 Hello everyone, welcome to the session just after lunch, I hope you had a good lunch and plenty of yummy food. So all of the sessions this afternoon in this part are around the critical frames of reference and our first talk is from Michael Flaven on what the world's leading universities think of tell. Okay, thank you. I'm going to look at what the world's leading universities think of technology enhanced learning as expressed through their strategy documents. Just to give a little bit of background, last year together with my co-author Valentina we had an article published in research and learning technology which examined 44 strategy documents from UK higher education looking at how they articulated technology enhanced learning and we used disruptive innovation theory as our lens through which to conduct that investigation. I'll move on to the theory in a moment. The article went on to be the most downloaded article from research and learning technology in 2018. It was run up in last year's research project of the year and it was also translated into Chinese and published in distance education in China so we were quite pleased with the impact that had but then we started to think about how we might conduct some follow-up studies that came out of that original research. One thing because we'd done our research effectively desk research publicly available strategy documents it had brought us into collision with a lot of mission statements and if there is a clinical condition called mission statement fatigue we both had it by the end of the research. One of the things we did therefore as a follow-up was do an analysis of 127 mission statements from UK HE 76% of the entire sector. It was about us thrilling as it sounds now I'm narrating it but that was published a couple of weeks ago in the journal for higher education policy and management if you want to take a look at that though I haven't exactly made it seem very appetising. The other thing we did and this is where these this presentation comes in one of the things that had been suggested to us was that we might want to look at not just a UK bound sample so for the research we undertook as a follow-up we looked at 84 documents from international higher education institutions and what we did was take one of the world ranking tables the QS world rankings go from 1 to 200 and then our sample was drawn from the publicly available documents from those sources. So we used disruptive innovation theory which I'll move on to a second but I'm going to bookend this presentation with reference to a separate case study published by Carl and Groddall in 2016. This wasn't a tel case study it's actually a case study of the market for insurance for domestic goods in post-world war 2 America clearly I've made that sound thrilling as well but if you bear with me I'll outline its relevance it's actually really interesting and in post-world war 2 America it was the beginning of a long economic boom and so ordinary people began to acquire what previously been luxury goods for the first time cars fridges washing machines and they wanted to ensure them because they had these luxury products well there was therefore a growth in the domestic insurance market but because it was clerical bureaucratic work it was quite labour intensive work and the insurance companies didn't really have the personnel to develop this because of the casualties inflicted by wartime so the main companies were looking for effectively computerization some technological solution that would allow them to respond to demand and make more profit. There were two companies that were at the forefront of this industry IBM and Remington Rand and it was IBM that won in the struggle between the two now one interest Carl and Grodal was it wasn't as though their products were technically superior intrinsically they were pretty much the same nor was it a question really of an explicit marketing strategy because they both attended the same trade fairs but what Carl and Grodal argue quite persuasively is that IBM won out over Remington Rand because of what they call its discursive strategy the language that they use to articulate their products to their marketplace and whereas Remington Rand talked about the technical specification of machines and talked about how transformative they would be IBM used much more homely language about how these devices these computers will enable you to do what you've been doing a bit better than before. I'm going to come back to this study at the end of the presentation but the lens we used for looking at our 84 strategy documents is disruptive innovation theory my apologies to those of you who already know it I'll keep this synopsis fairly brief. It's not a theory about technology enhanced learning or indeed education it's a theory about goods and services that came out of the Harvard Business School in the 1990s and he's most closely associated with the work of Clayton Christensen his most synoptic definition of disruptive innovation is in his first monograph his first book from 1997 what interested Christensen was how good firms fail because in a way it's obvious why bad firms fail they may have a poor product range be badly led managed but Christensen was interested in why good firms fail and the thesis he came up with was it happens when a competitor emerges who has a product that's simpler cheaper smaller more convenient than the powerful incumbent now it's not as though the powerful market player doesn't see this but because this product is often technically inferior they ignore it because this new product or service just cares to the periphery of the market whereas their most profitable sector is left untouched so in fact they're kind of pleased because it allows them to focus on their most profitable customers but then the disruptive technology having gained a foothold proceeds incrementally along sustaining innovation lines to such an extent that it poses a threat but by the time it's reached that stage the powerful incumbent really is no longer so powerful and can't dismiss it his method is the case study just to give one to illustrate the theory and as shown there it's the sony transistor radio in the 1950s prior to the sony transistor radio radios i don't know if anyone's folk memory goes back that far were valve based and were these colossal things that were often with a wood veneer and look like items of furniture and prior to the mass advent of television they were the main form of family entertainment so what got listened to was dictated by the head of household and indeed the programs that got made then reflected those domestic power hierarchies because in the united states these were sponsored programs by commercial organizations rather than a state broadcaster so when sony introduced its transistor radio in the mid 1950s the sound was poor was really tinny it was laced with static and with a transistor radio if you got the signal right you then had to stand infuriatingly still for some unspecified period of time if you wanted to keep it going so the valve based radio manufacturers weren't bothered in the least but the sony transistor radio could be afforded by people who couldn't afford the valve based radio and that was teenagers who themselves in that post war american period were earning wages for the first time and had notable disposable income so sony gained a foothold in the market through selling transistor radios to teenagers it wasn't a marketing strategy it just happened that way and because teenagers started to buy these devices and socialize around them it then led to the advertisers who wanted to reach out to this market with a lot of disposable capital to start saying to radio stations you need to start producing programs that cater to this market so i don't think anyone has yet written the phd on how the sony transistor radio created rock and roll but if anyone here does if you just cut me in for five percent of the resultant royalties will say no more about it but in the way this kind of a typical example of how a technology takes hold at the periphery and then moves on so christensen has these core categories of disruptive innovation that original technology that disrupts the market it creates new forms of practice but then once it's bedded in it proceeds along sustaining innovation lines i incremental improvement in more recent years there's been a third category a risen which is efficiency innovation i've raised that it's simplest efficiency innovation is about using technology to do more with less so if i go to a supermarket and go to the self-service till rather than to one with a human being behind it i'm utilizing an efficiency innovation efficiency on innovations are often good news for organizations because it reduces its overheads but they can be a bad news for jobs so essentially within disruptive innovation theory there are these three categories and what we did was apply those three lenses to a total of 84 documents from 71 higher education institutions some had more than one because we use the quakarelli simons the qs world university rankings our sample was weighted towards north america and towards europe a small number from australasia at the time we undertook the research the united kingdom was part of the european union i'm going to park that one there if i may because you know it's complicated um the first look at the data the average mentions of innovation per document there really wasn't much to choose between them but what we found when we then started to do content analysis of the strategies was something we'd also found when we'd looked at a simply uk based sample and what we found was that quite often these documents will make a bold statement of how innovative they are but then when you start to drill down you find something different so to take one from our sample Auckland digital disruption will be long fuse and big bang sounds transformative but then when you start to look at it in a little more detail you get these rather tame adjectives of desirable and cohesive we found the same with geneva in a capacity for innovation in the use and development and new digital technologies but then on the other hand look again at the adjectives appropriate responsible and right through our sample this happened queensland efficient and effective services efficient and expedient efficient and effective boston efficient of targo efficient all we looked and found sustaining innovation delft using technology to enhance look at how trinity college doubling and glasgo have almost the same formation of words focused throughout the sample we found we were much more likely to come across sustaining innovation or efficiency innovation than we were to come across disruptive innovation about the one notable outlier within our data sample came from Bergen in Norway where in talking about using technologies that were outside the institution's control and being self-explanatory being understood and utilized by everyone that was the closest alignment we found within the sample to the christen's definition of disruptive innovation at subsequent writing on it so in 10 of the sample that we subjected to close analysis we were around about 50% more likely to find sustaining innovation or efficiency innovation than we were to find disruptive innovation so on one level that was kind of the end of our research we did what we'd done with the UK sample with an inter a larger international sample and found pretty much the same thing quite bold surface claims to innovation but then a closer content analysis actually suggested that what technology was there to do was much more modest and ameliorative than in any sense transformative so that ends that part but the way I'm feeding that forward now into the work I'm slowly starting to gestate is to think about why these strategies are really rather modest documents and part of my thinking at this stage is that well institutions are geared towards sustaining innovation and efficiency innovation when we get new technologies we tend to relate them to prior experience and to use them to what we've always done a little better than before so maybe now that these technologies we've had a full generation of them it's time to start thinking less about the facilities of technologies their capabilities and start to think about how we create a narrative for technology enhanced learning that can facilitate genuine transformation which takes us back to the case study and how in the marketplace conflict between IBM and Remington Rand IBM won out because of its discursive strategy its ability to articulate a narrative that took non-technical stakeholders with it and I think without knowing yet what that tell narrative looks like I think it's opposite to start thinking in terms of how we can create that narrative so that we can truly start to use the transformative potential of the technologies we've been working with by way of a plug my last book in 2017 uses disruptive innovation theory as one of three critical lenses to look at tell the others being activity theory and the community of practice theory and I'm currently writing a follow-up study also for the same publisher Paul Graf McMillan on using disruptive innovation as the sole lens to look at technology enhanced learning the full manuscript is due on the first of June next year which I've got filed under good luck with that but nonetheless it's there and I'd what I'd like to do is a follow-up to this presentation is to have conversations with people interested in the same space so that we can start to gestate a narrative with an aim of creating an appropriate discursive strategy to enable transformation those are the references that I've used here those are my contact details at Kings I'll be delighted to hear from you and I'm delighted that you heard me thanks very much indeed have we got any questions from the audience yep we've got one Marta Mella from the Open University hi Michael big fan of your work thanks the only thing I would say is my personal view about disruption theory is just a big hot mess of nonsense so I wondered why you chose that particular theory was it because it's what people tend to talk even if you don't even if there's a kind of flaws in theory whether you think it actually has anything valid to say in this space I mean it was so indipidus that I caught the disruption of innovation theory wave I actually came across it when I was studying a fascinating masters qualification in online and distance education run by the open university great very cool I think it may have been the work of Manuel Castells but I came across it and as soon as I thought about it it made me think about the VLE in that I was part of a generation of teachers who when I first came across the VLE to about 2003 I remember going to a session where we were shown it and we were told this was going to change everything that students would be forming informal learning communities in this space they'd be bouncing ideas and sources back and forth and then I ran one for the first time and I had virtual tumbleweed running across it and after that original spike of hi everyone I'm it just and the first time I thought well I'm just perhaps haven't taught it very well because it's a new tool but the same happened the second time and it wasn't just me it was pretty much everyone I knew so I thought for all the fact that the VLE as was constituted in that first wave was presented to us in transformative in fact through its product architecture it was a sustaining technology not a disruptive technology it allowed us to relocate what we'd always done with the same hierarchy and was not transformative and that's when I found this theory is a useful way of thinking about which technologies are likely to work and which aren't and underpinning that why this works and that doesn't and I still think we're at the stage where that theory I set an assignment um google and wikipedia and of course academics never use wikipedia apart from several times day and whereas I think those are genuinely transformative technologies that have changed practice and so my continued interest in disruptive innovation theory springs from that original interest and my view is that it's a useful lens through which to consider what works and what doesn't and why it works and why it doesn't Laura from the university of Cape Town um I think your study is really important so I'm glad that you persevered with your um strategy fatigue my question is the about you said that the digital strategies were mostly modest and ameliorative rather than transformative and you made that sound like a bad thing there was a judgment in that can you elaborate because ameliorative isn't necessarily a bad thing and transformative as a kind of general good is also problematic it is um I think it's because the technical technological affordances of the technologies that we've unearthed and worked with over the last generation exceed what we have done with them it doesn't follow as an axiom that sustaining and efficiency are bad but I think if that's what we want to do with technologies then an honest declaration to that effect would be helpful what concerns me a little is pretty much every university strategies I am encountering a loudly trumpeting we are tremendous innovators yet when you look at what's actually done there is for me a noticeable space between surface proclamation and actual commitment and I think that space is interesting now if a university turns round and says look tell you the truth we use our VLEs to put up lecture notes but everyone's quite happy with that that's a problematic discursive strategy but it's probably quite closely related to practice most of the time and I suppose I'm interested in that contradiction between proclamation and practice and I think it continues to be a fertile space and I think the capability of technology to be transformative is there though except it doesn't follow as an axiom that transformative is good thank you very much Edina's work with learning technologies helps to develop skilled data literate students who can change our world for the better teachers and students can develop and share coding skills with multiple our Jupiter notebook service our digi map services deliver high quality mapping data for all stages of education future developments include a text and data mining service working with satellite data and machine learning and smart campus technology