 Okay. Thank you very much, Robin, and thanks to AUTT for inviting me to give this talk. Well, the semiotics of the logo are complex as you see. And I'm going to try and say a few words, skating over the top of what the technology-enhanced learning phase of the teaching and learning research programme is. I realised that for those not initiated into these sets of initials, the complexities may be somewhat obscure. So what is the technology enhanced learning phase of TLRP? Teaching and learning research programme was a programme founded in around 2000 with the express mission by government, by a department for education and skills to try to build an accumulativity, an accumulation of research findings and educational research that really could make an impact. And I'll say a few words in a minute about what it is I think that stopping us having much impact not only in higher education but in education more generally. I really do think it is the case that a visitor from out of space or visitor from back in time coming to an open university course or to what's happening in industry and in commerce and in finance and so on would find much that they didn't understand. But when they went into the lecture halls of our universities or the classrooms of our schools I think they'd know exactly what was happening because I don't really think that any fundamental changes have taken place in the last hundred or two years that would be so difficult for them. And the question is given the extreme power of the technology we now all take for granted, why is that? So what the technology enhanced learning phase of the teaching and learning research programme is is a set of projects with modest funding, I mean £12 million is a lot of money but it isn't a lot of money compared to the education budget. It is scheduled to last from last year to 2012 so almost everything I show you in the next half an hour is more or less new. And the idea is that the programme will try to rise above the specificities of the individual projects. So there's a set of projects that are working on their research themes, they're trying to answer research questions, you'll see in a minute that they are research questions both about education and about computer science. But the real issue is in order to have an impact can we go further, can the programme go further than simply answering the specific research questions of the individual projects. Often as you will know many projects of that kind even produce some really impressive software but almost none of that software and almost none of the educational background and theory and innovation that drives the project lives on very much longer after the project has finished. And it's my contention and I think the contention of those that launched the technology enhanced learning phase of TLRP that trying to think about the general in a more productive way even as the specific projects are going on might help us to achieve this kind of accumulation of findings that could actually make an impact. And we are doing that in various ways through commentaries. There will be a commentary released in a couple of months time now on designing Web 2 for Education and working papers and special editions of journals and so on. Now I want to stress that I think this is a modest enterprise. I don't believe that an initiative of this kind with a modest number of projects however well-intentioned is going to massively change the world. But I do think that there is much in educational research and in the leading edge of the way that computer science and artificial intelligence is assisting in that educational programme that may be of importance for those of us working in universities and higher education institutions. I think there will be a time lag and the difficulty with this kind of initiative is that it's almost, it's exceptionally unlikely that the outcome of a three-year research project, even one within one and a half million pounds is going to immediately make an impact in the way we do our business on a day-to-day basis. I think we have to take a longer term view but just how much of a longer term we can afford to take is of course a difficult issue. We have a number of partners, the Higher Education and the Academy and Bector and so on. I should say that only a minority of the projects are specifically involved in higher education but one special partner that I'd like to thank publicly is Jisk who have made not only material support but made us realise that even those projects that are taking place historically for the teaching and learning research programme that ostensibly had not very much to do with technology at all can be as a legacy of importance when we're thinking about how technology not just should be applied in higher education but how it should be designed. So I think this issue of designing technologies for specific pedagogies is something that we probably need to think about as a community of higher education academics and one that I don't think has occupied us specially in the last few years. Well, here is an unreadable slide of all the eight projects but I was petrified that there would be a representative of one of the projects that I didn't happen to say anything about so here is your project if you are secreted somewhere in the audience. But just casting your eye down you can see semantic technologies, you can see interlife which you could probably guess is something to do with second life. I will say more about the learning design support environment and the one after that. We have the Phantom project looking at haptic devices for training. The training of dentists is a fantastically interesting project but it makes me feel queasy whenever I read or hear them talk about what they do and I'm going to say something about the last two more specifically. So this is if you like a portfolio of projects and the question is whatever those projects are about and obviously at this point you don't know what they're about are there some more generalisable issues that we can bear in mind or the projects can bear in mind as they're taking place and which can allow us when the projects come to an end to say we have some more generalisable lessons that could make an impact in HE and elsewhere. So here's the challenges. First of all to develop, I don't know if there is a word cumulativity it's a pretty ugly word but I make it mean what I want it to mean. It's the accumulation of research findings. I think we're very bad at building on what exists. If you look at the proceedings of almost any conference that has the word education in the title you find some fantastically interesting projects no two of which have anything to do with each other. I'm exaggerating and I think that is a real challenge for us and one of the reasons why it's so difficult to say well look there are this group of projects that have taken place over N years and they seem to indicate that there is a way that we could improve the teaching and learning of whatever subject or maybe even more than one subject. We have a mission to develop research capacity and equally to foster change through co-design. So all of the projects whose names you've seen but whose content at the moment for you is empty are committed to working alongside the people for whom the projects are being undertaken so with teachers or with lecturers and so on. Now this next point it seems like a throwaway point but I think it's actually rather important. I think if you look for example at the proceedings of AI conferences you find some really stunning examples of leading edge technologies that ought to be having some effect in our teaching and learning and more or less I think it's true to say that having a very very limited effect. So if I'm making this up as I go along but if I could say to Denise wouldn't it be great if not just Moodle was being employed at the OU but it's a situation crying out for some ways in which AI research ought to be able to be fed into that kind of situation so that the system is intelligent enough to know what individual students or sub-communities of students might want and might need. There's a very simple example of how I don't think we are capitalising on what we have achieved and similarly I don't think it's especially useful to take a kind of drunk under the lamppost scenario. Now you know the drunk under the lamppost, the drunk guy looking over here and the guy comes up to him and says what are you looking for? He says well I've lost a £5 note and the guy said well did you lose it over here? He said no I lost it over there. He said well why are you looking over here? He said well because there's no light over there. And I think that just having fantastically interesting computational solutions to problems that are not state-of-the-art in pedagogic terms is equally unhelpful as the reverse situation. So trying to do something about combining computer science research with the state-of-the-art learning sciences research is something that I think the projects are trying to do. And that means that we have to build an interdisciplinary perspective bringing in social sciences and technological sciences together. You'll know any of you who have tried to get funding for educational research that's on the edge of technology and education. It's extremely difficult with honourable exceptions and Jisk is another is one of those. With honourable exceptions it's extremely hard to get funding from the ESRC and to get them to pay for some computer science input. And it's relatively difficult to get funding from the EPSRC if you want to put a substantial amount of money into pedagogic initiative at the same time. So it's a very welcome development that this program, the Tel-Phase of TLRP is not just encouraging but insisting that ideally there will be real advances in both computer science and in the learning sciences. Well, here are the grand challenges of technology-enhanced learning as stated not by me but as stated by those that were responsible some four years ago now for launching what became the Tel-Phase of TLRP. And the buzzwords are personalisation, inclusion, flexibility and productivity. I say buzzwords because some of those words like personalisation has become pretty much debased currency in the hands of some of our politicians. And it's not clear what it means. I mean what does it mean? To personalise a technology? Well, so the technology knows what you want but it also needs to know what it is somebody else thinks you need. That's what education is partly about. So this is a very complex question. And I've heard it argued with some force actually that personalisation puts too much emphasis on the individual in any case when the individual is part of the community. Maybe we need a new word that is kind of community of practicisation or something. So these words are pretty problematic. Flexibility. Well, we all love to use iPhones and we all like to be flexible and in theory it seems you can sit on the top of a bus learning mathematics just as well as you can sit in a classroom. Well, that's kind of true and mobile technologies do make certain things possible that weren't possible before but they also restrict the kind of thinking that I think has gone into many decades, hundreds of years of a more formal learning situation none of which necessarily has to be thrown out with the bathwater. So I think some of these ideas that drove the government's thinking at the beginning of this century and lent their name to the telphase of TLRP need to be analysed a little bit more carefully. So here's what they're supposed to mean. Personalisation is trying to exploit the responsive and adaptive capabilities of advanced digital technologies. And this is the kind of mission that makes you say, well, that would be great, wouldn't it? I think we have a long way to go and what I'm going to do now is in each of those cases I'm going to give you just one tiny glimpse of one of the research projects that in a sense represents the buzzword. Now, I can't do anything more than simply float above the issue and to invite you not to think so much about the specificities of the project as I described it, but to just ask yourself how generalisable is that? Are there lessons about personalisation in general that one might reasonably expect to emerge from a project dealing with this kind of issue? So here's the first one. I said in the abstract that I would say something about my own research and this is a project that I'm the PIO of. I should hasten to say that I was appointed director of TAIL after the receipt of the grant for this project, but this is looking at secondary school pupils' understanding of mathematical generalisation and any of you in the audience who are teaching mathematics at the higher level will know that you cannot take for granted even with undergraduates to whom mathematics is part of their degree. You cannot take for granted that they understand what the whole notion of generalisation is about. That's because it's an extremely complex idea. What my Gen project is trying to do is, first of all, assist students in recognising and analysing and expressing the structure of patterns. So here is a pattern. It seems that when you add two odd numbers together you always get an even number. So why is that? If you're 13 years old, it demands an explanation why you should want to know that it's true. If you take six examples, it obviously seems to be true. Why would you want to prove it in the first place? So thinking about those kinds of issues is a challenge for many students. At the same time, you remember I said we should have not just educational challenges but also computational challenges. We should build an intelligent support system that will support not just the students, the huge literature in AI and trying through user modelling and various other pathways to understand what the individual wants and much, much less, surprisingly actually, I think, of how we can support teachers in assisting their students. That's a fundamental problem. If you have 30 students in a class as a teacher you may have 200 students in a lecture. You may have however many you have in your tutorial group and having support from a computational system that would assist you in giving the right kind of assistance to students I think is far from a well-explored area of the literature. So here's what the MIJM project is trying to do. We're going to build a micro world for young students 13, 14, 15 years old to explore generalisation. Am I going to explain the details of this picture? No, it's just a pretty picture to say to you there's a micro world, something to explore, some interesting activities that you can do. Alongside this micro world we have an ambitious aim which we may or may not succeed. I should say that I think one of the interesting things about the projects that were selected for funding by the ESRC and the EPSRC is that they're extremely edgy. I think that I would consider the whole programme of success if half of the projects achieved half of their objectives and certainly some of the computer science objectives that the project have set themselves are extremely complex and the added complexity of having computer scientists and social scientists working together doesn't make life any easier but it is a kind of challenge that I think we're trying to rise to. So here's the micro world and at the same time a system of personalised feedback during the process of model analysis. Now here's an idea that rises above the specificity of this very dense five line description which is it isn't that difficult to build an intelligent system for a tutorial sequence. If I know seven things that I'm going to tell you and I know roughly the order in which you need to know those things and I have a simple way of assessing whether you've understood what I'm telling you or not it isn't that difficult now to build an intelligent quasi-intelligent system that will assist you and build an image of what the user needs and give the user a pathway through those seven ideas but if you give the user an exploratory system if it's not clear what at any instant the value of that particular exploration is whether maybe even the blind alleys of the exploration are just as important as the so-called correct solutions it may not even be clear what a correct solution is to a specific action then building an intelligent system is much more complex and of course there is a literature on this kind of issue but it isn't anywhere near as developed as the low hanging fruit of let's say how do you learn to do long division which on the whole is a sequence of actions which doesn't really matter if you know why you're doing them or not as long as you do them in the right order and the last thing and here again I'd like you to consider whether there might be at the end of a project like this some lessons that might be more generalisable is a collaborator that fosters and sustains an effective online learning community well online learning communities are to a penny now at least online communities are to a penny online learning communities are less prevalent and giving intelligent support for the creation and sustaining of an online community is really something that is still in its infancy okay let me go to inclusion how am I doing for time Robin? good okay so inclusion is pretty self evident what it means although I'd like to include in the idea of inclusion not just inclusion in the sense of individuals who might otherwise be excluded or communities that might otherwise be excluded but knowledge which might be excluded I think one of the huge potentials of digital technologies is that we can now help people to learn things that were virtually unlearnable before that learnability is something that is dependent on the tools that we have we have huge power potentially in these tools and there are new things that we could teach and perhaps old things that we don't need to teach anymore and I'll leave that in the air just for and I'll come back to it in the last minute of my talk I'm probably going to have to go faster than I would like to go but this is just a really interesting project on the theme of inclusion it's dealing with kids on the autistic spectrum specifically Asperger's syndrome and has a really very ambitious set of computer science HCI visualisation integration challenges I've tried to make bold the words gesture, gaze, tracking, agent-based context-sensitive interfaces and so on and you can see that this is an attempt to harness technology to try to get to the bottom of not just what Asperger's syndrome is which is an interesting social scientific goal but also trying to give those children some opportunities for interaction so that they come to understand better what emotional responses of themselves and others are all about here's a little boy who is following the details don't really matter but the interesting thing about Asperger's is that it's very difficult for them to understand that what other people do are based on their desires so any ways in which the system can give the student an opportunity to interact and for the system to interact back and say perhaps you need to look over there or perhaps you need to think about what so-and-so needs and so on is a very interesting problem and it's a problem that is well understood in the social scientific literature but bringing to bear computer science onto that problem is less well explored so what are the research challenges of a project like that well to take the second one first there are even just as the researchers say several of the components are currently at the prototype phase and their interoperability is not a given that's an understatement I think but the first one is an interesting social scientific challenge because autistic spectrum is a spectrum and we all live on that spectrum and it ought to be the case I think that really forcing oneself to be more specific because one's building a computational system more specific about what the disorder is we should also throw light on the emotional responses of us all and potentially of our students so let's just here's the rising above idea maybe some part of our initiative in bringing digital technologies to bear into our universities and HE institutions could be about precisely the emotional responses and the non-cognitive aspects of education which are obviously so critical for individuals flexibility well I've already said that we it's a buzzword that ought to be a very attractive idea it is a very attractive idea let me just tell you about a lovely project that's now been going for nearly a year Mike Sharples in Nottingham and Ian Scanlon in the Open University and various other colleagues and the idea is to investigate issues that affect children's lives across different settings including the classroom, home, discovery centres and so on the idea is that they're acquiring data making conjectures and trying to make headway into understanding not just formal tasks from the classroom but themselves, their environment and their community and as the researchers say the technology will run on small touchscreen computers, integral cameras data phones, keyboards and so on now this is an attractive idea but I know that the researchers will take us seriously as I do just what a challenge it is and how from a social science perspective it may not all be quite as plain sailing as it seems after all, if you take let's take the extreme example that you take some ubiquitous and attractive social network software like Facebook and you find a way, not that the researchers are trying to do this but that's a thought experiment you find a way to integrate Facebook into the teaching of some arcane piece of science that the students need what will immediately happen is the students who love Facebook when they're not in the lectures the students who are looking at Facebook when you think they're supposed to be listening to you giving a lecture will suddenly find reasons why Facebook for learning whatever it is is not as attractive as it was and I think this whole relationship between we would like to acquire students' own technologies and exploit them for our purposes but as soon as we do that we change the way that students feel about that technology so I think that's a challenge and I know that the colleagues involved in that research know that it's a challenge and that's what I mean by the mutual interactions on learning motivation okay let me move swiftly on to the final point which is productivity so I'm slightly squeamish about productivity I can see that we would like to be productive I can see that it would be nice if technology made things cheaper all the evidence seems to point to quite the reverse I think particularly all the evidence seems to suggest at all levels of education including the workplace and HE schools and primary schooling all the evidence seems to point to the fact that the teacher becomes not just as critical but even more critical than they were before the technology was introduced and that the teacher needs help not just computational help to understand how to exploit that technology so as I say I'm slightly uneasy about the notion of productivity because it would be nice to be more productive but not at the expense of what we consider as educators good pedagogy and nevertheless there are researchers trying to work on productivity without compromise and one of those is Diana Loredad and colleagues learning design support environment for teachers and lecturers hers is squarely in the field of higher education but she has made some effort along with her colleagues at least at the proposal stage this project hasn't even started yet so it's clear that there are ought to be spin-offs beyond the HE sector and indeed if you found ways for the HE sector to be more productive using technology it would be hard not to come to some conclusions about productivity in general so what her team are trying to do is to develop an interactive environment to enable teachers to lead the discovery of innovative pedagogical design just think of the effort that has been made in learning sciences and computation of sciences to produce systems where students can explore where students can construct things for themselves where students can come to criticise and critique what they're given and so on student-centered learning but how many can you think of that put the teacher in the same situation I'd be surprised if anybody can think of more than a handful and that's strange because if we unless we're going to discard the teacher heaven forbid altogether because heaven forbid at least because we'll be out of jobs unless we're going to discard the role of the teacher it's the teacher who can inspire the students to learn, to explore to take responsibility for their learning and how bizarre if we think that teachers are going to inspire students to take responsibility for their learning if we don't give teachers the responsibility for thinking about their own teaching and tools that enable them to do so so what this project is trying to do is both of those and to try and find out what kinds of digital technologies will enable teachers to lead innovation and carry out successful design for technology-enhanced learning I don't have time to say very much about this but here's a duality of I rather like the duality of this project to change the way software engineers think about tell support and also to change the way educational theorists think about expressing learning theory there's nothing better than to get education this like me to stop waffling and have to think much more clearly about what it is they're trying to achieve and how they're trying to achieve it than trying to assist in the design of a computational system because computers are much less forgiving than audiences human audiences and I'm I was going to say suffering but also benefiting hugely in my own project the Mygem project from working alongside computer scientists to say things like can you just tell us what it is you think the students would be learning then and it's astonishing that I actually had you know it's taken me more or less a year of that project to be clear what the answer to that question is and how come nobody asked me that question before so that's what interdisciplinarity is about when it works I'm not saying our project makes it work yet but it's one of the challenges okay so grand challenges for tell I think there are ten grand challenges for computer science my time is up these four challenges were set by policy makers not by researchers and I think that they go some way towards setting the parameters of what grand challenges for technology enhanced learning might be but let me just say one last thing for 30 seconds two last things one is I think that we have yet to exploit the potential of the technology for students and teachers to construct with them for themselves and I don't really see how that fits easily into the four challenges we have already and finally the point I started with and I said I'd come back to in the last 30 seconds I've called it revision but what I mean there is it's time surely to consider chucking some of the things that we so dearly think are crucial for students to understand and importing some things that were hitherto unlearnable I think that's true in my own subject which is mathematics and I suggest that it might be true in your subject whatever that is thank you sorry I overran Robin Frank, Rennie, Jai I was a really stimulating talk and you set a number of hairs running I was particularly interested in your later points surely that we're looking at the reason that we can't do what you're saying you want to do is that we put the teacher or the tutor into little pigeonholes and little boxes and we don't look at it in the whole context of the whole environment that the student has a couple of examples on that would be Amazon for example you click on Amazon and it says people who have bought this book also read this thing we can do that in education for copyright laws that are arcane and beyond the pale we ask students to sign things and put their signature on things because we have to have a written signature and yet we happily have complex agreements for paypal and for buying things online and so forth that we don't import into education so don't you think we actually write artificial barriers around what the tutor should be doing and that's why the tutor isn't the centre of education yes at least that's one of the reasons I think technology actually has a role to play in unlocking some of those cages sorry that wasn't your word but but again it's hard to see that happening in the short term what you're suggesting is a long term project very interesting and if I was to try and summarise it I would say what's happening is we're trying to or you're trying to get computer systems to meld their way close to the boundaries of individual learners if you can see that particular point but I think there's another ground challenge which is that we need to try and change the characteristics of the learners so that they become more productive learners in themselves particularly in the view of the fact that we have limited teaching resources we have an increasing number of students somewhere there's going to be a breakdown in the system we don't have enough teachers to deal with learners so I'd be interested to know your views on the development of metacognitive skills in learners in other words the ability to set goals to plan how to realise those goals to change the plans to change the goals that need be it seems to me that there are a lot awful lot of students coming into higher education who are incapable of doing that and who still either need to be spoon fed or demand to be spoon fed and I think that there's a huge advance to be made in that particular area if only we knew how to do it well Mark, okay I can only react as an amateur in that field metacognition isn't a research field and in fact interestingly and rather lamentably there aren't really any projects in the teleport portfolio about metacognition which I completely agree with you is a crucial issue I suppose my amateur response is this problem is only tiny part to do with technology and hugely to do with culture and in fact I would say that cultural change in terms of what it is that education is for I'm talking now about formal education a huge amount of hours that every individual in the western world puts into being formally educated somehow we have to find a way to rebalance what is taught from a list of content and topics into the kind of metacognitive issues that you raise now so just here's a question it can't be that technology doesn't have a role there it must be the case especially as technology gets more flexible and flexible in the standard sense it must be that we ought to be able to design ways to try to catalyse that changing culture but I have no idea how to do it and as far as I know there are very few research projects internationally that are attacking that and it's weird because as you say it's probably the crucial thing that we all face I wonder if you'd just like to comment on an issue that arose in the conversation recently a number of us were sitting around discussing precisely the same kind of issues we're discussing now and somebody said wait a minute nobody's looking at face to face why do we require all the learning technologists and all the learning technology to provide all sorts of wonderful things and the default option is just left lying there let me give you an example one of the people I work with had an online resource for distance learners she then went back to her classroom and said I'm not going to tell you this stuff in the class you can have a look at it on the web because it's there anyway and in class we'll turn the class into tutorial and the tutorial will be based on questions on a discussion forum so if you put a discussion forum question saying I've looked at x, y and z I'm not clear about so and so that will form the agenda for the tutorial that totally transformed her contact time and I looked at this and I said we've never done that we've never said the default option which is contact time is okay we need to interrogate the technology use so it was just a different perspective from my point of view this is a really good example remember when I was mentioning the way that disk helped us to understand that even projects that ostensibly had nothing to do with technology could feed into future projects or even existing projects that did have something to do with technology so there is maybe you're aware maybe not forgive me if I'm wrong but it could be that you're not aware of the huge literature in education that does look at ways in which tutors and teachers interact with their classes and tutorials there really is a massive amount of literature almost none of it has anything to do with technology and in that situation that's fine I think now what is really challenging and maybe this is a kind of placeholder for a much more general challenge ok we have this huge literature in education research largely unread by people who are education practitioners but now we have the extra added ingredient of the potential not the reality but the potential of digital technologies can be used by digital technologies in their place to enhance that face to face interaction and the answer might be no not really not yet we don't have intelligent enough technology maybe yes judiciously used the kind of thing that the the teacher said to her students maybe just the right thing to say in a particular way go and look on the web might develop the kind of metacognitive skills that Mark's talking about I don't know but I think that kind of issue is in in need of research but as I say perhaps afterwards we can talk about the research that has been done in that Professor Elizabeth Whitman from the University of East London's Smartfab thank you very much and thank you all for your patience in the setup I am as I say in America legally blind so while I see very well to function in the world hitting little tiny buttons is not what my lenses are tuned in for so it really could take ages for me to do a simple small thing big things are much easier so I'll just start what I've done is prepared a video exactly 35 minutes long and I'll talk over it and what it does is introduce what Smartlab is what our method is how we evolved from the Open University BBC and it was a fantastic introduction to have the previous talk there a lot of what I'm going to address comes from our experience of working with the Open University BBC for eight years and then evolving through other formats until we're collaborating closely again with BBC R&D now so I'll explain that show you some examples of some of our main projects dancing live this evening in the theatre across campus with two of our colleagues with severe cerebral palsy and some other disabled dancers and some virtual dancers so I hope you'll all come to that and I'll introduce that project briefly but the main focus of my talk which I called building the arc is really about basically in recent years I've begun to describe the building of the Smartlab PhD programme as building an arc it's a space as the last part of this presentation will show where it is safe to explore create, collaborate, take time off have a family, have children, be disabled work in teams, not work in teams get feedback from many different people and continue your studies whether one to many to many or one to one in whatever format works and where the team will help you to create the technology tools to enable you to do whatever you need to do so that programme has now been running our PhD programme for 15 years our first graduate was from the Open University linked to our BBC research there we've now graduated 30 successful PhDs all with a practical base to their work we'll just pause it for a second yeah, thanks and we've got another current cohort of 35 students and a constant queue of people wanting to join the programme and I think it's because of our method the way we work and what we're trying to do with that practice-based PhD programme so that's where I'm going with this talk and I hope that's relevant to you I thought it would be useful if I take you through the stages of what SmartLab is why we work in this mad way that's so hard to describe without the video and introduce you to some of the key players some of whom are across campus right now rehearsing as well so that's the plan I hope it makes sense and I will just shout over top of this video and I just need to know how to restart it again on this keyboard down here show me which keyboard you're using okay cool I'll shout over top and where's the volume in case I need to bring it down okay hopefully perfect thank you perfect, yay