Dai Griffiths's position paper
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Hey Dude - Where's my Data
Position Paper
Dai Griffiths, Reader in eLearning, CETIS, The University of Bolton
The current situation
The future consequences of the Internet and the web have been consistently hard to predict since they first appeared, and there is no reason to suppose that this new phase of development, often described as Web 2.0, will prove any different. Web 2.0 technologies have shown themselves to be powerful and a motor for change, and adoption of this mixed bag of technology (some of which has been around for some time) now seems to be reaching critical mass. In particular the recent dramatic increase in the importance of user generated content seems to be a tipping point in the development of online activity. At this stage, however, I feel that the implications of this process for society in general and education in particular are not clear, and one of our tasks in this seminar is to try to reach a better understanding of where these trends might lead.
It is perhaps not surprising that I do not have a clear picture of where Web 2.0 is going, because like many others I have a range of contradictory attitudes to the technologies themselves. On the one hand Web 2.0 technologies place more power in my hands. They enable me to make use of a wide range of cross platform services, which are independent of the applications which are used to access them. This constitutes a threat the dominance of large expensive desktop applications, which I welcome, and promotes practical interoperability of data. It also puts a lot of power into the hands of application developers (both professional and hobbyists) who can put together powerful systems relatively easily by stitching together a set of services into an interface. On the other hand the number of services being used on a large scale is rather small. There tends to be small number of services for each application area. So in there is a tendency to repeat the dominance of Google in searching by associating photos with Flickr, link collections with del.icio.us, online text editors with Writely, and so on. This may mean that the variety of underlying processing on offer in Web 2.0 will decrease in comparison with desktop systems, even though the interfaces through which they are presented increases.
A second concern is that these services will gather enormous quantities of information about their users. In using services we are often volunteering information which we spend time trying to protect from spyware. Can we trust large capitalist organisations with this data? Even those organisations which we trust can be taken over at any point. Can we trust the government with this data (as they will surely access it). Perhaps in the future we will look back in longing at the days when our data was safely locked up on CDs and floppy disks!
As far as education is concerned, there are three specific issues which deserve particular attention.
- The implications for the institution. It has always been traditional for Universities to provide the basic IT infrastructure for their students. They get an email address, some disk space, and if they are lucky some publishing space on a web server and access to applications. Increasingly institutions are finding that their students are using Gmail, publishing on Bebo, and so forth, leaving the institutional offering looking rather poor in comparison. So it will be necessary for a institutions to have a radical reconsideration of their role as technology providers, and to refocus on providing services which are not available elsewhere. This will not be an easy change for institutional IT departments.
- The implications for VLEs. The Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) performed a useful function when it first appeared. At that time it was hard to build a system which combined easy web page publication, email, chat, forums. The VLE aggregated all this functionality in an integrated system which was (relatively) easy to set up. Web 2.0 has changed this situation radically. It is now increasingly easy to “roll your own” VLE because the functionality required is available as services. It seems attractive now to disaggregate the VLE, and this is a particularly attractive option given the near monopoly enjoyed by Blackboard/WebCT. Moreover, the VLE is an institution oriented technology, designed to support individual institutions in delivering courses to discrete student groups. Web 2.0 technologies encourage us to think more in terms of the individual at the centre, who gathers together streams from the various services and institutions which support her social life and learning, and contributes and manages them using a Personal Learning Environment (PLE) and/or social software. [[1]].
- The implications for funding bodies. Funding bodies will have to start considering if the fund the development and/or maintenance of online services for education. This would not be just the provision of repositories of learning resources, but rather services which provide a particular piece of processing which can be used by educational applications. In this respect the work being carried out by JISC is of great importance, where the eFramework sets out to model the whole of higher education as a set of services http://www.e-framework.org/. This hugely ambitious programme is significant whether or not it achieves its final goals, simply because it is the first attempt to build an open, service based educational infrastructure, and will have an essential pathfinding role.
We should ask ourselves, however, what might be the results if use of the eFramework and the more general Web 2.0 technologies became widespread in the education system. Would there be any reason for all institutions to provide the whole range of services? Would we find ourselves moving towards the hollowed out University, with all the key services farmed out to external suppliers?
What needs to be done? Firstly the problem of entrusting data to corporations seems to me to be intractable. In addition to stringent data protection laws, we also need to develop cooperative Web2.0 service providers which are organised in a way which is parallel to Open Source foundations. The data provided by users, and the mission and functionality of the service should be protected by the regulations of the foundation itself.
Secondly, a related point is that it is essential that the data formats and APIs which are used in the services are not controlled by private corporations, who will inevitably use this power to their own advantage. It is therefore essential to have wide participation in the development of open specifications
Thirdly, the nature and use of PLEs needs to be explored in funded programmes. This development enables providers to support the learner in their proper position at the centre of learning, which should improve the quality of the education provided. More than this, however, the PLE and related approaches offer a way in which Life Long Learning can be managed and structured by the individual, rather than by a set of competing institutions, and this is the intention of the TENCompetence project. Similarly, the way in which the explosive trends in user generated content can be used in education needs to be explored. These developments have the potential to be threatening to institutions to the same degree that they are empowering for learners, and pressure will need to be maintained in order to ensure that the benefits to the learner lead policy formation, rather than the desire to maintain the current structure of the education system.
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