Pontydysgu – Bridge to Learning

Last week I expressed concern that the development of the Open Univeristy SocialLearn project was being motivated by business concerns rather than learning. But it is not difficult to see why a university – especially the Open University which is based on distance learning – might wish to explore new business models.

I am struck by he growing avaiability of free online courses and opportunities for professional development. Just this morning I have picked up on an excellent free seventeen week course on on-line community facilitation being run by Leigh Blackall from the University of Otago on the Wikieducator and the weekly events around Metanomics – the study of economics and policy in the “metaverse” of online virtual world – run by…I am not quite sure who. I found about the first from Twitter and the second form Skype. These services are becoming the new global prospectus of learning opportunties.

Certainly in the field of Technology Enhanced Learning it is perfectly possible to follow an advanced professional development programme for free and engage with the best thinkers in vibrant global communities without having to enroll with a formal education institution. OK – we might expect this in such a technology enabled subject but how long before other subjects catch on.

It has been said for some time that the selling point for universities will be their certifcate granting powers. I am unconvinced. Our study some time ago of the use of technology for learning in Small and Medium Enterprises suggested that apart from in reglated occupations there was limited interest in certification. Both employees and employers were more intersted in competence in terms of what people could do and what they had learnt to do rather than their certificates. And as in one form or another e-Portfolios – or more likely individual eletronic mash-ups showing achievement – become more common then pressures for certification will lessen.

So what is the future for universities? Obviously they have an important role in research. And they could hve an important role in teaching and learning provision. That the Wikieducator is offering a programme in on-line facilitation for free is brilliant. The enrolled students are from all over the world. But how will universities fund themselves in this new world? This is where the rub of the problem lies. The recent trends in many countries towards devolved budgets and funding based on enrolled student numbers does not help. Far better to try to assess the value of universities to the economy and society as a whole and fund their activities accordingly. Of course that is not easy. And universities are not cheap. But we need to start developing new models and that probably requires far more radical thinking than just tinkering with existing funding models.

Pretty crazy and scary video recommended by Cristina Costa. Director Micheal Wesch says “My videos explore mediated culture, seeking to merge the ideas of Media Ecology and Cultural Anthropology.” This video, Tiwtter and teh World Simulation “demonstrates the use of Twitter and Jott in the World Simulation, a radical experiment in education coordinated by Michael Wesch, Kansas State University.”

I am greatly intrigued by Martin Weller’s presentation on SocialLearn yesterday. One of the advantages of Elluminate is it allows you to watch a recording of the presentation afterwards, although it is very frustrating not being able ot take part in the rolling chat channel. SocialLearn is a UK Open University project. According to the SocialLearn blog: “Some learners will be happy running 20 web apps [for their Personal Laerning Environment], while others will want to access this ecosystem via a coherent web interface. Currently one would do this via iGoogle, Netvibes, Facebook etc, if the apps have widgets in these different walled gardens.

In SocialLearn, we aim to move beyond web-feed based interoperability and visual clustering of apps on the webtop, with SL-aware apps communicating via the API, so that the learner’s profile can track and intelligently manage the flow of information and events to support their activity.”

This seems a great approach and I particularly liked Martin’s demo of their alpha software. two things stood out for me – the focus on people as a recommender for resources, thus allowing Open Educational Resouces to be accessed in context. Secondly the idea of supporting micro and episodic learning.

I do have concerns. The OU appears to be positioning the project as an experiment in exploring new business models in a world of competition by multiple learning providers. I am not sure that this is the ideal starting point but I suppose innovation is driven by many concerns and motivations!

When I watched the presentation last night I was also not happy with another of the core assumations behind the project – namely that “there is a major shift in society and education driven by the possibilities new technology create for creating and sharing content and social networking.” This seemed to me too technology centerd. But looking at it again in the cold light of a Friday morning the emphasis on the possibilities of new technology seems right. What then becomes interesting is that if such possibilities exist and if we assume that technology can be socially shaped, how do we use such possibilities in facilitating learning.

And in that respect, the SocialLearn project looks to be a very important initiative.

I have been reading a lot more blogs lately. For one reason, I have been in one place for a week so have had a little more time to explore ideas. But the main reason is twitter. True, it gets a bit of time to get right who you are following. On the one hand you need to follow enough people to gain a range of ideas on what the community is saying – to follow the Zietgeist. On the other hand you want to get rid of those annoying people who twitter endlessly about nothing (one well known educationalist posted that the swimming pool in his hotel was closed for a second time in a week for a private reception and he was going to demand a discount on his bill – do I really want to know that?). This takes a little time in weeding and tweeking the list of people you are following.

But then twittier becomes a wonderful resource – not just of access to live feeds and events – but of recommendations of blogs and paper to read. And so far I have found it that – most of the things people recommend are worth reading. Much better than any of the repositories or collections. twitter seems to me another step towards a Personal Learning Environment. I make the choice who I am following – nobody else. And with Open Sourrce Identi.ca mini blogging service, it should be possible to develop organsiational networks or networks to support communities of practice for communciation and learning.

What would be cool though, is a way of harvesting the resources being recommended and somehow of classifying them. I have been messing around with using rss feeds from twitter search and that is proving quite useful but there must be better ways of doing it. Be nice if some of this stuff could somehow be displayed in a wiki.

The other feature which would be cool would be a Shoutout service. What is a Shoutout? It is when someobne says – “Does anyone know” or What do “People think about”. The results of the Shoutouts could be another very neat resource if they could be sensibly harvested.

This is indeed an assumption many tend  to make when they are introduced to it. Is it because at the first sight it doesn’t seem to comply with the traditional ways of teaching? Is it because learning technologists sometimes may sound like geeks – when getting involved with social media in a rather overwhelming way? Is it because one doesn’t feel comfortable using these new media which are meant for our “kids”? Is it because one doesn’t care about new approaches that will make them “lose the expert” seat once again? Or maybe it is all/none the above… who knows…

The fact is that lately every conference I have taken part in, I always meet these brilliant minds who are thinking of doing something fantastic with educational technologies. They are usually people who either are developing a new piece of software or came up with this great idea to approach their practice differently. It also turns out that 9 out of 10 of those people I meet in these conferences call themselves Learning Technologists, Learning Technologies researchers, Lecturers in learning technologies, and so on!  Although there is nothing wrong with it, the fact is that we end up preaching to the choir; talking to those who have already perceived the potential and educational side of learning technologies. And all of a sudden everything seems so easy because our audience nods with conviction while we enthusiastically present about our topic. However, outside the conference building, our audience is not always like this.

We often come away from those venues reassured we have made important contributions to the educational world and that this will probably trigger more practitioners to follow our steps. In a way – YES – but we also tend to forget one thing: most times it’s researchers presenting research finding to other researchers. And although this is not bad, this is also not all we can do. Where are the teachers and all those lecturers who are preparing our youth to a future which more and more relies on technology? Well, they are probably attending and presenting at conferences of their own area of expertise, talking to other professionals who share the same interests and most probably the same kind of experiences. And this is not bad, but we can do better than this, especially at a time like this when we all seem to believe collaboration and cross-discipline cooperation is important.  Apart from the foreign language learning and teaching contexts of which I am part of, I don’t come across a great diversity of examples where learning technologies have been applied to the curriculum in a rather impressive way. Usually, I only come across new approaches by the same small group of  people. However, However, I am well aware that a wider variety of excellent practices exist both in number and diversity, and that there are lots of educators doing great stuff. The problem is that they tend to present the ideas and the results of their projects at conferences of their own subject, which is only fair. But more collaboration across sectors and disciplines is also desirable.

The example I am about to report is one of these cases.

The MSc in Advanced Occupational Therapy is a programme “totally delivered online” – so was it yesterday announced during the launch event of this new Masters programme hosted by the Faculty of Health and Social Care- University of Salford.

This programme has been a dream that after two years of hard workfinally come true.   – Angela Hook and Sarah Bodell – occupational therapy lecturers – have done a magnificent job by putting it all together. In their own words – two years ago they ”knew nothing about learning technologies and powerpoint hadn’t been part of their practice for that long either”. Today this seems hard to believe, if we bear in mind these two ladies have just projected and launched a magnificent programme which incorporates the latest approaches such as podcasting for content deliver and discussion trigger, blogs for reflection, wikis for peer collaboration, SL and Facebook for socializing and skype for personal tutoring, because in the end it is the individual who really matters! The student’s assessment will even be negotiated by students themselves!! How cool is that?

As Sarah stated yesterday in the launching ceremony, this programme aims at putting occupation in occupation therapy. She also emphasized their passion for learning and the awareness that in this new century new ways of pursuing further development have to be taken into consideration, in order to provide professional people with the opportunity to engage with the latest development in their field of practice and also get updated qualifications.
Angela also excelled with the way she presented the structure of the programme. Before emphasizing the learning approach mentioned above, she said the programme was aimed at anyone who wants to engage with it and they only need very little ICT skills to do so. As she put it, “if you know how to use word, if you can manage email and you use the Internet to search for information, then you will be able to do this, because you already master the hardest part of technology.” And I could only agree. The hardest part is to get started. Once you do, everything will become easier, all the time. And to reassure learners of that and also make sure they will be looked after, this programme will provide their students with a four week induction period where they will have a chance to try all the tools and overcome all the fears they might have while doing so. ANd all of this with the personaizedl support of a team. Is this something or what?

This is indeed a great initiative. It becomes even more relevant, when you think that this team has been working on this for quite a while now, engaging themselves with all the applications and technologies they decided to include in the programme. It is like the old saying: Don’t expect others to do, what you yourself are not ready to. And in this case I think they can expect a lot, because they are guiding – and inspiring I’d say -  by example.

They themselves have meaningfully engaged with the approach they are trying to pass on to others and they are doing a great job at it. Example of that is their blog which has already enabled them to collaborate with other practitioners in their area who just happen to be on the other side of the globe. They even have already had the chance to write a paper together and present with them at a conference dedicated to Occupational Therapy issues, of course!

I am sure there are many other great examples like this one out there. Like I said before, I know quite a few in the Language learning / Teaching field, but apart from that my knowledge is quite limited to the people I usually engage with. I would be interested in knowing about other instances of outstanding practice in many different areas.

My post ‘Universities get with it, wake up, be cool‘ has attracted some attention, both in comments on the blog and on twitter. Most people have agreed that the university degree ceremonies in the UK are outdated but some have not.

OK – it was a semi-humerous post. But there is a serieus point. How we celebrate achievement is part of our culture. And how universities celebrate student achievement is part of the learning culture of the institution. Degree cermonies such as the one in Aberystewth that I described – and I have no reason to believe there is any great difference in other UK universities – cannot be seen as anything other than a reflection of the learning culture of those institutions. What are the messages such events present. Firstly a veneer of the medieval univerity run by mysterious committees with inpenetrable ceremonies. Places where hierarchies are important – why else the different coloured gowns – or batman claoks as someone said on twitter. Secondly the lack of technology speaks for itself. And thirdly all this is overlaid with a crass commercialism. Vendor produced souvenirs, overpriced group hotos, hired gowns etc. University is a place you go to purchase your degree. This is not the learning culture I want to see. Universities should be serious fun. Universities should be democratic – a place of mutual leaning. And universities should be a part of continuing learning – not seperate from the rest of your life but part of a learning journey.

Universities get with it, wake up, be cool!

Cristina took this photo whilst we were chatting this morning. Started me thinking – when I set out as a researcher our media was esentially print. Working in Germany, I used to visit the University of Surrey library twice or three times a year to photocopy vast numbers of journal articles. In 1995 we were still sending project documents by snail mail. Telephones were the main mean of ‘chatting’. How things have changed. Skype is always on, Tweets twitter in and out, people are always ‘present’ in my office. The challenge I feel is how to manage the flows of information and how to reflect the richness of such communciation on this web site. The web site itself is increasingly a mashup and i guess we will further develop that. But I wonder if we are not still over-reliant on a text media – at least for reflection – as our society moves more and more to using visual images.

It might be summer but it is certainly not quiet. And the slow revolution of self organised elearning is gathering pace (Twitter seems to be a major ‘organising’ technology but more on that in a later post). One initiative which looks interesting is F-Alt. Inaugurated by post punk playboy Scott Wilson, F-Alt is the Fringe for this years Advanced Laerning Technologies Conference, Alt C, to be held in Leeds.

As the wiki says planned (or not so planned) activities include “round-table brainstorms on some of the top topics (and non-topics). Its all up for debate.

Format: each session is a round-table brainstorm of problems, issues. Short quick quick fire format, say 20 to 30 minutes, with the aim of gathering of thoughts. Each topic identifies the questions that need to be answered to make some of these socio-technical educational interventions actually work.

Rules for participation
No long winded waffle. Participants must be short and sharp and to the point. More twitter than paper presentation.”

Sounds my kind of conference. If you are going to F-Alt and would like to be part of the loop just sign up on the wiki. And even if you are not planning to go I am sure we will have all kind sof technologies for distance communication.

Been travelling for last week – hence few entries in this blog. Amongst a run of meetings I went to Aberystwth for my stepdaughter Arddun’s graduation ceremony. I can’t say I was looking forward to it and indeed it was every bit as boring as I expected. Don’t get me wrong – I am all in favour of celebrating achievement and Arddun worked hard for her degree and deserved her day out – well done love.

But why – oh why – do the universities make such a mess of such cermonies. We were sheparded into an overcrowded hall – with no air conditioning – where we were treated to half an hour of dirge like organ music. Then we have to stand whilst a procession of middle class, middle aged, white (mostly) men trail in wearing the most ridiculous fancy dress costumes (although I did like the silly hats – theyw oudl go down well in a German carnival).

The presentation of the honoury degrees could have been entertaining – if only because Welsh actor Mathew Rees was included (the other one was to a woman whose entire life seemed to have been devoted to serving on government committees) but the univeristy screwed it up by making them stand sheepishly silent whilst soem academic read out a leaden text of their career. Then came the student presentations. I have to say it was well managed. Aber had obviously hired a member of staff with previous experience as an air traffic controller as she signalled and led students to the stage in groups of six – accompanied front and back by an usher carryng a ceremonial stick to keep them in order or in case they lost their way back to their seats. The rector or chancellor or whoever he was made some short reading in Welsh and bowed or rather nodded his head at each student in turn. Back to seats and on with the next six. An hour and a half of this, interupted only by some Welsh harp music.

And then to the finale. A speech by the Rector (or vice chancellor or whoever he was) with wonderful words of encouragement marking the students progress from “learning to earning” (he obviously hasn’t heard of the credit crunch) and “think not what Aberystwth can do for you but what you can do for Aberystwth” – i.e. if, by some miracle, any of you lot do make any money in the future, give us some of it. Oh – and a brief history of the univeristy.

And then on for ONE (and one only) free glass of sparkling wine or orange juice and the opportunity to buy graduation tat (slang word for mechantising rubbish such as graduation teddy bears!) from a tat stall and to pay over-inflated costs for a picture of the big day.

It doesn’t have to be like that. Why not some of the excellent Welsh rock music. Lights, multi media on the big screen. A collage of university life – like it really is. Culture – todays culture – not an made up medieval ceremony. And if the rector and staff can come in fancy dress why not us. How about  dancing. Or – better still – why not run it in Second Life. Or lets have audience particpation with a back channel.

If any Univeristy out there is interested I would be happy to liven up your degree ceremony next year. For a small fee. Or perhaps for an honoury degree in event management.

For last two days I have been in Pontypridd. Pontypridd is small industrial town in South Wales. it is not the prettiest of places (though I like it). It is certainly not a rich town.

The UK press is obsessed at the moment with youth gangs and gang violence. And so I thought I would investigate the gangs in Pontypridd.  In the interests of journalism I was forced to hang out in the brilliant local member owned Clwb y Bont.

Are there gangs in Ponty? Yes, without doubt. In a short time I found out about 16 active gangs of young people. These gangs are self organised. They use advanced technologies for communications. Many of the gang mebers were involved in raising finances for their activities. Many members of the gangs wear hoodies despite government and press panics over this obviously threatening form of clothing.

I was truly surprised by the variety of subversive activities being undertaken by the gangs.

The gangs:

• The Film gang. This subversive gang are involved in making short films and have coerced many members of the local community to participate in their activities. (They have been nominated for an award for the Wales short film of the year)
• The Music making gang. Members of this large and growing gang have different roles. Some are invloved in playing in bands, others in organising gigs and yet more in producing the first CD of local unsigned bands, Outside the City.
• The Burlesque gang. This is an interesting gang in that it is composed solely of girls. The Burlesque Troupe as they call themselves have been putting on shows in local pubs and clubs.
• The Comedy gang. This is a gang of jokers organising comedy nights in community venues.
• The Charity Cricket gang. A highly subversive activity involving rivalry between two pubs popular with young people. The gangs are planning a ritualised clash on the cricket pitch in September to raise money for a locally run charity for kids in Bangladesh.
• The LAN party gang. A high tech gang organising weekends of techncial development and building computers for people who want to join the gang but haven|t got a computer and can\t afford one otherwise. May provide technical infrastructure to many of the other gangs.
• The Shakespeare gang. Very new,  have launched a Facebook group appealing for new members to establish a Shakepeare acting group.
• The War games gang. Truly violent, they met on Sunday afternoons upstairs at Clwb y Bont to recreate and re-enact historical battles.
• The Creative writing gang. Also based in Clwb -y-Bont, this gang appear to gather on a Monday. Who knows what they are plotting?
• Gangster rap. In welsh. So the English do not know what they are plotting. Sinister.

So ganglife is growing in South Wales. More and more young people are joining gangs. Interestingly, few are being paid for their membership – indeed many of having to pay to be members. And a huge amount of informal learning is going on. Learning in all kinds of diverse fields. Many of these young people are students or are involved in some form of continuing learning. Is their learning being supported or recognised by the education system and education? Of course not. Because this is learning in gangs. And we all know that gangs are dangerous.

By the way, if any of these gang members recognise themselves and want to send us pictures of their anti=social learning activities, we will be happy to publish them and promise not to report them to the authorities.