Matthew Pittinsky – CEO Blackboard Inc. (and founder)

A thoughtful presentation from someone who I assumed I would disagree with from start to finish. Philosophically, Matthew firmly pinned himself to the social constructivist tree espousing a strong belief in a social model of learning. In fact he is currently studying for a Doing a PhD in social relationships in education.

He had a number of propositions about e-Learning and although I will not expand in here I have listed them and I had little real issue with any of them.

- a change from bricks and mortar to a distributed networked learning environment
- currently practice is very ‘conservative’
- education is boundless, NLE are ever evolving
- benefits are many and varied, depends upon where you are sitting
- social relations will govern
- power of technology as an enabler and change maker.

However, the killer view lay beneath the following statistics presented by Matthew:
80% features only wanted by 20%
20% features wanted by 80%

Mathew explained that the 80% features wanted by the 20%, the alternative discourse tools, learning environments that empower learners, etc were in fact not on the planning board anytime soon. He defended this position with an explanation of how Blackboard had a gradual approach to introducing them and taking the lecturers along with them rather than introducing a range of tools that would make the environment overly complex and few would use.

I believe he misses the point. Firstly, the creation of a powerful e-Learning environment with an appropriate philosophical standpoint is not inherently complex. Secondly, I am reminded by a song by the Jam (Going Underground) with a clever switch between two lines ‘the public gets what the public wants’ which changes too ‘the public wants what the public gets’. To assume that either HE lecturers on mass are aware opportunities (pedagogical, student centred approach, etc) that online e-Learning technology has to offer (the public gets…) is naive in the extreme. The reality is that we want what we are given because on mass we know no better and are generally ill informed or supported to understanding issues surrounding e-Learning from a teaching and learning perspective – this is a gross generalisation so apologies to those who do care about teaching and learning in HE.

So I asked the question at the end of the session “To what extent does Blackboard promote the philosophy of learning so eloquently explained today?” Matthew started his reply with a caveat to any Blackboard shareholders or customers say that his views were not necessarily the views of the company. He then stuttered to an affirmation that he believed it did display his philosophical educational beliefs and then tumbled back to the 20% – 80% argument and finished by saying he hoped he didn’t come across too defensive.

In summary, Blackboard is a public company with shareholders – it has to make money. To do this it makes software that lecturers are comfortable with that promotes a delivery model of learning with the opportunity for a social constructivist or conversational model at best tacked on. I see no prospect of significant change, why should there be as the company is successful!

A really interesting presentation by a couple of guys (Rick McGeer and Mark McCahill) on open source software they have built called Croquet that can trace its lineage back to HyperCard. The guys explained how HyperCard was killed off because of commercial pressures and that was one of the reasons they were determined to use open source for this application – big corporates would no be in control! In a nutshell this is a virtual environment similar in appearance to that which the massive multi-user games use, the term used was immersive virtual environments. The difference being that starting with a flat and bare landscape the users can build a world of their own that is 3 dimensional as contrasted to the www as we currently have it which is a 2D ‘document management’ approach driven by hyperlinks.

Where it gets really interesting from a learning perspective is the ability to upload multimedia media, text files, etc. as the application has a high degree of interoperability for a range of operating systems and new and older applications. So, you can share resources, make resources with authoring tools, discuss things, find other people/groups all within this virtual world of ‘authored 3D web pages’.

The information architecture supporting all of this is really clever – so I was told. When up and running widely (about 6 months away) it will depend upon a network of servers coordinated by one server. Each of the networked servers (worlds) can have many smaller virtual spaces either private or open. As a user, I log onto my worlds and see the spaces I belong to, I can create content, additional spaces, etc. All of this is stored on my world server but anyone joining the same spaces as me has the content located on their machine for the duration of the connection. We see each other and the same content.

OK, maybe this particualr offereing will not fly but the idea of moving from the flat world of web pages to easily authored 3D webspaces seems to be an exciting one to me. The future for online learning?

I have just returned from the e-Agenda Summit with a mind full of interesting stuff. I will be posting over the next few days but an interesting observation was that despite the e-Learning being the focus of the summit there was little or no support for me, the e-Learner! That is no power points for my Mac (I need these as my battery is only holding 45 mins at the moment), no wireless Internet access except for 10 minutes from the conference next door (dentistry I think) started a network up, but they promptly came round and told us to keep our hands off! Ho hum.

Anyway, for a first post some feedback on a seminar called Next Generation Network Services. Sounds dry, first part was impressive conceptually, the second seemed to have immense potential for online learning.

The first speaker, was Julian Lombardi was planet-lap and he painted a picture of what comes next. The argument ran that currently the Internet is the same architecture now as it was in 1984 (ARPANET) and that the demands now put upon it by the billions of instances of use means that something new is required. The way that the Internet is currently structured has one big flaw and that is when you need a service so do I and everyone else at the same time. This leads to a failure of the Internet of either a catastrophic form where services don’t work at all or something less dramatic where things just slowly grind along.

What is needed is intelligent routing and this can be delivered through a set of servers using the current Internet for transporting data and jointly holding multiple sets of data to allow for the ‘intelligent’ network to make choices about where data is accessed and retrieved from. This is one such server at Princeton University and it is part of the planet-lab network of interconnecting nodes.

The example used being email, currently this sits on a server somewhere (your ISP) and if this fails you have no email, but if this were simultaneously located in places around the globe whenever you needed it would be readily accessible. Your email needs to be stored somewhere, but not at a particular place! So what about data integrity, well this was explained by using the analogy of time and clocks. As we move around day to day we come across many different time pieces and although we probably don’t trust any one 100%, we know that by a process of ‘mediation’ between them we have a robust and trustworthy system overall. This sounded complex to me, but was explained as possible because of the decrease in the cost of both powerful servers (linux based), and the shared nataure of the project, that is to join you have to commit a server and a connection. It reminded me of the SETI project that harnessed the power of individual’s computers.

This is a very much a non-technological take on all of this. I am always aware of the hype that surrounds these things and no doubt other groups are also working on the second generation Internet along this and different lines.