Uber users: Tom Morris and Mike Green
Tom, who is currently doing an MA in philosophy and will be moving on to a research degree, details some of the many things that irritate him as a student. Mike, who manages SOAS’s Blackboard system, gets grilled on the usefulness, or otherwise, of virtual learning environments.
Tom Morris
I used Blackboard very briefly in 2003-4 but during my undergrad studies there was no learning technology at all. Printed essays out and gave them to the receptionist. Now all undergrads at my university are covered by a Moodle but my course isn’t covered so we email essays.
Tom details some of the issues involved in trying to access a particular paper as a pdf. Jstor said it didn’t cover the right period, didn’t want to do a 50-mile trip to London. Tried his mother’s university, Brighton. Discovered that Oxford archive had it and found it and got the pdf but it was an accident because the catalogue said it didn’t have it. Why aren’t these things easy to get online?
Googled for hours for another paper and couldn’t find it in edited collections so bitched about it to a friend on Twitter and another friend, a law student at Wisconsin, responded, and they have a system where you can do an inter-library loan and they will scan it and email it. The friend did this and a week later got a message on Twitter with the link. Why can’t my university, which subscribes to the hard copy of the journal, do this? If they won’t we’ll Napster it. That Twitter favour cost Wisconsin $65. Can download texts on BitTorrent.
On Brighton’s website it took six clicks to get from the home page to the library catalogue. Gives example of convoluted url for his college library. And the OPAC is even worse. Randomly picked a philosophy book from the University of London reading list and found it on Telnet and then accessed it on the library service using Telnet. Finds it easier than using the library search, which is just a telnet seacrh with some CSS and has no extra benefits but is slower. All I want from my local library catalogue is for it not to suck. My local library, Kent, is the worst. I don’t understand how it can be so difficult. I don’t need all this web 2.0 stuff, I just want it to work. I want our catalogues to not suck. The internet will do the rest. Fix it or we’ll fix it with BitTorrent.
Delegate: that’s not really fixing it is it?
Tom: it’s fixing it in the same way we fixed the music industry… If the academic publishers don;t want to play ball then we’ll set up the Facebook Philosophy group for trading papers. I know people who go around conferences with USB stciks containg stacks of papers to trade
Delegate: so it’s not a technological fix to a tech problem, it’s about getting them without paying them
Tom: but I’m already paying the university to be a student. I’m not going to pay a publisher to get access to a paper for 24 hours. If there was some kind of iTunes system to pay a small fee and then have the paper to keep then I might consider it.
Delegate: so it’s really about cost not technology, though?
Tom: well, if I could a paper I needed for three dollars without having to travel to London and pay £12 for an interlibrary loan then I would consider it.
Delegate: it’s a common problem. We’ve looked at it at JISC. The electronic versions of the journals exist so it’s about lining it up to share electronic resources. We are trying to resolve it. For a student it doens’t seem like a major thing to do, get a pdf from one place to another but from a publisher point of view it is a major thing. But it’s useful to show the publishers that students are already solving the problem through BitTorrent and other networks.
Tom: I don;t know how to fix it and it probably can’t be fixed with a Twitter mash up (though could probably find a better way to share papers illegally that way)
Paul Walk: there are a lot of problems here but which is the main one: crap OPAC, the cost, not being able to find it?
Tom: OPAC crapness is a big thing for me. They’ve put the system which works on the public kiosk on the web so it times out after a certain short time and you can’t go back to your search page. The email address to report bugs bounces. The library has a Facebook page so I wrote a user script called Senate House Library Unsuckifyer to remove the time out refresh and put a post about it on the Facebook page and have had no response from the library. They have a Facebook page but nobody responds to the posts so I’m not sure what the point is.
Delegate: people are told to do something so they do it eg a corporate comms person tells them to have a page on Facebook so they do that but have no concept that they have to interact. It becomes another place to fail.
Delegate: do students record good lectures and upload them to BitTorrent?
Tom: not seen that but I have seen good podcasts. Hubert Dreyfus podcasts have become shockingly popular. I subscribe to a few podcasts. There is one big blog which has a lot of gossip on it about philosophy. I get a book and try not to get too distracted by the internet.
Delegate: part of what publishers say they do is around copyediting and spelling etc and referencing and that is important for philosophy. How do you reference a BitTorrent version?
Tom: it’s just a pdf of the journal article so I don;t need to say where I got it from. I don;t say that I bought a book from Waterstones.
Delegate: but it does matter. Dreyfus likes to put voice out because with voice there is no need to worry about punctuality etc. I would question referencing as an equivalent level of integrity something that has been found online and something that has gone through the academically rigorous process.
Mike Green
My issues are probably more vague than Tom’s. One of the things about VLE is that it is push learning but I manage Blackboard at SOAS and the things that lecturers can do interactively is limited. Students may not be able to get on to it at the beginning fo the course. Some lecturers not so keen to embrace web 2.0 or even web 1.0… All the great tools are out there in isolation and how do we wrap them together into one simple accessible space for students. Both lecturers and students have different levels of confidence and expertise with technology.
I’m thinking of a more interactive space, more like a portfolio, more shared and gets round some of the issues of it needing to be tutor moderated. Need something more organic, allows students more freedom but within an authenticated space. It should also encourage low level users as it’s easy to pitch stuff to web savvy students and academics.
Delegate: why do you want people to do things within the VLE anyway?
Mike: using that as the portal out to bring various things like Flickr or Twitter into one place. Not all users are aware of these things so how do they know they are there? And the problem of so many different passwords.
Paul: the password problem is always exaggerated. What is the advantage of having these things in one place? If it’s a beautifully integrated environment then possible but that is rarely the case. Blackboard is sold to the management for student tracking but is the portal ideal dead now?
Mike: it depends on the quality of the VLE and getting the up to date information on there - no point having all the info there if students can’t access it.
Paul: why not put the resources into teaching and supporting students in getting online with the web 2.0 tools out there and then universities do not need to provide accounts etc. Why do they need to have control? What’s the point of a VLE?
Mike: is still surprises me how far you have to move down a few gears when doing staff training on a VLE. And the VLE may not be user-friendly
Delegate: in terms of learning processes, how do these tools come together, how do they fit in?
Mike: it depends how a lecturer deploys them and how they encourage students to use them
Paul: Moodle advertised itself as being in one pedagogical camp while another VLE sold itself as being pedagogically neutral.
Mike: often once these tools are created people work out how they can use them, like Twitter. Case of cart and horse.
Tom: on my mother’s course they use Blackboard and all they use it for is putting up announcements. Why can’t they use email for that? It means that every morning before going into college she has to check both Blackboard and email. My college only uses Moodle for uploading essays which, again, could be done by email.
Delegate: Administrators may ask for things to be uploaded to the VLE so that they can check permissions, rights etc which they can’t do if it’s all happening by email.
Paul: three years ago, in the largest VLE rollout 95% of the courses used it to upload content and nothing else and 5% used it for everything. Two extremes. But basically just a place to bung stuff.