Networked Learning and Networked Information: Towards a
Theoretical Basis for the Development of Integrated Information Environments
Peter Brophy
Manchester
Metropolitan University
p.brophy@mmu.ac.uk
In recent years it has become clear that networked information
environments need to be closely integrated with the environments in which their
users undertake their mainstream tasks and activities. The EDNER project,
undertaking a formative evaluation of a major national information environment,
provided an opportunity to explore the ways in which information resources were
being integrated into learning and teaching within the United Kingdom. In this paper the Director of the EDNER
project describes the work that has been carried out and summarises some of the
key findings. The paper suggests that
integration between different environments, including those delivering
information and those supporting learning, is the key requirement. As we move towards ever more complex
networked environments, including those driven by complex interactions between
“objects” of many different kinds, it will be necessary to revisit the
underlying theories and paradigms which have been developed by researchers and
practitioners operating within their own areas of expertise.
information environments; learning; digital libraries; evaluation
Between 2000 and 2003, a multidisciplinary team from Manchester
Metropolitan University and Lancaster University, UK, undertook a large-scale
formative evaluation of the UK’s developing academic information environment,
focusing on its development in support of learning and teaching. The approach
taken in the Evaluation of the Distributed National Electronic Resource (EDNER) project was multifaceted, reflecting
not only the differing backgrounds of members of the team but also echoing a
very broad range of development projects, services and infrastructure within a
complex environment which was both maturing and finding new directions during
the period of the study. A general description of EDNER has appeared elsewhere
(Brophy, 2002). The team reported to the Joint Information Systems Committee
(JISC) in July 2003 and was asked to continue its work, with an even broader focus, for a further year to July 2004 – this is,
at the time of writing, in hand.
EDNER was funded by the UK’s JISC as part of a large development
Programme, known as 5/99, which was seeking to develop what was then known as
the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) to provide a greater focus
on learning and teaching – in part this was a reaction to what had been seen in
some quarters as an undue emphasis on the support of research and thus, to some
extent, the Programme could be seen as a rebalancing activity. The nature
of this DNER, which rapidly came to be
restyled the ‘JISC Information Environment’, is discussed further below.
However, it is worth quoting here from one of the documents produced when the
5/99 DNER Development Programme was set up
Although this data has been primarily used
for research purposes, it is beginning to find a use in learning and teaching.
However, this work has been slow and some additional funding would enable the
JISC services to be used in totally different ways than originally envisaged.
There is a strong requirement to improve the interaction between the people who
are involved in the development of new learning environments and the national
information systems and services being developed by the JISC. It is therefore
proposed that an initiative be funded to integrate learning environments with
the wider information landscape aimed at increasing the use of on-line
electronic information and research datasets in the learning and teaching
process. (Joint Information Systems Committee, 1999a. Emphasis added)
We were charged with undertaking formative evaluation at the Programme
level i.e. to look at the overall development and its impact rather than the
performance of individual projects or studies. In our terms, evaluation was
concerned primarily with the outcomes and impacts of the services and projects
we were investigating. Thus we were not so much concerned to assess the
internal quality of products and project deliverables, but much more interested
in the effects that these had on the user communities. Colleagues from the Centre for Studies in
Advanced Learning Technologies (CSALT) at Lancaster University provided
pedagogical expertise while the Centre for Research in Library and Information
Management (CERLIM) at Manchester Metropolitan University undertook
investigations from an information management perspective. The background to
the pedagogical research approach taken will be found in Goodyear and Jones
(2002).
The JISC Information Environment (IE) is a particularly well-developed
instance of an environment designed to deliver networked information services
across a wide area – in this case the whole of the UK’s higher and further
education. The concept of an ‘information environment’ is relatively new, and
derives from the shift of traditional, mainly paper-based information services
– such as those provided by libraries – into networked spaces. Thus most
‘information environments’ owe their design to research into the concept of the
electronic library or information service (see, for example, Owen and Wiercz
(1996), Dempsey, Russell and Murray (1999), Brophy (2000), Brophy (2001)). In
essence these approaches depicted the role of the information environment as linking
together highly heterogeneous information resources with a disparate body of
users. It was, in Owen and Wiercz’s words, a ‘knowledge mediator’. At this
stage the models described were essentially self-contained, providing little
explanation as to what these environments were, fundamentally, for. The
user was essentially a ‘black box’ appearing at the end of a process of
information transmission.
However, it has become clear as development has proceeded that a
conceptual shift is needed in order to integrate information environments more
closely with the other environments in which their users are working. Thus the
JISC IE must be integrated with the research environments of UK academic
researchers – such as the Grid – and, more to the point here, with the learning
environments which students and tutors in UK higher and further education are
utilizing. One might suggest that what is needed is an information environment
seamlessly woven into each virtual learning environment, although
terminological distinctions perhaps make such a concept very imprecise.
Nevertheless that description would give a flavour of what is intended.
The origins of the JISC Information Environment itself can be found in
the eLib Programme of the mid to late 1990s (see
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/elib/). While that Programme had funded a large
number of individual projects – alongside electronic information services
organised nationally by the JISC – there was a lack of coherence so that the whole
was perhaps rather less than the sum of the parts. In 1999, the JISC launched a
new programme in which the term Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER)
came to prominence. In a Circular letter to institutions inviting proposals, it
was stated that:
The Distributed National Electronic Resource
(DNER) is a managed environment for accessing quality assured information
resources on the Internet which are available from many sources. These
resources include scholarly journals, monographs, textbooks, abstracts,
manuscripts, maps, music scores, still images, geospatial images and other
kinds of vector and numeric data, as well as moving picture and sound
collections. (Joint Information Systems Committee,
1999b).
An early task for the EDNER team was to try and develop an understanding
of what the DNER was and what it meant to its various stakeholders – just as it
was transforming itself into the JISC Information Environment. The project took
a number of approaches to this question. One was to analyse related concepts,
ranging from VLEs and MLEs through digital libraries and museums to publishers
and dot.com enterprises to identify commonalities and examine how these
addressed the tasks and activities being undertaken by their users. At a
practical level we worked with 5/99 project teams to elucidate their views on
the intended outcomes of their work, encouraging them to undertake a number of
exercises designed to surface their assumptions and critical engagements i.e.
who among their intended user communities would need to be actively involved
and committed if sustainable, positive outcomes were to be achieved. We were
interested, of course, in outcomes which demonstrated effects on the practice
of teaching and the experience of learning. Among the techniques used, a
‘History of the Future’ exercise (EDNER, 2002) was particularly successful. As
noted in the Final Report, “a central
point of our approach has been to help create a shared understanding of what
project teams thought would change in educational practice and how their
actions would lead towards those changes” (Brophy et al., 2004).
The JISC IE addresses a very wide community with a range of very
different perspectives. We therefore devoted considerable effort to an attempt
to characterise these views and perceptions. The project’s Final Report (Brophy
et al, 2004) summarises these findings. In brief:
·
Students are aware of the need to use information
resources in their learning, but they define the quality of resources in ways
which are quite different from the formal academic enterprise – so, for
example, whether or not a paper is peer-reviewed is well down their list of
priorities (Griffiths, 2003). This finding reflects that of Cmor and Lippold (2001),
who stated that students will give the same academic weight to discussion list
comments as peer reviewed journal articles. Rapid response to queries is
important, while ‘satisficing’ – the ‘good enough’ syndrome – is widely
apparent. Hence the widespread addiction to Google as the search engine of
choice, over and above academically-oriented services provided within the JISC
IE, such as the Resource Discovery Network (http://www.rdn.ac.uk).
A further important issue for IE developers, though it will probably seem
obvious to educational researchers, is that use of resources is linked to
progression. However, we noted very few examples where the level for which a
resource was being developed was part of the design of the project or service.
·
We noted during our work that there was some evidence
that academic staff’s awareness of networked information resources was
increasing, yet conversely there seemed no evidence that this awareness was
being transmitted to their students. A particular area of concern was over the
presentation of resources to students, where there is no consistency of
practice. In the past one might have expected modules to be accompanied by a
more or less self-sufficient reading list constructed with intelligible if not
always strictly accurate references to the subject literature. Now the
availability of both the Web and various online learning environments has led
to a situation where students are being pointed to a bewildering array of
resources, many of which are out of date and which may be deeply embedded in
other materials. Thus some academic staff would set up extensive web pages with
pointers to useful online resources, but the contents would not infrequently be
idiosyncratic and frequently out of date. As with students we noted that tutors
make heavy use of search engines, particularly Google, rather than JISC IE
services – which is not to say that the latter are not used. We also noted that
there are significant differences between disciplines in tutors’ use of
information resources in networked environments. Finally, it was useful to find
evidence to confirm earlier findings (e.g. Wilson and Streatfield, 1980) that
tutors make heavy use of non-formal information resources, including
face-to-face and electronic discussion with colleagues.
·
Another stakeholder group was the academic librarians,
who are charged with the systematic collection, organisation and delivery of
information resources in support of learning, teaching and research. Among the
web sites we analysed, the library sites tended to be the best organised with a
systematic presentation of information resources. However, librarians did not see
it as their role to organise free, Internet-based resources but rather to
concentrate on those for which they had to pay a subscription. This in itself
raises an interesting issue about the ‘quality’ of resources, which we refer to
again below. We also noted that relationships between librarians and tutors are
generally weak, and that few librarians are significant players in the
development of VLEs or of their components. Librarians believe that they have a
key role to play in enabling students to acquire ‘information skills’ or
‘information literacy’; it is not at all clear that this is a view shared by
their teaching colleagues.
·
Our final major stakeholder group (though we could have
explored many others) consisted of senior managers with responsibility for
information and IT resources. What we found was that, apart from those
individuals serving on the JISC’s Committees or other working groups, there was
a feeling of disengagement from the JISC’s development activities. Although the
JISC was felt to provide an important function, these individuals did not
articulate a vision of how this fed into and influenced institutional
development. In particular, the contribution they wished the JISC IE to make in
the delivery of learning in general and e-learning in particular was unclear.
There is a close relationship between an ‘information environment’ and
the underlying technical architecture or framework which enables and supports
the delivery of services to users. Initially the thinking was very much about
the architecture as enabling ‘information objects’ – books, journal articles
and their equivalents – to be identified, requested and delivered. So, for
example, integrated systems would be needed to enable an object to be
discovered, located, requested, delivered and used. However, two considerations
have led to a broadening of thinking in this area. Firstly, it has been
realised that the concept of ‘use’ can only be represented meaningfully once it
is unpacked and thus allowed to influence the whole design – use drives the
nature of the systems required. Secondly, it has been recognised that in order
to deliver information services in support of use we have to manage a whole
range of objects which are not themselves ‘information objects’ in the sense
described above. For example, we must manage people, rights, use processes,
names/identifiers, relationships (between people, between objects, between
names and so on) and policies. In treating all of these constituent resources
systematically, it becomes apparent that the underlying architecture of an
online information environment is very similar to that of an online learning
environment, an online research environment or an online work environment. In
each case the focus shifts away from specific content or content types towards
interlocking processes. For example, an individual’s rights need to be managed
in a similar way whether the system is supporting a person’s learning, research
or information acquisition.
For this reason there has been an emphasis recently on exploring the
relationships between environments that have grown up separately (IE, VLE etc.)
but started to converge. The JISC’s DiVLE Programme in 2002-3, which we also
evaluated, is a case in point – this work is described by Markland (2002). An
example of the convergence of interests is given by the work being undertaken
to map learning object meta-data (LOM, SCORM etc.) and information object
meta-data (Dublin Core etc.) – an instance would be UKOLN’s work on mapping the
collection description schema developed under the Research Support Libraries
Group to IEEE LOM (see http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/tools/rslplom.html).
One of the issues for EDNER has been to attempt to elucidate the links
between activity within a national framework, such as the JISC IE, and work
being undertaken at the local institutional level. A second issue has been to
try to develop understanding of why different countries have taken very
different approaches to the development of information environments, although
this work had to be deferred to 2003-04 and is not reported here.
During our work we examined the national and institutional priorities
being followed by higher education institutions[1].
In the main we found that the JISC IE development work aligned well with
national priorities, although some, such as ‘widening participation’, had
perhaps been neglected. Here we should add that this should not be taken to
imply that across the whole of the JISC’s activities the same emphases would
necessarily have been observed – work funded by the JISC Committee for Learning
& Teaching (JCLT), for example, might have demonstrated a different profile
but was not being evaluated.
We did not uncover a great deal of convincing evidence of planned or
actual integration between the national service development and the student
experience within the local institution, except perhaps in a few very tightly
defined areas where a project was engaging with individual tutors. Instead we noted that IE developers often
characterised their contribution as “improving access” to resources. There was little conceptual continuity between
this notion and that of a learning experience.
We concluded that there is as yet only a weak link between the planned
outputs of development projects in this area and educational practice. This in turn led us to conclude that
development teams often need to spend more time elucidating their pedagogical
beliefs and engaging with educational practitioners.
An intriguing issue for the future will be to explore how developments in
ambient information environments, including the development of the semantic web
(Berners-Lee et al., 2001) in particular, will affect the design of
integrated user environments. Where objects and systems contain the
intelligence required to predict a learner’s requirements in advance, to offer
personalised services ahead of expressed need and to deliver via a multiplicity
of interactive devices, it is unlikely that the user will be able to discern a
separate ‘system’ recognisable as an information, or a learning, environment.
In such scenarios, with which many researchers are already engaging[2],
the everyday living environment possesses the intelligence to offer all the
services the individual needs. This suggests that there is a need for further
focus on the interoperability of objects (whether they are ‘learning’,
‘information’, ‘leisure’ or whatever will be irrelevant), which in turn
requires well developed ontologies to describe the properties of both objects
and individuals (and collections and groups) and the relationships between
them. This is a hugely challenging, yet exciting, agenda.
The implication of these developments is that we need to draw together
pedagogical theories and paradigms, research frameworks, “cultures of enquiry”
(see, for example, Byrne 1998), information – or even knowledge – environments,
and broader concepts of living within a networked world with constant
interaction with highly heterogeneous e-objects. It may be that, if the current
emphasis on lifelong learning has long-term validity, we are starting to see
the development of an integrated environment in which learning, research, work,
leisure and indeed everyday life are able to interact and thus artificial
barriers between human activities are reduced.
Returning to
the EDNER Project itself, we have been able to explore a major national
initiative in higher education from a number of different standpoints. We were
convinced that the development has enormous value, but our role as formative
evaluators gave us a remit to highlight issues where we felt the evidence
showed that greater value might be obtained.
In particular
we noted that the information environment means very different things to
different stakeholders. Thus perhaps
the greatest challenge is to reconcile differences of viewpoint, and to ensure
that we are all talking the same language.
In terms of learning and teaching it is clear that the provision of
networked information services as very considerable value. However that value can best be harnessed if
those involved at the leading edge of development commit themselves to
exploring beyond the boundaries within which they have become accustomed to
operate. So among our key conclusions
were that:
·
Development projects must go beyond the pursuit of an
“access” agenda and must, from the very beginning, describe the ways in which
they believe that learners can use their resources to enhance the learning
experience.
·
The outcomes of projects must be integrated into the
learning activities designed by tutors so that students are actively engaged in
turning the project’s product into a vehicle for purposive learning.
·
A pedagogical
rationale needs to be made explicit so that those who wish to become engaged
with the product understand how it is intended to lead to specific educational
outcomes and what may be required on their part in order to achieve this.
More than this, we would argue that arising from the EDNER
project and from the work of many other research teams who have been engaged in
examining the potential of new, networked environments there is an opportunity
to rethink the ways in which institutions, tutors, and learners engage with one
another and each facilitates the learning experience. At the very least, as we
have written elsewhere, “We need to explore how the student ‘connects’ between (a)
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[1] A complication was that during the period of EDNER’s research the JISC acquired responsibility for further as well as higher education, although our focus remained – until August 2003 – on the former.
[2] The European Commission’s current Information Society Technologies Programme, within the Sixth Framework Programme, is focussed on ambient technologies and is demonstrating considerable conceptual convergence.