In Global Peace Through The Global University System

2003 Ed. by T. Varis, T. Utsumi, and W. R. Klemm

University of Tampere, Hameenlinna, Finland

 

 

E-learning, social learning and learning conversations: experiences and possibilities

 

 

Paul Lefrere

Open University, UK

 

 

Abstract

 

This chapter describes current and prospective e-learning practice at the Open University, and provides some context for the choices made to date, which are consistent with proven models of social learning and learning conversations. It outlines ways in which developing countries could work with partners such as the OU to offer "education for all" via locally-relevant forms of e-learning. Two infrastructure possibilities are considered: using narrow-band Internet (which is feasible today in many parts of the third world), and using broadband Internet.

 

 

Introduction

 

Before addressing the topics mentioned explicitly in the title of this chapter, I shall provide some context for current e-learning practice at the Open University.

 

The Open University (OU) was established in 1969. It has since become the UK's largest university, with more than 200,000 people per year studying its courses. It has opened the door to higher education for more than 2 million people across the world, and continually seeks to broaden access to university. This means seeking approaches that will suit the circumstances and backgrounds of all groups, not just more-favoured groups. New technologies are key to this, as is the use across the OU of teaching approaches that help students to jointly construct and refine their own understandings of topics that are new to them and relate those topics to their own backgrounds and previous learning. The basis for such approaches is often a 'conversational' model of learning (reviewed in Browne, 2002). Such a model may be combined with a group-oriented 'social-learning' model (implicit in teaching that supports the development of shared understandings, such as communities of practice), or a combination of social learning and learning conversations.

 

Through such efforts, the OU is ranked amongst the top UK universities for the quality of its teaching and for the ways in which it has used e-learning to maximise the quality and effectiveness of its courses. For the OU, e-learning extends to using blended combinations of options such as computer conferencing, email, CD-ROMs, DVDs and the Internet, in ways that will work across cultures, time zones and different generations of technologies (e.g., low-bandwidth modems, as well as always-on high-bandwidth technology such as DSL). In that broad sense, e-learning has for several years formed a significant part of the university's courses and student support services.

 

Today the OU is regarded as the UK's major e-learning institution. It continues to develop its e-learning activities, reflecting advances in technology and increasing public access to personal computers. The OU strongly believes the new media offer a more advanced and interactive form of learning than can be gained by using traditional audio-visual products or conventional teaching methods alone. The new technologies also allow the OU to further remove the 'distance' from distance education, gathering together students from all over the world and bringing higher education to the doorstep of geographically remote students.

 

 

The Broader Context: Education for All

 

It was on behalf of the former Vice-Chancellor of the OU, Sir John Daniel (now Assistant Director-General of UNESCO) that I attended the 'Emerging Global Electronic Distance Learning (EGEDL)' meeting of the Global University System (GUS) at the University of Tampere in 1999, and began to appreciate the potential of the GUS as an agent for change in today's educational institutions, and more widely for bringing together thought leaders concerned with global needs such as education, health and peace. So I feel it appropriate to draw upon Sir John's admired "Education for All" speech (Daniel, 2002). His speech included an English-language rendering of the words of the great Cuban poet and thinker José Marti, who lived from 1853-95: "All people, when they arrive on earth, have a right to be educated; and then in return, they have the obligation to educate others", and "To educate is to give people the keys to the world, which are independence and love; granting them the ability to walk alone, at the happy pace which is that of natural and free individuals".

 

As Sir John went on to observe, the influence of the writings of José Marti lives on. The intrinsic human value of education was recognised in 1948 in Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In his words, "The right to education is the key to unlocking other human rights. Where the right to education is guaranteed, people have a greater chance to access and enjoy other rights. Second, education is a key to freedom. The key, as Marti put it, to the 'ability to walk alone, at the happy pace which is that of natural and free individuals'. Third, education is the route to development. Nobel prize-winner Amartya Sen puts the case brilliantly for us in his book Development as Freedom (Sen, 1999), whose title sums it all up. He argues that the purpose of development is simply the expansion of freedom. Development, in his words, 'consists of the removal of the various types of un-freedoms that leave people with little choice and little opportunity of exercising their reasoned agency'….because education is the key to freedom it is also the key to development. A new generation of economic growth models gives human resources a central position in increasing development returns. We know that schooling improves productivity in rural and urban employment. We know that literate people have fewer and healthier children. Rights, freedoms and development benefits make up a powerful triangle of arguments for Education for All. The challenge for each country is to recognise the validity of these arguments, define their own distinctive policy priorities and map their own route to achieving Education for All." (Daniel, 2002)

 

Like the GUS, the OU supports the goal of Education for All: at its inception in 1969, its mission was declared to be concerned with what is often referred to today as the 'four opens': "open as to people, open as to places, open as to methods, open as to ideas". Minor refinements of that statement over the years have been followed by a strategic review in 2003, resulting in this proposal: "The Open University leads the world in open and distance learning and will continue to transform higher education. It promotes social justice by providing continuing opportunities for high quality university education to all who wish to fulfill their ambitions and realise their potential, wherever they may be." That proposed wording, which is currently being considered in a University-wide consultation process as part of the strategic development of the University, builds upon the 1969 statement of the four 'Opens', which are retained as the basis of the OU's core values.

 

Both the original 1969 "open as to" declaration and the 2003 "social justice" declaration of the OU are consistent with two precepts of GUS:

• the right of global citizens to enjoy access to educational opportunities that could open their horizons (leading to "the expansion of freedom " in Sen's words)
• the need to help global citizens increase their appreciation of and tolerance for people from other cultures (which is compatible with peace-oriented agendas).

As with the GUS, the OU's goal is to offer people affordable access to education, regardless of where they live and regardless of whether they have particular qualifications or belong to particular groups in their society. The close fit with the GUS vision can be seen from an explanation of the second sentence in the OU's "social justice" declaration, provided by the OU's Vice-Chancellor, Professor Gourley:

• 'It promotes social justice' - working to ensure equality of opportunity by removing barriers to learning and academic achievement for all people;
• 'by providing continuing opportunities' – offering learning opportunities to people throughout their adult lives;
• 'for high quality university education' – bringing the best of higher education within the reach of everyone;
• 'to all' – being accessible to everyone and enabling everybody to participate fully and equally in the life of the University;
• 'who wish to fulfill their ambitions' – helping students to successfully complete their study and achieve their learning objectives, whether linked to personal, academic, professional or employment needs;
• 'and realise their potential' – helping students to recognise and explore their full talents and abilities, to broaden their horizons and, in many cases, to exceed their expectations;
• 'wherever they may be' – offering ways of learning that enable students to study in their home, workplace or elsewhere not just within the UK but also elsewhere in the world
  (Gourley, 2003).

 

Those emphases and nuances are important to note, given that since its inception, OU methods, philosophy and values have diffused steadily throughout the world. OU staff helped to establish many of the fifty open universities that now operate in other countries. Crucially, those developments are locally-led partnerships, in which courses and approaches are driven by local philosophies and needs. As Sir John Daniel observed: "…exporting OU values and learning methods (i.e., supported open learning) can often be a more helpful contribution than taking our courses and materials to another jurisdiction…" The latter approach seems to be the implicit model for web-based universities that use the Internet to offer everyone in the world the same courses. The risk here is that presumably well-meant attempts to reduce the costs of courses by enlarging the market for them, end up akin to imperialism, supplanting local cultures and values with an imposed mono-culture that is inappropriate for local conditions. In Sir John's words, "Various institutions now claim to be global universities. Most of these claims are fantasies. The Net may 'deliver' courses worldwide but most of the courses it carries fail to address the world's cultural and intellectual diversity. Creating a network of open universities that share a common methodology but offer courses designed for local conditions is a better approach" (Daniel, 2001). Complementary points have been made by Gajaraj Dhanarajan (2001), in the context of addressing the issue of whether on-line learning is a social good or another social divide.

 

A similar, bottom-up approach, which too respects local perspectives, needs and approaches, has been used in GUS, in creating GUS first in developing countries, e.g., in Brazil's Amazon region, in Cuba, Malawi and Uganda.

 

 

Towards Large-scale and Routine Use of E-learning

 

Two necessary precursors to the large-scale use of e-learning are access and connectivity (IBM, 2001). Those issues are considered in depth elsewhere and so I devote little space to their generic aspects. Instead, I consider the possible impact of the OU's experiences here on developments elsewhere.

 

The OU's transition to large-scale and routine use of e-learning involved years of capacity-building, to develop the skills and facilities necessary to deliver a wide range of applications of e-learning to a large number of students. The specific targets of that capacity-building changed periodically, to reflect changes in the kinds of communications and computing facilities that seemed likely to become available to our students and affordable by them. Over the period of initial building of capacity within the OU, different generations of technology were involved. The path taken involved a series of implementations, of gradually increasing complexity and sophistication, leading to gradual roll-out across the whole organization. Looking back, it was necessary to take each step in order to proceed to the next step. The eventual system that evolved has elements of preceding systems. As a result, it is arguably better able to prosper in the 'e-learning ecology'. That ecology includes other organizations; some of them may be using current generations of e-learning technology or previous generations. By maintaining elements of previous generations of technologies and practices, the OU can inter-operate with older systems in use elsewhere.

 

At issue is whether other institutions need to follow a similar path, to obtain similar results. In biology this would be equivalent to the saying that "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny", which relates to the characteristic set of visually distinct developmental stages that complex organisms (e.g., mammals) pass through, as the number of cells in a given organism increases and as those cells differentiate. I use that biological metaphor deliberately, to highlight the possibility that to make effective use of e-learning in a way that could scale to suit large numbers of students and could also be integrated with future generations of e-learning technology, it may be necessary to pass through some intermediate stages, possibly involving simple systems and approaches, associated with past generations of technology. This would be consistent with some views of what is needed for success in managing change. To enlarge on this, as with other socio-technical innovations, success in e-learning is not a matter of simply making the 'right' choice of technical system, and then providing everyone with access to the new system. That 'bottled change' approach is unlikely to work, since it ignores key issues such as the social aspects of how people as individuals interact with a system or technology that is new to them, and gradually come to understand what it is capable of and how each of them can make use of it in their particular context. Becoming comfortable with a given technology, and making effective use of it, may take some individuals considerable time, as they move through stages of development. During that process, those individuals may not be able to develop their own e-learning materials economically or in the time available, and the organization may therefore be forced into dependence on materials from third parties, possibly from quite different cultures.

 

Not surprisingly, some institutions seeking to introduce e-learning across their institution look for ways of minimizing risks associated with change. They may look to vendors (the 'turn-key' approach), or they may seek the help of consultants in identifying and localizing relevant practices in early-adopter organizations, and developing implementation plans that take account of possibly significant differences in cultures, capabilities, resources, time-frames and needs. In that way, they can better judge whether they can safely leapfrog the pioneering organizations and move to new generations of e-learning technology, requiring new skills, attitudes, processes and organizational systems, or whether they need to stay with the organizational equivalent of "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny".

 

 

Incorporating Social Learning / Learning Conversations

 

For the OU, the path taken eventually led to ICT-supported social learning and learning conversations (see Browne, 2002 for a general appraisal of those areas). The path taken was influenced by two major factors:

 

• The characteristics of available infrastructures and technologies (costs, availability, ease of use, congeniality, etc), which affect everyone who wants to use e-learning.
• The OU's mission: education for all implies a concern for the individual, and hence an interest in being able to personalize what is on offer to each student, which e-learning makes increasingly feasible.

 

Regarding the characteristics of available infrastructures and technologies, in the first ten years of the OU it hardly needs to be said that there was no Internet (although OU researchers were amongst the first to use the precursor to the Internet, the ARPANET). The OU's initial pre-Internet mode of operation made effective use of the socio-technical systems of the day. The result was a series of highly-regarded multiple-media courses, which, uniquely, included radio and television programmes developed in collaboration with the BBC. Several other aspects of those courses were unusual and may be relevant in an Internet world:

 

• First, their collaborative method of production; each team comprised communication professionals (editors, designers, TV producers, educational technologists, etc.) as well as subject matter experts. Today, collaboration via the Internet is increasingly feasible, and so the members of such a team can be based at different locations. Consideration needs to be given to the factors that motivate participation in such a team, both initially and on a sustainable basis; much attention has been paid to this by OU staff, almost since the OU's inception (e.g., Alexander, 1979, 1992; Alexander and Hussey, 1984).
• Second, often those subject matter experts were eminent academicians from other cultures and countries. Here too, Internet technologies make it far easier to bring such people together.
• Third and crucially, those experts were chosen to represent different (opposing or complementary) points of view, with the expectation (mostly realised) that they would strive to compare and contrast their particular perspective with that of others on the team. In this way, OU students would experience multiple perspectives on a wide range of issues; they could thus be given a far more rounded view of a field than was the case in many traditional universities.

 

Also unusual was the OU teaching system. Its staff looked for ways to help students to develop a sense that they really were members of a community, even if they mostly studied on their own. This showed itself in multiple ways. For example, OU printed materials were characterised by frequent activities, designed to encourage each learner to check their understanding as they studied and to become an active contributor to their own learning and the learning of others. In addition, those materials were written in a direct 'I and you' conversational style, which in the 1970s was rare. Students could 'meet' members if the course team in their living rooms, through television and radio. Team members appeared in specially-produced radio or television programmes associated with each course. Some of those programmes included letters and phone calls from students, or electronic feedback (the OU had a private communications network, comprising hundreds of computer terminals, which students could gain access to at local centres). Through those actions, the OU pioneered the use of communications technologies to develop a sense of community. In addition, there was 'supported open learning': students could get mentoring from tutors, by mail or phone or face-to-face. They could physically meet other students and their tutors in small groups (akin to Oxford's famous tutorials) within easy traveling distance from their homes. They could participate in large-scale events aimed at all the students taking a course (residential schools and day schools, often on traditional university campuses). Through such support mechanisms, most of the OU's initial students felt they had truly become members of the university community. GUS brings nearer the prospect of a global university community.

 

 

Towards Shared Understanding

 

The next phase of the OU's development was the introduction of mass asynchronous communication. Over 100,000 OU students are now online and making regular use of e-learning and/or asynchronous telecommunication (e.g., e-mail, discussion boards, and shared-document computer conferencing).

 

Today's version of that mass system assumes that the majority of students have access to 56K modems, although an increasing and now significant proportion have home-based access to ADSL or cable modem. Surveys show that some students also have other forms of access: GPRS or wireless access for mobile use; and multi-megabit connections at their place of work or at local centres.

 

In such respects, the OU's current system has many counterparts; the bulk of the facilities offered by its asynchronous email system, and the standard training offered to tutors and mentors, do not differ significantly from practice elsewhere, as represented in other chapters. Accordingly, my focus here is restricted to insights and approaches that seem especially pertinent to the theme of this book, Global Peace through the GUS.

 

First, I look very briefly at cultural issues, and then I offer personal insights about bandwidth and connectivity.

 

Regarding cultural issues, it is worth stating what will be obvious to many readers of this book but may not be as obvious to other people: if students from different groups are required to work together then provision for group differences may be needed. Examples range from simple administrative solutions (e.g., assigning students to single sex groups, in cultures where this is necessary), to resource-intensive solutions (e.g., sensitivity training for students or tutors; training in listening skills or commenting skills; or even using mediators).

 

Regarding bandwidth, OU experience in the 1980's showed that, with careful design, it is possible to use even low-bandwidth dial-up connections to support the development of shared understandings between students from different regions and backgrounds. However, more bandwidth makes a difference. I have seen learners using low-bandwidth dial-up connections, satellite systems, and terrestrially-linked video or audio conferencing systems, all with varying degrees of aural or visual fidelity and latency (responsiveness). The impression I have is that the lower the bandwidth or the longer the delay in system response, the more difficult it is for people to spot mal-communications or misunderstandings quickly and recover from them gracefully and without drawing attention to them. This has obvious implications for the choice of bandwidth for any systems whose primary function is to promote global peace through mutual understanding.

 

Unfortunately, adequate levels of connectivity are beyond the reach of people in many parts of the world, including some urban areas and rural or remote regions of the UK, as well as the world's more obviously poor regions. Through local and regional partnerships, and sometimes directly, the OU is addressing the problem of how to reach students who are in areas of poor connectivity. In each geographic region it is possible to develop a technology road-map, indicating the anticipated availability of data links at a given price-band or offering a given level of bandwidth.

 

As with the GUS, due account must be taken of the on-line options available to students. Here are some examples of those options, in order of increasing sophistication and cost: intermittent shared access to dial-up connections at local or regional centres; use of radio-based or line-of-sight data links; negotiated use of bandwidth available from time to time on publicly-owned satellites; use of commercial satellite connections; and use of 'bandwidth-on-demand' systems. The last of these is increasingly seen as representing the future of e-learning, even in the third world, and so I now outline some relevant explorations of that possible future.

 

 

Learning-on-demand, Using Bandwidth-on-demand

 

National and international agencies, in Europe and North America, are supporting studies at the Open University and elsewhere of 'bandwidth-on-demand' e-learning systems that could become relevant to the GUS, including systems that link together large number of computers in what is called the 'Grid' (Gaeta, Ritrovato and Salerno, 2002). From private communications with Stefano Cerri, Marc Eisenstadt and Pierluigi Ritrovato, on which the closing parts of this chapter are based, this is arguably just a logical step in the evolution of technology-enhanced learning:

 

1970s     video-tape based interactive training; TV-based Open University lectures

1980s     the emergence of the personal computer and the use of it to deliver interactive learning tools to the solitary learner;

1990s     the Internet explosion and the Web; use in educational contexts of interactive networked groupware and collaboration technologies (e-mail lists, bulletin boards, chat, agents to track contributions from previous cohorts of students and retrieve them when relevant); emergence of interactive web-based learning environments; the Web as a vast repository of lecture notes;

2000s     technologically-superior versions of the 1990s technologies, using more bandwidth, in some cases synchronously as well as asynchronously to provide a sense of 'presence' ('being there'); applications of distributed Grid technology first to e-Science for individual 'power' users, then to groups of power users (collaborative e-Science), then to learners, as in the e-Learning Grid.

 

 

Adding the Face-to-face Dimension

 

As we move towards 2010, we can expect significant increases in the bandwidth available to those people who have a network connection today. Research at the Open University and in many other institutions (e.g., see Riva et al, 2003) shows that the increased bandwidth can be used to increase the sense of presence referred to above, first by increasing the quality of the audio channel to move towards hi-fi stereo sound (which, with headphones on, gives a powerful impression of where someone 'is', relative to you as the listener), then by adding a 2-D or 3-D video channel. Initially, video bandwidth is likely to be limited, so the video can be prioritized for high quality static images. As more video bandwidth becomes available, so some limited form of motion video can be added, the image size can increase. With a lot of bandwidth, the number of images per second can also increase to support fully blur-free motion.

 

By 2010, each of those 'presence technologies' can be incorporated in some form of Instant Messaging, IM, which permits multi-media contributions to a learning conversation. IM provides automatic notification of the appearance of friends and colleagues online. It is increasingly used to support the collaboration of individuals separated in space and time. As such, it is a key technology for involving younger people, since it provides a way for them to engage at speed with others, which is often valued and can also be of real help in building a sense of community rapidly.

 

Primitive, first-generation forms of IM were text-based and required only modest bandwidth. They remain relevant today because text-based IM is sufficiently ubiquitous and low-cost to become widely used around the world. The next generations of IM allowed the addition of instant audio, which requires a minimum of 56K modems. Current generations assume the availability of broadband, which can be used to support instant two-way video messaging as in Apple's iChat. Still in research is the Multi-Sensory e-Learning Grid, which incorporates all of those forms of IM and adds haptics (touch-based interfaces), plus the possibility of instant access to grid-supported simulations and data manipulation.

 

Face-to-face interaction between people in different locations becomes increasingly viable and commonplace, as broadband-based IM becomes more available, more affordable and more adopted. This could provide a powerful way to involve young people. In a learning context, OU studies (e.g., Whitelock et al, 2002) show that the presence of peer-group members can enhance the emotional well-being of isolated learners and improve learning. This is related to observations about the behaviour of Smart Mobs (Rheingold, 2002), in which vastly increased social cohesiveness can result from knowing the presence and location of others in both real and virtual spaces. Ethnographic studies of IM in the workplace (e.g., Nardi and Whittaker, 2000) indicate that IM encourages informal, flexible and expressive communication: quick questions and clarifications, coordination and scheduling, organising impromptu social meetings and negotiating availability. Intermittent instant messages give people a sense of shared space and are more immersive than e-mail (Nardi and Whittaker, 2000) and arguably asynchronous conferencing. Also relevant to the GUS is the use of IM to maintain 'presence awareness', as it creates and maintains a sense of social connection to other people. People find value just in knowing who else is 'around', without necessarily wanting to interact with them. A feeling of 'being connected' even if people are not in the same space creates a shared 'world', which is extremely important when developing on-line communities dealing with global issues such as health and peace.

 

 

Conclusion

 

The experience of the Open University is that 'learning conversations', supported through a combination of peer-group exchanges and formal mentoring (face-to-face and via available technologies), provide a way to combine economies of scale (meaning serving the needs of large numbers of people, economically) with economies of scope (meaning being able to offer each person individualised support and considerable choice in what they study). Perhaps more significantly, the OU's large student base includes people from many cultures and many countries, and the OU's courses represent many academic viewpoints. This provides every student with the opportunity to encounter different views and come to new understandings – as Sir John Daniel once famously remarked, OU graduates are notable for never seeing just one side to an argument.

 

I feel sure that similarly positive things will be said of people who gain access to world-class education through the Global University System, since they too will meet many cultures and will find ways to develop shared understandings, where that is appropriate, or to acknowledge each other's viewpoints, in other cases, or simply to make friends around the world, using tools such as Instant Messaging.

 

In conclusion, the GUS and its partner institutions have the potential to serve very large numbers of people, as communication costs drop and as e-learning becomes more effective, cheaper and more widely accessible. I confidently expect that the GUS will become a key player in supporting the emergence of tomorrow's global citizens, who not only see global peace and understanding as absolutely necessary, but also have the confidence, education and contacts to collaborate to achieve it in ways that respect the many cultures and peoples of the world.

 

 

 

References

 

Alexander , G. (1979) Towards an alternative future: A communication-based framework. Retrieved July 10, 2003 from http://sustainability.open.ac.uk/gary/pdf/altfut.pdf

 

Alexander , G. (1992) Communications-centred Multi-media Learning Systems. In Learning Technology in the European Communities, Ed. S.Cerri and J. Whiting, pp. 79-90, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992.

 

Alexander, G. and Hussey M. (1984) Becoming friends: approaching world harmony through social learning or The transactional dynamics of convergent and divergent communication. Presented at the American Society for Cybernetics conference on Autonomy, Intervention and Dependence, November 1-4, Philadelphia, PA (chair Fred Steier). Retrieved July 10, 2003 from http://sustainability.open.ac.uk/gary/papers/friends.htm

 

Browne, E. (2002) Beyond our wildest dreams, an evaluation of conversational learning using Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Presented at Networked Learning Conference 2002, Sheffield, UK, 26-28 March 2002. Retrieved July 10, 2003 http://www.shef.ac.uk/nlc2002/proceedings/papers/08.htm

 

Daniel, J. (2001) "The Global University: Fact or Fantasy?" The Independent, Open Eye Supplement, May 2001. Retrieved July 10, 2003, http://www.open.ac.uk/vcs-speeches/Open-Eye-May-2001.htm

 

Daniel, Sir J.D. (2002) Progress towards the goals of Education for All, speech to the Institute of Education's International Centenary Conference. Retrieved July 10, 2003 from http://portal.unesco.org/education/ev.php?URL_ID=10075&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201&reload=1052315374

 

Dhanarajan , G. (2001) On-Line Learning - A Social Good or Another Social Divide? Keynote Address at International Conference on Learning and Teaching On-Line, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China, 10 January 2001. Retrieved July 10, 2003 from http://www.col.org/speeches/southchina_00.htm

 

Gaeta M., Ritrovato P, Salerno S. (2002). Implementing New Advanced Learning Scenarios Through GRID Technologies, presented at LeGE-WG 1st Workshop Toward an European Learning GRID Infrastructure: educational models for grid based services, Lausanne

 

IBM (2001). Access and Connectivity Workshop Discussion Paper. eLearning Summit, Brussels 10 - 11 May 2001. Retrieved July 10, 2003 http://www.ibmweblectureservices.ihost.com/eu/elearningsummit/ppps/downloads/acprint15.pdf

 

Laister, J. and Kober, S. (2002). Social Aspects of Collaborative Learning in Virtual Learning Environments. Presented at Networked Learning Conference 2002, Sheffield., UK, 26-28 March 2002. Retrieved July 10, 2003 from http://www.shef.ac.uk/nlc2002/proceedings/papers/19.htm

 

Nardi, B.A., Whittaker, S., Isaacs, E., Creech, M., Johnson, J., and Hainsworth, J. (2002) Integrating communication and information through ContactMap. Communications of the ACM 45:4, pp. 89-95, April.

 

Rheingold, H. (2002) Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Cambridge, Mass., USA: Perseus.

 

Riva, G., Davide, F. and Ijsselsteijn, W.A. (2003). Being There: Concepts, Effects and Measurements of User Presence in Synthetic Environments. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: IOS Press.

 

Sen, A. (1999) Development as Freedom. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press

 

Shirky, C. (2003). Social Software and the Politics of Groups. Retrieved July 10, 2003 from http://shirky.com/writings/group_politics.html

 

Whitelock, D., Romano, D.M., Jelfs, A., and Brna, P.(2000) Perfect Presence: What does this mean for the design of virtual learning environments? Education and Information Technologies, 5:4, pp277-289.

 

 

 

Author Biographical Sketch

 

Paul Lefrere, Ph.D. Open University Walton Hall Milton Keynes MK7 6AA UK Tel: +44 1908 274066 p.lefrere@open.ac.uk http://www.open.ac.uk

 

From August 2003, Paul Lefrere will be Microsoft's Executive Director of e-learning. He is currently Policy Adviser for Interoperability Systems at the Open University, and Academic Director for a number of multi-national collaborative projects concerned with how to create and enhance opportunities for learning, how to bridge the digital divide, how to improve digital literacy and the quality of learning in formal and informal learning, and how to enhance user experiences. In addition he has a visiting chair of e-learning at the University of Tampere. His particular areas of expertise concern applications of advanced forms of technology-enhanced learning and infrastructures (e.g., grid, mobile, ambient intelligence, networked games). He is the author of over 50 papers related to ICT in education. He maintains an overview of developments in this area through membership of the advisory boards of journals, and thought leadership in groups concerned with socio-technological futures and transformative technologies. His latest book (Transforming e-Knowledge: A Revolution in the Sharing of Knowledge (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Society for College and University Planning, 2003), co-authored with Donald Norris and Jon Mason, can be read in its entirety at <http://www.transformingeknowledge.info/>.