Qualifications for the Future
SQA, 1 November 2007
Effects of technological change on
learning, qualifications and assessment
Ray Land, University of Strathclyde
ISL Dublin 3rd September
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print culture and the digital turn
shifts in the nature of knowledge
the challenge to academic authority
the academy and speed (Virilio)
temporalities – slow and fast time (Eriksen)
• the five-minute university (Novello)
• liminality (Meyer & Land)
• troublesome knowledge (Perkins)
• prometheus bound? possible
appropriation and repurposing of web 2.0
ISL Dublin 3rd September
• more than 70m blogs on the internet;
• 195,000 new blogs are created every day (two
every second).
• dominant languages are Chinese, Japanese
and English
• there are 1.8m blog posts a day.
• MySpace the busiest website in the world
(120m registered users)
• YouTube grows in value more than $100m a
month
•
Source: Technorati 2007
ISL Dublin 3rd September
• 62% of content created by users under age 21 is
generated by someone they know
• 57% of teenagers create content for the Internet
• 73% of students use the internet more than the library
• teenagers average four hours a day on television,
the web and SMS
ISL Dublin 3rd September
text
stability
individual
private
image
mutability
collective
public
web as application
architecture of participation
user-owned data
rich, interactive interfaces
no
walled
gardens
ISL Dublin
3 September
rd
[Taken from Dempsey, L.The (Digital) Library Environment: Ten Years After
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/dempsey/]
Speed and collective action
eg
 Katrinalist.net
 Wikipedia
The Great Northern War Wikipedia


Between 1560 and 1660, Sweden created a
Baltic empire centered on the Gulf of Finland
and comprising the provinces of Karelia,
Ingria, Estonia, and Livonia. During the
Thirty Years' War Sweden gained tracts in
Germany as well, including Western
Pomerania, Wismar, the Duchy of Bremen,
and Verden. At the same period Sweden
conquered Danish and some Norwegian
provinces north of the Sound (1645; 1660).
These victories may be ascribed to a good
training of the army, which was far more
professional than most continental armies,
and could maintain much higher rates of fire
due to constant training with their firearms.
However, Sweden was unable to support
and maintain her army when the war was
prolonged and the costs of warfare could not
be passed to occupied countries.
In 1617 Sweden's gains in the Treaty of
Stolbovo had deprived Russia of direct
access to the Baltic Sea, and internal strife
during much of the first half of the 1600s
meant that they were never in a position to
challenge Sweden for these gains. Russian
fortunes reversed during the later half of the
17th century, notably with the rise to power
of Peter the Great, who looked to address
the earlier losses and re-establish a Baltic
presence. In the late 1690s, the adventurer
Johann Patkul managed to ally Russia with
Denmark and Saxony and in 1700 the three
powers attacked.
ISL Dublin 3rd September
ISL Dublin 3rd September
Personal
 ‘me’ media
 Time Life magazine –’You’
 YouTube
 MySpace
 FaceBook
 Flickr
 ‘If you're not on MySpace, you don't exist’
 ‘the collectivity fad’
 Digital Maoism
(Lanier)
 ‘the hive mind’ (Kelly)
“These sections of the web break away
from the page metaphor. Rather than
following the notion of the web as book,
they are predicated on microcontent.
Blogs are about posts, not pages. Wikis
are streams of conversation, revision,
amendment, and truncation.”
Alexander, 2006
• open text – loss of closure and fixity of
printed page– a shift in epistemology
• shift in medium implies shift in reading
mode, from literacy to multiliteracy,
technoliteracy, visual sophistication,
multimodality (Kress)
the body of the book = the body of knowledge –
makes it stable and ‘graspable’
volatility and instability of digital text –
infinitely editable,
instantly distributable,
methods for imposing fixity and authorial control
(pdf, page scanning, restricted access) work against
rather than with the mode of digitality
Shifts in epistemology: how Web 2.0 is
transforming HE
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process over artefact
consensus & trust over authority
exploration over exposition
emergence & novelty over argument
open text / the rigour of no completion
convenience & speed overriding quality
knowledge network/ access over
possession
• public/private continuum
authority
gatekeeping – mark poster’s exploration
of how digitisation shifts history as a
discipline – breaking down boundaries – if
all historical resources are ‘googled’, if
all history work is instantly publishable,
how does that affect who counts as an
historian? or a journalist? what is the role
of the university, of the discipline?
institutional control
 textual instability as a reflection of
instability in the academy’s idea of itself
(Barnett 2005)
 media implicated in the academy’s
inability to claim universality in its
pursuit of Truth
supercomplexity
we now live in a world of radical
contestation and challengeability, a world
of uncertainty and unpredictability. In such
a world, all such notions—as truth,
fairness, accessibility and knowledge—
come in for scrutiny. In such a process of
continuing reflexivity, fundamental
concepts do not dissolve but, on the
contrary, become systematically
elaborated…
In this process of infinite elaboration,
concepts are broken open and subjected
to multiple interpretations; and these
interpretations may, and often do, conflict.
As a result, we no longer have stable ways
even of describing the world that we are
in; the world becomes multiple worlds.
(Barnett 2005 p.789)
The risks of Web 2.0:
The DEFRA wiki
Speed
(Virilio 1999)
The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage
Ezra Pound 1920
rise of digital information technologies
located firmly within the neo-liberal
ideology of globalisation, and seen as
caught inexorably within a logic of ‘fast
time’, increasing acceleration and
exponential growth of information.
the defining
characteristic of
early twentyfirst century
society, and an
increasing
source of its
hazards, is its
relentless
‘“Faster,
acceleration andsmaller,
–
compression of cheaper”
this NASA
slogan could
time.
shortly
become the
watchword
‘Our history is the
history of
acceleration’
Virilio, 2000:51
‘Speed is power
itself’
Virilio 1999:15
the ‘tyranny of the moment’ - effects
of speed
(Eriksen 2001)
 speed is an addictive drug
 speed leads to simplification
 speed creates assembly line (Taylorist)
effects
 speed leads to a loss of precision
 speed demands space (filling in all the
available gaps in the lives of others)
 speed is contagious – when experienced
in one domain the desire for speed
tends to spread to new domains.
 death of geography
 loss of political
space
 advent of universal
real time
 loss of slow time
 ‘presentified’ history
 single gaze of the
textualities and temporalities
fast and slow time (Eriksen)
Slow and fast
time (Eriksen 2001)
Web 2.0 practices seem
caught in an awkward
tension, if not
disjunction.
The pedagogical claims
made for them seem to be
located within, and to
require the integrative
and deliberative logic of,
what Eriksen characterises
as slow time.
Slow and fast
time (Eriksen)
As digital phenomena,
however, they increasingly
serve to constitute fast
time, can only accelerate
in their future modus
operandi, and reinforce
the dromocratic principle
that fast time drives out
and occupies the place of
slow time.
our experience of time in the media conditions
of the internet
(Lee & Liebenau 2000).
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Duration (shortening attention
spans)
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Temporal location (internet
always on)
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Sequence (loss of continuity)
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Deadlines (positioned differently
in a task, temporal shifts)
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Cycles (Constantly renegotiated,
simultaneuously operating)
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Rhythms (condensing and
dispersal of working effort; new
patterns of busy-ness)
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Presence / absence, co-presence
Distanciation (Giddens)
The structuring of time–space distanciation
relies on such social relations as
“presence-availability ”—the organization
of presence, absence proximity and
availability, and the degree of co-present
activities in relation to “tele-present”
activities.
Notion that students in the digital age are
‘never away’ but permanently networked
the five minute university
Fr. Guido Sarducci, rock critic, l’Osservatore Romano, Vatican.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO8x8eoU3L4
impact on academic estate
public/private continuum
 displacement of slow time to the
domestic sphere
 domestic privacy compromised by 24/7
digital
Liminality & troublesome
knowledge (Meyer and Land 2006)
liminality, the transformative
threshold space and process in
which (necessarily) troublesome
knowledge is negotiated and
conceptual difficulty
encountered and overcome
(Perkins 2006, Meyer and Land 2006)
seems truncated by fast time
and the linear, trouble-free
‘consumptive’ academy it ushers
in.
asking for trouble
The liminal state permits an integration
of new knowledge into a new way of
seeing, a re-conceptualisation. It is the
state of trouble, stuckness, letting go and
changed subjectivity, without which the
possibility of things being otherwise is
unlikely to come into view. It is the space
of meaning-making.
Troublesome
knowledge
• ritual knowledge
• inert knowledge
• conceptually difficult
knowledge
• the defended learner
• alien knowledge
• tacit knowledge
• troublesome language
EARLI 2007 Budapest August 31st
Liminality
• a transformative state that
engages existing certainties and
renders them problematic, and
fluid
• a suspended state in which
understanding can
approximate to a kind of
mimicry or lack of authenticity
• liminality as unsettling – sense of
loss
EARLI 2007 Budapest August 31st
looking for trouble
• Knowledge is troublesome for a variety of
reasons (Perkins 2006). It might be alien, inert,
tacit, conceptually difficult, counter-intuitive,
characterised by an inaccessible ‘underlying
game’, or characterised by supercomplexity.
• such troublesomeness and disquietude is
purposeful, as it is the provoker of change that
cannot be assimilated, and hence is the
instigator of new learning and new ontological
possibility.
EARLI 2007 Budapest August 31st
East of Eden
EARLI 2007 Budapest August 31st
through the threshold
Janus – divinity of the threshold
epistemological
EARLI 2007 Budapest August 31st
ontological
‘Strangeness’ as the new
universal
(Barnett 2005)
“The new universal is precisely the
capacity to cope, to prosper and to delight
in a world in which there are no
universals.”
Barnett, 2005
contestability and challengeability
radical uncertainty and unpredictability
teaching: from knowledge to being
prometheus bound?
Can the 21st academy appropriate and repurpose social technologies to discover new
contemplative, transformative and perhaps
creative liminal spaces?
Or are such notions a nostalgic residue of
print culture? Does digital culture usher in
(fast) new modes of thinking, creativity and
decision-making?
Digital gaming
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(James Paul Gee 2003)
Active, critical
Design
Semiotic domains
Meta-level thinking
Pycho-social moratorium
Commitment
Changed subjectivity
Self-knowledge
Amplification of input
Practice /time on task
Adaptation to changed
conditions
• Transfer of earlier learning
• Distributed meaning/
knowledge
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Regime of competence
Probing
Multiple routes
Situated meaning
Textuality /intertextuality
Multimodality
Material intelligence
Intuitive, tacit knowledge
On-demand, just-in-time
Experimentation, discovery
Exposure to new cultural models
Affinity groups
Decision making in complexity
Production
CybraryCity2
Second Life
Questions for learning
• How does the digital change the way academic
knowledge is produced and distributed?
• What forms of ‘technoliteracy’ and multimodality are
required to work in these spaces?
• How can assessment regimes and qualifications be recrafted for these volatile spaces?
• What digital pedagogies will work best in these
environments?
Step in evidence
cycle
Web service
Evidence
creation/discovery
Live search, Bloglines, Google
groups, Wikipedia, Answers.com
Google docs and spreadsheets
Evidence capture
Furl, del.icio.us, Clipmarks,
Googleorganisation
mail, Flickr
Evidence
Evidence
organisation
Box.net, Netvibes, Flickr, Blogger
Evidence sharing
Furl, Clipmarks, Box.net
B. Elliott, SQA, Sept 2007
a student could use Live Search to search the world wide web
for relevant information, subscribe to a number of RSS feeds
using Bloglines to monitor appropriate websites, and check
Wikipedia for appropriate articles. Relevant web pages could
be saved using Furl or parts of web pages could be grabbed
using Clipmarks. Google docs and spreadsheets could be
used to pull together this information into an initial report,
which can be stored online using Box.net. The whole project
can be coordinated using a dedicated home page created
using Netvibes, which would include RSS feeds, calendars,
instant messaging, e-mail and a range of additional ‘gadgets’
relevant to the assessment task. Throughout this process,
students can learn from one another by sharing their
discoveries through such services as Furl and Clipmarks,
which permit students to subscribe to one another’s archives..
B. Elliott, SQA, Sept 2007
ray.land@strath.ac.uk