 It's my privilege to be able to welcome our first keynote speaker. And we're delighted to welcome Steve Wheeler as our opening keynote to set the tone here at Ulzee. And I think Steve is well-known to many of us for his innovative and challenging work on the digital student experience and the impact that technology used to support learning should have on pedagogy. I know he's got some exciting ideas to share with us today. Steve is an associate professor from Plymouth University down on the south west coast. And he's also brought to his students along to join him with sharing in the keynote that's Rebecca and Kate. So, and Steve, I should add also, apart from all the other description of him in your welcome pack, he's also chair of the European Distance e-learning network and just recently fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. And so please do welcome Steve Wheeler. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. I didn't expect this gig. Marin invited me and I had to come. You can't say no to Marin, can you? But here's what I'm going to do today. I'm only going to speak for a while and then I want to bring my students home. You said I'm bringing all my students with me. I've only got two of them. If I brought them all, they'd more than double this congregation here today. But thank you for coming, you two, and we'll be seeing you shortly. I've got a lot of memories of Ulzee. Who's here for the first time? Who are alt-virgins? That's quite a few. That's quite a lot, isn't it? So that's amazing. I first came to alt about 1997, I think it was. And so I've got lots of memories of alt. I haven't been for about three years, but do you remember Fault? The fringe alt with the little star... What were they? They were kind of like space invader badges that Francis Bell made. Hello, Francis, if you're watching. Do you remember the VLE's dead debate? People literally shouting at each other and pointing fingers across the room at each other. It was amazing, wasn't it? It was great fun. 150 people crammed into an 80-seater room and 30 more turned away. It was quite amazing. Martin Bean, on this very stage, being blinded by the glare of the apple from Diana Laurelard's laptop. Remember that? Donald Clarke with his don't lecture me lecture. And the subsequent Twitter storm. It was amazing. Polarised the audience, hands rosling, balancing precariously on top of a huge stepladder. Remember that pointing a stick at the screen? And poor old Seb Shmoller grimly hanging on below. A whole of his career flashing in front of his life. Mentally balancing his... The indemnity insurance agreements and wondering about visits from the lawyers and so on. These are all memories of old. These are all part of the culture of old. And old C is just an amazing event. This is probably one of the most knowledgeable audiences for learning technology that you'll ever see. There's two or three that I could mention. This is probably one of the top ones. But today really what I want to do is try and talk to you about the future of learning in terms of who we're dealing with now. The students that are coming in through our doors. The students that are coming in through your doors this year are going to be probably students that don't remember the last century. That's the century that you and me were born in. That's the century that you and me were educated in. This learning I'm going to say to you is changing. That's my argument today. Learning is changing. Not at a fundamental level. At a fundamental level we all know that learning occurs when neurons connect and we make connections and so on. That's a fundamental level of learning. That's never going to change. That's biological. But at a kind of a psychological level and also I think at an operational level I think that learning is changing in many ways. And I'll try and show you what I mean by that as we go through this presentation. Here's part of the problem that we've got. When we try and look at the future, when we try to look at what is coming, when we try to anticipate what's next, we get the problem that Voltaire talks about here. It's a psychological problem. I suppose in psychology you would call fixity. You can't break out of the box. You can't see things in a new way because you're still stuck in the old culture that you're used to. And this kind of comes out in all sorts of new technologies. When Alexander Graham Bell allegedly invented the telephone, there were several others that had to claim to that. He had the best lawyers. But when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, he made this starting statement. I truly believe that one day every time in America we'll have a telephone. And he was right, wasn't he? You go to America, every time, has a telephone. What he couldn't foresee, of course, was all the kind of the miniaturisation, satellites, digitisation. He couldn't see that far down the corridor. So when you try and make predictions that are sweeping about the future, you end up looking quite ridiculous. Because there are things that happen which you don't anticipate. Here's a picture by a French artist called Vilmar, painted in 1910. This is education in the year 2000 according to him. You see what he's done? It's interesting, isn't it? He's working off the old model of transmission. Of course that doesn't happen in universities now, does it? But you see what he's got here. He's got new technology that he's incorporating. I thought about this as a total transmission model until I was listening to Audrey Watters. Hello, Audrey, if you're watching. Your last year's keynote speaker. Audrey mentioned that this picture actually represents network learners. But it could actually, because interestingly, if you can send information one way, you can send it the other way as well, can't you? And that means that this could represent network learning. But what I'm trying to get at here is actually we need to break out of the old models that we're thinking of and start thinking about disruptive pedagogies. You see, when new technologies are introduced into conservative environments, students often take them and run with them and they learn new ways to use them. But embarrassingly, often, it's not the case with teachers. Teachers cannot find new ways to use them because they're still stuck in the old mindsets or they haven't got time or they haven't got the energy to change things. A classic case of that is the smart board. Other brands are available. But the smart board, interestingly, was introduced into schools several years ago as a government initiative. And what did teachers do with it? They did two things. They wrote on it and they projected on it, just like they would with an old white board. So we've got this problem of being stuck in the old mindset, psychological problem. Here's my background. In 1970, I went to this building here. Anyone know what it is? I think Stephen probably will, because he lives near there, doesn't he? But who else knows what this is? Anyone? You live there, too. It's the Evaluon, the Philip's flying saucer we used to call it. And in those days, it was a technology and science museum. I went there as a kid at school and I was amazed by what I saw. And that inspired me to become what I am today, a learning technologist. I started off my work in 1976 before it was called learning technology. In those days, we called it media and audio visual. And I started off by using these type of technologies here, if the clicker works. That guy there looks like he's obviously enjoying his job, doesn't he? But I saw this in 1970 at the Philip's Evaluon. I saw this demonstration of what can now be only called video conferencing. You had a television and a camera and a microphone in one room and you could sit in there and see your mates down in the other room and say hello to them and all sorts of stuff. At the same time, Star Trek had just come out. And of course, all of this was happening on the screen in front of you. And it really inspired me. It inspired lots of other people as well. And then, of course, these things came along. I joined in 1976 at a place called the College of Mark and St John's, which was a teacher training college that I still is. It's now a university. And we taught students how to use these things. Open real machines, video as well as audio and things like the Banda Spirit Duplicator. Those things were evil. More evil than the dark bot. They were really evil because they were full of spirit. And of course, when you gave them to the students, the students sniffed them and went high. That was something to behold. But we had to teach students how to use these things as well before they went into school. The 16mm Ballon Howell projector. And the VHS cassette had come out around about 1980, 1979. And the Betamax, which beat it hollow in terms of quality, but never really took off. All of this really is transmission stuff. It's all teacher tools. And then suddenly something happened. Computers came in. I remember building a PC from Kitform. And it was huge. The PC itself was huge. And it had about 128K in it. And the tiny little green screen monitor on top was how you looked at how it worked. But you see, when Q-Peters came in, things started to change. And the BBC B, remember that one? What's that one? The ZX Spectrum? What was that? Space Invaders? C-Fax? All of this information explosion suddenly happened. And people were starting to use it for their own means rather than having it transmitted to them. You could actually buy one of these things and learn to program it. And then, of course, along comes the World Wide Web. That's a picture from the Olympics opening ceremony, as you probably remember. And what we've suddenly got is a sea on which to send all these ships around. And people start to connect with each other. People start to participate more. People start to become more social in their learning. It becomes for everyone. And more up to date now, we start to look at technologies which connect us, which allow us to collaborate, which allow us to interact. And eventually we get to this stage where I suppose you could say now that technology is very student-centred. It's very learner-centred. It's very user-centred. So where does that leave us? Because you see one of the abiding themes of any artsy conference, and I've been to quite a few now, always reoccurs, is what are we doing with technology? How can we make it effective? How does it influence pedagogy? These are big questions. And hopefully by the end of these three days, you'll go away inspired. You'll go away maybe challenged as well. But the problem is you've got to go back to your own environment then. Will you still feel inspired when you get back there and you meet the same old problems again? Well, the thing is you've got an alt community which you can connect with and talk with. And obviously we support each other. So it's a very difficult job that we're in. But I'm looking at trends you see that I've seen over the last few years emerging. And one of these trends is that because of the technologies that students are bringing in with them now, I think education, particularly in higher education, it's going from teacher-led to learner-led. The learners are taking more responsibility for their own learning now. And you're going to hear some examples of that from my two students when they come up and speak later on. We're going to have a conversation with you about this. I often use the Mandelbrot set. You're probably familiar with this, especially if you're a mathematician. The Mandelbrot set is basically a recursive towards infinity type of mathematical equation. Every version of it gets smaller and smaller, but it's a similar version of itself. And this is very much like the education that we see still going on in many of our schools and certainly in some of the universities that I've worked with in. What we should be doing is moving towards discursive approaches to education which are different each time. Instead of reproducing knowledge, we should be pursuing new knowledge. And there's an example of this from a secondary school. So the student is explained this equation. You can see it over here. You've got infinity on the right-hand side there. And so then the teacher said, I tried to check to see if she really understood that and I gave her another example, a different one. And that's what she got. Very recursive, isn't it? Repetition. And of course you get problems when you don't understand the problem. The problem becomes the problem. So we've got to be careful that we don't reproduce knowledge and lose people. We've got to, I think, be responsible with education and start thinking about how we're going to be more discursive and how we're going to draw out people more and get them thinking critically and get them thinking in various ways that we couldn't think when we were at school or university. We're going from analogue to digital. And Greg Ponte talked in 1995 about atoms becoming bits. And that's a really important distinction, I think. Atoms take a lot of time and energy and so on to move around, whereas digital is instant. It also has attributes to it which can improve the content as well. We're going from close to open now. I know that I've got to be careful because Martin Welles is in the audience somewhere. And he said the other day that we've won the battle for open, but it doesn't feel like we have. And you can talk to him about what he means by that later on. But I think we're kind of halfway there, myself. We're looking at going more open with our education, aren't we? A lot of my content is repurposeable. All my images and photographs and texts and so on that I send out, that I publish is under creative commons. And it can be used again without my permission. And that reaps some interesting rewards. The other day I saw that someone had translated one of my blog posts into Spanish. And it put it up on their own website and directed people back to my website. And suddenly my blog traffic increased because the whole of Latin America woke up to the fact that I was writing about education. And that was a real bonus to me. I didn't expect that, but it happens when you become more open. Open scholarship I think is going to be important for all of us. Should we open ourselves up to criticism as well? I think we should. I think we're all responsible for what we believe and what we say and what we do as educators. This is an interesting picture. I took this on the way into work the other day. They cordoned off this telephone. I don't know whether they're going to demolish it or repair it or whatever, but we're going much more from tethered, aren't we, to mobile? How many of you have got a mobile device in here today that's internet enabled? Forest of Hounds. How many of you got two? Still a Forest of Hounds. Three? Less, but still a few. You see there are more mobile devices in the world now than there are people. And you're why that's happening. But the first mobile phones were huge. I remember having one. They were huge. Actually, miniaturisation is quite an important process because it does allow us to be more, things to be more portable, but it allows us to move around the ambient learning approaches. This couples in with distance education, it couples in with e-learning. All of this together, I think, is where we're going with these trends. Another one that I see happening is going from standardised to personalised. We're not quite there yet. There's a story of an architect who designed a university and they said to him, okay, the students are coming next week and the staff are all in. Where are the roads? Where are the pathways? He said, wait. He said, wait. And the students and the staff all came in and they made their own pathways and when they finished, he paved it over. It's design against user experience, isn't it really? That's the difference. Desire pathways, I think, is another important development in higher education where we should be heading. The idea that knowledge becomes experience allows you to join the dots up. But when, in fact, you let young people and students decide for themselves what pathway they're going in, then you start to see the creativity emerging and they join the dots up in different ways that you didn't even anticipate. And I think that's part of the exciting thing about being in higher education today. We're going from isolated to connected. We know this. We're trending on Twitter. We have been for the last half an hour. Did you know that? I'll see this trending on Twitter. And it will continue to do so because we are connected and we want to share what we've learnt with other people who are connected to us. It's part of our culture now and that's going to increase as well. It's about creating your personal learning network. You can imagine this guy here next to the table over there. He's connected to three people. That's not really a network, but bearing in mind that each of those is probably connected to somebody else as well, then suddenly you've got a network of experience and network of learning and it becomes incredibly powerful. And this is exactly what I do with my students. I show them that actually Twitter is not a tool for mum and dad. It's actually a tool they can use for themselves as well. And we have a back channel going in many of our live lectures and seminars and so on. And if students are separated by seminars, they can connect with each other and compare what they're learning in the same seminars in parallel with each other. And it wasn't... I think it was about four years ago. Some of my students were talking about one of the books that I'd recommended reading for one of my modules. And it was on Twitter and I looked at it and so I put it onto the screen in front of me and they mentioned the author's name and so I tweeted it and of course I know full well that the author's following me on Twitter. He's in America. Within 20 minutes, the author was actually live on the screen talking to the students about the book and they went. And they couldn't believe that the author that they were studying was actually directly interacting with them. With Twitter. It's an amazing tool, isn't it? We talk about connectivism. We talk about it's not so much what you know anymore but who you know. Who you connect to is important. I think that's another trend that we're seeing. Ed chat you probably know about. Who's been involved with Ed chat? Some of you. It's a regular event. In fact, it's not just an event. It's ongoing. It happens all the time. One that we recently set up and I hope Amy Burval is watching in America. We set up a challenge over the summer. The two of us called Blimage, which is basically a meologism blog and image. You send someone an image. They write a blog, a learning related blog about it and then they challenge three other people with another image and so on. And it becomes a kind of a cloud based environment where everyone starts talking to each other and everyone starts to reflect on images. Everyone starts to think metaphorically. Everyone starts to think critically. And before you know it, you've got a whole body of knowledge out there. I think there's just over 200 blog posts so far. The Dutch have really run with it. They've got over 80 or 90 blog posts so far. Blimage.nl. We've done the same with Blidio vision, which is obviously blog video. See how it's done? It's very interesting. But the point is a lot of these people who have been doing these blogs have discovered other bloggers who they never knew existed. And their own traffic, visitor traffic has gone up as well as a result of it. It's become a very creative process. It's all about connection. There we are. I'm going to introduce my students at this point. I'd like you to welcome Kate and Becca. Microphones. I'll give you some microphones. There we go. Becca and Kate actually came up yesterday with me. One of them is my star student with this one here because she's Manchester United fan. Put your hand up if you're a United fan. This one here is a troublemaker. She's Man City. We're going to have a conversation, I think, and please feel free to join in with us because I want the student voice to be heard here. I've been spurting on about what I think of the trends, but I'd like them to tell you themselves what the trends are. I'd like you maybe to question them as well and find out for yourself what learner 2.0 looks like. These guys were born in the 90s, weren't you? Yes. Really, do you remember the last century? No, not at all. Not really, no. Well, you wouldn't, would you? Take a seat if you like or wonder around. Before we start, because this is the first ever time we've ever spoken in front of this many people and the first time we've been to this conference, we would quite like to take a selfie with you all. I got this from my birthday. It's a brilliant thing. It's a selfie stick. I'll put this down. Right, okay. If you don't like selfies, you might want to put your head down now. It's right out. Must I? Okay, fine. You ready for this? Thank you. Okay, right. Right, well, we got that out of the way then. Okay, right, now. Interestingly, I heard this the other day. I'd like to hear your opinions on this. Apparently the digital birth of children is six months now. Right. In other words, that's when young people first start to appear on the web. Probably pictures from their parents who've taken and put them on Facebook. I actually dispute that because I received this picture from Steve Anderson the other day in America. It's a girl and of course that's an ultrasound picture. So children are appearing on the web even before they're born now. Is that going to be a significant thing, do you think? What does it mean to you that we appear on the web even before we realise that we're appearing on the web? I see it all the time. I think it's frequent now, isn't it? I think we're kind of at the age now where I am anyway, I'm 22. So I'm kind of getting towards that age where some of my friends are having children and things like that. I see it loads like people put in scans on and I think if you challenge people about it, I don't think they really understand what that actually kind of means. You're starting that sort of digital footprint before your child even has a choice. I don't know whether that's kind of an ethical issue. I don't really know. It's literally like a diary every day I see a photo of their walking. Of course it's more or less permanent. This is something I think you might want to discuss later on. Ethically I think it's an important issue. We'll come back to that one I think in terms of what we now call digital footprint or digital reputation. There are lots of issues here I think to emerge. Here's another one. This is from Alec Curos. He talks about children not only consuming, young people not only consuming, but also remixing existing content. I suppose sharing it and producing their own content as well as a lot of that going on. He talks about learning changing as a result of that. What do you think about that? Is that something you actually do? Are you familiar with that yourselves? Yeah, I think... Why? What is it you're doing? I consume knowledge at university obviously. And then for example blogging and things. I then consume that knowledge and produce it onto a blog in my own thoughts. When you actually blog, what does that do to your kind of thinking about what you're studying? It helps us collect our thoughts I think. You can take as many notes and things as you like but I think if you then go away and reproduce it how you see it kind of thing, I think that kind of helps us to... Again, I will go back to that when I'm writing my assignments and again I then reproduce it again to make sure that obviously it's academic, standard and things. But it's just that constant thought process and obviously again things are changing and more update research has been done and I keep reproducing it. So it means... The provisionality of it means you can remix it all the time and keep adding to it. Here's something I often show people. This is the three biggest fears of teachers using technology. And I'll let you to contrast this to the three biggest fears of students using technology. And here's the difference. That's so true. So true. Does that resonate with you out there? I'll go back, there you go again. Can I just say this Steve? This first one here, we're both trainee teachers. Now, the other one with the Wi-Fi and stuff like I said, so true. Get that all the time. The first time we did what we got to the hotel yesterday was go to Wi-Fi. Yeah, do we have Wi-Fi? But the one before that, I mean personally now if I'm using, or if I'm at home, or if I'm at university or whatever I don't have a fear of technology but as soon as I am on placement and I'm trying to teach it's kind of that environment that you're in I think as soon as I become Miss Bartlett it's like you step in as a computing leader or something and you see people are like how do you fix a projector and I don't have a clue. But then you do know how to connect to Wi-Fi. I think maybe it's an expectation that you should know and maybe you might know it but I think it's just the expectation that you do that's quite scary. So really we're not talking about age here then. We're talking about contact. Definitely not. Which I find fascinating. I mean this relates to me to the work of the digital residents and visitors theory which really knocks natives and immigrants into a top hat doesn't it really? You know the natives and immigrants theory. I find that really difficult to swallow because in terms of Prenski's ideas I'm an immigrant. I can talk technology but I teach I talk it with an accent. I can't give you the accent because I'm struggling with it whereas these guys are supposed to be adept at and yet they've just told you that when they go into a context where they are the teacher they sometimes struggle with the technology. So I think we are looking more at a context-based thing than an age-based thing with this kind of approach to using technology. I'm going to move on swiftly because we're going to run out of trouble. Look at this. And you can do the same with other old technologies as well. The problem is you see young people have a very narrow kind of point of reference. I was sat on a train the other day. I tell you no lie. And there were two secondary school boys sat next to me on the other side of the aisle. And they were talking about Sherlock Holmes. And one said oh I love the new Sherlock don't you? You know the one with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. I love that. And his mate turned to me and said yes it's very good. He said I prefer the classic version of Sherlock Holmes with Robert Downey Jr. And you can see that the reference is narrower and of course young people don't understand old technologies but they do know what to do with the new technologies when they've got them in the right context. What do you think? Is there anything you want to say about that? Or anything anyone wants to say? We've got some microphones here. We can start the conversation. I think you're taking the mic out of young people to be honest Steve. I don't like it very much. Well. I'm only joking. You should have to. I'm marking an assignment next to that. That's so true. That would be my best behaviour. But I think we'll move on and we'll look at something else here because this is quite an interesting image in itself. And it's not what you'd expect but I think I see this a lot. My father is actually 87 years old now. And a few years ago I introduced him to Facebook. And he called me over recently and said to me, Steve what does this mean here? And he put a post out. And underneath it it said 54k. And I said dad you've got 54,000 likes. I was spitting lead. I can't even get 100. But he had 54,000 likes because he tapped into some mainstream Facebook discussion without realising it and had posted something which was really evocative and 54,000 people had come in. He's a big celebrity now on Facebook. But he still doesn't know how to talk it. He used an expression the other day. What happened was he had to explain to my grandchildren that his sister had died. And he said I'm sorry to have to tell you that Antietna passed away in her sleep last night. We were all very sad. LOL. And of course my daughter was in a sense. She said you can't say that grandad. He was laughing out loud. He said no I didn't mean it that way. I thought it was lots of love. So there are language differentials we've got to be careful of aren't they really? So go away and look up P999 now. This is a good one for you to look up. Some of you know what that means already. You probably know what it means. But people of my generation don't unless you look it up. So there is this interesting conundrum when you put several generations together in the same digital space and you share it there are different narratives going on. There are different versions of language and barriers that are put up against it. This is what I see happening a lot now. Do you see that? I do, but I just wish students like us could afford Apple Macs. This looks like one of our lecture halls. Other devices are available. Other devices are available. We said that. Absolutely. Bob, thank you Bob. Doesn't mean they're any good. Doesn't mean they're any good. OK. No, but I think what we're trying to, the point we're trying to make here really regardless of the tool is that students now have personal winners on the world. But when I was at university, I wasn't able to do anything other than make notes and ask questions if I was allowed to. Now I can Google what's happening. I was actually sat up there about, when Martin Bean was speaking, when was this about 2009, was it? 2009. I remember sitting up at the back there and he'd finished his keynote and then down at the front row somewhere here another Australian academic got up and mentioned who he was and where he came from and asked the question. At the back, everyone at the back, Google this guy to see who he was. And I thought, no one is really anonymous on the web anymore, are they? This is one of these things that we're now having to deal with. Can I say as well, Steve, that with this, we have some lecturers at university who are really against, I guess, the use of technology. If that was happening, I think they'd probably, we've actually had it before, haven't we? We've been asked to put our devices away. I think that's kind of the divide that there is now. I think someone who maybe isn't so into technology and things might look at that and think that we're all ignoring the lecture and just on Facebook or internet shopping or whatever if we have money. But we're not, I think, is that divide and it's that understanding of maybe what we actually use technology for in a lecture. I get it, it's a psychological, it's a mindset problem, isn't it? Some people will see the value others think of it as a threat and I'm sure that someone wants to ask a question actually in the middle here. We need microphones. In some of the time, in most of these things are a two-way conversation and the interesting thing about our identities that you were challenging is that actually most teachers, best teachers are the best learners and the best learners are the best teachers and we never want identity and just as you're confident and happy with technology until you're putting in front of people and going to eat you alive in a different world there's somebody responsible for their access to technology and it's lit. So we do contextify who we are, how we react to technology and there's somebody who, at one moment, is goofing the lecture and a great student is in Kate. The next really second, if they're most people are shopping, you have to have an email in and are distracted and are actually passing your lecture and they're stepping into another world in another personality and our desire to control that may be wrong and may be challenging to the people we're around because it is probably a necessary part of the way that we interact with each other because we don't tend to like people turning around in a walking way of talking and that's something else technology gives us all the time and that's freedom and security and the other way. I hope that was got on the webcast. If not, we'll need to put the microphone around because we need to get people to pick up what's being said here so that people outside can hear this. But good point and it is still all about context. We learn by doing said Piaget, we also learn by making. I don't know if you want to say anything about what you're doing through learning through making at all, do you? We're always using equipment and stuff at university and I think it definitely benefits our learning massively and again then you go and tweet it out or whatever and you're constantly learning and blogging and things in order to collate that learning I guess. Being primary school teachers you're going to have to learn all the topics. You have to teach all the topics. Did you know that? A primary school teacher teaches every topic. They're not like a secondary school teacher who specialises. How does that help the multidisciplinary of it for you? Does it help at all? I think a lot of technology these days you can see how the technology can be used in a broad range of subjects. So learning deeply into one type of learning by making and using these tools you can use it in so many different subjects and that really helps us as primary school teachers especially with SCN children and all those different aspects. It really does help by making and little children love learning with their hands and things. You recognise these students don't you? These are the group that are just qualified and these three students here were creating a video because they were exploring theories of learning and the best way they thought of to actually learn it was to actually create the video and then show it and get some criticism from their peer group and I think that was quite a brave of them I think to actually do that to open themselves up to criticism from the rest of their group but that's what they did and I'm assuming that you do something very similar to that. Do you do make videos? Yeah we've some videos and things aren't we? Yeah, which are available on YouTube if you'd like to go and check them out. Yeah but you do put yourself sort of out there for comments and discussion which can be quite scary at first but it's good you know that's how you learn through that discussion so. We're going to move on again and just going to talk briefly about the tools and the technologies and the idea of user generated content. Some people I know complain about Wikipedia a lot of my colleagues and you know who I'm talking about will say I'm not going to allow my students to use Wikipedia as a reference because... Do you have a response to that? Do you use Wikipedia at all? So how do you use it? A bit scared to say. I do look at Wikipedia. I'm quite careful. I don't know. It's all that context I guess. If you mention it in the context of that it is Wikipedia and it might not be completely factual or if you say we've got it from I think it's okay. It's just such an easy website to use. It's just there. It's just got the information on it but you do have to just be careful about what you use because I tend to use it as a first point of call and then sort of go to that. You know that Wikipedia will know the basics and then you go to the academics and stuff for the additional research. That's how I tend to use it. I'll be interested to hear what the audience thinks about Wikipedia as a tool for learning. Maybe somebody down here needs to bring the microphone to him and one at the back over there as well. My boy is eight actually. Last year I was immensely proud the first time he did some homework by cutting and pasting from Wikipedia. I thought that was very impressive. He identified what he needed to find. He dragged it and dropped it into the word processor into it. That seemed to me as good a feat as copying anything out of it. Basic ICT skills and editing. He even used open license materials. Interesting. Somebody at the back over here. Can you say who you are, Marin? Marin needs to be your baid. Hi, I'm Roger Harrison, University Manchester. One of the things I often come across is that people think that what already existed is perfect. You are comparing people to say that Wikipedia has problems of because you don't know the source of the authorship and all those types of things. We know that the British Medical Journal and the Lancet also publishes work which has problems with it too. We sort of think what we already do for example in a non-technological perspective is perfect, so then other things that we are introducing can't be as good as. Interesting. We have someone down here I think who wants to say something and also while we are waiting for the microphones to go around what would happen then, guys? In our next semester I set you a task as a group to go away and create a new Wikipedia page on a new topic which doesn't exist yet. How hard or easy would that be? I think it's a lot harder actually to get something onto Wikipedia than people might think because I'm not trying it personally but I know that it has to be verified by somebody. You can't just put anything on it so I don't know who that person is but it does have to be verified by someone. I don't know, perhaps we should do that. Sounds quite good. Has anyone ever done that? Over here, several people have and I'll be interested in talking to you afterwards. You haven't got time now to actually find out what the results were. Coming from over here. I really want to both. Is it Becuron, right? I'll let your Wikipedia first point but also emphasising behind. The skill that we didn't have to teach in the past because we assumed all the science was right was the actual critical skills of actually working out what's right. I spent half my time debunking things on Facebook nowadays just looking at the facts behind and you typically find it. Again, perhaps reflecting back seems to be but isn't necessarily what's happening. One of the critical skills that we need to have going forward and perhaps more so than in the past but perhaps highlighted by the fact that we go to Wikipedia to know that we actually ought to do the same when we go to the British Medical Journal or Nature or wherever we're looking. Thank you very much. The critical skills I think is the key word there. This kind of thing happens a lot. This is students taking notes clearly I know you guys do this. What do you do with the pictures afterwards? A lot of my colleagues say to me that's not learning. What happens next probably is, isn't it? We don't always just take the picture and just forget about it. I personally use Ebonote, the app that has the capacity to store your notes and your pictures and things. If there's a whole page of notes you don't have time in a lecture to sit and write them all down or even type it down. This thing usually to do is to take the picture and just import it into my document and it's just there for me to use later. I don't know if you do anything. I feel as well like taking that picture you've got the slide. But then if the lecturer is speaking about off topic you want to take notes on that as well. So I tend to spend time taking notes about what Steve is saying but also taking a photo of the slide so then you've got that to refer back to also. There's a kind of a new digital literacy. The idea of interpreting images and reflecting on them melding together other content so that you've got a new whole I suppose really that allows you to explain or understand things better. Bob you've got a comment down here. Thank you. Bob Harrison, alt member and chair of Governors at Northern College. I'd like to ask you an opinion about assessment and technology because Ciaran my stepson just graduated from Leicester University and having spent the last three years working on keyboards or touch screens or whatever was asked to sit down and write for three hours using a pen and a paper and my friend and colleague Steve describes that as somebody learning to drive in a Formula One car I mean asked to ride a horse for assessment. Could you say something about your views on that? Well for us luckily we don't have exams but it's all course work. I just literally use technology for my assessments for assignments and things so it's difficult for me to say about exams and things but We are going over this year completely in Plymouth to online submission of assignments. I don't know who else has done that already I'm one of two people perhaps we're ahead of the curve in some ways and behind in other ways but that's going to raise all sorts of issues what about online assessment? We can't wait. You think that's a good thing? Why do you think it's a good thing? I think we're most excited but that may be because we are technology computing students I mean some people don't like the idea of it because they think it might fail you might not actually be able to submit it I don't know, again it's just it's the attitudes towards technology I mean the actual process of online submission to me is a good idea but to other people maybe not so. We're certainly moving from atoms to bits that is one classic example of that when we're thinking about that we move on to student maker spaces I think that's on someone's bingo list as well actually student maker spaces I'll just tell you a quick story about this I heard about a secondary school who recently wanted to enthuse their students into making and fixing things and so what they did was one of the teachers set up a broken computer a computer in all its components were separate from each other and they put it on a table outside in the corridor and they put a sign next to it saying whoever fixes this and brings it to my office will win a prize within 24 hours a student proudly brought it working to the teacher's office he was so excited he forgot to claim his prize then five minutes later a whole group of boys said he was too quick we wanted to do the same thing give us a challenge too then a whole lot of the girls came to the door and said we think we can do that quicker than the boys and suddenly the whole school was enthused about making and fixing and designing and solving problems and so on and it was a very exciting time for them that's something that I believe we're trying to set up now in the Institute of Education at Plymouth we're going to be doing these little pop-up shows where we can put together things like makey makey anyone heard of makey makey explain makey makey if you know what it is I'm sure you do I won one actually at Raffle the only raffle I've ever won and it's like a credit size card sort of yeah device and you use crocodile clips as a known in primary school to attach the wires to your computer and any random object so a banana I've made a banana piano and that I've gone down a storm in primary schools and they're just amazed at what you can actually make so you can connect it to your stairs and make piano stairs and all sorts it's really good so basically you're taking objects and turning them into the internet of things yes basically interesting so there's that one final slide before we finish this is the work of John Waters and it's from several years ago now but he identified all these key characteristics for what we call new learners and let's go through these to see if he's accurate or not I mean I'm sure you've looked at this list already and thought about it but I'm going to ask you now the first one are you more self-directed do you think than you were in school yes in what ways I use the internet basically as by Kotsky's Knowledge Willover so he becomes your scaffold that becomes your scaffold I think it's more so now less than school not because technology has progressed in school but say I was in school now I think a lot of schools are a lot more reluctant to let children use devices this is just a bit of a plug for you actually Steve Steve wrote an article the other day that got into the western morning news about using smartphones in school basically about how a lot of schools and teachers don't like it but I think university it's encouraged and yeah come a lot more self-directed definitely the one I really am interested in is the third one down are you actually more reliant on feedback from your peers do you actually appreciate that more yes I find that interesting because I think now it's not even so I mean we see each other every day at university anyway and we all live quite close to each other like our peer group within our specialism but we have our own facebook chat we have our own twitter hashtag we have our own everything so even if we're not together we can still communicate we can still communicate all the time and we do we rely on that all the time with each other you know when we're having assignments to hand in constantly talking to each other aren't we tens of thousands of messages have happened and the last one now I'm going to skip the other one so the last one more oriented towards becoming your own nodes of production what does that mean to you I think it means being able to what's the word like being more motivated I guess to kind of learn yourself and not have to rely on a teacher you know you become you know I mean like in a lecture for example if you're talking about something and you mention someone's name because we've got we might go off and oh I want to find out more about that person and you might write that down and obviously you know the technology helps us to do that I don't know yeah what do you think I think it's going back to blogging and things again yeah you are more trying to do what interests you the most and that interest I find is always a better way of learning you have written lots of blog posts between you haven't you really I mean and do you get actually feedback on those I've had so many people say do you mind if I put this on my Facebook page or something and you'd be surprised how many comments and things you have and likes and whatever to and it really like it makes you like it's going back to that peer assessment and things it makes you feel that you're doing it you aren't along along the right tracks and things and yeah right well I'm going to blank the screen there at that point and just try and sum up with this I think we are seeing a new shift in learning we're seeing younger people coming in with new ways that they're learning which we never had opportunity to do when we were at university and I think we're also seeing a whole range of conflicts going on between what lecturers are trying to do and what students actually want to do or need to do I think there's a bit of a rift or a gap appearing between students intentions and lecturers actions and hopefully that will be something that we can debate further throughout this conference I think that's it thank you very much for listening to us Steve thank you very much for setting the tone with our opening keynote lots of things for us to be thinking about and let the conversation carry on can I just give you a thank you present to each one of you and also Becca and Kate thank you very much as well wow that has kicked us off to what I'm hoping