Activity 4.1 - Innovation and Politics

Here begins a series of four blog entries based on the PEST framework (no, I'd never heard of that before either). PEST stands for: Political, Economic, Social, Technical. It's a way of looking at the bigger picture.

 The theme I have chosen for my H818 project, is innovation. Google defines innovation as: "The act of making changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas or products." I think of everything in educational terms, so I think about innovations in the field of education - interactive whiteboards, voting systems, virtual learning environments, etc. Today though, I'm going to attempt to think politics.

I didn't know where to start but Google is always there to help. I learned a lot, though as always, it was difficult to work out what the most relevant search results are. Here are my top three:

1. Innovate UK - the UK's innovation agency; an executive non-departmental public body. From their site, I was able to search policy documents on a whole range of industries (including education) and find links to other organisations that might be relevant.

2. British Innovation is Not Dead - a Guardian article from 2012. I liked one particular part of this, which probably will be raised when I look at social factors.

What I liked about this quote is not that one innovative idea is necessarily better than another, but that innovation is not new. I think we can be sucked into thinking that innovation is all about technology but that's only this generation. Most of the things we take for granted were once innovative inventions.

3. Nesta - "an innovation charity with a mission to help people and organisations bring great ideas to life" (Nesta website). I can already hear you asking how that fits with politics but it was a fun quiz they offer about innovation policy. I love online quizzes so I gave it a go. I didn't expect to do very well but the last hour or so of research helped me immensely. Give it a go. Here's my result:

Activity 3.2

Section 3.2 of the module materials have been about exploring the different formats for the conference presentation in February. There are three options:

• written paper/case study
• presentation/demonstration
• activity/workshop

In this activity, we were asked to find examples of each and comment on why we found them interesting. The problem is, I find lots of things interesting and some of those things bear little/no relevance to the course. Narrowing it down to find something that is relevant to my project plan, yielded few results. It's as though no-one else has ever looked at electronic ILPs (individual learning plans) before, which I'm sure is not true.

In terms of deciding on a format for my project, I'm currently torn between a presentation/demonstration and a workshop but I'm leaning more towards the former. In fact, before learners even embark on their eILP, something we need to address is explaining the relevance of an ILP to their learning. Talking to learners, they often see it as an unnecessary and burdensome piece of paperwork. So maybe a video to explain the value of it would be good. This could then be embedded in the final online area.

Yes, writing this is swaying me even more to a multimedia presentation to demonstrate my ideas.

Initial Project Plans

This week has felt a little chaotic! I've had a very busy week at work and not much time to engage with my studies. The tutor group forum is really active, which is good but if you don't look at it every day, it's easy for new posts to mount up and then it becomes a major catch-up exercise. Anyway, I've now got a day's leave and before I head off to see my youngest son (newly at uni) I'm catching up with my studies.

Several of my colleagues have started posting initial plans for their projects. It's been fascinating to read their various plans and ideas and think about how it all links to the final conference in February. It's also been interesting to see what online tools and networking sites the others use. I've been introduced to Diigo and set up an account there. I already had a SlideShare account but I've never used it. So this morning, I've created a presentation of my initial plans, uploaded it to SlideShare and here it is.

Project plan from Nicki Berry

What I would really like, is some feedback about how widely used RARPA is. It was new to me when I started working in Further Education last December and I'm interested to know which sectors use it. I would also like to know how understandable my plans are to non-specialists. Please leave comments (they'll be moderated to filter out any spam so they may not appear instantly).

Activity 3.1 - Selecting a topic and title

1. Read the Initial conference call  for the H818 conference.
2. Decide on a topic that will form the focus for your H818 activity.
   Remember that this should be a topic which is of interest to an audience at the conference and relates to one of the three themes. It should also hold your interest across several weeks of activity.
   Your selection could be informed by your current work or research interests, or it could be something that you have previously worked on, e.g. as a past assignment which you now wish to spend time developing further or updating.
3. Choose a provisional title that makes clear what the topic and the theme are. This will help you to direct your search and craft the title of your final presentation.
4. Spend up to four hours conducting an online literature search. Include the OU Library and the Ready to Research websites mentioned above.
   Note the sources of information that you can draw on for your topic and recent relevant work that you need to read. You could use the Library Information Literacy (LIL) site which supports learning about activities such as using an Open Access Repository, or finding information on the ‘invisible’ or ‘deep’ web.
   You may find it useful to set up a systematic way of doing this, e.g. using a bibliographic management system.
5. Use your tutor forum, or any other professional networks, to help identify what information people may already know, or assume, about your topic. What might they expect from a presentation with your chosen title?

2. Topic Idea

After some discussion in the tutor group forum, where we discussed the extent to which the project has to be truly 'open', I think I'm going to go with the development of an eILP (electronic Individual Learning Plan) on our Virtual Learning Environment. This is something that I will be doing at work anyway, and it should fit the time frame of H818 quite nicely. We already use ILPs but they are currently paper-based. What I want is something interactive, that links targets to the calendar and where evidence of progress can be uploaded.

3. Provisional Title

Recognising And Recording Progress and Achievement: the development of an electronic Interactive Learning Plan (eILP).

4. Literature Search

I haven't finished this yet but I have made a start. The only problem is, I have given some of them author file names and others title file names. I definitely need to organise them better.

Activity 2.5 - Visualisation

The task gave us a choice of visualisation tools to try out. The aim was to produce visuals of our Twitter (or other online) activity and then ask the following questions:

• Did the visualisation reveal anything surprising?
• Could you think of ways you might use a visualisation like this in your presentation?
• What else would it need to do to add benefit?
• Did you have any concerns about what could be found about the networks of others using these tools?

The tool I chose is called Twitonomy. Go on, try it out - it's really quite interesting!

Here are a few of the visuals I produced, with my thoughts on them.

Interesting User Information

This is the one I found most interesting because it shows who I've engaged with the most. Thankfully, DatBrit7 is one of my sons and he comes out as my top priority. My other son isn't as active on Twitter. Then there's a whole bunch of professional contacts, some of whom go back quite a long way. There's Dughall, who I worked with many years ago when VLEs first came out and we were trying to get one embedded across all the primary schools in the local authority. Then there are the MinecraftEdu people and educators who are connected with that. Some of the people in the list, I've never really met but they are contacts from the BETT show. It will be interesting to see how these change over the next 6 months as I focus more on professional networks.

Slightly Embarrassing Hashtags Information

Okay, I admit it - having Eurovision as my top hashtag is just embarrassing. I can't help it and there's no excuse. It's a family tradition and we thought it would fade out when Terry Wogan retired but Graham Norton is just as sarcastic and we're addicted. I'm over the moon though, that MinecraftEdu is a close second!

Pretty graphs showing when I'm on Twitter

I can't see any earthly use for this but it is still kind of interesting. I have no recollection of ever being up at 4am, so I can only assume it doesn't self-adjust for different time zones. Clearly Saturday evenings got a boost because of Eurovision, which leads me to my overall conclusion. For small-scale users, statistics like these can easily be skewed by a one-off event that attracts a high number of tweets, especially if they are hashtagged.

Activity 2.4 - Privacy Invasion

Think of two or three scenarios that you would consider acts of privacy invasion or risks of this occurring (focus on personal information). These may be examples from personal experience, friends or ones which you have heard about in the news. Choose one of these to develop through discussion with others in H818.

We're going to be discussing this in our tutor group forum but if any of my Facebook friends or Twitter followers feels like commenting, I'd be grateful for the opportunity to discuss, reflect and generally chew over some of these issues.

My biggest concern over online privacy actually starts with situations that aren't a problem. I'll throw out a couple of examples in a minute. The problem is that there are so many fears - real and imaginary - about privacy invasion that it becomes difficult to know what to take seriously and what to ignore. Lack of accurate information is, in my opinion, a big threat.

1. Facebook are going to steal all the rights to my photos!

I have to admit that when these messages first started, I got sucked right in but very quickly, it was flagged up that they are a series of hoax messages. There are two problems here. Firstly, some people quickly forget that it is probably a hoax and so they continue to copy/paste, spreading fear that Facebook might be interested in selling that picture of your roast dinner or video clip of your child giggling for the first time. Secondly, there is the risk that when a real issue arises, we'll all just assume it's another hoax and totally ignore it. Maybe that is the aim of all the hoaxes... or am I now being paranoid?

It's not an ideal solution but now, when I see these, I tend to copy/paste the first sentence into a search engine and it generally brings up a series of hoax alerts.

2. There are aliens in cyberspace and they're watching me!

Okay, this isn't what was really said but it was along those lines. My son and I were asked to help a friend (a generation ahead of me) with her iPad. Now neither of us are Apple experts so we asked what the problem was before deciding whether to go and help. It went roughly like this...

Friend: My iPad has been hacked.
Me: How do you know? What has happened?
F: I can't get into my emails. The password has been changed.
Me: Have you tried requesting a reset?
F: Yes but whoever it is changes it straight back again.
Me: So it's your email account that you think has been hacked, not the whole iPad?
F: No, it's everything. I think they got in through the webcam. They've done something to our phone line too... and maybe the fridge.
Me: You've got an Apple fridge?
F: No, just a normal one but it's not working properly.
Me: And who do you think has broken your fridge through your webcam?
F: (Near tears) I don't know but they could be watching us all the time. It's causing us both so much stress.

Etc...etc...etc...

I had two immediate concerns. If she genuinely believed that someone was watching them and damaging their white goods through her iPad, why didn't she turn it off?!?! Also, and this goes back to my previous example, how vulnerable will she be if she does get an account hacked? The total lack of understanding about this, is likely to mean that she'll have burnt out all her 'this looks dodgy' receptors and she'll be open to anything.

Does anyone have any thoughts to share on this theme or any similar examples to share?