This involves: updating the Handbook for this instance of the course for the last time. We will be revalidating a new PCTHE for 2011-12; updating the VLE (Brookes Virtual/Blackboard) and Wiki (Confluence).

There are a lot of new features on the VLE, particularly Voice Tools and related Wimba applications. I hope to start using these “for real” this year.

I am also resolving to keep a Course Leader’s blog here in my BrookesBlog site. A. J. Cann at University of Leicester has written a piece on “Why blog”  http://www.microbiologybytes.com/AJC/why…) on his excellent (for biologists) Microbiologybytes site. What he said …

I have to confess that I have become something of an on-line learning luddite. Fifteen years ago I was something of an Internet pioneer, developing Web-based support sites for professional development modules as part of a postgraduate certificate in in the management of the international energy industry. I did my MA in education by distance learning and wrote my PhD on community information technology centres. I am active in the social networking world (my Google Profile is here: http://www.google.com/profiles/georgebro…).

So, what gives? I feel an almost visceral antipathy to virtual learning environments (VLEs). OK, I know they are only sets of tools. James Clay keeps a wonderful blog on the virtues of using VLEs  http://elearningstuff.wordpress.com/cate…). When Blackboard bought WebCT, the predecessor to the current BrookesVirtual, I wrote a few pieces on the political-economic implications as I saw them at the time (e.g. here: http://my-world.typepad.com/rworld/2006/…). But, I don’t just feel an antipathy only to Blackboard. Moodle for all its open-source loveliness doesn’t do it for me any more, either.

I used to love VLEs. But as we all know, when you fall out of love it is really hard to re-ignite the flame. So, maybe me and the VLE need a little relationship counselling. I promise to listen more and sulk less, focus on the strengths and “accentuate the positive”. Maybe that is a lesson for my life in general!

Engage!

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Professor David Stephenson opens the conference by asserting the entrepreneurial culture of the university. Cranfield is interesting to me for several reasons. Few universities (or Business Schools) have quite such close contacts with large, high technology manufacturing companies. Prof. Stephenson emphasises the high capabilities of the Cranfield academic community.

Dr David Walker from Dundee University is the keynote. He will be speaking about "Realising the promise of e-assessment". Which is interesting because despite their allegiance to technology in general, Cranfield is pedagogically conservative when it comes to learning technologies, preserving a techno-deterministic, content-centred view of e-learning, and an antipathy to adopting LT: just like everywhere, really. 

Walker asks a good question: where does assessment start? He will be putting forward a model of mature institutional approach to e-assessment based on the University of Dundee's experience, where Walker heads the e-assessment team, based in the Learning Resources department. E-assessment has been on the brink of transforming education for 30 years: "end-to-end electronic assessment processes where ICT is used for the presentation of assessment and the recording of responses" (JISC). Definition has broadened from MCQ. Walker emphasises the importance of curricular alignment in e-assessment. Quotes Ray Land. Walker takes a strong social constructive perspective: "Academics do not create learning, learners do."

Walker asserts that e-assessment is likely to start with summative assessment of learning, driven by efficiency needs. But, he warns, if we start here and there is no preceding formative e-assessment or e-learning activities in the curriculum there is lack of alignment. He gives the example of students typing all their essays and then having to hand-write exams. Summative assessment is high stakes activity requiring validity, reliability, credibility, fidelity, fairness and transparency. E-assessment can help in all these areas. But, high salience for the assessed and the assessors leads to high anxiety. Therefore U of Dundee encourages a lot of formative e-assessment including, reflective journals and scientific logs as well as "traditional" MCQs. He suggests a wide conceptualisation of e-assessment including the use of simple appropriate technology (VLE, Dropbox) to administer submission and MS Word insert comment to annotate scripts. If e-assessment is only thought of as MCQs, it is seen as both difficult and empoverishing.

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Federated walled gardens – community gardens (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2009/10/goodman) is an interesting model. The UK access federation (http://www.ukfederation.org.uk/) – were it not aimed to protect publishers' and universities' privileged access to markets – provides one example. Some people defend VLEs because they provide such "safe spaces" (e.g. Michael Seery http://michaelseery.com/home/index.php/2010/04/vles-are-they-dead-or-not/ James Clay http://elearningstuff.wordpress.com/category/100-ways/). The problem with such federations is that they, as yet, have insufficiently porous boundaries. You are in or you are out. There needs to be a means for members of any federation to let others from other federations to connect to them without that thereby giving access to all the other members of the federation. Would there still need to be a few "Pirate Bays" (http://thepiratebay.org/) to act as hubs? Profile directories? How would widely distributed databases of private information work in such a scenario? Facebook works well as a hub because "everyone" is there. One of the things that I liked about Diaspora (http://www.joindiaspora.com/) – still under the radar of its hype – is that they do not reject Facebook, but see it as simply a node, a federation, in a wider vision of federated social networking. A problem with the "old" Internet was that, despite the egalitarian ideology of the pioneers, it was an elite network. But, like TV in the '50s, when comm tech goes massive, the common mass (i.e. all of us) get exploited by new elites without an egalitarian ideology. This is the real dilemma of the commons, or as Žižek would have it, the communist hypothesis.

Ultimately @downes is right: critical literacy is the only "answer" (Facebook and, sadly, 4chan http://www.4chan.org/ are still posing the questions from two different perspectives). But, having worked in and around community development education for 25 years, the resilience and creativity of the powerful is awesome (and I do not use that word with sophomoric casuallness, viz Facebook), and the subjugation of the excluded would-be consumer so effectively accomplished, that at times I feel like retreating to some monastary (another walled garden) to stare at my navel and weep. Time to take a deep breath and plunge back into the estates on the margins. Because, while I might prefer to live in a communist utopia, I do not want to withdraw from the world to do so. I want to retain doubt and scepticism of even my own position. I want to hang out with my friends arguing many points, wherever they may choose to federate, and I want to be able to invite them back to mine. I want public spaces, private spaces (both commercial and personal) and all the spaces in between.

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Taken individually these projects have all achieved great things at the practitioner and institutional level. Taken collectively, the outcomes of the programme are going towards helping to define what we can imagine as the future higher education space. This is a space where we might see institutions be (virtually) disaggregated and recombined at various levels into novel partnerships and associations with other institutions, enterprises, firms and civil society bodies at the regional, national and even global levels. Alongside this reshaping of the institutional space we will see novel frameworks for accreditation supporting more and increasingly flexible pathways for progression, personal and professional development and lifelong learning. New literacies and practices for the digital era are being developed by teachers and learners (are we not all in our ways researchers, mentors and designers of learning?) and these will be set against new knowledge frameworks for validating academic knowledge and assessing and recognising achievement: while still early days, for example, there is an assault on the hegemony of print as the medium for storing valorised propositional knowledge; how do you cite and annotate a podcast; what are the real challenges for providing audio and video feedback? We are already seeing the physical and digital worlds becoming more and more mutually interpenetrating as reconfigurable learning spaces are built and connectivity and connected devices become ubiquitous. All this, of course, means that there is a lot of work still to be done on the semantics of access and discovery; it is not just identity management, but a new web of people and things articulated through new standards and practices: what Tim O’Reilly recently called the operating system of the Internet. And, of course, all this means that the notions of “traditional” and “non-traditional” learners and learning breaks down. Will the new higher education space be one where participation in learning is accessible to all who need and want it? I would hope so, but we need to recognise that the space is still contested (and costly) and that there are many drivers for change: political, economic, pragmatic and – mediating between these – JISC programmes. In the months to come I will producing a number of reports and briefings for senior managers, higher education leaders, and the JISC. I look forward to reflecting on the meanings of these achievements.

We observed that the motivations behind this initiative appear disconcertingly similar to those that drove the UK eUniversity. There is an assumption that online learning is (or opens up) a terra nullius: a space awaiting colonisation or exploitation, within which there will be competition for domination, and that the “brand values” of UK HE are somehow an enabler of this colonisation: a USP. Definitions of online learning are still used quite fluidly and there is an implicit underlying transmission/consumption model of learning.

Each dining table was provided with a conversation menu to accompany the excellent dinner. Our table was asked to consider what changes were needed to ensure students were able to benefit from online learning. We were a fairly sceptical lot. We questioned why there was an assumption that students were NOT already benefiting. Indeed each diner was able to offer examples of positive benefits of online learning already being used at their institution. We spent some time considering the brand values of UK HE (scepticism, empiricism, willingness to challenge received wisdoms, low power-distance within the academy, respect for tradition, pastoral concern for learners) and questioned whether these very brand values did not militate against a transmission model of education, regardless of the mode of engagement. We were not Luddites; all the people at our table could be classified as e-enthusiasts, but we valued human-human contact and collaboration through multiple channels. We explored the assertion that education was about relationships and that learning was a factor of identity and community. We were uncertain how many meaningful learning relationships could be sustained but felt that, again, regardless of the mode of engagement (online, offline, distance or face-to-face) there might be some sustainable ratio of students to teachers and that to think this could be changed by deploying various technologies was at least open to challenge.