 Hynny. I'm afraid I don't have any sweets. I don't have any crisps. I don't have anything for you, but I have built a treat in here. I've also got loads of slides so I'm going to talk at the speed of light. I've got a nice little treat for you. So what I plan to do here is to just talk about some key issues in digital literacy. Digital literacy is not my field of research per se. But looking at it and having to deal with it in relation to my role as director of the Institute of Educational Technology, I've been kind of going over this ground at the moment. I'm going to note how the relationship between learners' technology and the academy of the institution is framed and then I'm going to take a personal look, a rather personal look, I apologise in advance for how personal, at some research which predates digital interests in its current form, but which I think is very pertinent. I then come back to real life after that. Felly ydy'n ddechrau ymlaen i ymddangos ylluniau ac yn ysgolwch wedi Sylvia Jones. A yn y 2011 cymdeithasio ar gyfer oedd yn digwyddiaid, rydym yn ddiefyniad i gael bod yn ddod o wahanol flynydd. Rwy'n meddwl i'r cymdeithasio i gofio. Mae'n ddod o'n ddod o'n meddwl i'r cyfweld. Mae'n meddwl i'r ddaant yn ddod o'r cyfweld. The interrelationships of literacies and technologies has the potential to disrupt conventional literacy practices of the academy. So here's the institution talking. Recognition of the central role of text in the construction of knowledge in the practice of learning is very important. Now I'm speaking to people in this room who probably know much more about digital literacy than I do. But these are the sorts of points that Mary is making. We have issues around potential shifts of power between learners, communities and institutions. And the role of the institution, the attitude, the framing, the way that the institution reacts to all of this is critically important. And the boundaries of the texts that we might be talking about are much more fluid and unstable than in previous times. Now many of you will be familiar with the Open University in some shape or form and you will understand the scale of the problem that we have. The OU operates in the public domain. So I was very interested in Dave White's talk earlier today. We do operate in the public domain. We engage the public in learning. So as well as the number of students that we have, we are also talking to the public. And we extend reach to make higher education open to all. So if there was ever a digital literacy problem, we are in the thick of it. Because we not only have students who are coming to us and wanting to use digital artefacts and digital means to learn, but we are actually talking to the entire population and expecting them to be able to cope too. So in case you didn't know, the Open University runs out across many different media and many different platforms. So one that many of you may have bumped into. And I do think Sugartram had some pages from Open Learn in some of those slides. Children were picking them up from India. This is our Open Educational Resources which has been running for several years now. In way in excess, Jonathan will know better than I do, more than 6 million people. What's the current figure? Yeah, about 7 million of individual people using this resource. We are also on iTunes U. We have a very big presence on iTunes U. We are one of the first universities in there. And we have got a great deal of extremely high quality material that covers all the disciplines. So the arts and humanities as well as the sciences. And we find that those are downloaded by the 16 millions by people. A lot of them in the States, which is quite interesting. So it's not just about chasing student audiences. It's about putting out high quality educational experiences for people to engage with. The university increases under Martin Bean's leadership. Martin Bean spoke in a keynote last year at this conference. He's going more multi-channel and multi-device. But there isn't anything we don't use, I don't think. And of course we have our long standing and very important, very significant relationship with the BBC for this kind of issue. And in case you didn't know, and here's your treat, the sort of things that we do, cop a load of this. We took you on an epic journey. Captured the breathtaking beauty of planet Earth. Was just the beginning. Discovery presents the next groundbreaking television event. A spectacular look at nature's extreme behaviours. Between the BBC and the OU to celebrate Darwin's own tainery. So some of the stuff that we're producing, we very much have understood something about the way that someone who might be approaching education may not have a lot of these quite sophisticated literacies that we might expect to see in students. And therefore there's work that goes on between the Open University and the BBC around how to draw people in to this kind of subject matter. And that's an example of the visual stimulus, the music, the sound. Very exciting. Get people in. And then that's followed through in a variety of ways. So we don't end there. That's just the, well, one of the attractors. We then take it through into all kinds of other support for learning that goes on afterwards. Okay. So let's think about though now, focus down on the students who are working with the Open University. We are moving people on a trajectory which I don't presume that this little picture here captures everything that there is to say about this topic. But we are taking people who may not have thought of themselves as students or think of themselves as having any kind of academic leaning whatsoever, are going to start to engage in seriously higher education study. So they will be moving from the sorts of informal learning that they may have organised for themselves previously through all kinds of phases and stages to arrive at a point where they are able to take an examination and qualify with a degree level qualification. So the proposition is that we have a large volume of students in excess of 250,000 who may be entering or re-entering education, some of them with bad experiences, using digital distance education technologies in the home on their own. And we've got to make it work for them. So there are, you know, there's a limit to how many assumptions we can make about anybody in that situation because the types of people that are enrolled with us are many and varied and of all different age groups. So the proposition for the institution is, well actually, we've got a large volume of staff in excess of 7K who are developing courses which require digital literacy for study using distance education technologies and some of them are not, in this digital literacy sense of the word, digitally literate. I saw that quite confidently. The Open University, as you may be aware, has been working for 40 years with media and for the last at least 30 with digital media of some shape or form. But I would still argue that in our staff base there are staff members who are not able to conduct their scholarship digitally with complete confidence. So that's meant to be a reassuring statement that even in the Open University we are aware that staff are in this rather anomalous situation. There may be fantastic domain experts but their familiarity with some of these digital technologies may not be what we would like it to be. The Institute of Educational Technology has the challenge of providing professional development for such staff which itself connects into our quality enhancement strategies which itself connects into the way in which we're encouraging our staff to engage in scholarship. I'm interested in it. I'm going to use the work of quite a lot of people in IET who are leaders in literacies of various sorts. Mary Lee, Robin Goodfellow, Chris Jones, Martin Weller. So the work that I'm citing is mainly theirs here. The role of the institution I would like to just profile in this what is it that's valorised for students and Mary Lee's work tells us that students still rely on the authority of the institution to accessing and utilising resources for their assessed work. I thought it was really interesting in the previous talk where as soon as we start to talk about assessed work we saw in the older populations that Soogarton was talking about a slight anxiety around assessed pieces because of the problem that someone else might claim that they did more than they did or that your credit might disappear from you. And from my point of view what is it that's valorised for staff? Promotion and reward, project practice, building reputation for themselves in areas that is both good for them and that the institution also recognises systemically. Blogging is one such area. So we have some very high profile bloggers in the educational technology sphere. Martin Weller, Groniw Cynol, you might be aware of. But the question is does the institution reward them for that activity? How does the institution see that activity? So there are all these issues around that we don't really we haven't really solved. But improving our understanding of student behaviour is that where digital literacy is taking us. So I'm now focusing in on some work of Mary Lees where she tells us that there are rich accounts in the literature of students' use of technology but there are no detailed or in-depth examinations of what students actually do in context when using different applications or how meanings are being made from and through engagement with digital technology. That statement I agree with to a point. I agree that currently I'm not able to find the sorts of studies that I used to be able to find with detailed analysis of what students are doing. What are the activities that they're engaging in? What I would like to do is move from here towards highlighting a few in my own past as examples of the sorts of studies that I would be really glad if somebody can point me into if you know they're going on. I started an academic career in 1983 working with Ben de Boulay at Sussex University looking at people who were trying to learn prologue and unbelievably to me these were the early days of the email there was no internet at this stage Sussex University had just taken delivery of its first batch of BDUs so it was the first time that anybody had been using a screen to engage with a computer which is a bit astonishing but we were trying to teach students prologue and they were struggling some of them were struggling some of them weren't so we knew that the teaching was okay because some students were going through fine and we undertook close observational study of students writing and understanding prologue programs and what we discovered in that process was that students were telling themselves stories when I was doing the studies saying what's happening what are you doing why have you written this why is the computer behaving like that why are you writing little narratives in which they were trying to establish for them and for me little causal links so this does this because of that over there and then it comes back here that sort of thing these students were on an MSc conversion course so we had a rich diversity of backgrounds some coming from the sciences some coming from the arts and a mixed age range and the place that we went to to help to explain what was happening was Percy's notion of abduction it's been used in other studies where this is the basic proposition the surprising fact C is observed and if A were true C would be a matter of course hence there is reason to suspect that A is true so it's like modus ponens A if then B A therefore B but it's wrong it's actually this is not a logical not a correct logical form so we're reasoning from the consequent to the antecedent there could be other explanations that doesn't follow logically but what Perth was identifying was that this form of reasoning is extremely common and it has much in common with the sort of studies that Wason and Johnson Byrd were doing in logical deductive reasoning and in fact I went into that literature and found quite a substantial mapping between the sorts of behaviour we were seeing in students learning prologue and what people were doing when they were trying to do logical deductive reasoning so what was happening was that people were constructing these stories and the problem was that when they were right they made a huge leap forward they suddenly got something but when they were wrong they had no understanding to reach into they had nowhere to go and they kind of went down a big hole and that's what we were looking at so what we got from this previous background matters what you put into the reasoning process even if your reasoning process is a bit faulty what you put in is critical if you put the wrong things in what you had got an understanding of something to do with closed worlds and logical systems so people who have done some maths perhaps some logic or some science found it easier to understand what was going on people who were coming from areas which might have been equally analytic and I kind of take issue with the fact with the statement that the arts and humanities have nothing to offer in the job market but discourses that were equally analytic but did not operate inside closed worlds people were bringing things to bear but it didn't work in the prolog domain so that's what was causing the problems ok so some of those things I think relate to digital literacies they are to do with what it is you've done before and the way in which you're approaching the task in hand moving now to another study MENO which again some of you might remember Multimedia Education and Narrative Organisation ESRC funded Diana Laurelart who's in the audience so she'll pick me up if I've got it wrong Lydia Plam and Rose Luck in Matthew Stratford again close observational study of learners using Multimedia to learn about Darwinian theory through Galapagos and Risa Dillipazas in the audience who helped us with that examining here the impact of different interfaces on the same material as they're learning and in this case we were looking at young students who are A-level first year undergraduates and to explain what we were seeing here Lydia in particular was very knowledgeable about narrative and narrative theory and we made reference to Brunner and what Brunner was saying was that narrative for him was defined as a connected sequence of events this is the sort of thing our students were trying to build the representation of those events and it's a mode of thought a primary act of mind transferred to art from life is a quote from Brunner and I have found it impossible to distinguish sharply what is a narrative mode of thought and what is a narrative text or discourse so again the relationship with digital literacies I think is beginning to kind of emerge so within Meno we defined narrative as a process of both discerning and imposing structured meanings which can be shared and articulated and again if we were looking at some of the studies that were just being shown you could take this kind of analysis and apply it to those situations and how do you provide that kind of oh sorry the narrative guidance and construction the guidance is offered by the teacher or the teaching materials or the system or the interface narrative construction either explicit or explicit is a process brought to the task by the learner so again I very much go with the proposition that you can make the environment available and amenable and then it's up to the learners to come in and construct another context is another word is context that's relevant here but it needs to be carefully scaffolded and Diana had this wonderful representation of what did it mean to scaffold now I'm not going to go into detail here because I'm not taking you into the detailed findings of these studies I'm just citing them as examples of the sorts of in-depth work that was trying to not just identify the fact that students were engaging with screens, with material with stuff that was on a computer they were working in groups but what were they doing and what were they thinking and in what ways can we theorise that activity so we took the Galapagos application which was one of the first CD ROMs that we built at the University we had three different interfaces one was linear, one was resource based and one was guided discovery over the same basic resources so what varied was the degree of narrative structure that was provided in each of the interfaces so in the first one you were kind of led through in a bit of that BBC like where you know let's all look at this and then we'll move to the next thing and we'll look at something else the narrative thrust was very strong in resource based you just got all the resources you were given the question left to get on with it and in guided discovery was a sort of a mix it offers some guidance in taking the task and breaking it down offering you menus offering you choices so a bit more interaction from the interface to support your activity so they kind of looked like this so this is the linear straight through and at the other end that's still in this very linear fashion resource based learning you just go from your starting point and out to any of the resources but the guided discovery was actually semi-structured there were things that we knew as teachers we wanted you to do and we kind of made sure that you got to all the places you need to get to answer the question and what we found was that for resource based learning even very skilled learners answered the question but they didn't actually look at all the resources that they should have done so that we know that their answer to the question was not as good or as complete as those people who are going through the guided discovery and I just want to quote here some of the things that Lydia was saying at the time so this is 1996 her comment was that miles, these multimedia learning environments require a new form of literacy which learners don't yet have and that they perturb and distort the sense of meaning making that learners bring with them leading to fragmented factory learning experiences if we don't support them if we don't help them that rings as true now as it did then I think so the conclusions from that study less experienced learners benefit from explicit narrative support so if you've got people who are only beginning you do need to support their narrative construction but even quite experienced learners result in patchy coverage of the necessary material so we need to take care we can't just leave people to get on with it rushing on now to the last topic that I'm going to introduce which is the mobile-learn project much more recent now 2004-2006 this is looking at people using hand-held devices in a variety of ways Mike Sharples, Yasmin Varulla, Jenny Waycott, Patrick McAndrew and a host of European collaborators scrutinising how people learn through mobile devices with fragmentary engagement on the move so again we're challenging the academy this is not doing learning like learning is done as far as the academy is concerned scholarly practice is changing rapidly but no theoretical accounts were coming together to help us to understand what was happening and the studies in the literature largely focussed on the technology not on what the learners were doing so in this case we reached to PASC and any of you who are familiar with PASC's conversation theory will also recognise in relation to Diana's model sorry it's gone to my head, conversational model but in this context what we were saying was that here we're saying that conversation is the converse of control leads to deregulation now the thing that strikes me about digital literacy is what we're talking about is perpetual and ongoing conversation and sometimes it's a conversation that's going on inside my head as I'm doing something sometimes in the interconnected way that we set people up these days I'm connecting out to lots of other communities, lots of other people concepts are exchanged in conversation and often the public concept is shared but it's a cybernetic view of conversation which is another theme that's emerging in digital literacy the participant might be a computer or a person or anything else we don't distinguish between machines and people in this view of conversational theory there are other people that we were referring to as well my best quote going back to 1916 but what we produced was this kind of analysis which actually I prefer this diagram which is a double-decker triangle we don't need to again go into the detail of this but what it was saying is that there are two layers here there's the semiotic layer which is the level at which the people are operating and that's a person-oriented discourse and there's a technological support layer and that's the layer at which the tech support people are working and basically what you're looking at at any given time is a person's relationship with the technology layer which is one thing but also with all the other people who are on the same level as them and what they're doing and what the activity entails so here what we were aware of through PASC's theorising is that we were beginning to challenge quite seriously the role that the teacher has teachers just another participant in a continual conversation that may or may not matter depends where you're coming from your value system but the key thing is that traditional education needs to be explored in relation to the new world of global knowledge and mobile technology and it's not sufficient to assert that authoritative knowledge is always located in the specialist professions and disciplines so ok so here I go completely megalomaniac I'm suggesting that there are continual dynamics between semiotic and technological levels in any of the situations that any of us as learning technologists might seek to analyse that there is continual co-evolution of technology and human learning we're seeing that speeding up rapidly now so trying to hang on to the technology is a mistake in my opinion even though I'm professor of learning technology and that's why I put it on the front of the slide I'm actually interested in people not technology the creation of meaning lies in the exchange between participants in the conversation whether that's the humans or technology within a distributed context I believe that abductive reasoning processes need to be explored much more in depth to help us understand how people are putting that together and the semantic web I've not talked about but from the computer side from the machine side you could imagine a lot more support for learners coming out through semantic techniques conversational theory helps us understand the processes that people are working with as they share information and work in communities and groups and we also ought to be able to support that through a variety of AI learning algorithms which I've also not mentioned at all in this talk so what we're looking at is a framework for humans to work within and that's what I think digital literacy needs to talk to us about you might say it already is but kind of back to reality now that's all very well but is it too fine grained and too detailed an approach for us to work with these days given the scales that we talk about I've got 7,000 staff to develop pretty damn quick and I've got 250,000 students to support now and they're all doing workplace based learning most of the open university student population is in full time employment so the only thing I can do is to focus on the staff if I can get the staff together and able to produce very high quality materials then I can kind of move on to the students after that so the only assumption I can make is that although the staff may not be very sophisticated digitally they are relatively in comparison with the students that they might be trying to teach relatively sophisticated learners and the priority then becomes enabling the environment and the context to allow them to develop in peer supported communities and that's the role I believe of the institution in this whole business so I have to that's what I have to do but the agenda for research in this area I believe is that previous in depth studies of learners and what they do are relevant and we should go back to them not just these ones that we know about and those studies need to be factored into our thinking methods so that we are actually building a knowledge base I have a great anxiety that we kind of scatter our knowledge we have important studies that take place and we don't consolidate enough and in the UK I think we could really do that context is a dynamic process and it is as much constructed by the learner in real time as it is a given in the learning situation what that means is a technological challenge and that I do acknowledge I think there are some difficulties there but I don't think they are lying with the technology I think it's because people will be moving in a way that will be potentially quite difficult to track they're dire and I had a lunchtime conversation we decided that perhaps it's not that difficult really so my conclusions are that we should focus on the role of oh this is actually a slightly different point I was also very interested in the lunatics taking over the asylum kind of scenario institutions sometimes worry about letting go control about letting students go off in the previous study the teacher leaving the room is not something that we are awfully keen on but actually in other spheres we do talk about the role of critique in academia in the academy and in digital literacy practice but the other thing that we need to bear in mind about that is that if everybody is as connected as they are there will be consequences because once that critique turns on what I'm doing now what my university tells me to do now the critique could be quite strong but institutions need to take that on board as they have always done they've always had difficult academics who stand up and say things that the institution might prefer they didn't do at the moment we are equipping students to do a similar thing but we need to be able to reflect that role of critique in assessment processes which we currently don't very effectively to reflect on the emancipation of students that we are engaged in and to understand how to react or not in the institutional nightmare of lunatics taking over the asylum IE the shift of power that is likely to happen in that case sorry it was a bit gabbled wasn't it thank you we just have a little bit thank you we have a little time for questions so we have a hand up over there and the microphone is coming over to you thanks very much it's Pete Bradshaw from FAILS at the Open University one thing you said it may have been a passing remark but something you said I just wanted to to ask you about you said about developing staff at the university and enabling them to continue to produce high quality materials and what you see what does that mean in this digital literacy age and if we've got that shift of power what does it mean because we do produce high quality materials what does that mean going forward that's kind of what I'm trying to sort out by approaching the digital literacy agenda because the philosophy of I'm trying to put this in the most problematic terms we like any other organisation are concerned that we present students with a range of options for work that they might do and bearing in mind in the OU case this is you sitting in your sitting room so you don't have like people to go and ask and you don't have peers to say what did you do and have you got one of those and I've left mine behind so we're trying to make sure that in a person sitting room they've got everything that they need to know how to tackle what they've been given so I believe we have always produced materials in the OU a lot of those though and in different disciplines it does vary are paper based really text based in that sense text based and quite a lot of those disciplines when they've moved on to the digital media have moved those texts on to computers now again I think the OU does very well in this respect we have always argued that one medium doesn't duplicate another and if you find yourself doing that then something's gone wrong so we're not keen to just take printed text and dump it onto a computer it's always gone through a transformational process the question is how well are we doing on that front and now that we've got all sorts of other media which potentially can carry that material in what way are we factoring those into the learning situation in such a way that students feel enabled not crushed beneath the weight of 101 different things that they're expected to do that they don't really know how to do so it's finding the ways of producing the materials that support the developments of literacy as viewed as skills so that's one element of it but the other elements are to do with the way in which we are treating the nature of academe what does it mean to be a student what does it mean to engage with us you know as an undergraduate sorry are we done sorry need to get to the microphone okay we just have one quick question from illuminate which is how does the OU social learning project relate to digital literacy can you answer that in briefly well I can answer it briefly but also rather abstractly because the way that social learn relates to digital literacy and social learn is not a system that is fully up and running at is that it's supposed to be the enabling environment that allows communities to spring up around different kinds of interests et cetera so it is very much not a piece of the organisation that is run by the teaching staff in that sense thank you very much Josie for your contribution that's been really interesting