Interview with David Porter

On Saturday afternoon I had a conversation with David Porter of BC Campus which happened over Skype, and despite both our efforts I didn't manage to record it. Subsequently what was planned to be a podcast here has turned into a typed report.

So I will start with a bit about BC Campus which was mentioned in a previous post. The program is a virtual higher education campus. It is a partnership of 26 public higher education institutions within British Columbia in Canada, which allow their students to become part of a much larger educational community. Its students are mainly undergraduates and BCcampus has been running officially for about 3 years now.

The idea has been running for much longer, but it was 3 years ago when the British Columbia government picked up on the idea, and David told me that a lot of government funding has since become available and has really given the project the chance to make it what it is.

I asked David how he could see BC Campus evolving over the next few years and he said that their vision of supplementing traditional educational schemes with more social softwares was a general goal, using items like blogs, casts and wikis, to build on these social virtual environments.

In my previous research the word social hadn't really arisen, but during my interview with David it came up a lot. He had just returned from a conference on the idea of wikis and he painted a picture of educational environments that were less run by the instructors, and what seemed to me as more of a socialist community whee everyone could contribute, comment, post and debate on an equal level.

This idea of peers leads me onto my next question, which was based on futuristic technological aspects, and which did David feel would be making a big impact. His first answer was peer to peer services, talking about the influence of services such as iTunes. In retrospect, the idea of "Peer To Peer" sums up this socialist concept, where each persons perspective is equally welcomed and the instructors role becomes more of a guiding influence. David also went on to talk about managing identities. In the creative industries, as students and practitioners, we have portfolio's of work, and he proposed the idea of an "intellectual portfolio". People can advertise their knowledge, their lack of knowledge, the things they want to learn about and the things they feel they could contribute. This again paints a nice image of perpetual learning, an erasing of the boundries between education and the work place.

While we were on the subject of portfolios, I asked how he felt about the decline in "value" of degrees, and what the state of things on the other side of the ocean are. He agreed that students that come along with credentials from Harvard or the other Ivy League colleges have an instant impact and it's the rest of the population that would benefit from these "intellectual portfolios" in the same way that creative industry graduates do.

The coversation went on to talk about V.L.E's in a more specific way and one of the key themes was that of feedback technologies, where student weren't simply being given the content over the web, but also the chance to comment, ask questions in real time or in the future during revision. It's the lack of this feedback, that is currently hindering a lot of V.L.E's.

David made the observation that this could strictly be due to the traditional approach of a lot of the instructors, and as the generations move on and students become the teachers, this will become less of an issue as they will be working on experience a pre-established vision.

I mentioned that due to the lack of virtual communities at Ravensbourne, a lot of the students have turned to their own structures, and I used the MID 2 Blog as an example. David simply stated that it's a common occurance right now, and if the instructors don't pace themselves they will lose a lot of valuable contact with the group.

I asked David how he felt about virtual environments in relation to students social skills. A lot of the critics state that this new approach doesn't supply the students with vital interpersonal skills. David said that when the environments are structured in the synchronous style that this is a big issue, but as new technologies allow for asynchronous structures and easy feedback, these skills can be easily supplemented. Not only that but they can be built in a more creative fashion. Students can comment, debate and voice their opinions during live conferences or at any time of day, the broadness of their contributions become much wider.

In all these situations, the effectiveness of the system relies on the creativity of the architect and the instructor.

We did touch on the concept of augmented reality but we both agreed that most of the projects that have so far been publicised have been conceptual and the stuff of research labs.

In conclusion, the key thing I drew from the discussion is that the boundries of the V.L.E. world are implemented by the creativity architects and the instructors. As time passes and younger instructors have a chance to play a key role, these boundries will stretch.

The concept of this "socialist" environment also got me thinking a lot, and although in the content David spoke of it it seemed to be aimed much more at post graduate students, I think the (relatively) simple implementation of wikis and the increasing willingness of young students to contribute to the digital world makes a very interesting picture of virtual education and our perceptions of the lines between student and teacher.