Emergence and Innovation in Digital Learning

George Veletsianos

• Publisher: AU Press
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781771991513
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Educational systems worldwide are facing an enormous shift as a result of sociocultural, political, economic, and technological changes. The technologies and practices that have developed over the last decade have been heralded as opportunities to transform both online and traditional education systems. While proponents of these new ideas often postulate that they have the potential to address the educational problems facing both students and institutions and that they could provide an opportunity to rethink the ways that education is organized and enacted, there is little evidence of emerging technologies and practices in use in online education. Because researchers and practitioners interested in these possibilities often reside in various disciplines and academic departments the sharing and dissemination of their work across often rigid boundaries is a formidable task.

Contributors to Emergence and Innovation in Digital Learning include individuals who are shaping the future of online learning with their innovative applications and investigations on the impact of issues such as openness, analytics, MOOCs, and social media. Building on work first published in Emerging Technologies in Distance Education, the contributors to this collection harness the dispersed knowledge in online education to provide a one-stop locale for work on emergent approaches in the field. Their conclusions will influence the adoption and success of these approaches to education and will enable researchers and practitioners to conceptualize, critique, and enhance their understanding of the foundations and applications of new technologies.

With contributions by Terry Anderson, R. S. Baker, Angela D. Benson, Amy Collier, Alec Couros, Michael Dowdy, Margaret Edwards, B. J. Eib, Cassidy Hall, Katia Hildebrant, P. S. Inventado, Royce Kimmons, Trey Martindale, Rolin Moe, Beth Perry, Jen Ross, Elizabeth Wellburn, and Andrew Whitworth.

PART I

FOUNDATIONS

1 The Defining Characteristics of Emerging Technologies and Emerging Practices in Digital Education

George Veletsianos

The growing need for an educated workforce, changing student demographics, opportunities presented by new technologies, and increases in the cost of accessing higher education have led many educators, researchers, policymakers, and business people to engage with a variety of emerging approaches to education, including competency-based assessment, open educational resources, flipped classrooms, micro credentials, and private-public partnerships in degree offerings. Concomitantly, many scholars have been engaging in an ever-expanding array of emerging practices, including blogging, networking on social media, and sharing their scholarship in different forms (such as via videos and open courses).

Many of these approaches to education and scholarship can be categorized as either emerging technologies (such as automated grading applications within MOOCs) or emerging practices (such as sharing instructional materials online under licences that allow recipients to reuse them freely). The terms “emerging technologies” and “emerging practices,” however, are catch-all phrases that are often misused and haphazardly defined. As Siemens (2008, para.1) argues, “terms like ‘emergence,’ ‘adaptive systems,’ ‘self-organizing systems,’ and others are often tossed about with such casualness and authority as to suggest the speaker(s) fully understand what they mean.” A clearer and more uniform understanding of emergence and of the characteristics of emerging technologies and practices will enable researchers to examine these topics under a common framework and allow practitioners to better anticipate potential challenges and impacts that may arise from their integration into learning environments.

In Emerging Technologies in Distance Education, I described emerging technologies as “tools, concepts, innovations, and advancements,” intentionally defining “technologies” broadly to include not just tools and software but also concepts, such as pedagogies (Veletsianos, 2010). A number of researchers and students have found this definition helpful in framing the contested and complex nature of technologies and online learning environments. Returning to this work six years later, however, it is clear to me that the term “emerging technologies” does not fully capture what is emerging in digital education. At the time, I argued that contextual factors determine whether a technology is emerging or not; I now also believe that the notion of emerging phenomena in education can be better captured by differentiating between “emerging technologies” and “emerging practices.” This differentiation, I believe, will help practitioners and researchers make better sense of the innovations and advances currently occurring in educational technology worldwide. This change emphasizes the social, political, cultural, and economic contexts that surround emerging technologies and provides a timeliness that transcends particular advances and innovations.

Both in 2009 and 2015, my review of the literature did not provide adequate definitions or descriptions of what individuals mean when they refer to emerging technologies and emerging practices. The literature is littered with casual uses of the term and spans content areas and disciplines. The view espoused in this chapter and in this book is that the terms “emerging technologies” and “emerging practices” transcend academic disciplines. New technologies and practices have emerged in diverse disciplines, even if some technologies might be more appropriate for specific content areas (e.g., Geometer’s Sketchpad for mathematics-related disciplines), some practices may be more pronounced in some disciplines that others (e.g., open scholarship in the sciences), and some technological affordances may render some tools more appropriate for certain purposes than others (e.g., wikis and blogs for community-focused and writing-intensive approaches). An October 2014 search on the PsychInfo database, for example, revealed that emerging technologies were being examined in a number of disciplines across the social sciences, humanities, formal sciences, and professional fields. Within education, emerging technologies were being used in teacher training, instructional design, language learning, distance education, higher education, adult education, and medical education. The term “emerging practices” was used less often, but again in numerous disciplines. The lack of a clear framework with which to consider emerging technologies and emerging practices calls for an education-specific definition that can guide our thinking, research, and practice. Establishing a common understanding of these widely used terms will provide a significant step toward meaningful conversations and inquiry.

HOW HAVE EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES BEEN DEFINED IN THE PAST?

When composing the introduction to Emerging Technologies in Distance Education in 2010, I began with what seemed a logical starting point, attempting to define the term “emerging technologies.” To this end, I scanned my personal bibliography, typed the term in my favorite search engine, searched the academic literature, and to my amazement (and increasing angst), discovered that a definition for the omnipresent term was nowhere to be found. Searching magazines, periodicals, and industry reports, I discovered a few descriptions but no formal, commonly accepted definition.

Could it be that a definition existed and I had simply been unable to locate it? I emailed colleagues, posted requests on social media, and contacted all the authors whose papers were going to appear in the book, asking for possible definitions. The answers I received were informative and helped shape my thinking, but a clear definition was still elusive. It appeared that the term central to the book I was editing had never been defined, or, if it had been defined, neither my colleagues nor I had been able to locate that definition. This experience provided the impetus for converting what I had envisioned as a short introduction into a chapter.

In my searches, I was able to locate four significant publications that focused on the terms “emerging technology” and “emerging practice.” These are described and summarized below.

In a report for the Australian Capital Territory Department of Education and Training, Green and Putland (2005) stated that a technology is still emerging if it is not yet a “must-have.” Email, for instance, moved from what was once an optional communication technology to a must-have, must-use technology for most people in most organizations. This definition helped me understand that “new” may not be a necessary descriptor for emerging technologies and practices, and that all technologies not currently used in educational institutions can be considered emerging. Educators explore and adopt technologies even before they become “must-haves,” and some technologies that may become must-haves for other industries and venues will not necessarily become must-haves for educational providers.

The second publication is a series entitled The Horizon Reports, which the New Media Consortium (NMC) has released every year since 2004 to lay out adoption horizons for key technologies. The descriptions of emerging technologies given in these reports suggest that emerging technologies are those that (a) have not yet been widely adopted, and (b) are expected to influence a variety of educational organizations. The descriptions of emerging technologies in each report vary slightly, indicating that uncertainty exists with respect to the definition of the term “emerging technology” and the expected magnitude of its impact.

The third publication is a series of reports entitled Emerging Technologies for Learning, published by the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Bryant et al., 2007; Oblinger et al., 2008; Stead et al., 2006). As with the Horizon Reports, these emphasized the possibility of a near-future impact.

The fourth publication is Emerging Practice in a Digital Age, published by the Joint Information Systems Committee or JISC (Knight, 2011). In this report emerging practice was described as involving “experimentation and openness—the ability to respond to changing circumstances and to embrace unforeseen benefits” as institutions move “to changes of approach, and to more collaborative ways of working” (p. 5)

THE CHARACTERISTICS OF EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES AND EMERGING PRACTICES

As noted earlier, this chapter argues that what makes technologies and practices emerging are not specific technologies or practices, but the environments in which particular technologies or practices operate. This definition recognizes that learning, teaching, and scholarship are sociocultural phenomena situated in specific contexts and influenced by the cultures in which they take place (Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989; Vygotsky, 1978). This perspective is particularly appropriate for digital learning situated on the contemporary Web which has social and co-producing capabilities and practices. According to this view, technology is itself socially shaped. It embeds its developers’ worldviews, values, beliefs, and assumptions into its design and the activities it encourages (Oliver, 2013). Learners and instructors can accept or reject particular technologies or practices. They are also capable of finding alternative uses for them that will better meet their needs and values. Thus, sociocultural factors make technologies and practices emergent.

To provide an example of why it makes sense to consider technologies and practices as emerging, consider online journals and social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. These technologies have become an integral part of open scholarship, which is often seen as a major breakthrough in radically rethinking the ways in which knowledge is created and shared (Nielsen, 2012; Weller, 2011). Much of the existing literature argues that scholars can amplify and transform their scholarly endeavors by adopting open practices supported by technology, and a multitude of ways to do so have been developed (Veletsianos, 2013). For instance, a cultural anthropologist might share draft versions of her research on her blog, a geographer might post his syllabus on a document-sharing website, a World War II historian might enlist the help of online crowds to obtain digital copies of letters to examine personal communication during the era, and a political scientist might use social media data to investigate political campaigns during elections. These are examples of the emerging practice of Networked Participatory Scholarship (Veletsianos & Kimmons, 2012; Veletsianos, 2016), which refers to the use of participatory technologies, online social networks, and other emerging technologies to share, reflect upon, improve, validate, and further scholarship. Scholarly blogging, for instance, is an emerging practice within an increasingly digital scholarly life (Kirkup, 2010; Martindale & Wiley, 2005; Nardi, Schiano, & Gumbrecht, 2004; Walker, 2006).

Emerging technologies and emerging practices, therefore, may be adopted in a variety of educational settings to serve various purposes (such as instructional, social, and organizational goals). After an extensive examination of these emerging educational phenomena and the literature about them, all appear to share these four characteristics: not defined by newness; coming into being; not-yetness; and, unfulfilled but promising potential.

Emerging technologies and emerging practices are not defined by newness

Although the words emerging and new are often treated as being synonymous, emerging technologies and practices may or may not be new. Emerging technologies and practices may be recent developments (such as using 3D printers, publishing open data) or older ones (using open-source learning management systems). Even though it may be true that most emerging technologies are newer technologies, the mere fact that they are new does not necessarily categorize them as emerging. For example, synthetic (or virtual) worlds were described as an emerging technology in the mid-1990s (Dede, 1996), and research on Multi-User Dungeons dates back to the 1980s (Mazar & Nolan, 2008). Yet virtual worlds are still widely referred to as emerging technologies (Warburton, 2009; Dawley & Dede, 2014), particularly in some fields, such as healthcare (Boulos, Hetherington & Wheeler, 2009; Rogers, 2011) and hospitality (Huang, Backman, Chang, Backman, & McGuire, 2013), where their appropriateness shines. Newness by itself, then, is a problematic indicator of emergence.

Emerging technologies and emerging practices are evolving organisms that exist in a state of “coming into being”

The word “evolving” refers to a dynamic state of change in which technologies and practices are continuously refined and developed. To illustrate this, consider the chalkboard and dry-erase board, the use of which is generally established within the educational community and thus, while still in use, is no longer evolving. Contrast this to Twitter, the currently popular social networking and micro-blogging platform. Although various practices and activities on the Twitter platform can be said to be established (e.g., the ReTweet (RT) activity (boyd, Golder, & Lotan, 2010)), numerous aspects of the technology, as well as practices associated with it, are emerging as platform refinements change the way the technology is used and users engage in practices that may depart from those originally anticipated.

For example, Twitter’s early success and popularity caused frequent outages, which were most noticeable during popular technology events such as the 2008 MacWorld keynote address. Early attempts to satisfy sudden surges in demand included using more servers and on/off switches on various Twitter features, while later efforts included re-designing the application’s architecture and withdrawing services such as free SMS and instant-messaging support. Existing in an evolutionary state, Twitter is continuously being developed and refined. At the time of writing, for example, Twitter engineers are considering introducing filtering algorithms aimed at refining and curating user timelines. Twitter practices are also in a continuing state of evolution. For instance, it has been used for scholarly purposes (Veletsianos, 2012) and as a tool to engage learners (Dabbagh & Kitsantas, 2012; Junco, 2012), establish instructors’ social presence (So & Brush, 2008; Pollard, Minor, & Swanson, 2014), and conduct research (Chong, 2010; Darling, Shiffman, Côté, & Drew, 2013). Researchers have argued that tweeting has emerged as a new literacy practice, a practice that consists of both traditional and new literacies (Greenhow & Gleason, 2012).

As emerging technologies and practices evolve, some will be integrated into the day-to-day operations of educational organizations, while others will fade into the background. The context surrounding emerging technologies and practices also shifts and changes over time, creating a negotiated relationship between the maturation of a technology/practice and the environment that surrounds it.

Not-yetness: Emerging technologies and emerging practices are not yet fully understood or researched

One distinguishing characteristic of emerging technologies and practices is that we are not yet able to understand their implications for education, teaching, and learning or for learners, instructors, and institutions. We also lack an understanding of the contextual, negotiated, and symbiotic relationship between practices and technologies. For example, what effect might the opportunity to socialize with classmates via social networking sites have for online learners? How do automated grading practices reconfigure the role of instructors? Could social networking sites or MOOCs break down digital divides between haves and have-nots? Or are social networking sites simply another medium through which societal inequalities are perpetuated? What are the pedagogical affordances of social networking sites? How may learning analytics support online instructors? How may we design supportive and engaging self-paced learning enviro...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I FOUNDATIONS
• PART II APPLICATIONS
• Concluding Thoughts
• List of Contributors
• Index