Part of the set up to my thesis was establishing the shift towards Internet enabled education and the shifts toward using technology. The rapid growth of connections has had a huge impact on the ways we interact with one another. Also, as noted below, broadband access was not commonly available while I was doing my research. This needs to be accounted for within some of my assumptions. But the rapidity with which these changes have occurred and the effects of them are telling. Read more of How the Internet became central to education
Category: teaching
Learning and interactions
In an effort to review my research focus, and to update what I know, I’m blogging my thesis. It’s more a reblogging exercise, if you think of the thesis as a huge blog, which it’s not. But the things I learnt while doing it are very important and in the 5 years since its completion, I’ve barely touched it. In some ways, I think it has become more important because we are much more engaged in many more forms of interaction. I collected my data nearly a decade ago and my concern was that we weren’t really sure what learners were doing while engaged in ‘online learning’. I’m still not convinced that ‘online’ is different from face-to-face but I’m also not convinced that it’s the same. There are different affordances available through each, and how this plays out in learning is still not well understood. There’s an insidious pedagogy (Lane, 2009) implied with their use, but that is also true of face-to-face. I’ll come to that later.
This is the beginning of my thesis – the background, the set-up. I don’t think there is much changed since I wrote this, but there is a broadening of issues. Read more of Learning and interactions
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Tags: learning
On being more interesting
Over the last few days, I have been looking at sections of my PhD to help me understand some of the processes that are happening with attempts to censor/filter the Internet as proposed by the Australian Government. One of the particular issues I have is not so much whether censorship is bad (I believe it is) or whether free speech trumps it (perhaps in a limited way), but what opportunities we forego in an attempt to protect children from ‘inadvertent’ exposure to ‘stuff we don’t like’. I use ‘we’, there, to mean society in general or at least the vocal portions of it. Read more of On being more interesting
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Tags: nocleanfeed, research, teaching
Reflecting on my first year course
I’ve been teaching first year Business Informatics for 3 years now and I think I’m starting to get the hang of it. No, that’s not right, I think the students are finally at a place where I’m not that far ahead.
When I started teaching this course, it was pretty ‘scrugged’. It was a traditional IS/IT course with a ‘shotgun’ approach to learning. We basically filled students with the bits and bolts of Information Systems. Each week was a new set of stuff to be remembered. When I took over, it was renamed from Business Information Systems to Business Informatics to coincide with the new book ‘The Book of Informatics’ which just happened to be written by our Professor of Information Systems. That book gave me licence to innovate. I spent my summer holiday reading it and rethinking the course. Since then, there’s been continual updating and tweaking to get it right.
One thing that struck me tonight during the lecture is something that I ask during the first lecture each semester. How many students have a FaceBook? This year, I think nearly a third of the attending students raised their hands (last semester I think there was about 10 out of 200 in the room). I got daring and asked how many had a MySpace. Not as many. Then I threw caution to the wind and asked how many had Twitter. Surprisingly, there were more on Twitter this semester than there were on FaceBook last semester. Last semester I actually had to ask if they’d even heard of Twitter and the response was a dismal no. So, there’s a very different feel to the class which is only partly explained by being in a smaller lecture theatre. Heck, there was even a student who approached me at the end of the class to tell me she was a mod on a wiki somewhere (I can’t remember where now, but that’s post lecture funk, I’m sure I’ll be chatting with her again).
Amusingly, no mobile phones went off, so I didn’t get to dance to any unusual ring tones, but I did dance to the music I put in my video. I did mention that it was probably the lamest video that they would have to watch all semester (it came after the sheep).
It’s always interesting doing this course, because I’m able to push the boundaries. I tell students they are not buckets, and I will not fill them with facts to be regurgitated in the exam – any facts in the course will be outdated by the time they finish their degree so that’s a pretty pointless exercise. This group seemed to get that, although some seemed a bit tentative. But that’s okay, it really is only week 1 and there’s a heckuva lot more to follow.
A dilemma of thinking
It’s the first week of semester, well, actually, it’s the Sunday before the first week of semester and I’m suffering my normal first lecture jitters. You see, I always want to grab students’ attention. I want them to see the importance of the things I will be talking about. I want them to appreciate just how much technology, particularly the Internet, has changed the way we do things in business.
Normally, I put a video up while they all settle down. I usually start with 5000 Web Apps in 333 Seconds from SimpleSpark. It kind of sets the mood as it’s fast-paced and quick-moving. It lets me start with the question of how do we keep up with all the changes, which, of course, is a central theme of Business Informatics. Then I usually do 2 stories to introduce systems thinking, another core theme of the course.
Once upon a time, there was a man, he was a powerful man. He was the head of a large multi-national corporation, which made STACKS of money. But things changed. Technology intervened. He couldn’t cope. He said
I wouldn’t be able to recognize a good technology person — anyone with a good #$&^&# story would have gotten past me.
Technology was breaking his business model. He had an analogy. He said:
If you had Coca-Cola coming through the faucet in your kitchen, how much would you be willing to pay for Coca-Cola?
[At this point, I usually take a swig from my bottle of water, bought specially for the occasion, and say something inane like: seriously, would you pay for what comes out of your tap?]
There you go, that’s what happened to the record business.
So who was this man of such forethought? Doug Morris: Head of Universal Music [Source]. Doug gave us the recording industry’s new business model:
Sue anyone who doesn’t give us money. Break the customer’s technology!
Of course, more companies have jumped on that bandwagon, giving us technology that doesn’t perform as we would like, it’s defective by design.
Then I used to have a second contrasting story. But that story has been broken and become the first story. But maybe not. I have to reframe it. The second story was about Jeff Bezos and Amazon, about how he had a vision, and persevered. How he’s one of the successes of the dotcom generation.
But after the last few Kindle Kerfuffles (the Kindle has been featured on Defective by Design), I’m not sure that it fits any more. Well, sure, he apologised, so perhaps the recognition of the power that the Internet gives people could be the factor in the way I present it.
I was going to add a third story, United breaks guitars, about how consumers can really bite into your reputation, but that’s almost too much like Amazon’s kindle swindle. I would really like to have a positive story, but … I now really don’t have one.
These stories were to introduce systems thinking, but it seems that systems thinking is becoming a dying art, particularly in the business world. How can I emphasise its importance when there are very few well-known examples of it? How do I demonstrate the importance of seeing the bigger picture, of linking that to strategic thinking and thus to the underlying systems thinking concepts when I no longer have really good examples?
Just for the record, I usually present systems thinking as “a way of thinking about the World based on four pillars: emergency, hierarchy, control and communication” where the emergent property is the behaviour of the system which emerges after the interaction of elements within a system, hierarchy implies different levels of subsystems within a system and communication and control maintain the interrelationships of elements within a system.
So, do I stick with Amazon even though there is abundant evidence that they stopped systems thinking for a while? Is there a better example of an organisation that is pretty well known that shows some evidence of systems thinking?
Such is my dilemma.