Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

I have chosen “I-Europe” as the title of my personal blog. Obviously, there is a story behind this title. In this case the story is related to discussions at the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) 2003 in Hamburg. Looking back, these discussions were a turning point in the development of European vocational education training (VET) research communities. Moreover, for me personally the discussions in Hamburg (and the follow-up phase) were a learning experience in my own re-positioning as a European VET researcher. So, I need to revisit the Hamburg experience in order to explain what this blog of mine stands for in the current discussion on European VET research and in the mapping of European innovations in VET.

Back to ECER 2003 in Hamburg

Alongside the ECER 2003 in Hamburg the VETNET network of European VET researchers (see www.vet-research.net) organised an Open Meeting to discuss alternative prospects for European research cooperation. The reasons for organising this special meeting were the following factors:

1. The preparation of proposals for the 6th European framework programme had become a Marathon run for creating huge consortia to cover ‘critical mass’ of European VET research by strong partners. Yet, at the end of this Marathon there semmed to be very few survivors and there was much doubt whether such consortia were workable.
2. As an alternative option for trans-national cooperation in European educational research the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP) of the UK had started to create a network with other national research programmes in education and training. The related “Learning in Knowledge Society” (LinKS) platform appeared to offer a new avenue for European cooperation (independently of Brussels).
3. In addition to the two above mentioned developments there was a need to discuss the state of the art in VET research after the completion of earlier generations of European projects and networked research activities. Also, there was an open question, how the umbrella networkVETNET could support new initiatives.

The “I-Europe” approach as an alternative agenda

My contribution to the Open Meeting was related to the third point. I prepared a Power Point presentation (which I still have to dig out from the archives of lost treasures) and subsequently a strategy paper (see the attached document) – both with the heading “I-Europe”. My idea was to stimulate VET researchers’ own debate on a future European research agenda. The “I-Europe” approach drew attention to following developments in VET and to related research tasks:

a) Integrative developments: The need to analyse the role of European framework processes and the prospects for promoting mutual learning across different VET systems or VET cultures;

b) Innovative developments: The need to analyse the role of pedagogic innovations in VET or work-related learning and their relevance for wider innovation agendas in working life and reagional contexts.

c) Intercultural developments: The need to analyse internationalisation of labour markets, redistribution of job opportunities and new mobility across Europe as a challenge for hitherto national-oriented VET policies and practices.

d) Inclusive developments: The need to analyse the possibilities for promoting social inclusion and alternative career prospects with the help of vocational learning and the use of portfolios in the empowerment of learners.

As I remember it, the “I-Europe” presentation was received well in the meeting and there was a great sense of having something common to be shared with the colleagues. I was encouraged to write it down as a strategy paper and to circulate it across Europe. Some colleagues felt that we should sign it as a “Manifesto”. But the everday life brought very soon the grey realities into picture.

The short history  of the follow-up

When I actually managed to write my thoughts into a strategy paper and to present thed paper for the VETNET board meeting some months later, there was very little do be done with it. The colleagues gave praise for bringing together several strategic points and suggesting corresponding activities (reviewing, accompanying and evaluating activities). Yet, without special funding to carry out such measures, there was no prospect to continue the discussion on the basis of the “I-Europe” strategy paper. Everyone was busily looking for new funding opportunities and there was very little available for such self-developed initiatives to promote European research & development dialogue in the field of VET.

As I remember the discussion at the VETNET board meeting, one of the collegues – possibly Alan Brown – mentioned that the paper was years ahead its time. At the moment this seamed to me as a ‘fair enough’ interim assessment and to move on to other issues. Now, after some years have passed, it is possible to look back and consider, what all has changed and what would now be appropriate ways to stimulate new research intiatives, networking and knowledge sharing in European VET research. Furthermore, now it is possible to take a look what are the new developments in the European landscape of VET-related innovations.

So, this is the background story for my personal blog. In my next posting I will revisit the “I-Europe” approach from the perspective of present date and bring the debate ‘back to future’.

Pekka Kämäräinen

PS. For those who have an interest to go deeper into the discussions at ECER 2003 in Hamburg I have also attached my related mission reports of the year 2003 and my presentation at our ECER symposium.

How ironic. I was waiting for a telephone call to IBL to talk about a discussion for Sounds of the Bazaar podcast on collaborative learning. And my eye caught this article from the Guardian technology page.

“More than 1,700 public employees have been sacked or disciplined for internet or email misuse in the past three years, our research has found.

The figures – obtained from 65 institutions – show how strongly employers are clamping down on staff who spend hours on social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo.

Unions say that disputes over the sites are growing at a phenomenal rate and have demanded clearer guidelines for their use. Studies have shown that up to £130m a day in productivity is lost because of the sites, with Facebook’s British members spending an average of 143 minutes a month logged in.”

And I went on to have a great talk with Jaan and Agnes from Berlin about how e-collaboration tools can enhance learning – especially informal learning, boost productivity and promote innovation.

But it seems UK employers just don’t get it. To a large extent it is a question of trust – the very issue I talked with Jay Cross about in an interview a few weeks ago. Informal learning is the most powerful route to competence development and innovation in the workplace. But informal learning means trusting employees – trusting employees to usefully use their time, trusting employees to make decision, trusting employees to try out new ideas.

The public sector is probably the worst place for trust. In many organizations public sector workers are not even entitled to send emails without prior approval. Supervision rules. Why? The work culture of the public sector is still all too often rooted in Fordist ideas of production. Knowledge is carefully filtered and controlled. Strict hierarchies prevail.

I ‘m not sure even researchers and those who defend the workers get it. From the same article: “Cary Cooper, a professor of organisational psychology and health at Lancaster University, said that managers should be realistic. “Britain has some of the longest working hours in the developed world. Employers have created this culture. It is natural for people to have to use work computers for organising their personal life.”

Of course I agree with him. But that is not the point. Social networking is not just about organising ones social life. I certainly do not go to Facebook to arrange to meet my friends in the pub.

Social networking can be about spreading and sharing ideas, solving problems, forming and participating in communities of practice. And to all of you who say I am not being real, I suggest you study how people really use the internet n companies. Most people like to learn, they enjoy learning. Learning is a natural human activity. How sad we are so suspicious of it.

end of todays rant. Time to organise my social life. i am going to the pub.

Technorati Tags: communities of practice, informal learning

I am thoroughly bored with Facebook now. An endless wall of twitters. I am totally indifferent that Brian Kelly added the Where I have Been application, that 5 of my friends were tagged in an album or that Emma Duke Williams joined the group A Cup of Tea Solves Everything. Sorry. Perhaps I am just an anti-social heartless being. But I don’t care. Mind, it is strange. As much as Facebook status updates annoy me, I like the same feature on skype. That Ben is at ‘Coffee time’, Martin ‘is buzzing’ and Lawrie is ‘overrun by ferrets’ seems to add to my day. I can’t really explain it.

S, time to move on to something new. I have just opened an account with Ning. I know I’m probably being slow – I’m sure you have all already got Ning accounts.

Ironically I only opened the account because Michelle De Craene invited me to join a group she had set up: ‘Remixing History: The International Techohistorian Project‘. Ironically – because she invited me through Facebook. So, tehre is some use for it after all.

Anyway I like the idea of being a Techohistorian – perhaps I should put that on my business card. And although there is not much there yet the idea sounds good to me – “This project is to encourage educators to take on the role of historian in sharing technological advances.”

Back to Ning – had a play around. Seems very easy to set up groups, teh interface is clean and attractive and appearance can be fairly quickly customised. I could see me using it for quick ad-hoc groups around an event or a course. And indeed, my friends from UOC have set up a group to continue discussions around the recent inspiring UOC Unesco International seminar.

The problem I see with it is the opposite of Facebook. There is little or no potential or functionaility for social networking. Unless I am missing something you can set up or join groups. Thats it, full stop. And for that metter, the my groups page isn’t working properly for me – it only displays one of the three groups I am a member of, having grown up on Elgg, I am used to being able to link up with others based on their interests, to manage feeds in and out and to configure my own page through Widgets. Ning has none of this.

I suppose I am just a moaner. But there has to be some half way house. Trouble is that much as I love social networking software we are not in teh driving seat, we are evlauting other peoples designs and development to see what use we can make of it. That is why I am still excited by Freefolio – at least in hacking WordPress we can react to real needs as we find them, rather than telling people what they need is what the software provides.

Pontydysgy will from now on host my personal blog. I thank Graham and Dirk for this opportunity and try to do my best.

I will write on current developments in vocational education and training (VET) with a focus on

• Innovations in teaching/learning processes and in the use of digital media,
• Integrative initiatives in European cooperation and in trans-continental dialogue,
• Inclusive initiatives in the shaping of educational pathways and vocational progression routes,
• Intercultural understanding at the level of international cooperation projects and everday life in education and training.

All this is related to my work as a researcher in VET (with a focus on European and international cooperation). In a short while I will tell more of the background of the name “I-Europe” and explain what it stands for.
Welcome to share this space with me,

Pekka Kämäräinen

(Pekka Kämäräinen is a senior researcher at Institut Technik & Bildung (ITB), University of Bremen and a voluntary test-writer at the blog-space of Pontydysgu.)

Despite one erroneously dated back entry, which, for an hour until I corrected it, indicated I was in Houston, I have enjoyed two weeks of not traveling. And that has left me with enough time to work on developing this site. And after two weeks it is worth a quick reflection on how the site is doing.

Firstly I am gratified with the number of visitors. Firtsly as far as i can tell most regular readers have diverted their feedreaders from the old World Wide Web bog to our new address at Pontydysgu. Secondly, visitor figures seem to be very respectable (although I am not quite sure what respectable means in this case). Of course, we were boosted by a reference in Steven Downe’s OL Daily, which resulted in a quick flurry of hits.

More importantly perhaps, Dirk Stieglitz has made great progress in bringing on-line new sections of the site. Multimedia is mostly live. Some of the projects section is partly populated. Now we are thinking about how to deal with the research section.

At a technical level, we still have a few glitches. WordPress stubbornly refuses ot show us thumbnails of uploaded graphic files (anyone any suggestions?). The categories list which we use to allocate the entries ot different parts of the web site is growing alarmingly long and we can find no way of displaying sub lists. Widgets are working but we cannot find proper ways of dynamically styling the contents. Any help with any of these issues will be gratefully acknowledged.

But the site is developing in the direction we intended. We particularly wanted a web site which is dynamic , which incororates multi media, which can be updated frequently with minimum programming effort and which allows us to show the relation bewteen out research and ideas and the day ot day work we are undertaking, particualrly on projects. And we wanted a site which connects with the wider community of practice. In this respect, the number of comments on different post has been very gratifying.

Over the next week we will continue to bring the projects section online. And I will continue to enter back posts from Wales Wide Web. This is particularly tedious. I am uploading them from Ecto. This uses a small Apple script to reset the date to the original. But of course the categories all have to be re-entered and Ecto crashes on some entries, those with attachments or multi media which it does not know how to handle. We will also be incorporating more feeds, from delicious and possibly from aggregators around the different project topics. Hope you are enjoying the site. And if you have any suggestions how we can improve it do not hesitate to put forward your ideas.

I remember three years ago having a debate with Alexadra Toedt at a SIGOSSEE meeting in Denmark on why I thought there was no future for VLEs. I was a bit torn between wanting to promote Open Source software alternatives to Blackboard and the like but also frustrated by the pedagogic restrictions of institutional systems for managing learning. Needless to say I convinced few people at best they thought I was well meaning but hopelessly impractical.Nowadays it is becoming almost respectable to predict the end of the VLE. But fortunately we have well developed alternatives to the VLE. In any case students are voting with their feet (or mouse). Better still we have an increasingly sophisticated argument not just as to why VLEs are bad (which I have to admit was the heart of my argument but why “loosely coupled, freely available third party systems” can be better. This is from The Ed Techie blog by Martin Weller:

• “Better quality tools – because offering each of these loosely coupled elements is what each company does, it is in their interest to make them really good. This means they stay up to date, have better features, and look better than most things produced in higher education.
• Modern look and feel – related to the above, these tools often look better, and also their use makes a course feel more modern to a user who is raised on these tools compared with the rather sterile, dull systems they encounter in higher ed.
• Appropriate tools – because they are loosely coupled the educator can choose whatever ones they want, rather than being restricted to the limited set in the VLE. This is one of the biggest draws I feel – as an academic if I want a particular tool I don’t have to put a request in to IT and wait a year to get a reduced quality version, I just go ahead and use it.
• Cost – using a bunch of free tools has got to be cheaper hasn’t it?
• Avoids software sedimentation – when you have institutional systems they tend to embody institutional practice which becomes increasingly difficult to break. Having loosely coupled system makes this easier, and also encourages people to think in different ways.
• Disintermediation happens – this isn’t really a benefit, just an observation. If a services can be disintermediated then it will be. In this case the central VLE system is disintermediated as academics use a variety of freely available tools.”

This may not be entirely new to readers of the old World Wide Web, I think I posted an early draft of this paper. Indeed, it has been six months in revsion. And now I have missed the deadline for publication. The paper was originally intended as part of an special edition of a soemwhat posha cademic journal. I thought they might protest at the content ideas. But no, the big problem was the referencing. One reviewer said: “I did, however, miss proper referencing in the first few parts of the paper. For example, the author is unlikely to have come up with the link between the societal demands of the industrial revolution and the organisational structure of the education system, but it looks as if that is what he claims.” Well I did. Honestly. But I am sure I am not the only one to have that idea and if anyone can come up with refercnces for me I would be very grateful. And also for any other feedback.

I have included the full text of ther paper in the extension to this post. But I have also linked it as an RTF file if you would prefer to download it.

The Social impact of Personal Learning Environments

1. Personal Learning Environments – cause and effect

Although the Personal Learning Environment (PLE) is a very new term, (van Harmalen (2006) argues the first recorded use of the term is November 4, 2004) the concept represents the latest step in an alternative approach to e-learning which can trace its origins to earlier systems such as Colloquia (reference) , the first peer-to-peer learning system (released as Learning Landscapes in 2000), and to more recent phenomena such as the Elgg system released in 2003 (reference). The PLE approach is based on a learner-centred view of learning and differs fundamentally from the alternative Learning Management Systems or Virtual Learning Environments approach both of which are based on an institution- or course-centred view of learning. Van Harmelen describes Personal Learning Environments as “systems that help learners take control of and manage their own learning. This includes providing support for learners to

• set their own learning goals
• manage their learning; managing both content and process
• communicate with others in the process of learning
• and thereby achieve learning goals.”

He goes on to say: “a PLE may be composed of one or more subsystems: As such it may be a desktop application, or composed of one or more web-based services.”

Downes (2006) says “the heart of the concept of the PLE is that it is a tool that allows a learner (or anyone) to engage in a distributed environment consisting of a network of people, services and resources. It is not just Web 2.0, but it is certainly Web 2.0 in the sense that it is (in the broadest sense possible) a read-write application.” Important concepts in PLEs include the integration of both formal and informal learning episodes into a single experience, the use of social networks that can cross institutional boundaries and the use of networking protocols (Peer-to-Peer, web services, syndication) to connect a range of resources and systems within a personally-managed space. The ‘pedagogy’ behind the PLE – if it could be still called that – is that it offers a portal to the world through which learners can explore and create, according to their own interests and directions, interacting as they choose, with their friends and learning community. Seely Brown (1999) has drawn attention to the social nature of learning: “Learning becomes as much social as cognitive, as much concrete as abstract, and becomes intertwined with judgement and exploration.”

This paper examines the social impact of Personal Learning Environments. In so doing, it is difficult to separate cause and effect. Personal Learning Environments can be expected to have a profound effect on systems for teaching and learning, on pedagogic approaches to learning and on knowledge development and sharing. Conversely, the emergence of PLEs and the widespread interest in PLEs may be seen as a reaction to the changing ways in which people are using technology for learning, to new societal demands for education and to changing forms of knowledge usage within society.

Download rtf version of full paper

(more…)

Project at a glance

A Framework for the Continuing Professional Development of Trainers, TTPlus

Partners: Pontydysgu (Coordinators), University of Bremen, University of Utrecht, Pantelon University, Athen, Academus, Navreme

Funded by the European Commission Leoanardo da Vinci programme

Start date: November 2006

End date: October 2008

…

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