Month: April 2013

Australia’s National Broadband Network – framing costs and benefits

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I wrote this in 2011 when the Liberal party and others were calling for a ‘cost-benefit analysis’ of the NBN. They are calling for it again – and last week launched their own proposals, which would bring fibre to a (local-ish) node rather than to the home. 

What cost the future? Education and the National Broadband Network

Peter Goodyear

19-May-2011

When Julia Gilliard pushed the button to activate the National Broadband Network in Armidale on Wednesday, the complaints were not long in following. ”There goes $18 billion,” said shadow treasurer Joe Hockey in Canberra, stating that the government was rolling out a Bentley to every Australian when the nation can only afford a Commodore.

Complaints about the cost of the National Broadband Network, the NBN, are not going to stop any time soon. It’s easy to see the expense but assessing the value of the NBN will take far more thought.  Supporters of the NBN have been quick to argue that it will strengthen education. Unfortunately, they’ve been slow to anticipate a damaging counter-argument: namely, that technology does not improve learning.

If you read studies that have tried to assess the effects of digital technology on learning outcomes, you have to conclude that technology does not – in itself – make a significant difference. No doubt opponents of the NBN will eventually pick up on this research. When they do, it will be important to put it in context.

People with a stake in education need to point out that studies of the impact of technology on education often miss the key point. What these studies end up illustrating is that the benefit you get from using any tool depends on whether you know how to use it properly. These studies aren’t – in themselves – much help when it comes to assessing the intrinsic value of something like the NBN. They don’t help us assess its potential, and it’s the potential of the NBN that matters.

Let’s turn to the potential of the digital technology available in Australian homes right now. Your teenager, for example, probably enjoys access to the web and all the educational benefits associated with it. If, however, they’re downloading music and playing Tetris in the corner of the screen while supposedly using the Web for research, the potential of the technology they have is not being realised. It’s not the tool that’s at fault though, it’s how it’s being used.

So how does broadband help learning when used wisely? There are five rock-solid benefits.

First, and most obvious, is access to a world of information. We shouldn’t take this for granted. My primary school’s library in the late ‘50s was a single, narrow cupboard. In a few months, you could read every book it contained. The first public libraries provided a lifeline for learning for the socially disadvantaged. The Web is filling this critical role today.

Secondly, the Web doesn’t just offer raw information, it’s also populated with explanations. Thirdly, the Web features recommendation systems that let you follow in other people’s footsteps and see what resources they found useful. Fourthly, you can network: you can find other people to learn from, learn with, or help you change the world. Finally, there are powerful tools to help you figure out complex issues – tools for visualising data, modelling systems and asking the big ‘what if?’ questions.

This is a snapshot of the benefits associated with digital technology today. But the NBN is not about the present, it’s about the future. Despite the fact that we know technological change is accelerating, it remains perversely difficult to frame a public debate about the future that’s not based on the delusion that it’ll be just like the present, only more shiny.

Imagine people connecting to the NBN six years from now. What do you picture? Smartphones, laptops and iPads? This time last year almost no-one in Australia had seen an iPad. Six years’ ago we had no iPhones or Kindles. We weren’t using YouTube, Google Maps, Facebook or Twitter. What potential technologies and developments that we haven’t even imagined yet will the NBN enable?

Assessing the future benefits of the NBN is not going to be easy. It has no intrinsic value. It will only help us if we learn how to use it wisely. And Australians will have to. Big challenges are on the way: from climate change, globalising competition, food security, peak oil, obesity, chronic ill health, and drug-resistant superbugs.

There’s no doubt the next generation needs to be better educated. After all, they’ll have to fix many of the problems we’re leaving in the too hard basket. They’ll need to be bold in unravelling complexity and quick to innovate. This ‘innovation generation’ will need a world-class broadband network, not a cut-price lash-up made of fencing wire and wishful thinking. It’s up to us to deliver it and let them maximize its potential. The costs of failing them, due to a lack of nerve on our part, are unaffordable.

Slow Learning

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This is an old piece, written in 2006 for  ElNet – the E-learning Network of Australasia. I’m including it here because some recent discussions with one of my PhD students – Miriam Tanti – brought it back to mind. Miriam is using a mix of interview and document analysis to work out how some ideas from the ‘Slow’ movement might improve how we think about, and use, digital technologies in schools.

Slow learning

Contrariness is deeply engrained in academic habits of thought. We learn to question received views and poke a sharp stick at orthodox thinking. In the commercial world, too, there is money to be made by thinking outside the box. A surefire way of opening up new opportunities is to look hard at the dominant trends and notice the counter-currents.

For the last 10 years or more, the orthodox view in training and development has focussed on speed – on accelerating product development cycles, global flows of information, the shortening half-life of professional expertise and just-in-time support for the problem-solving knowledge worker. This focus is understandable. The rhetoric of corporate and personal success foregrounds change – the management of endless and accelerating change, pushing individuals and organisations to their limits.  I’m not sure that I can see this altering, but what opportunities are we missing when we only look at the main stream?

An interesting counter-current set up by globalisation in the food industry – by the imperialism of McDonalds, the supermarkets, agro-business etc – is a resurgence of interest in the provenance of food. Worries about mad cows, GM crops and felling of the rainforests do not completely explain the growth of consumer and media interest in organic foods, sustainable local production, the preservation of distinctive regional cuisine and so on. Rather, we have to recognise a cultural counter-current – a perfectly normal and significant resistance to the dominant trends. Depending where you sit, you can see this as an interesting market opportunity or a bell-whether for future developments.

What has this got to do with the e-learning industry? My thought for the day is that we’d do well to take a look at the ‘slow food’ and ‘slow cities’ movement that’s been gathering strength in Europe over the last few years. ‘Slow food’ is the antidote to fast food. It’s local, authentic and sustaining; grown, sold, bought and cooked with love and care; enjoyed for itself. Food that knows where it came from.

In our concern for just-in-time e-learning, for the anytime, anywhere, we may well be focussed on the froth of knowledge work and missing what really counts. As professionals in the business of e-learning, what do we really know about learning that takes time to mature? About the distinctive qualities of local knowledge? About knowledge that is firmly rooted in people, their organizations and cultures? About knowledge that knows where it came from?

Peter Goodyear

Peter Goodyear is Professor of Education at the University of Sydney and co-director of CoCo – the Research Centre on Computer Supported Learning and Cognition. He has been working in the learning technologies field since the late 70s.

Australian educational research – getting your facts right

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On the 19th March 2013, Alan Tudge MP, made a speech criticising the quality of educational research in Australia. The text of the speech is here. It includes the following statements.

“We are spending billions on education research, but it is not having the impact it should. Worse, our education faculties are failing to be engines for ideas at a time when school outcomes have dropped despite a huge increase in public funds for school education.”

“… it is a waste of public money if education research is not of a high standard and is not having impact. Over the last decade $1.7 billion has been spent on education research. It is a sector that has been growing steadily each and every year and now employs almost 3,000 people. If the ARC’s report is indicative of the decade, then we can say that nearly a billion dollars has been spent on below standard work. What would an extra billion dollars have achieved in, say, biotechnology, a research field that is universally at or above world standard? 

… education faculties are not having an impact at a time when high quality, evidence-based research is desperately needed.”

Bernard Lane, then working at The Australian, approached the Australian Council of Deans of Education (ACDE) for comment. I prepared the following notes for ACDE and the Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE).

Since the notes were written, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) have reversed some of the decisions that made educational research’s footprint unnecessarily hard to assess in the ERA exercises.

The number of free-standing education faculties has continued to diminish.

Notes from 26 March 2013.

Point 1: ERA’s definition of Education isn’t what Alan Tudge means by Education

Alan Tudge appears not to understand that the ERA definition of educational research doesn’t align with how universities are organised internally. We (AARE & ACDE) conducted a survey last year to learn more about what’s behind the ERA figures. 

It turns out that around 40% of the educational research assessed in ERA2010 and ERA2012 was produced by people who do NOT work in departments/faculties of education. 

Much of this research is being conducted by other university academics as part of improving their own approaches to teaching – these people are found in all departments/faculties. Their research is not about schools – it’s about higher education, which is generally judged to be an Australian success story. 

Also, not all the research done in education departments/faculties is labelled Education in ERA. The classification system used in ERA (designed by the ABS) excludes the following from Education: educational psychology (including how people learn), educational policy (including how to design and manage better education systems), sociology of education (e.g. understanding how social disadvantage effects educational outcomes). 

The ABS defined Education in such a way that these key areas are NOT included in the statistics or the ERA results for Education. Some of Australia’s most prolific educational researchers (esp. in psychology of education) find that their work is not classified as Education by the ABS and ERA. 

Point 2: He hasn’t caught up with the fact that there are very few free-standing departments & faculties of Education any more. 

Most are mixed into larger social science and/or professional education schools/faculties. His ‘aunt sally’ (or the straw man he’s trying to attack) isn’t there any more.

This makes it harder than it used to be to identify someone as being ‘from Education’ – so when Mr Tudge says that ‘education academics are missing’ (from debates in the print media) one wonders how he knows who is from Education & who not (or even, whether that’s a sensible question any more).   

Point 3: The international footprint of Australian educational research has put it among the top 3-4 fields of Australian research during the last decade – the period during which Mr Tudge reckons we were wasting money. ARC Annual reports, on several occasions during the last decade, have used the success of education research as an indicator of the international visibility of all the research ARC funds.

Point 4: Education research (on the ERA definition) is underfunded compared to other fields/disciplines. 

ERA2010 data showed that for every (full-time equivalent) Education researcher there is around $17k of funding per year; the equivalent figure for Studies in Human Society (sociology etc) is $36K, Economics $44k, Biology $90k, Medicine/Health $152k per full-time equivalent researcher. 

Point 5: Education (FoR13) has improved 2010-2012

Using the ARC ERA data, 12 universities have improved their rating, 3 have gone down. There’s no room for complacency, but these are encouraging signs of improvement.

Peter Goodyear, Professor of Education, University of Sydney. (Led a joint AARE/ACDE initiative 2011/12 on building Australian educational research capacity.)