- Email: [email protected]
The Virtual University: The Internet and Resource-based Learning
Computers & Education 37 (2001) 179–194 www.elsevier.com/locate/compedu
Book reviews
The Virtual University: The Internet and Resource-based Learning Steve Ryan, Bernard Scott, Howard Freeman and Daxa Patel. Kogan Page, London, 2000. 204 pp, ISBN 0 7494 2508 3, £19.99, paperback. The Changing Face of Learning Technology Edited by David Squires, Gra´inne Conole and Gabriel Jacobs, University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 182 pp, ISBN 0 7083 1681 6, £7.99, paperback. Integrating Technology in Learning and Teaching Pat Maier and Adam Warren. Kogan Page, London, 2000, 162 pp, ISBN 0 7494 31806, £19.99, paperback. Allow me to issue a warning (one most of you probably don’t need): if you decide to spend a few pleasant minutes at the end of your day perusing the educational technology titles at amazon.com to see what’s new — well, it’ll take you right through next week. Given the flood of new books available in the field (1094 on my latest search) it’s difficult to decide which will be worth our time, and which will simply drop us several hours further behind developments in the field. I’ll try to help you out just a bit by considering three recent installments in this tyranny of choices. The Changing Face of Learning Technology is an edited volume of articles chosen from the past several years’ issues of the journal ALT-J, and arranged into four thematic sections. Although the overall quality of the articles is uneven, with a number that are very profitably skipped, each section features at least one offering worth consideration. In the first section, which covers the design and evaluation of learning technologies, a bracing wake-up call from David Mitchell challenges education researchers’ ‘pseudo-scientific’ reliance on quantitative measurements to evaluate the effects of using new technologies in education. The second section, devoted to institutional issues related to the implementation of educational technologies, is perhaps the book’s strongest, highlighted by two articles from Australian academics who discuss their institutions’ trials and triumphs in trying to establish dual-mode systems that integrate face-to-face and technologically-mediated courses. The third section focuses on specifically networked technologies, and has little of startling interest to offer save for Chris Jones’s ‘From Sage on the Stage to What Exactly?’, which lives up to its evocative — and educationally countercultural — title. The final section, ‘The Future’, features only one genuine look into the perhaps-yet-to-come, David Squires’s intentionally provocative and entertaining depiction of the PETs — ‘Peripatetic Electronic Teachers’ — who may someday roam educational cyberspace. The twist The Changing Face of Learning’s editors offer is that most of the older articles, i.e. those that date back a couple of years or more, are followed up by more current comments from
180
Book reviews / Computers & Education 37 (2001) 179–194
their authors. This sounds good in theory, but in practice there’s little new actually added. There’s also no attempt made to develop a coherent picture of current educational technology issues; this collection’s highly focused articles from a wide range of institutional settings mean The Changing Face of Learning Technology is for the specialist practitioner only. The authors of the two other books I’ll consider here have broader aims: both try to develop overarching frameworks for the use of technologies to mediate education. Given their similar goals and coverage, it’s useful to compare them directly. Pat Maier and Adam Warren, authors of Integrating Technology in Learning and Teaching, are ambitious yet restrained. They recognize that any introduction to such a broad subject is destined to leave many questions unanswered, and have therefore designed their book to serve as a jumping-off point or gateway to a huge range of online resources (both on the purpose-built website that accompanies this book, and on many, many others). Annotated weblinks appear after most topics, inviting the reader to dig deeper as time and interests dictate. This approach is to be complimented: rather than assuming they can provide all the reader needs to know, the authors truly serve as facilitators. This is not to say that their overview-style coverage of the book’s topics are inadequate: conversely, the heart of the book — i.e. chapters reviewing educational technologies and designing learning environments that use those technologies to deliver content and facilitate communications — are admirable introductions to a variety of techniques and possibilities. Maier and Warren manage to cover salient generic issues while remaining crisp and concise. Particularly praiseworthy is the chapter on using online communications technologies. The authors clearly draw from a deep well of hands-on experience. Far from being mindless cheerleaders, however, they warn the potential technology adopter of numerous pitfalls as well as strengths of all of the commonly-used online communications technologies, and judiciously employ diagrams and tables for easy reference and comparison. The only substantive criticism I would level against this book is that its introductory chapter, which attempts to situate the use of educational technologies in broad pedagogical, technological and political contexts, over-reaches and indeed comes off a bit frantic. It’s as if the authors, having decided such an introduction was obligatory, tried to address the entire range of complex forces driving the changes in contemporary education. Their de facto position seems simply to be that the changes are happening, there’s not much any of us can do to stop them or hold them back — even assuming we wanted to — so let’s build some solid surfboards and catch that wave. Seekers of practical foundations for designing online teaching and learning should not, however, be put off by this rather weak introduction, as they will be well served by the rest of Integrating Technology in Learning and Teaching. It can be recommended to beginners, for whom the text of the book itself will likely provide more than enough ideas for getting started, and to those with more experience, who will find its ‘gateway’ function to a well-selected and annotated range of online resources equally valuable. The Virtual University, on the other hand, is incongruously titled. This book, from four faculty members at DeMontfort University, sets off with an admirably clear introduction delineating the authors’ purposes and intended audience, and the book’s structure. The first several chapters covering general approaches to distance and online education are also helpful. ‘Resource-based learning’ is clearly explained and serves as a flexible and useful rubric for considering the ways in which courses can be presented in online environments.
Book reviews / Computers & Education 37 (2001) 179–194
181
When the authors turn to practical methods and techniques for teaching and learning on the Internet, however, they stumble. The book’s ambitious scope makes it difficult to satisfy both novices and ‘old hands’: the authors jump from the very basic — e.g. ‘these are frames’ — to discussions of quite advanced programming languages that are unlikely to be used by many members of their target audience in any but the most unusual circumstances. Chapters on webbased resources, computer mediated communication and online assessment also struggle to strike a balance between trying to establish generic principles and techniques for making online learning effective, and illustrating these principles with frequently extraneous technical detail. In particular, a surfeit of less-than-illuminating examples of online practice presented as screendumps clog the book’s flow. Is there any need to show four screens from a single website depicting fruit fly body parts, for example? This quick retreat to the uncontroversial realm of technical detail is symptomatic, I think, of the authors’ tendency to envisage technical solutions for most teaching and learning problems. In a telling example, they discuss an initiative at their university in which some of the psychology students who had taken a resource-based course — mostly more mature students, we are told — said they ‘had the impression they were using computers for the sake of it and not as a tool to aid learning of academic subjects’ (p. 167). The university project leaders’ response (also on p. 167): As a result, initial induction and training in the use of IT and computer-based RBL has been intensified to ensure that this group of students are more positively motivated. If they don’t like to use the technology, we’ll teach them to like it? The Virtual University concludes with a speculative look into the mid- to long-term future. This is entertaining, but the authors dodge the most profound questions raised by the title they’ve chosen: Just what is ‘the virtual university’, in a philosophical rather than purely operational sense? What effects do its ‘virtuality’ have on the university’s traditional functions, especially as bearer and ‘home’ for a scholarly tradition? These are questions one could ask of all three of these books’ authorial/editorial teams. Such concerns are alluded to — unfortunately, almost always in passing — in nearly every book on online education I’ve read. Yet in most cases the ‘drivers’ or societal forces propelling the sweeping changes in which many universities are engaged are accepted as impassively as a mariner contemplating the tides; i.e. that universities must transform themselves to accommodate new computing and networking technologies and related methods is a fait accompli. Perhaps it is expecting too much from Integrating Technology in Learning and Teaching, with its explicitly practical title and aims, to ask that its discussion of methods and techniques for making online learning effective be grounded in a thoughtful consideration of the effects these developments have on real teachers and learners. A treatment of the subject titled The Virtual University, however, calls for a more critical consideration of the ‘university’ as well as the ‘virtual’. Omitting any such broader perspective from the articles chosen for The Changing Face of Learning Technology seems to me a similar failure. In all three cases, then, these books are more or less about the means rather than the ends of teaching and learning through technologies. Such books abound, and many, including at least two of these three, are useful. It would nevertheless be gratifying, and perhaps even more
182
Book reviews / Computers & Education 37 (2001) 179–194
instructive, to see a fraction of the time spent on methods devoted instead to reflection on the ends of the university in this increasingly technology-dominated age. Ross Vermeer Educational Technology and Publishing Unit Open University of Hong Kong 30 Good Shepherd Street Homantin, Kowloon Hong Kong E-mail address: [email protected] PII: S0360-1315(01)00040-9
English in the digital age: information and communications technology and the teaching of English A. Goodwyn (Ed.), Cassell, London, 1999, 176 pp, ISBN 0 304 70623 X, (paperback) £15.99.
Andrew Goodwyn, in the introduction to this useful volume, declares ‘This is a difficult time for all teachers, and for English teachers in particular’, and he poses the question which forms the central tenet of this book: ‘Does the machine serve us or do we now serve the machine?’ English in the Digital Age ‘celebrates the potential of technology to transform reading, writing, speaking and listening’ while being realistic about its limitations. The writers of the individual chapters argue cogently that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) does have a fundamental place in the teaching of English, and provide persuasive examples of its creative possibilities. In his introductory chapter, ‘An English Teacher in the Computer Age’, Goodwyn sets the scene. He thoughtfully dissects such problematic notions as computer literacy, ‘universal’ education, the multicultural dimension of the English language and the role of students and teachers in cultural change. ‘Linguistic culture’, he asserts, ‘is now the culture of the Internet, the global media, the hypertext, the interactive encyclopaedia, and, of course, the book’. The anxieties and hopes of English teachers living and working in such a period of cultural change are examined sympathetically, and their fears that computers will replace teachers are convincingly allayed. The next two chapters offer practical perspectives of the teaching of English in two widely divergent geographic regions. First, Jude Collins looks at the situation in Northern Ireland, with a survey of attitudes to ICT among students and teachers, and he provides some useful case studies. He flags up some difficulties and concerns, but also finds real enthusiasm for the future health of English studies in the digital world. ICT is viewed positively by pupils in the schools he studies, and he finds much mutual support among teachers coming to grips with the technology. A sense of joint enterprise was also apparent in student–teacher work at university, and this seems to emphasise some of the collaborative, collegial modes of working within the ICT environment. He concludes by pointing to some of the possible downsides of the use of ICT, in particular the danger of the technology overshadowing the real value of the learning of English. For him, the technology is the medium not the message.
Book reviews
The Virtual University: The Internet and Resource-based Learning Steve Ryan, Bernard Scott, Howard Freeman and Daxa Patel. Kogan Page, London, 2000. 204 pp, ISBN 0 7494 2508 3, £19.99, paperback. The Changing Face of Learning Technology Edited by David Squires, Gra´inne Conole and Gabriel Jacobs, University of Wales Press, Cardiff, 182 pp, ISBN 0 7083 1681 6, £7.99, paperback. Integrating Technology in Learning and Teaching Pat Maier and Adam Warren. Kogan Page, London, 2000, 162 pp, ISBN 0 7494 31806, £19.99, paperback. Allow me to issue a warning (one most of you probably don’t need): if you decide to spend a few pleasant minutes at the end of your day perusing the educational technology titles at amazon.com to see what’s new — well, it’ll take you right through next week. Given the flood of new books available in the field (1094 on my latest search) it’s difficult to decide which will be worth our time, and which will simply drop us several hours further behind developments in the field. I’ll try to help you out just a bit by considering three recent installments in this tyranny of choices. The Changing Face of Learning Technology is an edited volume of articles chosen from the past several years’ issues of the journal ALT-J, and arranged into four thematic sections. Although the overall quality of the articles is uneven, with a number that are very profitably skipped, each section features at least one offering worth consideration. In the first section, which covers the design and evaluation of learning technologies, a bracing wake-up call from David Mitchell challenges education researchers’ ‘pseudo-scientific’ reliance on quantitative measurements to evaluate the effects of using new technologies in education. The second section, devoted to institutional issues related to the implementation of educational technologies, is perhaps the book’s strongest, highlighted by two articles from Australian academics who discuss their institutions’ trials and triumphs in trying to establish dual-mode systems that integrate face-to-face and technologically-mediated courses. The third section focuses on specifically networked technologies, and has little of startling interest to offer save for Chris Jones’s ‘From Sage on the Stage to What Exactly?’, which lives up to its evocative — and educationally countercultural — title. The final section, ‘The Future’, features only one genuine look into the perhaps-yet-to-come, David Squires’s intentionally provocative and entertaining depiction of the PETs — ‘Peripatetic Electronic Teachers’ — who may someday roam educational cyberspace. The twist The Changing Face of Learning’s editors offer is that most of the older articles, i.e. those that date back a couple of years or more, are followed up by more current comments from
180
Book reviews / Computers & Education 37 (2001) 179–194
their authors. This sounds good in theory, but in practice there’s little new actually added. There’s also no attempt made to develop a coherent picture of current educational technology issues; this collection’s highly focused articles from a wide range of institutional settings mean The Changing Face of Learning Technology is for the specialist practitioner only. The authors of the two other books I’ll consider here have broader aims: both try to develop overarching frameworks for the use of technologies to mediate education. Given their similar goals and coverage, it’s useful to compare them directly. Pat Maier and Adam Warren, authors of Integrating Technology in Learning and Teaching, are ambitious yet restrained. They recognize that any introduction to such a broad subject is destined to leave many questions unanswered, and have therefore designed their book to serve as a jumping-off point or gateway to a huge range of online resources (both on the purpose-built website that accompanies this book, and on many, many others). Annotated weblinks appear after most topics, inviting the reader to dig deeper as time and interests dictate. This approach is to be complimented: rather than assuming they can provide all the reader needs to know, the authors truly serve as facilitators. This is not to say that their overview-style coverage of the book’s topics are inadequate: conversely, the heart of the book — i.e. chapters reviewing educational technologies and designing learning environments that use those technologies to deliver content and facilitate communications — are admirable introductions to a variety of techniques and possibilities. Maier and Warren manage to cover salient generic issues while remaining crisp and concise. Particularly praiseworthy is the chapter on using online communications technologies. The authors clearly draw from a deep well of hands-on experience. Far from being mindless cheerleaders, however, they warn the potential technology adopter of numerous pitfalls as well as strengths of all of the commonly-used online communications technologies, and judiciously employ diagrams and tables for easy reference and comparison. The only substantive criticism I would level against this book is that its introductory chapter, which attempts to situate the use of educational technologies in broad pedagogical, technological and political contexts, over-reaches and indeed comes off a bit frantic. It’s as if the authors, having decided such an introduction was obligatory, tried to address the entire range of complex forces driving the changes in contemporary education. Their de facto position seems simply to be that the changes are happening, there’s not much any of us can do to stop them or hold them back — even assuming we wanted to — so let’s build some solid surfboards and catch that wave. Seekers of practical foundations for designing online teaching and learning should not, however, be put off by this rather weak introduction, as they will be well served by the rest of Integrating Technology in Learning and Teaching. It can be recommended to beginners, for whom the text of the book itself will likely provide more than enough ideas for getting started, and to those with more experience, who will find its ‘gateway’ function to a well-selected and annotated range of online resources equally valuable. The Virtual University, on the other hand, is incongruously titled. This book, from four faculty members at DeMontfort University, sets off with an admirably clear introduction delineating the authors’ purposes and intended audience, and the book’s structure. The first several chapters covering general approaches to distance and online education are also helpful. ‘Resource-based learning’ is clearly explained and serves as a flexible and useful rubric for considering the ways in which courses can be presented in online environments.
Book reviews / Computers & Education 37 (2001) 179–194
181
When the authors turn to practical methods and techniques for teaching and learning on the Internet, however, they stumble. The book’s ambitious scope makes it difficult to satisfy both novices and ‘old hands’: the authors jump from the very basic — e.g. ‘these are frames’ — to discussions of quite advanced programming languages that are unlikely to be used by many members of their target audience in any but the most unusual circumstances. Chapters on webbased resources, computer mediated communication and online assessment also struggle to strike a balance between trying to establish generic principles and techniques for making online learning effective, and illustrating these principles with frequently extraneous technical detail. In particular, a surfeit of less-than-illuminating examples of online practice presented as screendumps clog the book’s flow. Is there any need to show four screens from a single website depicting fruit fly body parts, for example? This quick retreat to the uncontroversial realm of technical detail is symptomatic, I think, of the authors’ tendency to envisage technical solutions for most teaching and learning problems. In a telling example, they discuss an initiative at their university in which some of the psychology students who had taken a resource-based course — mostly more mature students, we are told — said they ‘had the impression they were using computers for the sake of it and not as a tool to aid learning of academic subjects’ (p. 167). The university project leaders’ response (also on p. 167): As a result, initial induction and training in the use of IT and computer-based RBL has been intensified to ensure that this group of students are more positively motivated. If they don’t like to use the technology, we’ll teach them to like it? The Virtual University concludes with a speculative look into the mid- to long-term future. This is entertaining, but the authors dodge the most profound questions raised by the title they’ve chosen: Just what is ‘the virtual university’, in a philosophical rather than purely operational sense? What effects do its ‘virtuality’ have on the university’s traditional functions, especially as bearer and ‘home’ for a scholarly tradition? These are questions one could ask of all three of these books’ authorial/editorial teams. Such concerns are alluded to — unfortunately, almost always in passing — in nearly every book on online education I’ve read. Yet in most cases the ‘drivers’ or societal forces propelling the sweeping changes in which many universities are engaged are accepted as impassively as a mariner contemplating the tides; i.e. that universities must transform themselves to accommodate new computing and networking technologies and related methods is a fait accompli. Perhaps it is expecting too much from Integrating Technology in Learning and Teaching, with its explicitly practical title and aims, to ask that its discussion of methods and techniques for making online learning effective be grounded in a thoughtful consideration of the effects these developments have on real teachers and learners. A treatment of the subject titled The Virtual University, however, calls for a more critical consideration of the ‘university’ as well as the ‘virtual’. Omitting any such broader perspective from the articles chosen for The Changing Face of Learning Technology seems to me a similar failure. In all three cases, then, these books are more or less about the means rather than the ends of teaching and learning through technologies. Such books abound, and many, including at least two of these three, are useful. It would nevertheless be gratifying, and perhaps even more
182
Book reviews / Computers & Education 37 (2001) 179–194
instructive, to see a fraction of the time spent on methods devoted instead to reflection on the ends of the university in this increasingly technology-dominated age. Ross Vermeer Educational Technology and Publishing Unit Open University of Hong Kong 30 Good Shepherd Street Homantin, Kowloon Hong Kong E-mail address: [email protected] PII: S0360-1315(01)00040-9
English in the digital age: information and communications technology and the teaching of English A. Goodwyn (Ed.), Cassell, London, 1999, 176 pp, ISBN 0 304 70623 X, (paperback) £15.99.
Andrew Goodwyn, in the introduction to this useful volume, declares ‘This is a difficult time for all teachers, and for English teachers in particular’, and he poses the question which forms the central tenet of this book: ‘Does the machine serve us or do we now serve the machine?’ English in the Digital Age ‘celebrates the potential of technology to transform reading, writing, speaking and listening’ while being realistic about its limitations. The writers of the individual chapters argue cogently that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) does have a fundamental place in the teaching of English, and provide persuasive examples of its creative possibilities. In his introductory chapter, ‘An English Teacher in the Computer Age’, Goodwyn sets the scene. He thoughtfully dissects such problematic notions as computer literacy, ‘universal’ education, the multicultural dimension of the English language and the role of students and teachers in cultural change. ‘Linguistic culture’, he asserts, ‘is now the culture of the Internet, the global media, the hypertext, the interactive encyclopaedia, and, of course, the book’. The anxieties and hopes of English teachers living and working in such a period of cultural change are examined sympathetically, and their fears that computers will replace teachers are convincingly allayed. The next two chapters offer practical perspectives of the teaching of English in two widely divergent geographic regions. First, Jude Collins looks at the situation in Northern Ireland, with a survey of attitudes to ICT among students and teachers, and he provides some useful case studies. He flags up some difficulties and concerns, but also finds real enthusiasm for the future health of English studies in the digital world. ICT is viewed positively by pupils in the schools he studies, and he finds much mutual support among teachers coming to grips with the technology. A sense of joint enterprise was also apparent in student–teacher work at university, and this seems to emphasise some of the collaborative, collegial modes of working within the ICT environment. He concludes by pointing to some of the possible downsides of the use of ICT, in particular the danger of the technology overshadowing the real value of the learning of English. For him, the technology is the medium not the message.