine the sustainability and scalability of work using other ICTs, such as computers or video cameras, are less pressing when it comes to mobile phones, which have been widely adopted and adapted by people in even the poorest areas, with least capacity. However, many of the other issues and concerns around the digital divide and ICT as it relates to social change do remain. [...]

For one thing, users in more developed markets are able to take advantage of the highest functionality, and usually the cheapest rates. There are great differences in opportunities provided by the mobile market throughout Africa (i.e. the difference in network capacity between South Africa and other African countries) and within countries, such as between urban and rural, or rich and poor.

Manchester University Development Informatics group found that despite the potential of mobiles to flatten information asymmetries there is still a “mobile divide”, which has its roots in fundamental access barriers of electricity, network coverage, and income, as well as difference in functionality of elite high-end models. So while mobiles provide a fantastic tool to enhance community-based development and social equity work, they also are another area to watch as regards inequality of opportunity.

These sorts of issues don't only apply to mobile phones in developing countries, they are to do with the relationship between technology and people everywhere.

Farewell to T305: Digital Communications

We had little lunchtime gathering today, to say farewell to the Open University (OU) course, T305: Digital Communications. (Today was what was probably the final meeting of the course exam board.)

In some ways the course was a 'run of the mill' OU offering. There are many more innovative OU courses, and there are courses that have had lots more students, but look at these (approximate) statistics for the course:

Ten presentations (1999 – 2008) and something like:

• 10,000 students
• 280 TMA (tutor-marked assignment) questions
• 900 CMA (computer-marked assignment) questions
• A quarter of a million TMA answers… each marked by a tutor
• Not far off a million CMA answers
• Millions of viewers for our TV programmes
• Lots and lots of FirstClass electronic conference messages - which means lots of students helping students, lots of tutors helping students, and lots of students telling staff what they think of the course
• Total income to the university measured in £ millions

and that’s not counting the Singapore or the Arab OU presentations.

………………………………… then there’s still the long tail on OpenLearn….

and if you search the web you’ll find all sorts of bits of the course scattered around the world.

I quote these statistics simply to draw attention to the scale of the OU. Maybe if someone from, say, China, India or the USA is reading this they'd be less impressed, but within the context of the UK and Europe generally, these are big numbers, are they not?