 Yes, thank you. The title changed. It got a question mark. Do worlds collide because the interesting discipline about writing of course is that you change your mind and you discover that the abstract that you put in some time ago doesn't in fact take you where you thought you'd go. This also could be to some extent an answer to Donald Clark although I didn't know what he was going to say. Let me say straight away that some of my best friends of physicists that I think they're very good teachers and that I like lectures. I think this puts me in Donald's framework impossibly in the category of both the criminal and the stupid but I can live with that and let you judge for yourself. This also builds wonderfully on my colleague Helen Keegan's wonderful talk a little earlier in the session and in fact in her response to the very last question which was about what was she doing as a lecturer in computer science dealing with creative content which after all belongs to the discipline of art and design and the framework of our university. I think that question in Helen's response really poses to me some of the questions that we need to think about the way that we use digital technologies in teaching and learning as we try and take forward our ambitions to improve the quality of learning and teaching in all of our institutions. I want to start as far away as I can from here in Mali. My background is in archaeology by the way and so I've always been interested in African archaeology. Mali is one of the world's earliest centres of learning 700,000 scholarly manuscripts dating back to the 13th century to really transform the entire way that we've understood the history of this part of Africa. Of course one of the great projects that's taken advantage of the new technologies we have is the now widely available digital copies of those manuscripts which in turn are changing the notion of the scholarship of early Islamic writing. In my work, and I do a certain amount of work in that part of the world, I had the opportunity recently of starting a conversation with a man called Abdulain Yang who works on Bumco in Malawi and has established a foundation for sustainable development which in fact as you'd expect depends overwhelmingly on a digital web-based platform. Let me say to Donald by the way and answer to his response to the question about whether there really is a digital divide, try going to Mali. There certainly is a digital divide. Don't send anybody in Mali any email attachment with a graphic because it will take them about half an hour to download it with dial-up connections. But clearly, and why I think Timbuk-2 is a very useful example for us is that the mythology of Timbuk-2, the far away place in the world is now of course connected in with these educational platforms. I want to come back to that a little bit later on in what I want to say. Rather improbably I want to go from Timbuk-2 to Milton Keynes. And what I've structured this here is a response to a couple of very interesting presentations made by Martin Bean, the Vice Chancellor of the Open University. I encountered his particular presentation at Giscsebs, pointed out to me subsequently that in fact he has made similar presentation here at Ault, a very provocative and interesting presentation that he makes. And his argument, and many of you would have heard it, is that we are at a threshold between the formal learning structures of the past and the informal socially networked world of the future. And I think that to me resonates with the theme of an ocean of a sea change and the question mark that's being asked as a theme through this session and this conference. And in Martin's phrasing, and the quotations indicate that it comes from his presentation, he sees institutionally accredited learning as what he says having a fixed granularity. And he juxtaposes this against informal learning, which he says, and again from his presentation, is not accredited so much by institutions, but it's accredited by mentors and by the platforms themselves on which it's delivered. In other words, by a claim or comment from people working within the same technology frame. The key metaphor that Martin Bean uses in this presentation is this juxtaposition of clouds and staircases. And the concept of these clouds of informal learning are colliding with the rich, thick granular staircases if you like of formal accredited learning. And I want to take issue with that presentation because I think he's wrong. And I think we need to think around that particular juxtaposition that he poses here to take us forward. And it's to some extent an extension of what he's saying because the interesting thing about Martin's very provocative presentation, at least the one that I heard with the clouds and staircase metaphor, is that's the point at which it stops. So rather like Donald this morning, there's no solution that follows on from this. There's no offer of what we should be doing differently once we've abolished the lecture, once we've abolished the university, once we've abolished the lecture theatre, abandoned all of the buildings and taken resort to our mobile devices. There isn't a clear model here of exactly what education is going to look like. And I think we have a cul-de-sac here in this representation that doesn't help us move forward. Some issues that I'd want to put up here. I apologize for the quality of my PowerPoint here. Frank put me to shame. I got carried away in preparing for this because it was a challenging brief. So I wrote rather long paper and mercifully I made the decision not to read it out in front of you given the comments this morning because that would have been an embarrassing position to have been in, wouldn't it? But I have, the whole written text of the paper is available through Alton, it's on my website. And so anyway I put together the PowerPoint and a bit fuzzy graphics because I stole these off Amazon and they didn't come out so well. But basically the notion first of all I want to put in front is that we need to give attention to content before we give attention to technology and that's been mentioned by a number of people here. For the simple reason that our capacity always extends ahead of us, either through the Moore's Laws process of the accelerating capacity of the technology or through the expansion of bandwidth that we have available. And so what we tend to find is that digital content is invariably slow and inherently unsatisfactory and a number of people have made that comment in the session. That's the phenomenon where we are always working with this wonderful machinery that can basically run a spaceship but we use about 5% of its capacity and we all have that experience of the devices that we use. Very few of us actually catch up with what our technology that we have can do. And that in my experience, my earliest work in using information technology was at the University of Cape Town in South Africa where I worked for a long time before moving to Salford. I went there on account of the weather. But my experience there in back in that environment and again moving into using information technology in the early to mid 80s is that we were always behind the ability of the technology. And there are a number of useful literature connection points on this which help us to understand that. I always find Manuel Castel's work on the information age, the huge trilogy that he wrote in the 90s, are very interesting to help us to understand why that is, why that's a phenomenon of the world that we live in. And another text that's important to me and I'm going to touch on this in a minute is Dominic Foray's work on the economics of knowledge. And a key distinction for what I want to say next is the distinction between tacit knowledge and codified knowledge which will be familiar to many of you. So hold on to that idea then that in my argument here that we must really put content for technology. Here's a key distinction which I think helps unravel that issue and take the sort of very interesting train of thought that Martin Bean has taken us on a little bit further. A key distinction which helps me to understand this. The different terminology here, I'm using Foray's definition, there are other words that are used, but tacit knowledge is the sort of knowledge that's immediate exploratory. Classically, and this of course is way outside the frame of digital technology, learning through tacit knowledge is via apprenticeships. It's a sort of face-to-face learning experience where knowledge is passed on between people immediately. And there are all sorts of ways though in which tacit knowledge works in the academy. Advanced Scientific Laboratories, classic example of tacit knowledge. Ideas are thrown around between people in the research team before they're codified. Some are rejected, some are accepted. And that if you like is at one end of the spectrum. On the other end of the spectrum is what we can call codified knowledge. And these are the highly structured forms of knowledge that are used for mass communication exchange. And of course the printing press in the book is the key example, Frank had some very interesting examples of that in those various technological revolutions that have gone through education through Xerox machines into photocopiers, that sort of technology. The ultimate in codified knowledge would be something like Einstein's equation, expressing something in a single line. And the experience of course of what Manuel Castells would call our information age is this massive expansion of codified knowledge through digital modes of communication. The problem that our students face today is not the problem of getting the train fare or the air fare to go to a library to find the resources for their research. It's making discriminating decisions and choices between the immense mass of information that they have in front of them. That's a very different skill set. And so I think what has come about for those of us whose careers have extended back beyond what Castells would call the information age is that's the great change, this massive expansion of codified knowledge. So what I'd argue here is that the technologies of the information age have changed the nature and relationship between both codified and tacit knowledge. I've mentioned already how codified knowledge has been massively expanded. But of course tacit knowledge, and this is key to what I want to argue here, has also been very significantly extended by ubiquitous social networking platforms. So email, Facebook, Second Life, YouTube, Twitter. I have a great claim to fame by the way. I'm said to be the first Vice Chancellor to Twitter and I think I'm still one of only three. I'm hoping that Times Higher Education is going to entrench that as a matter of fact for the archive. But when I started doing this, people thought this was completely crazy. We did it primarily to try and break one of the most difficult things in academic leadership where you're privileged to be leading an institution about 20,000 people, which is keeping in touch with your own people internally, let alone the rest of the world. And that's one of the most difficult challenges one faces. But I think we'd all agree that social networking platforms have again simply changed the way that we've worked. Certainly in environments like these, it might not be happening right at the moment and I'm not looking behind me, but I have certainly found almost every time I speak now, I will find myself in the front here talking like this and projected on the screen will be a Twitter feed telling all of you what everybody out there actually thinks about what I'm saying. And that's an extremely confusing environment to work in. But it's one, of course, which is really a classic example of that tacit immediate knowledge that's being passed around. And we know these platforms well. We tend to forget, of course, because we take it for granted, that the very first use of email was overwhelmingly by the international academic community exactly as a form of immediate tacit knowledge exchange. And then the other key point, again, obviously given for a conference like this, is that interoperability with mobile devices is freeing us from the technology of the desk and the chair. In other words, we're freed from the constraints of where we are physically. Again, very disconcerting for those of you who actively teach using social media, because, of course, unless you're in some sort of video, you don't really know where or who you're actually speaking to anymore. And there was a famous punch cartoon of a number of years ago, which I wish I'd kept, but I didn't, with a picture of a dog sitting behind a computer. And it said, basically, the great advantage of the internet is that nobody knows you're a dog. And that is, again, changes the nature of the way that we communicate. So, question. Staircases and clouds. Are these different forms of communication then part of a collision? And I thought they were when I started writing this paper. This is why I had to put a question mark back in the title. Are these, in fact, worlds colliding? Is social networking clouds confronting the rigid hierarchical word of learning? I think not. And I think that the better way of looking at it is in that third bullet point there. And that is to begin to think of open content as codified knowledge and social networking as not inherently tacit knowledge. Let me just amplify a little bit on that. This has not come out at all. This is Colb's classic experiential learning cycle that will be known to many of you here. And it's this constant virtuous circle between concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualisation and active experimentation. And many people here will have known this either directly or indirectly in thinking about creating rich learning experiences for our students. And what interested me here was that, of course, Colb was writing back in the early 1980s before any of this was even imagined. Back in the early 1980s, I think we were using Apple IIs with 64Ks. And we were completely delighted that we could put a six-figure code before and after a word and it was magically underline. And Bill Gates really did say, I believe 64K should be enough for anybody. Colb certainly, I don't think, imagined this sort of world. And what's interested me is how we can take this notion of experiential learning and use it to look at this distinction between what I'm calling codified and tacit knowledge and the different forms that that takes in the use of digital content. So if we look at the experiential learning in a digital environment, we have four stages in the cycle, as I've already mentioned, concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualisation, active experimentation. And what I'm arguing here is that in ideal learning environments and the sorts of learning environments that we are finding productive, each one of those stages will actually use a combination of tacit and codified knowledge, ranging from informal discussion through written text to abstract highly codified formulations. In other words, in each stage all forms of digital technology can enhance and extend the learning experience. We shouldn't be pitting formal content against informal content as if there's that precise sort of equation. And in talking to a lot of people who are really interesting practitioners in this respect, we can see how those sorts of things come together. Now, I haven't had the opportunity to talk more to Helen about her presentation this morning. One of the interesting things about all the institutions we work in is we might work in the same institution inside of each other's buildings, but we have to come to a conference at the other part of the country to figure out what we're respectively doing. But that serves as a very good example, and how I know about it I would have used it here. Because of course constructing a very rich student learning opportunity through the challenge of making films using the video devices in mobile phones is the learning content appropriating and using the whole range of social networking type technologies. But of course that is work that has been submitting as part of a formal structure for accreditation, for examination, for credit that's actually given within the formal environment of the university. It doesn't step aside from it. It's not a cloud colliding with a staircase. It's in fact a different way of conceptualising the clever use of digital technologies. So going back then to Abdelay Foundation, Abdelay-Niang's work, and again this is an example of many that one could choose. I'm just using the rhetorical device here of using Mali as a nice far away place. It was really, really interesting talking to this man. The encounter was that I've been doing some work in Dakar and Senegal, and he and I were on a jury together, interestingly enough, judging awards for new innovative programmes in learning. Talking to him in Dakar about his passion for what he wanted to bring into Mali really brought home to me how these sorts of technologies are changing the way that we do things. So when he constructs his vision of what this future is, he's constructing a vision of a learning platform that totally combines structured content that's delivered in a digital way, content that will be equivalent to MIT or the Open Universities Open content, which is formally structured accredited type learning structure. He envisages a situation where he takes those sorts of formal parts of what he wants to do and completely combines them with the sort of social networking technology that's essential to his vision because he's dealing with vast distances with no roads, with no fixed line technology where his dependence on reaching his learners will depend entirely on the availability of social networking technology. And the two come together in that framework in a common sort of way of doing things and delivering. So, to tie up then, what I'm suggesting in really trying to take forward this important strand of conversation that's now running through a number of these sorts of conferences through very thoughtful presentations by people like Martin Bean and, of course, the Open University plays such an important role in this respect. My suggestion is that rather than thinking about these worlds being in collision, what the real potential is is that digital technologies allow a massive extension of the full range of knowledge dissemination from immediate to the highly abstract. I've used the example of Mali as a rhetorical advice, a device that's a long way away and because it's somewhere near Timbuktu, which we all think of the other side of the world. But it's also, in my part of the world, in the Northwest, we're also dealing there with generations of social exclusion from higher education opportunities, very dissimilar to the sorts of parts of Islington that we've just heard about earlier. And the huge potential, I think, of these extensions of the full range of knowledge dissemination go to extending access to learning in these sorts of ways as well. I do think that we have to put the epistemology of what we do, such as experiential learning theory, which I happen to like and which I've used, but there are other epistemological approaches. There's certainly critiques of experiential learning theory that needs to be taken very seriously. But whatever they are, I think they have to be put before the technology so that we can actually free the full potential of that digital communication and realise what we can do with it. And I'll stop at that point. Thank you very much. I should just say that your paper is also available on Crowdvine. I noticed you've linked it to your session, so that's a very easy place to get it. And I would strongly recommend that you do download it and read it. I think it's a paper that a few vice-chances will probably read and fewer could have written, but it's a well worth the effort. Can we have some questions from the floor, please? Roving mics, if you start down the front. Hello, one of the themes you included, Martin, was some discussion of open content. If I heard you correctly, at one stage you seemed to align open content with being codified knowledge. I wondered whether that was because you felt that the process of making content open was necessarily one of codification, or whether you felt that tacit knowledge couldn't be presented in the form of open content. Because shortly after that you also said that one of the first users of email was by academics to share tacit knowledge. I couldn't quite in my mind fit that kind of comment with the notion that open content couldn't be in some way tacit knowledge. No, thank you. That's a good point, and I should tighten that definition of it up a little bit because you're right, it becomes a bit confusing. What I was meaning in this context by open content was very much with an O and a C in a formal sense in terms of what has now become a movement with Open University, MIT, Oxford, other people, making available their formal curriculum without charge or without registration requirements to anybody who will take it. I think we now have a sufficient number of very strong institutional precedents to have something out there which is a bit of a movement and a phenomenon. Not in the broad sense because you're absolutely right, of course. The issue of open access as opposed to open content, you must certainly make available any form of knowledge including tacit knowledge sharing openly, and I would very strongly advocate that, and that would extend to institutions that would want to put open repositories in the centre of what they do, which is the case that we do at the University of Salford. The reason why I want to put open content, including very particularly the Open University's open content on the structured side, is because it's very appeal is to me that it's codified and organised. It is part of those staircases in Martin's formulation that will eventually lead to a qualification. There's also a very strong implication in open content that you've got to access it sequentially because you would then move through the formal sequence of a formal curriculum because there's certain things in a formal curriculum that you've got to know one before the other. What I'm suggesting is that we need to see that as structured and that's its value for me. That's its immense value. Thank you. In the middle here. Derek Morrison, Higher Education Academy. Something that's exercised my mind for years is the whole concept of lock-in. I've waxed lyricals since about certainly 2004 about the idea of e-learning filling stations. We're at the rough equivalent of how early motoring used to be where you couldn't just pop into your local garage. You had to go to either your local pharmacy or a specific type of filling station. I see several times today, I've actually seen the assertion about, particularly in the mobile arena, that the liberalisation of content via mobile devices. But yet, where I'm sitting and thinking about in terms of things like iTunes U and the way that Amazon behaves with Kindle, if anything, if not specifically at the content level, at the service delivery of that content level, there's an even more ominous approach to actually locking in a dependency that is positively unhealthy. When I actually see about the liberalisation and interoperability, then I think particularly the likes of eBooks and I think about the debate between Apple and Adobe regarding whether there should be flash or not. We still seem to be allowing ourselves to do exactly the opposite of liberalising content. We seem hell bent on actually getting ourselves locked into services. Well, absolutely. I mean, the Amazon relationship with Kindle is a good one, but consider this. If you ask anybody at MIT what their return is on the massive upfront investment that they've put for open content, they'll tell you that the availability of open content has massively increased demand for the formal registration of their courses and therefore their ability to charge up to $40,000 a year of people to register. Let me declare an interest straight away. I mean, I'm in charge of a university. We're dependent on student fees. That's lock-in because the thing that we still own that is not owned out there is the right to award the qualification. And as long as you have the right to award the qualification, then you are locking in your learners and it would be dishonest for anybody who runs a higher education institution to say that that doesn't matter. I mean, we're not giving away our qualifications. We're giving away our content. We charge for our qualifications, whether we charge learners or whether we receive a subsidy or government grant. That's our income source. So I think you're absolutely right. Thank you. We've got a question at the back. Thank you. Clare Killan, I'm pondering here. It's not about content. To me it's about learning experiences. And what I'm wondering is when we're in a world where there is so much content now available and we know so much from all the various research programmes and there is more choice being talked about. The government is pushing choice, but our learners ready for it. I'm not saying they're not capable of it, but are they ready for it? And what are we doing looking to the future which was the question asked at the end of Frank's session. What are we doing to help prepare them for this choice, to help them access the resources? And I don't mean physical access. There are so many things we can do in the design of the learning experiences we create that will help them achieve their potential as autonomous learners. But I'm not seeing that coming out. I think that is right. There is a huge amount of choice. And I think the degree of discretion and rationality behind choices varies very much according to the nature of the learner and what they're looking for. I mean I think that older learners and particularly those who are taking up the opportunity to return to education are very discriminating indeed in the choices that they make and will seek the best sort of information. I don't think that they're well served. I mean there is a notion that somehow or other the market will create perfect information. I don't think markets do create perfect information. And I'm not convinced that one has the information available to make those sorts of choices. I think when it comes to younger learners and we see this through the application patterns that we have to our universities, I think that we know in fact from our marketing departments that the basis on which younger learners make decisions about universities are often very alarming indeed and are not really based on any particular sound notion of what the education offering is. It will be the perception of the nature of the city. It will be whether it's a party city or not a party city what the reputation of it actually is and a whole variety of other factors. So I don't think that we are doing enough in putting out genuine information about what those options are. We are of course enslaved by the league tables in that respect. And that is probably about the most insidious part of what we're faced with. Partly because of course league tables generalise across an entire university and say nothing at all about the specific course that somebody might be interested in and also because they drive a very simple linear notion of the organisation of opportunities. But I think the implication of your question is completely correct and that is that we're not matching the openness in access to content and information with the sort of tools that people need to make a choice in often a very confusing and bordering way of opportunities. Just one very quick question here. Can you keep it short as well against time? Certainly I'll try and do my best. Nigel Ecclesfield. It strikes me when you talked about social networking not inherently creating tacit knowledge, Martin, that there is some work from Caroline Haythorn's weight at the University of British Columbia from an information processing information science aspect where she's looked at the formation of groups in social networking environments and at learning societies and makes that very distinction you're making that in a sense within a social networking environment issues are single issues for those groups who aggregate and move apart very quickly whereas in a group like Alts there needs to be more commitment both to the individuals within the group and the issue in order for the knowledge to become tacit and circulate in the way that you've described. Yes, thank you. I think that's right. I mean I think that we, again the over-categorisation of if we say for instance that something like platform like Facebook is inevitably a social networking tacit knowledge content I think we actually miss the point about the way that a lot of people are using a platform like Facebook for exactly those sorts of special interest things and if one looks at the way that that is used in Facebook you're finding what in my book are much more codified forms of knowledge and become very interesting from that point of view and very interesting ways of organising and disseminating that sort of information. I think one of the key things and again it would be pretty well common cause here is of course the sort of interoperability that allows us to move across these sorts of different platforms and different opportunities in a way that allows us to produce and generate very smart educational solutions.