On Friday I sat in a Commencement (= graduation) ceremony and listened to Stephen J Trachtenberg talk on the subject of the changing face of higher education.  With his many years of innovation behind him (and more probably still to come), it was great just to hear him say publicly what so many are thinking.  Of course, some of his examples were US-specific but the principles remain the same.  There’s a recording of his speech on www.excelsior.edu and a separate discussion on chipgriffin.com

Modern universities need to be more (and less) than the institutions of twenty years ago.  Inclusivity, technology, lifelong flexibility and openness are essential.  Adults often do not classify themselves as learners and yet they willingly (OK, sometimes not so willingly) take courses to keep up to date or try a discipline that may complement their experience and take them in new and rewarding directions.  As universities reach out to these non-traditional audiences so, also, they need to consider their overall communications using some form of a Principles and Communities model.  It is, and in this I agree with Trachtenberg, inexecusable that students are not told the format of the course, or its syllabus, before they begin.  The detail may change but at least the hours, the venue and the professor/teacher (barring illness or death) should be known.  In return, however, the students need to engage with the university and be part of an education community, not ‘customers’ waiting to be given answers in return for a fee.

The impressive surroundings of the British Library made a delightful, if strangely incongruous, setting for the Eduserv Foundation Symposium 2008.  Several hundred people listened to luminaries from the world of journalism (Bobbie Johnson of the Guardian and Jem Stone of the BBC) as well as the practical but forward-thinking experts from higher education (including Chris Adie, University of Edinburgh).  What did it all mean to you, me and every other learner on the planet?  In some ways, not a lot: if we want to find out things, we all have umpteen different methods of doing so and very few of us call first at a library, no matter how prestigious.  Instead, we Google, text, email, use an IM service - even talk to the person sitting next to us. (Who will probably Google, text, email, IM etc on our behalf.)   However, what was interesting was that several hundred academics were sitting there seeing this user-driven multiple-platform use of information services as both perfectly normal and not just acceptable but to be encouraged.  As Geoffrey Bilder reminded everyone, checking sources is still vital and no one doubts the immense value of repositories such as the British Library but higher education has already undergone a quiet revolution, one it may not yet have reflected upon and one that the laggards are still forecasting: days and weeks in a single library with a notebook (and no sandwiches) are no longer a rite of passage and automatic commanders of respect; today’s revered academic is the person who can best use the technologies available to access relevant information fast and then synthesise it to create something new and get it out into the ICT-enabled world as fast as possible.

Why do people do it?  One look at a cv that claims a degree over a decade ago from an ‘annexe’ of ‘Sussex’ raised concerns.  Why does someone ostensibly with professional qualifications and some English O-levels gain an MSc and not think it necessary to give intervening evidence?  A quick check with Sussex Uni, England finds that they know of no such annexe.  ‘Brantridge’ does, however, feature in the US Bear’s Guide which has a most useful chapter on diploma mills.  A US Masters degree and a UK MSc are, of course, somewhat different in character so even if the claimed degree is real, changing its title is misleading.  How much better it would have been to be a highly able professional - albeit without a degree.  People who can do jobs at an advanced level are highly valued and only the dimmest of recruitment agents uses a degree as the sole filter for professional positions.

EmmaJane Kirby has written a real ‘voxpop’ view of  higher education and employment realities in France.  She is right, of course: there are too many students in France studying the wrong subjects for a life of useful employment.  The same can probably be said of the UK - and often is by the current Government - but there is a difference: in France the love of structured philosophical debate permeates every café and dinner table.  It is common to be asked to dinner and told, with joyful anticipation, not just what one will be eating but also what the assembled company can debate.  French university life without discourse is unthinkable.  Here, in the UK, ‘management reports’, or something akin to them, are often required as part of academic programmes.  These require individual views on actions to be taken, taking responsibility for those views, and evidence.  That is quite different from presenting a balanced overview of accepted opinion before coming to a conclusion that, itself, respects those views that have been cast aside.  Of course, the best UK universities require that kind of essay as well - but it is very debatable that second-level universities regularly require the same level of balanced discourse as is the norm in France.  Then again, how many young graduates in France are allowed to take responsibility for their decisions and to follow them through?  In the UK, if you cannot ‘do’, you might as well go home.  (”Doing”, in this case meaning to take on a task and see it through independently of management - a somewhat un-French response.)

If a worldwide survey fails to rate French universities highly, perhaps the survey needs adjusting to take into account a wider view of life.  Engineers who can discuss the merits of different global economic policies or approaches to poetry do exist in both cultures but it is more common in France and life somehow more enriched and enduring for that.

Discussions about the merits of lifelong learning divide into three broad categories:

1. Lifelong learning is an economic necessity
2. Lifelong learning is good for you
3. Lifelong learning is fun.

It is this third and most neglected category that is introduced here although a fuller article is available on the ElementE website.

Humans play: it is one of the defining characteristics of our species. Psychologists have long studied the development and use of play in children and the effect not allowing them to experiment/play has on their future actions. As adults, we continue to play and some organisations boast in their recruitment campaigns that their employees work hard and play hard(er) as this extract shows:

If you work hard, keep your activity levels high and hit your targets, you will be rewarded big [… ]. A real work hard, play hard culture!

Seen on www.targetjobs.co.uk , job 11758

Executive toys for enlivening a dull office (webcam missile launcher, panic button key for the keyboard, lifetimer,,,) just fly out of the stores[1]. Adults in deeply repetitive jobs with no control over how to organise their time or their workspace easily become depressed and ways have to be found to allow them some autonomy[2]. Educationalists have long known that mere lectures or reading produce very poor retention-of-knowledge rates (5 and 10 per cent, respectively, according to a study lost in the mists of time but still acknowledged according to the NTLI in Bethel, Maine[3]). People need to ‘have a go’. Depending on their learning style[4], their preference may be to have a go sooner or later than other people but, somewhere in their own personal learning, have a go they will. Most people recognise that doing something in real life is better than a simulation (trying downhill ski-ing on a board attached to a television monitor is not quite the same as falling over in a metre of snow on a mountain) but games created for online learning are becoming ever more sophisticated, sometimes necessary (cleaning up major chemical spills is much better practised in theory) and sometimes such good fun that people play them as games, forgetting any ‘learning‘ connotations. (They do still learn – but that’s a by-product.) There are, naturally, those who feel compelled to point out that SecondLife is not ‘just a video game on steroids’[5] but while they can take an analytical approach, others just pick an avatar[6] and join in.

Do you agree that lifelong learning is fun and part of the human condition? Which learning approaches and resources do you prefer?

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[1] Try iwoot.com (no commission involved!)

[2] See, for example, “A field study of worker productivity improvements”, Applied Ergonomics, Volume 26, Issue 1, February 1995, Pages 21-27 Ashraf A. Shikdar and Biman Das

[3] http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/polovina/learnpyramid/about.htm accessed 19/02/08

[4] See Kolb D, Experiential Learning: experience as the source of learning and development, PrenticeHall, 1984 0-13-295261-0

[5] http://www.astd.org/TD/Archives/2008/Feb/Free/Feb2008.htm

[6] A pictorial screen character that represents ‘you’ as you wish to appear.

For one of the year’s more interesting and useful conferences, try UNISO 2008, the seventh annual summer event. (UNISO = University in Society) Last year the conference was in Versailles. This year, it is in the historically important and picturesque city of Iaşi in Romania from 16-20 July. The Call for Papers on the theme “Competence-centred Higher Education: challenges and solutions” has just been issued. There is a strand for student papers and workshop topics are welcome. Conference languages are English, French and Romanian. Simultaneous translation will be available.

Visits to the local sights (superb monasteries and artwork) and wineries are, naturally, on the agenda.

If you have not been to Romania before, do give this conference a try as the hospitality is bound to be great and the academic community is diverse, well-connected, helpful and knowledgeable. You are, of course, welcome to argue for or against competence-centred higher education and to give examples of how it does or does not work in the present plus implications for the future.

Yesterday at Learning Technologies 2008 (Olympia, London), I collected a variety of trial packages of learning resources and, this morning, was looking forward to a happy day of destruction testing.  Within half an hour, the day had completely changed in character.  Of the first three resource sites, two would not work with Firefox and one worked from Firefox but came up in the strangest mix of French and English with the added refinement of a drop-down country list that appeared to miss out all possible variants of United Kingdom/England/Great Britain and failed to put other countries in proper alphabetical order.  So much for the international nature of elearning resources!

Do I think you should avoid using Firefox, or Opera or any other non-IE browser?  No, I don’t.  Of course it takes time and money to ensure programs work with all possible configurations of end-user machines and there are some very niche browsers out there (anyone reading this use Gecko?) but Firefox is the browser of choice for many in mainland European universities.  One survey places Firefox usage as high as 36.3% of the global web population.  Now that IE6 has been replaced by the more robust IE7, I use Firefox and IE interchangeably - except, it seems, when major learning resource providers decide otherwise.

Many providers, it seems, are so focused on excellent content that usability testing has dipped below the horizon.  I shall not name providers until such time as they have had a chance to respond but I am testing resources for inclusion in EU portals and the ElementE website so, if you know of any otherwise good or  excellent resources that work in one browser but not another, let me know and let us build a case for wider usability.

Last night saw the UK launch of Ugo Riccarelli’s work Coppi’s Angel in an English translation by Michael McDermott.  Historical fact is blended with Riccarrelli’s empathy for sporting figures who achieved great success and true, pre-spin-doctor, hero status despite failure and human weakness.  Vision and a refusal to give up or just settle for the ordinary despite in many ways being just that, ordinary, is what led to their success.  The next time an educational assignment gets you down, just keep your eye on the goal, dig a bit deeper and keep going.  For a copy of the book, contact Middlesex University Press.

Thank you, BBC, for putting up the main page headline that Pierre and Thomas have been freed on bail by the Niger judge and their passports have been returned to them. Fuller details can be seen on both the BBC site and on Reporters without Borders.

Update on 29 January 2008: I sincerely hope this thread is now closed.  I know both families are extremely relieved that the journalists are home and safe and they are all delighted that the local driver, AlHassanye, was released from detention a couple of days later.  The story is not yet over as bail is still not the end of the legal process but at least everyone is alive and able to carry on working and being part of their respective family and global communities.

While travelling this last weekend, it was good to hear that the peaceful rally in Valence in support of Pierre, whose family live in nearby Chabeuil and Thomas was very well attended.  Unfortunately, a delayed train meant that I could not get to the solidarity rally held by French journalists at the Trocadero on Sunday but that was shown on the 19/20 news and had a good - and illustrious - turnout.

Jean-Michel Creisson and Marc Dandois should, by now, be in Niger with  Reporteurs sans Frontières and our thoughts are with them all.  Let us all hope that the President of Niger grants clemency to Pierre, Thomas and their driver, al Hassane, and that Pierre and Thomas can return home.