 And we're live! I love the way he did the countdown in such a way that it wouldn't show up on the video at all. Very nice to see you Stephen. And you. For those of you who don't know us and have never heard of us, this is Seb Schmoller. Alt C...Guru. I used to work for Alt. I don't anymore. Alt C...Ex-Guru. And my name is Stephen Downs, and I'm here to give a talk tomorrow afternoon here at Alt C, which will also be streamed live at 2pm, whatever time zone this is, British time. Or is it still British summer time? Yeah. So 2pm British summer time, which is 10am Atlantic daylight time, 9am Eastern time, and 5am if we're on the Pacific coast of North America. It's sad that I know that. Yep, I would agree with that. So what have you made of the conference so fast, Stephen? It's been fun. I guess my overwhelming impression so far, with all due respect to the conference organizers, very full meeting was. So I'm not used to being jam packed like that. Because I really, and Martin's in the room, so I can say this, I liked the... See again, the video doesn't tell you the whole story, right? I liked the conference website a lot, and I haven't had a chance to use it at all since I've been here, because when you're in these conference rooms, you're like this. And so I'm sitting there and I'm like this, trying to work, and it's just not conducive to my relaxed online participation. But the talks have been fun. I enjoyed hearing from the student leader, and I forgot her name, but I have it down here. Just for the live TV audience, I do have my cheats here. Rachel Winston from the National Union of Students. Best line of her talk, I sort of chuckled to myself, because it's one of these things. It was something along the lines of, yeah, Student Union was very good with communicating with students throughout the process, and I thought, yes, of course you would say that. But it's interesting, because I've had experiences in student leadership myself. I was editor of the student newspapers and undergrad, and president of the association as a graduate student. And so it was interesting to see her hackle sort of get up on the inevitable questions I'm offering. Are you really representative of students, or are you just some active students who have been given a podium? And with the student association things, it's always a bit of both, right? Because only the activists really become student representatives. On the other hand, it's untrue to say that they're not representative, because there is a process. And as she said, you know, it really depends on the process being a good process, but there is a process. I had the same issues, and the way I demonstrated my legitimacy is to organize a massive demonstration, which I understand has happened here as well recently as students, and I think they're a good thing, and I encourage them. And we marched across the bridge and onto the provincial legislature, and I was at the head of that march, and after that. And just so you know, we had 5,000 students march, which is a lot for Canada, not so much for Britain, but it was minus 30 degrees. I expected them. So 5,000 is plenty. Minus 30, and the march was about a mile and a half to two miles, and we had paramedics on standby. And you'd be going so slowly you wouldn't have kept going? No, you'd go fast. Oh, when it's minus 30, you go fast. So what did you get from Rachel's talk, Stephen? Well, let me check my notes again. Because that was mostly what I got from her talk. It's interesting, the thing I was thinking about when I listened to the talk, which I needed to remind myself of now, is the difference between personalization that is done for you, and personalization that you're a part of for yourself. And most, if not all, the personalization that I see being done by learning management systems, course providers, academic institutions is of the former type. We will personalize it for you. A large part of her talk was about students being engaged, not just in the menu selection kind of fashion, but in the actual design of the menu. The actual nature of the choices that are available, the actual course and progressive studies. You know, it's interesting, people talk about it. This is a personalized Physics 101 course and my reaction is, if it's Physics 101, it is by definition not personalized. You're going to cover this very specific content area. And personal learning, as opposed to personalized learning, is learning where you pick and choose even what the subject area would be. And I don't know if the university should even manage with that concept, where a student comes and studies for four years and they choose their own course of studies, although it was once like that. So do you think that broad issue of systems doing the personalizing, obviously it's a pervasive issue? What are your reflections on it as a pervasive issue across all the different ways in which we use web-based systems nowadays? Well, I mean, it's a pervasive issue, not even web-based systems, but just systems generally. I was in another session yesterday Jenny McNess and Roy Williams, who were participants in our very first massive open online course, and have been a lot of work on it since. I'll catch you later. Bye! We get these interruptions sometimes, and that was Bob Harrison, who's someone who just barges in. That's funny. So they had everybody go through an exercise where you take a course and you evaluate it on different dimensions of degrees of emergentism, and emergentism and personalization and personal learning are almost synonymous if you use the definitions that they used. They're obviously very different concepts, but in practice you end up with the same terms and the same measures and all of that. So I decided, because I'm a contraman to evaluate the conference instead of the course, and it's interesting because the conference has very strict control structures, it has a schedule, all the access is limited, you have to pay money to get to it, you have to travel to it and all of that. So it's interesting that this personalization thing impacts not just web-based courses but pretty much everything. Actually I think it's instructive to look outside online courses to think about the different degrees which can have personal as opposed to personalized learning. You think about the design of a city even, where people create their own personal dwellings or personal residences, they choose where they're going to live to a certain degree how much they're going to spend depending on their needs etc. But now I was one of the things I'm thinking about because I've spent the whole time at this conference thinking about what am I going to say tomorrow, because I have a deadline and I really need to write my talk sometime before I do it. And so one of the things that I've been thinking about is the explanation of why MOOCs fail. And of course they don't really fail, but that's a different issue. But the explanation if I had to give an explanation, my explanation would be well it's because they're courses. 90% maybe more of MOOCs basically are some course that's the equivalent of university course or some similar facsimile that's been put online and quote-unquote open. And so all the things that don't really work in terms of personal learning with courses are things that don't really work in terms of personal learning with MOOCs. Yes, I mean I might take issue a bit with one aspect of that and I'm reflecting on having done to conclusion of properly two MOOCs and the thing that I found completely counterintuitive was that in both of them I felt I was in a one-to-one dialogue with the teachers whose stuff had been canned months previously. And I'd got kind of two halves of my brain operating at once, one saying this is all being canned previously, it's utterly impersonal. And the other half saying this feels like I'm in a one-to-one dialogue and the fact that it felt like I was in a one-to-one dialogue definitely altered my motivation and helped me learn made me determined to succeed. And that just struck me as a very very odd characteristic which to some extent I think has been ignored when people describe content-rich, non-collaborative MOOCs as simply another form of publishing. Although technically they're another form of publishing, from a point of view of what learners feel like, that doesn't feel like reading a book in the science. I was just going to ask what's the difference between the MOOC you just took and reading a really good book. Because I read Gimmons to try and read more. And at the end of it I thought I'd lost a friend. Yes, I mean that may be because you, unlike I don't relate to books in that way and it may be that the proportion of people who kind of feel personally engaged by content is kind of very small in either context, in which case it's an outlier effect and therefore you don't have to worry about it. I got the sense from fellow students with whom I discussed this that that was a very predominant feeling that they felt when there's a guy on the AI course that Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun did who said it felt like sitting in a bar with a really smart friend who was explaining things to you in a way which you knew were going to get your head held. That strikes me as a remarkable set of feelings to have engendered in learners through dead content. That's not really what we think of as a course sitting in a bar talking with somebody who's really smart. I mean that's almost not transferring the academic process. It's something different and it's interesting as well you say you were talking to people in the course which means you were talking to people in the course. The course did not consist only of those videos. Although to be clear most of those conversations happened when the course was well near completion. So if I think about the two individuals that I kind of struck up extensive dialogue with, it was essentially because I was writing about the course that they picked up on it and we got to know each other. We didn't get to know each other through the course processes. How important was the writing up for me to your participation in the course? It clearly meant that I was thinking about the course in a way I wouldn't have been thinking about it if this is a self-evident point I'm making that knowing that each week I was going to have to write a report meant I approached it in a different kind of way. Of course to remove ourselves from the realm of self-evidence different how? Different how I was observing the sort of pedagogic processes because I was writing about them. So it's almost like the instructor was a tallied? No. Not specially. It's interesting. People who are themselves kind of interested in aficionados of online learning, their take on experiencing online learning is going to be different from people who are not aficionados. Right. I think we might be careful here too because the terminology can be confusing because we're talking about personalization or personal in terms of the personal connection that you get with the instructor or the material. But when I talk about personal learning or personalized learning I'm talking about the degree to which the learner is in control or is defining the course and the environment. There are two very different things obviously. And I think both are desirable. I mean what you're describing is what Terry Anderson describes as presence. And this presence whether it's an actual physical presence like we have here, even though the camera is a third presence in our conversation I'm certainly aware of it and I'm sure you are. I'm just like... The presence is a desirable feature in a course and in learning materials that doesn't require that the person actually be present in order to generate presence. That's one of his theses. And that would stimulate engagement. But I think if a person is designing their own course, their own learning experience they may or may not seek that out. They may or may not seek out the presence of particular individuals or particular types of individuals. I think there are two major TV series that were influential on me. Actually three. I'll use three because it's better. Where this sort of presence was created. One was Kenneth Clark's Civilization. Another was Carl Sagan's Cosmos. And another was Patrick Watson's Democracy. You may have heard of one, two or all three. Probably not all three. Two. Okay. And I much preferred Carl Sagan and Patrick Watson for different ways than Kenneth Clark. Kenneth Clark? I'm sure he's brilliant, affable and all of that. Not a guy I'd have a beer with. Just... Being the kind of guy he'd have had a beer with. And as much as Kenneth Clark tried to personalize that course for me, it wouldn't have worked. It has to be me picking. I'm going to study art. I'm going to do it a different way. Although I will say I love the book. I just thought to... We're being asked to wrap up so we're going to wrap up. I just like to wrap up now. I hadn't expected the conversation to take this form and it's been interesting having it. And we need to remember to tell people who are watching this that something is happening later. There's more of this. There are also some live streaming of various keynotes including Stevens and Dame Wendy Hall's this afternoon and I think before Wendy Hall's keynote there's a live streaming of a presentation by two people who are here from the Sloan Consortium. I think those are the three things that are happening that are live streamed. Very good. We'll cut an end at this point. There's nothing left to say. Don't cut it off yet. You heard it here first. Subschmaller has declared that the world is not ending right now. Something else will be happening. Thank you.