Thinking The Unthinkable report

=Recommendations for JISC and CETIS from the session=

Keywords: education, value, simple standards, technology in use, community, pedagogy, development, implementation, research, evidence

Summary of Session
This session was faciliated by Brian Kelly (UKOLN) and Steven Warburton (King's College London). In addition Mark Stiles (University of Staffordshire) was also involved in the planning for the workshop and contributed to the discussions.

The "Thinking The Unthinkable" session sought to address mainstream orthodoxy thinking in the JISC development environment. It had been planned to address issues related to Web 2.0 ("Web 2.0: Trendy Nonsense") and open standards ("Interoperability Though Open Standards! Really!"). At the event, however, although two brief presentations on these topuics were given, the discussion was much more wide-ranging.

In order to allow the participants to focus the wide-ranging discusions, groups of 3-4 were asked to provide reconmmendtaions for JISC and CETIS. A summary of these recommendations are given below.

Development

 * Technology needs to be in a fit state before being handed over to the academic (with sensitivity to ownership issues?)
 * Technologies should respond to user/pedagogic needs – agile programming ethos
 * Be more circumspect about supporting standards
 * Simple standards work complex ones don't (80:20 rule)
 * JISC - assess the potential value of technologies before and during development
 * Focus on early deliverables not the bigger picture
 * JISC - more professional in the process of writing and funding bids.

Implementation

 * Decision processes: wait, facilitate, encourage adoption.
 * Recognition that there are times to control/manage and times for flexibility. We don't always know when to apply each of these.
 * Organisations need to identify what they need to control/manage/enable and realise that these will change - there may be a facilitation role here.

Community

 * Involve all stakeholders from the start - appreciate the broader community (Q. where are the learners?) - support, facilitate and develop communities of practice
 * Projects need run together ... an ecology model ... such that they communicate, link and support each other as a flourishing community.

Dialogue

 * Work (JISC) more closely with the HEA subject centres and pull on their expertise
 * JISC - engagement strategy with the users - not proposing solutions to supposed problems – the gains would be a better-informed client base.

Value

 * Having enough information or perspectives to make value judgments (1) - what is important i.e. do these technologies support our underpinning educational beliefs?
 * Making value judgments (2) - academics, librarians, developers, students, IT services have different value systems and different metrics for success - we need make these explicit to engage in productive dialogue
 * Study technology in use. How do users appropriate technologies? How does the educational/institutional culture socialise/change technology (ethnographic research studies are needed)
 * Evaluate JISC funded projects against alternatives.

Pedagogy

 * CETIS keep up the good work! Exemplars of good practice – gather evidence of the use of new tools and new practices that can be collated and disseminated as case studies
 * We need a pedagogic map of how technologies fulfill particular teaching practices
 * Focus even more on the overall educational requirements of tutors and bear in mind that early adopters are not the norm.