 Okay, Seb asked me to say something about the Technology Enhanced Learning Program, which I will do. I just want to say it's a great pleasure to follow Aaron. Something he said near the beginning of his talk really struck me as a kind of talisman for why we're here. He said, you know there are lecturers that ask the students to close their laptops while they're speaking. And I challenge any of you not to admit that there's a little bit of you that wants to do that even if you don't dare. And in that clash between informal learning being part of a culture, being part of a network, knowing things because one wants to know things, in the clash between that on the one hand and formal learning as it takes place in universities and further education and schools and so on. That clash is not well understood by us. We don't know how to design our way out of that clash. It might be that we can't design our way out of that clash but I think it's a great image. It would be great to have a PowerPoint slide of that image actually, the undecided lecturer. Should I ask them to close their laptops or not? And we know why there's this bit of us that would like undivided attention. Okay, well I don't know if these are going to be grand challenges. There are grand challenges everywhere. Nanotechnology has its grand challenges, mathematics has its grand challenges. There are grand challenges about lifelong learning and computing and so on. So I wanted to change this slide to not so grand challenges and I'll explain why as I go along. Let me just put you in the picture about the TEL programme. The TEL programme is an initiative of the teaching and learning research programme which was founded in 2000 and has more or less come to an end except for the phoenix rising from its ashes which is only about technology enhanced learning. The two characteristics of the projects that are funded and here they are geographically located are one that they are all design research projects. Because they're design research projects they're funded jointly by the EPSRC and the ESRC. That's a really major step forward for funding of research in this field because any of you who've ever tried to get money from the ESRC but needed even a programmer will find the ESRC saying, we're social science, we don't do computing of any kind and anybody who's ever tried to get money out of the EPSRC for educational computing of any kind will find them saying, understandably we're not going to fund soggy educational questions. So the collaboration between those two research councils is very important for the TEL programme, the technology enhanced learning programme. This is a list, I don't expect you to memorise, there won't be a Twitter test on these but I'm going to talk about a subset of these projects which I think have something special to say to the area that we're all here for and higher education and also lead us towards thinking about some overarching issues. Well when the programme was launched there were four grand challenges and everybody including me who had to write a proposal asking for 1.5 million pounds said that we would address each of these challenges and here they are. One was personalisation. Well I don't think we're any nearer knowing now what personalisation might mean than we were in three years ago but you can get the sense of what personalisation is in discussion about the hospitals for example. So this is a political issue as much as a technical or social issue but of course it is a dream that we have and in dreams lies responsibilities we have a dream that we really will have personalised learning whatever that means so it's something to deconstruct and it's one of the ideas that I think we need to go further and deeper into. Secondly is inclusion. Well inclusion is one of those things that you can't possibly argue with. I think there's a dimension of inclusion that is often ignored which is not so much social inclusion as epistemological inclusion. Are we denying access to ideas which are accessible now because of technology but which weren't accessible to most people using pencil and paper? So I think there's a dimension of inclusion that we have yet to face. Flexibility, well you can see a more seamless environment is the hope but the example that I used at the beginning borrowing from Aaron shows you what the pitfalls of that view are. Flexibility is not necessarily directly connected to learning or to teaching so this flexibility that we all have to access any page of encyclopedia Britannica while sitting on the 73 bus is very nice and very seamless and very flexible but it isn't at all clear what the relationship is between that access to that kind of information and for more formal learning is. I want to say something about that as time goes on. Finally productivity is an interesting issue. When you hear politicians talking about productivity they invariably mean getting more for less. That might even be an admirable aim. I don't want to be too cynical about it but if you can really get more for less who would object to that. The question is what can we do to make learning more productive. That's one question but another question is what do we mean by productive are there more senses than purely financial ones. If we are going to share an evolving set of challenges there are certain criteria that have to be met. They have to be the right size of challenge and I think productivity is a good example of the wrong size of challenge. I've got a whole list of wonderful studies that say things like 72.3% of students learnt more using technology than when they didn't use technology. There was one in the papers just last week from the United States conclusively showing that technology didn't have any effect on the productivity of learning and teaching. It's like saying books don't necessarily help you learn. That's probably a true statement. It depends to some extent on how you use the books and what the books might actually be. I think they have to be the right size. They have to resonate with practice. They have to actually say something to people who are going to take the fruits of research and translate them into action. They have to be actually researchable and there are quite a lot of questions that we can't so easily research and they have to be scalable. That is to say it's nice to know that we can do a design research project with a class of students that something works but it's even nicer to know that that might scale up to the real world. For the rest of this talk, I'm going to try and make a modest contribution to this idea of saying what are the challenges that we might share, what are some of the challenges and try and start a debate on that question. I'm going to look at three key themes of learning and teaching. I'm going to show you, introduce you in just a few minutes to some of the examples of the projects that are being undertaken by the TELL program and then I just want to say something about the challenges that emerge from them. I should just say that some of the people whose work I'm going to site now are even in this room and they will as the conference unfolds have obviously much better purchase on what I'm going to say about their projects than I can but I think it deserves... I would like the projects to speak for themselves as well as speak for them. Okay, the first question is semantic technologies. Well, I think semantic technologies is interesting. It's like when Gandhi came to the United Kingdom just after the war and the BBC reporter said to him, what do you think about western civilisation? And Gandhi said, I think it would be a good idea. And so the idea of technologies that speak to themselves to understand what each other means that is more than simply accessing of information is here. We see it beginning to emerge. It will become commonplace in the very near future. Web 3 is not on the horizon. We're halfway towards that horizon. And we have no idea yet what it might mean for all the questions that are going to occupy us for the rest of this conference. I want to just show you in a couple of minutes one of the projects that's working on semantic technologies. This is the ensemble project based at Cambridge with Patrick Carmichael in which they're trying to combine semantic web technologies, grid technologies, social software and digital repositories to support case-based learning in advanced education settings. Let me get Patrick speak for himself on that for two minutes. Hello. I'm Patrick Carmichael. I'm the director of ensemble semantic technologies for the enhancement of case-based learning. We're about nine months into this project and we started with the assumption that learning technology and the notion of cases were emergent but at the same time claims made about semantic technologies suggested that they would be a good match for the demands of teaching and learning in complex and contested areas where case-based learning in some form seems to be the pedagogy of choice. For the first six months of the project research teams involved in technology development and in exploring the nature of case-based learning have worked in parallel. We're now beginning a phase where we're drawing on our understanding of both of these areas to help us inform the design and development of a range of new tools to support teaching and learning across disciplinary settings. OK. So what the project team say and I think they're right is that our understanding of the semantic web is at a stage a bit like our understanding of what the worldwide web could be was in 1993. And as you heard from Patrick they are simultaneously researching the kinds of pedagogy that are appropriate to case-based learning with semantic technologies and building tools for those technologies. And that's a very important characteristic of all the projects in the TEL programme that they are simultaneously seeking to understand and to design tools and technologies that not only facilitate learning but help in the understanding. So here's the first challenge. I don't know if it's a grand challenge or not but it comes out of, I think, this kind of work. And that's to understand better the relationship between information and knowledge. Once upon a time enthusiasts for technology, like all of us here, perhaps made a mistake in thinking that ubiquitous access to information might be the same thing as acquiring knowledge. And now we know better we know that simply acquiring information seamlessly, flexibly, productively and so on really isn't enough. We know that knowledge is different from information and we can now see a little bit more clearly that the forms of teaching and learning that are appropriate to helping people acquire knowledge are obviously much greater than simply just the sum of its informational parts. But maybe now we can take one step further forward because now that we are clearly in the not too distant future we are going to have information that has knowledge built into it. We are going to have pieces of information, as it were, that can communicate with each other knowledgeably. A meaning can be transmitted as well as merely information. Maybe we should take another step and ask ourselves just what that will mean for learning and teaching. So I think we have a long way to go to understand the relationship between information and knowledge and I think that the interim position that many of us took, which is, hey, look, wait, information and knowledge are different things and knowledge is made up of more than the sum of its informational parts, was an important step to make, but one that is not sufficient. I'm going to skip a couple of slides. You'll have to forgive the lack of seamlessness. So here's the second challenge. When learners are creating meanings for themselves with digital technologies they are not creating digital versions of the meanings they would create without digital technologies. I think one of the biggest misconceptions that any of us have in the learning and teaching business is that technology will simply add a dimension to the knowledge that would be acquired without it. It's not true. Mike's keynote this morning made it very, very clear that we're talking about a radical revision of what it means to know and of what can be known, of what can be spoken about, of what can be understood. And I think this whole question of understanding the literacies, the new kinds of literacies, the new kinds of meanings that people bring to learning and teaching is a second challenge. I'm going to just say very few things about the second project. The second project using web-based mobile technologies to help people learn transition skills. So here let me give you an example. This is the interlife project based at Glasgow with Vic Lalley. Here's an example. To develop a set of student-generated activities leading to a flexible, sustainable online resource to help the school to university transition. By the way, I'll tell you the really PowerPoint corruption issue is what you do with your PowerPoint slides when you've prepared for 30 minutes and you've only got 20 minutes. Here's Vic Lalley speaking for himself. We don't have any sound? Right, you can't hear it. So they're trying to attack the question of transition, the very difficult, emotional and cognitive questions that arise in people's minds that come in communities that are in transition and the particular transition they're studying is the transition from school to university and there are obviously questions about identity and about social recognition and so on that they're struggling with. And interesting questions that they're asking are, well, the obvious question. If you're using virtual reality, in this case second life, if you're using virtual worlds, I mean, to effect transitional change, so you enter into a virtual world and in a way rehearse the transitional change that you're finding problematic, how does that get handled, how the personal identity is developed during transitions and then the last two questions are about the kinds of tools that can be employed. So in this situation, you're talking about a medium of expression which is radically different from the medium of expression that is going to characterise the real world. So you're in your transition and you're rehearsing some aspects of that transition in a virtual world. And the really difficult question is, what is the relationship between what you're thinking and doing and how you're building an identity in the virtual world and the real world? Is it the case that if you manage to do it in a virtual world, it will become easier in the real world? I don't know. And this is one of the questions that the project is trying to tackle. But one of the challenges that emerges from this is that you really have a struggle with the interdisciplinary nature of projects like this. So you have people working on the psychological and social aspects of transitional skills and you have people trying to build tools that will help people to develop those kinds of skills. And one of the things that this project and most of the projects in the TEL programme are grappling with is this very, very hard question of getting, in this case, computer scientists and educators to speak a language that makes sense to each other, that appreciates the difficulties, that is asking the educators to formalise some of the ideas about learning and teaching and identity formation that they would otherwise not have to formalise if they weren't asking the computer scientists to build ontologies and build models and so on. So that's, I think, the third challenge. I think we have a long way to go in building a research community that is studying technology-enhanced learning. And in order to do that, we need to redefine disciplinary boundaries. In order to do that, the TEL programme is trying to develop some overarching themes, one on early career researchers and one on ethical considerations, which I'm happy to answer questions about, but I won't say anything more now. Obviously, the website will tell you more. So that's the third challenge. And then finally, I just want to share with you in a few minutes the project that the principal investigator is Diana Laurelard in London. She probably will be talking about this in much more detail tomorrow, I think it's tomorrow morning. But I wanted to mention it because I think it's relevant in terms of developing some themes. What the LDSE Learning Design Support Environment project is aiming to do is to build an environment that helps lecturers and teachers to develop innovative pedagogical designs that exploit the potential of technology-enhanced learning. And I think what's quite interesting about this project is that it is focusing on the question of supporting teachers rather than support, well, as well as supporting learners. That doesn't make it unique, but I think if you look at the literature in technology-enhanced learning research, you will find understandably an overwhelming bias towards supporting learners. And that's probably as it should be. But there is no, I was going to say, hope on the horizon, but we should be thankful for that that teachers are going to be replaced by technology. It might be true one day, but it won't be true in any of our lifetimes because we are nowhere near being able to understand how teachers do what they do, and if we can't understand how they do what they do, we can't build a machine. Thank goodness for my pension. We can't build a machine that does it. As I say, that might be different in 100 years' time or even 50 years' time, but probably not sooner than that. So I'm going to let Diana just speak for herself for a couple of minutes if she wants to. The problem we're focused on in this project is how to transform teaching. And I think many of the things that we see at the moment are about transforming learning using technology, which is important, but we can't transform learning until we've also made it possible to transform teaching. Very hard for teachers to embrace this new technology. So we're trying to focus on what they need with building this environment. That means I think that we're also focusing more on productivity than any of the other themes in the TLRP TEL programme. In the sense that we've got to try and get the teachers to think about the best way of using their learners' time. They are responsible for orchestrating how their learners embrace the idea of teaching and learning and the ways of thinking and practicing that Entus will talk about. So the research challenge for us is to make sure that we're expressing the knowledge of pedagogy in a way that can be expressed in a system that offers advice. And for the computer scientists, it's to work out what is the ontology of this field. OK. Well, I'm running out of time. So let me just say what I think emerges from that and obviously further details are available on the site. I think what emerges from that is that productivity is an interesting idea provided that we base our understanding of the idea of productivity on design. That's to say the question is not is this or that technology more productive than some other technology, including the technology of pencil and paper, but can we design for productivity? If we rise to the challenge of designing for productivity, we have to be prepared to be much more clear about what it is we're trying to be productive about and that leads me to the final challenge. I will skip Diana, and that is to try and redefine what we are trying to teach. I think that we are probably, when the history books are written about the uses of technology and learning and teaching, we will recognise that even now we're at the very earliest stages and I think what characterises that stage is that we're still at the point of taking for granted what the knowledge is that we would like students to learn. Of course there are some very good counter examples to this, but in general I think a visitor from the last century into our classrooms of universities and colleges would recognise the situation that they see. That is the knowledge is updated but the knowledge is more or less seen as an invariant of the situation. So you have knowledge that was appropriate in the 20th century and you're trying to use 21st century technologies, we're trying to use 21st technologies to access that knowledge. I think there are a huge number of areas and I'm thinking of the sciences and the social sciences which are accessible, learnable, teachable now because we have technology that were not accessible before. I think that the slices of human culture that we made available to students in the 20th and early 21st centuries are more or less arbitrary and shaped by, influenced by maybe even determined by the fact that we had a static technology to express them with pencils, papers, blackboards and so on. I think we have yet to embrace and by the way I don't expect me to know quite how this is going to develop but I think we have yet to embrace the real challenge, perhaps the most significant challenge which is there are things now that are learnable and teachable, there is knowledge that is understandable and graspable that simply wasn't the case without technology and it perhaps behoves all of us to try and spend just a little bit of our time thinking not about how to teach and learn better the knowledge of yesterday or even today but how to teach and learn the knowledge of tomorrow. I can't resist just sharing with you as a final slide an example of what I mean by that. This is an example that I came across not long ago. This is Goldman Sachs' chief financial officer being interviewed about what happened in the crash and he says we were seeing things that were 25 standard deviations several days in a row. Now, he thinks that the behaviour of financial markets is normally distributed and that's what everybody still gets taught in financial mathematics courses. I know because my son's just finished one. If you make that assumption then 25 standard deviations is more or less where that chair is and just to put it in practice in context for you if you think of the age of the universe as being roughly that then 25 standard deviations is that many days and that many days 10 to the power of 124 times the life of the universe and David Vineyard saw this happening several days in a row and even then nobody said perhaps this is not the normal distribution. It's a wonderful example of how information just isn't enough but it's also an example of how that kind of knowledge well this is unknowledge rather than knowledge but accessing so what kind of a model does make sense is there an emergent phenomenon going on here is there something chaotic that we can study and mathematics and so on that kind of knowledge was simply inaccessible in the past and yet the old kind of knowledge the normal distribution knowledge is still being taught and still being learned so I'll end there and obviously happy to ask questions. Can you try and keep your questions short and piffy please? Do you like to go first? Okay, the challenges you've come up with are fine but they feel a bit sort of fundamental sort of the right thing to research is sort of the meanings of knowledge and how we create meaning. Are we sort of going back a stage almost from the more practical challenges that you had to meet when you were doing your project proposals? I understood everything except the last sentence. Right, I was trying to make it into a question which is the challenges that they set out three years ago were sort of things they wanted to be done and it's a bit like saying you're asking the wrong questions we need to go back and put more into creating the right research environment understanding the deep meaning of knowledge versus information but it makes the timescale seem the wrong feel for a fast moving world. Well, I know I don't think that the four big words of the proposals were grand challenges actually I think they were themes and I don't think they were ever claimed to be challenges. As to the question of well you know this is going to be a slow business I think we're just starting and what you say is absolutely true to say we're just starting means it's going to take a long time and we don't even know what technology is going to be available next week so there is no answer to that. Some of the technologies that we've seen in the last few years are truly transformational I mean the mobility is truly transformational not I think because it's nice to have to access things on the move but because it breaks down mobile devices break down the division between real life and virtual life but some of them are not transformational I don't I've yet to be convinced that Twitter is transformational but I could be wrong about that anyway so you're right I don't know what to do about it there may not be a solution On that positive note I must say I have to bring it to an end so please do take it up with Richard afterwards there will be another session there Thank you very much indeed